Disclaimer: Open Drives paid for my airfare and hotel to attend this press event. I do not accept paid postings.
Earlier this month, Open Drives invited me to attend their press event in Los Angeles to announce Astraeus, their new data service. Currently in alpha testing, this system is designed to… well, I asked Michael Wilsker, Senior Director of Integrated Strategy at Open Drives, to explain this.
Larry: What is Astraeus?
Michael: Astraeus is a dynamically scalable application and data services platform designed around cloud-native principles—a comprehensive private cloud platform that runs on your infrastructure or in your datacenter. It manages your CPU, GPU and storage resources so you can run your mission-critical business workflows with the security, performance, and cost predictability missing in the public cloud today.
Larry: What problem is this designed to solve?
Michael: Digital transformations and modern workflows like AI/ML have changed the way we work with data. Teams are recognizing that some tools and workflows aren’t suited to modern platforms like the cloud. Similarly, running modern, cloud-architected applications and workflows outside the cloud is difficult, so the result has been an expensive and hard to manage fragmentation of data, tools, and workflows. Overcoming this siloed data architecture causes expensive delays and unpredictable costs. Astraeus is designed to break down data silos and connect your data and workflow tools so teams can focus on what’s really important to them: completing the projects and delivering the outcomes that their businesses and customers rely on.
Larry: Why is this problem important?
Michael: Organizations today operate under increasing pressure from many directions, but chiefly to deliver faster and to deliver cheaper- to lower costs. Today’s infrastructure options force you to choose between costly cloud scalability or maintaining legacy architectures, or moving between both and building costly and, oftentimes fragile, workarounds.
Astraeus closes the gap between old and new by bringing scalable compute and storage out of the cloud and bringing your workflows together in a single hybrid environment. It breaks down data silos so your workflow applications have direct access to your data, allowing teams to both deliver faster and control costs at the same time.
Larry: OpenDrives is known for high-performance storage, especially targeted at media and entertainment. Why did they decide to create Astraeus?
Michael: We have always identified ourselves as a technology company focused on solving data problems. We’ve also built a reputation as a workflow-enablement company with a strong focus on customer success. In other words, we’re a product-led company that knows how to balance innovation with consultation services. Our products solve real problems that happen to be industry agnostic. Atlas, our first solution, tackled high-throughput, low-latency data storage within the M&E industry because that’s the world our founder came from. Since the inception of Atlas, the world’s whole approach to data has evolved as the problems faced by workflow stakeholders has changed. Today’s data experts are less concerned about how to store the data. Instead, they’re focused on how to make data as fluid and accessible as possible. Data’s value is in its usage. Whether our customers’ jobs rely on creating data or gleaning insights from the data, we built Astraeus to close the gap between data, users, and data services in a way that is scalable and cost-predictable.
Larry: One of the aspects of Astraeus that struck me was that this could be used by far more than just people creating media. Who do you see as “typical customers?”
Michael: While the genesis of Astraeus was in conversations with customers and users in the M&E space, we have always planned to make the platform applicable to a wide range of workflows and data services. The need for on-premises data and services in a single environment that gives cloud-like flexibility in terms of scale and orchestration is not just limited to M&E. In our initial product-market fit conversations, we have identified verticals like financial, life sciences, civil engineering, and manufacturing, amongst others that have data problems Astraeus directly addresses.
Larry: What hardware does this require? (Is it Windows only? Or require specific servers?)
Michael: Our intent is for Astraeus to be hardware agnostic. Astraeus is Linux-based, and we want to give users the freedom of choice in what hardware and resource types they use to build their clusters. Our plan is to provide guidance detailing minimum specifications, then give users control from there.
Larry: As your CEO, Sean Lee, mentioned in his keynote, this is a challenging time in our industry. What do you see as its challenges?
Michael: Media & Entertainment, especially long-form content, has been through a lot over the past half-decade. We’ve seen workflows being turned inside-out due to the sudden need to work from home, multiple industry strikes that stopped productions in their tracks, and just recently earth-shaking mergers and acquisitions that in many cases caused job loss. These events are a lot for any market to absorb on their own, let alone when they come rapid fire.
The net results that we are observing are a focus on production quality over quantity, a growing reluctance to greenlight initiatives, and budgets being reallocated to more operational needs—all creating a hyperfocus on workflow efficiency and doing more with less. We’re confident that things will rebound, but that could be months or years from now.
As a product-led company with a workflow-enablement focus, these challenges provided us with an opportunity to go back to our roots, which was to solve data challenges. In doing so we realized that legacy infrastructure and traditional workflow tools are keeping customers stuck in the past. Astraeus is the future. It is both hardware and industry agnostic. Astraeus is flexible and will evolve with our customers and the world because, like our namesake, it is open.
Larry: Where can people go to learn more?
Michael: You can read our press release announcing Astraeus and you can find more information on our website about Astraeus, including a litepaper describing the need and value. Informational videos can be found on OpenDrives’ YouTube account and you can follow us on LinkedIn for the most up to date news and information. If you want to know how we can help make things easier for you, please reach out to us directly at hello@opendrives.com.
Larry: Michael, my thanks to you and your team for taking the time to answer these questions.
