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Christophe: Hello, today we are talking about the Active Archive Alliance. Molly, welcome.

Molly: Thank you for having me.

Christophe: It's great to have you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about the alliance.

Molly: I'm Molly Presley. I am the founder of the Active Archive Alliance. We're just having our 10-year anniversary, and so it's great to be talking to you about it today. A little bit of background, I'm responsible for product marketing at one of the member companies called Qumulo. And I'm really excited to be talking about where things have evolved over the last decade since the alliance was formed.

Christophe: So, why did you create it? You're one of the founding members. And what do you do?

Molly: So we created the alliance as technologies were starting to evolve around unstructured data growth a decade ago. And a lot of innovation was occurring in the hardware, the software, the storage, the metadata, and application space to solve disparate parts of that problem. Customers wanted visibility into their data. They wanted to retain it securely, but they were having a difficult time putting together how to pull all these disparate technologies together.

And we formed the alliance to help them get to understanding what are the tools available, how do they work together, and really drive towards best practices for different industries.

Christophe: Yeah, it can be so confusing. This is a great initiative. So, can you tell me a little bit about the members and the type of members you have, the type of technologies that are involved?

Molly: Yeah, you bet. So our membership has been growing. The time has never been more interesting for an Active Archive Alliance or an active archive solution as data is critical to growing businesses, to growing products for companies be competitive. And our membership really reflects that. It's everything from application, data creation tools in vertical market spaces like healthcare to folks who are really involved in data movement, date migration, metadata creation as well as the storage platforms where the data ultimately rests.

And that's the value of the alliance, is all these different technologies and vendors working together to make a complete solution to a problem that exists in the market today.

Christophe: So if you were to summarize the main objectives, you mentioned best practices, what other initiatives do you have at the alliance?

Molly: So we are really focused on putting together customer reference use cases, how is the media and entertainment industry using an active archive, and what tools are they using that maybe the HPC community could use. It's also around best practices around security. It's not just about who's accessing your data, but how do you ensure you retain it securely over time, protect it against ransomware.

A lot of the big challenges that people have around protecting their data and accessing the data, we provide the best practices to reference architectures and customer use cases of how they're leveraging an active archive to solve those problems.

Christophe: If you were to provide advice or maybe give your perspective to an end user, what would you tell them to do when they're looking at this deluge of data or maybe thinking about improving their archiving methodologies, what recommendations would you have for them?

Molly: First, we really focus on looking at what the peer community does. What have other users with similar challenges done to solve their problems and understand what tools they used? How did they get visibility into the data they had? How did they get visibility into who is using that data? Getting a good understanding of the cost of retaining that data and the different options both in the data center and the cloud for retaining that data.

And then doing an assessment of your applications. Which applications need to use that data? Are they requiring really fast access to the data? Is the slower access to the data okay? But really just starting with that assessment of really understanding, what are your organization application users' needs? And then what tools are out there that have been deployed both in your industry and other industries to help solve those challenges?

And certainly, the alliance's role is to help put users together to have those discussions as well as to write up some of these case studies and reference architectures to help a user really be able to put all those pieces together.

Christophe: Well, you know, given what we know about data transworld, there are no statistics in the future. We know there will be more data and certainly more need for active archives. So this is a great initiative. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you for tuning in today.

Molly: Thanks for having me.