Microland Digital Warriors

Microland Digital Warriors | 53 © MICROLAND LIMITED 2020. Internal Circulation Only 52 Earning that blind faith Hundred terabytes is a lot of data. Now imagine that multiplied several times over. But last August there was no need to image those volumes of data. When Intercontinental Exchange acquired Ellie Mae in August, the data density sky rocketed and it was Sagar who was called upon to battle the growing sea of data. Who else could have done it if not Sagar? After all, his name in Hindi means “sea”. Sagar identified Flexgroup, a new NetApp technology, as the silver bullet to manage that scale. The technology was new for both Microland and for Ellie Mae, but Sagar took on the challenge. He studied and created a model in a lab environment exclusively for this engagement. He pushed the envelope working closely with the NetApp partner team. When COVID-19 struck, the data volume for Ellie Mae boomed by 400% making the engagement much more critical, from annual 4 petabyte to quarterly 5 petabyte storage growth. “They freaked out,” is how Sagar captures the essence of the growing challenge. With the Flexgroup clusters multiple volumes could be managed in one single share, and the capacity was increased to 20 petabytes. That’s 200 times what was available earlier. While the half-decade NetApp-Microland relationship has been warm on many fronts this challenge and requirement was fairly new. One can sense the excitement in Sagar as he talks about how he collaborated with the NetApp team, working on a number of use cases with the person who created the Flexgroup. The outcome is a testament to sterling partner collaboration. In Jan 2015, when Sagar started, Ellie Mae’s demands were at 1.5 petabytes. By August 2020 they had become 35 petabytes. The rapport and confidence that Sagar built with the Ellie Mae team reached its peak when he was entrusted with the task of scaling the Ellie Mae storage team. “Blind faith” is what Sagar humbly attributes it to. But we know that Ellie Mae’s trust was earned through diligence and hard work. Battling the odds of storage exhaustion, Sagar’s agenda was to keep BAU functional all the time--which means there is more space for him to conquer. For someone who misses his long drives in a pre-COVID world, a constant dose of trends in the storage space keeps his wheels turning. Sagar Sant This Digital Warrior took the lead in introducing Flexgroup, a newNetApp technology and helping Ellie Mae harvest the benefits that included future-proofing the demands of growth and scale.”