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In this Tech Barometer podcast, database experts from a U.S. insurer, a Saudi bank and Nutanix describe the growing need for automated enterprise database management as organizations scale their AI readiness.
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Podcast transcript:
This Tech Barometer Podcast was recorded in April 2026 at the Nutanix .NEXT event in Chicago. Jason Lopez is host. Kurt Richards is database administrator, Penn National Insurance. Musab Umer Malik is senior database consultant, Alinma Bank. Ashish Mohindroo is general manager and SVP, Nutanix database services platform.
Kurt Richards: I’ve seen a lot of retirements in our company and I’m sure a lot of other companies are going through the same thing.
Jason Lopez: It’s not about AI taking jobs and it’s not about whether older workers can keep up. Those retirements can be translated to knowledge walking out the door, knowledge the IT team needs to deal with the complexity of databases.
Kurt Richards: Previously that storage guy, he retired long ago that was familiar with our old storage system. Had a couple DBAs retire. It’s in every area. If I could sum it up, it’s doing more with less now.
Jason Lopez: That’s the voice of Kurt Richards, database administrator at Penn National Insurance. He was one of the featured speakers at Nutanix’s 2026 NEXT conference along with Musab Umer Malik, senior database consultant for Saudi Arabia-based Alinma Bank. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast. I’m Jason Lopez. The life of a database administrator involves a lot of vigilance, which means patching, migrating, cloning, and recovering systems through processes that are often fragile and take a lot of time. And for DBAs, time is one of their top issues.
[Related: Data Storage Must Evolve to Support AI, But It’s Playing Hard to Get]
Musab Umer Malik: This kind of issues stopped us from growing. Once we talk about the roadmap of around like 700 databases and couple of clusters, when we wanted to move from these databases to extend or decentralize, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t have enough time and it was too complex and too time consuming for us.
Jason Lopez: Mosab says a database that could have taken hours was taking days. A migration that could have been routine had become a crisis.
Musab Umer Malik: It was around 50 terabytes. It used to have around 12 hours of downtime for the migration. We actually decentralized all the systems from a single Windows server failover cluster to around 25 Windows server failover clusters. There was like storage and infrastructure performance bottlenecks and we were not able to decentralize because a single Windows cluster would take around two weeks. This was the standard time to build the Windows clusters.
Jason Lopez: And then there was the latency. In database terms, latency is the lag between a request and a response. You can sense a lag of a thousand milliseconds, that’s about a second, but at 15,000 milliseconds the system can crash.
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Musab Umer Malik: The largest database we have is around 60 terabytes, 6-0. And this is a central database which is used for logging different applications. And previously when we used to have this database at around 10 terabytes, we had performance issues. The disk latency, the worst case was like 15,000 millisecond of latency and SQL Server Crash. This is the threshold for SQL Server.
Jason Lopez: The safety net you have to have in database operation, which is backup and restore, had become its own bottleneck. Kurt described his experience in terms of whole working days, keeping project teams waiting.
Kurt Richards: Backup was taking six, seven, eight hours. Then the restore was taking another amount of time like that and it just wasn’t working. We needed to turn that around quickly every day and keep the project teams up on their testing schedules.
Jason Lopez: You can take your database to the cloud and have someone else deal with its complexity. There are managed database services such as AWS, Azure, and Google. You can take it to them, but not everyone has that option.
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Ashish Mohindroo: In certain regulated industries, it’s a mandate because of data residency laws and so on that you cannot even go to the cloud. So that managed database option is not really even available to you as well.
Jason Lopez: Ashish Muhindru, who leads Nutanix database services, told the gathering that databases are too critical and too complex to leave to improvisation. We’re now at an inflection point, shifting the database administrator who’s faced with doing more with less from a hands-on IT role to that of an architect of sorts, overseeing the operation. Solutions such as Nutanix’s NDB were built to fill this need.
Ashish Mohindroo: What we are really doing with NDB is giving that same cloud-like experience to our customers so they can get the database automation on their on-premises data centers or on the public cloud as well and then be able to deliver the kind of productivity gains and cost savings that comes along with that. You can think about it as managed database services without the control of the cloud but the flexibility on their own terms. All of the top five most popular databases are supported on NDB today. So you can have Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL, and MongoDB.
Musab Umer Malik: When we use the same database to migrate from the old infrastructure to NDB, it took less than one hour.
Kurt Richards: Our 12-hour process to back up and restore these databases we’re now taking just a few minutes, which really opened up things for us and really allowed us to take the testing process a little bit further.
Musab Umer Malik: Now we have around 30 plus application logging everything and from the thousand average millisecond, now we have a 0.4 average millisecond of latency. That’s a huge success for us and we are able to expand even further.
Jason Lopez: Beyond the improved stats, another change was the way the databases were maintained, less improvised and more consistent.
[Related: The Rapid Rise and Future of Neoclouds]
Musab Umer Malik: After moving to NDB, for the applications we don’t have any downtime as of now. And it’s not only that once we do the patching, it is always successful like 90% of the time it is successful, 10%. Even when it fails, there is no downtime.
Jason Lopez: That shift to automation that Musab and Kurt experienced shows it’s not only about the performance leap and better uptime, but especially about supporting best practices. Every database adheres to the same standards.
Ashish Mohindroo: Every time they set up a new database, it was set up to the right specs. That’s when issues happen on databases is not provisioned right. You don’t have enough memory, you don’t have enough storage, whatever it may be, now you’re enforcing that.
Jason Lopez: As Musab put it, the goal is simple to describe and hard to achieve.
Musab Umer Malik: The long-term goal is to enable automation of all the manual tasks we used to do with the classic DBA.
Jason Lopez: Musab Umair Malik is a senior database consultant at Alinma Bank. Kurt Richards is the database administrator at Penn National Insurance. Ashish Muhindru is the general manager and SVP of the Nutanix databases services platform. Ashish has spent 30 years watching enterprise technology reinvent itself starting in CRM and e-commerce and for the last several years he’s been helping shape what comes next at Nutanix. You might check out the article at the forecast entitled Mastering a Myriad of Databases in the AI Era, which features Ashish, as well as the video, how AI is reshaping database management. You can find those stories and more at theforecastbynutanix.com. That’s the forecast by Nutanix, all one word.com.
