Episode Details

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.

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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