W. Curtis Preston: Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it all podcast,
I'm your host, W Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.
Backup.
And I have with me, my DIY commiserator Prasanna Malaiyandi.
How's it going Prasanna?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Uh, I wish I did not have to commiserate.
I wish I could cheer or celebrate, but.
W. Curtis Preston: I, I wish you could come over and help me.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: No, no.
So for the listeners or the viewers of the podcast, Curtis is finally
started his project to redo the floors.
And he started this weekend.
He's been prepping and doing all sorts of work before this.
He finally started and he
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
And then I,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: up just a little bit.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, I laid a couple of rows and then I realized I
was actually laying them backwards.
It would've worked it would've just made the whole job worse.
Right.
Um, harder.
And, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: it at the beginning, which is
W. Curtis Preston: did.
I caught it in the beginning.
And, um, it was because there's this guy that I'm using to help me out.
He has this, um, his name's Joe Letendre, he's actually up in the Midwest.
And he, he actually has a service where like, he, he helps you lay
out your stuff and all this stuff.
And, and I needed did that.
And I watched a bunch of videos, but so much time passed because.
Everything that's happened in this house in the last few months
that I had forgotten, uh, a really important, uh, part, which is
which side of the, of the LVT
Prasanna Malaiyandi: so simple, right?
W. Curtis Preston: which side goes towards the wall.
Um, and, uh, I, I had the, uh, I had the tongue.
Let's see, I had the groove.
Facing out instead of the, because to me, if you, for those of you that ever
looked at L V T like there's a, there's a tongue and a groove, but to me, the
groove looks like a tongue because it's sticking out really obvious.
It looks like it's a tongue, but it's not a tongue.
That's the groove.
The tongue is the part that looks good.
I don't understand why that is, but anyway, so, but, so it's good now.
I've, I've got, I've gotten two rows, uh, laid and the first row is the absolute
hardest, uh, cuz you gotta get it.
You gotta measure it just so to get it, you know, to, to exactly everything.
And so, you know, uh, now I just have to deal with the fact
that my knee is 56 years old.
Knee padding and, and Motrin is what it's better living through chemistry.
I throw out our usual disclaimer, Prasanna and I work for different companies.
He works for Zoom.
I work for Druva.
This is not a podcast of either company and the opinions that you hear are ours.
Uh, be sure to rate us at ratethispodcast.com/restore.
If you wanna talk about the kind of stuff we like to talk about, backups,
archives, uh, security storage, uh, you know, barbecue, uh, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: scuba diving.
W. Curtis Preston: scuba diving, uh, @wcpreston on Twitter or.
Uh, w Curtis Preston at Gmail
. Uh, so let's bring on our guest today.
He has been in the it industry since the late nineties running HP's enterprise
server business for a while, which means I might have actually been a
customer of him back in the day, before founding a startup that was actually
acquired by HPE for the last four years.
He's been the CEO of Datacore, a software defined storage
company in Fort Lauderdale.
Welcome to the podcast, Dave Zabrowski.
Dave Zabrowski: I'm glad to be here, Curtis and Prasanna.
Nice to have you.
I, I, uh, I have bad memories of doing my own floors.
Way, way, way before I had any money, I rented a ceramic saw and
it was like, it was a disaster.
So yes.
Good, good for you.
W. Curtis Preston: on, um, I'm doing luxury vinyl tile, and I will also
have bad memories, but I, you know, I'm in it, I'm in it to win it.
You know what I
Dave Zabrowski: yeah.
Well, Curtis, you know, when you get to be our age, you gotta be like
the pharaohs who built the pyramids quote, unquote, built the pyramids,
you outsource that stuff, you know,
W. Curtis Preston: I, I, yeah.
You know, a good, a good buddy of mine, this breakfast place
that I go to all, all the time.
I I've been going there 20 years and I was talking to him about DIY
stuff and he he's a Curtis Curtis.
He goes, my dad taught me something a long time ago.
Be really good at what you do so you could pay other people to do what they do.
and I'm.
Oh, that's just that's.
That is a way to live your life.
That
Dave Zabrowski: Haven't learned that lesson yet.
W. Curtis Preston: haven't learned that yet.
It's coming up though.
This, this, this one hurts, uh, nowhere near as painful as my last DIY project.
If you can believe this, actually, uh, put solar up on my roof, if
you can believe that that was, that
Dave Zabrowski: I'm afraid of Heights.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't dig that project at all.
W. Curtis Preston: no.
Yeah.
Um, I don't, I'm not gonna say I dug it, but, but yeah.
Anyway, uh, and ultimately ended up having to call the guy towards the
end of the project, cuz I, I wanted to finish by the end of the year cuz I
Dave Zabrowski: The call of shame.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Yeah.
The call of shame.
Exactly.
Well the worst part, the worst part and listeners will know this
already, but the worst part was like, he charged me like it was.
$800 to finish, uh, which was the fi I had put all the, uh, all the
posts in, and then he just had to put the, the panel just had to put
up the panels and do all the wiring.
And so he charged me $800 for that.
His team came out and they were done in a, like a day.
Right.
And, and I said, just curious, um, for the part that I had done already, how
much more would you have charged me?
To do that part.
He's like, oh, another $300.
I spent months, it took me months doing it because it's up high.
You can't work in the afternoon cuz you know, I live in Southern California.
It's hot as hell up there.
And anyway, so sometimes DIY is not the way they go, but um,
we're just, we're glad you're here.
And, and thanks for, uh, also commiserating with me here.
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah, of course
W. Curtis Preston: I, I I've been aware of Datacore, you know, a
lot longer than you've been there.
Uh, how, how long have they been around?
Dave Zabrowski: Datacore since 1998.
They were founded by 11 founders.
If you can believe that.
And they came outta the high performance computing business, believe it or not.
Fort Lauderdale Boca Raton area in the heyday was, was one of the places
for high performance computing.
And, uh, they came out of that world and, uh, built a company that was
very successful, very profitable, and barely anybody knew about it.
so they, they were very much technologists and not marketeers that's for.
Wonderful.
Wonderful people.
Wonderful founders.
Yep.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, by the way, super jelly, uh, love Fort Lauderdale.
I actually grew up in Orlando.
Um, and, um, I, the, the scuba diving in Fort Lauderdale is, is amazing.
Dave Zabrowski: I was just doing it on Sunday.
It's spectacular.
I, I spent almost my whole career in Silicon valley, so it's it's,
it's nice to go on the ocean when it's actually above 60 degrees.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, I mean, you know, you're, you're looking at 80, 85, right?
Dave Zabrowski: yep.
For sure.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Curtis is so
W. Curtis Preston: um, Yeah.
Super jealous.
Yeah.
Cuz you know, the temps that we're dealing with out here.
Right.
So, uh, what, why don't, why don't you give a, an overview?
Uh, I know it's a software defined, uh, storage company, but you
you've really looks like you've.
Uh, in the last couple of years you've really been looking at this
problem of, uh, ransomware and, and cyber attacks and things like that.
So why don't you give an overview of Datacore?
Dave Zabrowski: Sure.
Sure.
So my last company, as you mentioned, it was in the cloud
analytics consumption space.
We had a SaaS product.
We sold that to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2017.
And if you're familiar with that, uh, with HP's lineup called GreenLake, that's
essentially where cloud cruiser ended up going and, and growing that, uh, HPE
was our largest customer at the time.
And, um, in fact, many of our Cloud Cruiser employees, that was the name
of the company, um, are still there and take on more and more responsibility.
So that, that was a really interesting experience.
And, uh, and a good partnership with HPE.
So Antonio was president at the time and shortly after we acquired, he became CEO.
So, uh, so that's good.
So Datacore, as the software defined storage, we really focused on a vision
that we called at the time, Datacore one.
And what that meant was a single solution for all your storage needs
based upon a virtualized approach.
One of the things that was very obvious to me prior to my cloud company,
uh, we had, uh, I was in the storage business, um, in 2002, I left it.
And when I exited the company in 2017, I came back into the storage business and
poked around and not much had changed.
I mean, it was, uh, kind of an innovation, you know, desert, if you will.
A lot of the big guys that were big in 2002 were still more
or less doing the same thing.
Wasn't a lot of innovation.
So I got in touch with the founder and managing director of Insight
Venture Partners, one of the most successful software, but investors,
gentleman named Jeff Warren, I got to meet him through a friend.
And he said to me that there was this unknown unheard of company down
in Fort Lauderdale called Datacore.
That actually had some pretty cool things.
And, and they were on the, the, the hot side of the spectrum.
They were doing very high performance computing, as I mentioned,
that was the foundation of it.
Um, and the hypothesis was that there was an opportunity to actually
develop a broader offering, uh, based upon a virtualized approach
that would cut across the spectrum from hot to warm, to cool, to cold.
And so that's what we did.
That's what became Datacore one.
We actually organically released a few products.
Uh, we actually had some acquisitions that have been quite successful
in the, uh, object unstructured side, as well as on the container,
uh, native attached storage side.
Um, and then as it relates to ransomware, which was specific to
your question, you know, that evolved over the last several years where,
you know, ransomware was kind of, it was almost one of these random things.
And if you were a CEO of a company, you didn't think much about it a few years
ago and you'd hear, you know, one of your buddies got, got hit with it and you kind
of commiserated with them, but then it got to the point where it wasn't, uh, it
wasn't an, if it was when and how bad.
Um, and that's really, that really changed.
It reminded me a lot in the server business.
Uh, when I was running the server business at HP, uh, it was, you know,
where it was all about nines, how many number of nines you could get.
And so you're trying to get that server not to fail.
Facebook and Google came along and they basically said let's design an
architecture that plans on it failing.
And so that's what ended up with the, the next generation of servers.
And so that's really the, the reality is ransomware is going to hit you.
And it's just a question of, you know, how bad and, and when, um, so we ended
up the, one of the acquisitions we made was a company called Caringo, which
was also a relatively under the radar company based out of Austin, Texas.
Happened to have one of the best hybrid object stores, uh, in the industry.
Just not a lot of people knew about it.
And we were, uh, fortunate enough to partner with them.
We acquired the company about a year and a half ago.
And since then they had some real good architecture for
immutability and, and ransomware.
And since then we've built that out even further.
We actually have partnered with a lot of the backup vendors, you know, Veeam
and CommVault and Cohesity and others to bring an offering that basically, you
know, we just call it a time machine.
It's basically you just, you just know whenever it happens,
we don't do the actual detection.
Obviously we partner with other people that does the actual detection of it.
And, but what, when it is detected.
Basically just reset the clock to the, you know, the nanosecond or
whatever of, of, uh, right before it was attacked and then you re restore.
Um, so that's what our, that's what our solution does.
And it's, it's been very popular because of the, the dynamics in the market where,
you know, everybody's budget now in the it world has this budgeted and it's
been, it's been very successful for us.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: So I just wanted to go back to kind of
Datacore the foundation of it.
So I am sure a lot of our listeners are like, why would I even
need software defined storage?
Right.
Could you sort of go into the benefits, the reasons why you
would want that versus some of the traditional offerings out there.
Dave Zabrowski: Sure.
Sure.
So if you look at all the infrastructure in the data center, every single
technology used to be proprietary hardware with a very, very thin software stack,
oftentimes proprietary as well on top it.
And then all those industries actually migrated into a commodity based hardware
with software stack on top of it.
So the value pushed up from hardware into software.
Well, storage has not done that, and it's hard to believe we're sitting here
in 2022 and, and the majority of the storage industry still is proprietary.
And the benefits basically are no different than benefits you
get in the other infrastructure.
Basically, you, you get on, you get on cheaper hardware, you basically
have investment protection backwards.
So you now can move and optimize existing infrastructure, which was extremely
helpful during the COVID recession.
We had a lot of business where we were able to go in with our
software defined approach and leverage existing infrastructure
that had been underutilized.
And then it's future proof.
So you don't have vendor lockin.
Basically can move from, from vendor to vendor.
And then when new, when new technologies come like NVMe over fabric, for
example, you know, you're basically just Futureproof cuz, cuz that's, that's
the beauty of software defined storage.
So it's kinda like a, you know, think of it as a storage virtualization
layer and it's very flexible.
When we do, um, surveys of our customer, We always ask them
why we win and why we lose.
And one of the main reasons why we win is just that you can support
heterogeneous environments, backward looking and forward looking.
W. Curtis Preston: And so what we're talking about is when, when they
buy Datacore, what are they buying?
Are they buying just software?
Do you do an appliance?
And then you put stuff behind the appliance.
Um, you know, how's work.
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah.
So they, so specifically they buy from us the software.
They can have their own hardware installed.
Um, oftentimes we are part of a new project, either a, a new deployment or
an expansion of an existing deployment.
In which case we are put on new hardware that hardware can be bought
by the customer, or oftentimes they go through a partner, a resell it partner.
Uh, we tend to be focused on mid-market is where our sweet spot is.
And a lot of the mid-market customers have, uh, partners, integrator
partners or managed service partner.
That they, that they actually provide that, that bundled
service, but it's very simple.
It's a very simple install.
It's not complex at all.
You basically just load up the hardware, get the hardware running,
and then you install the software in a matter of, you know, an hour
or two you're up and running.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: And because you're sort of decoupled from the hardware.
Is there a lot of tuning the customer has to do or that the partner has
to do in order to sort of optimize the performance or is that all
sort of smarts that you guys have built into your software offering?
Dave Zabrowski: It's both.
I mean, we have configurations, we have best practices.
You know, we do industry benchmarks.
We offer those to our customers, but it depends.
I mean, a lot of applications are very, very specific to, uh, internal
requirements, in which case they would actually tune those, uh,
to those internal requirements.
We do have a solution architect, uh, function in all of our major geos
that helps customers with this type of thing, best practice sharing.
And if they do need to tune it specifically, uh, we'll help them do that.
W. Curtis Preston: and then what can you put behind a Datacore
engine from a storage perspective?
Dave Zabrowski: And literally anything.
I mean, what, whatever, whatever you want, you stick behind it.
And any, any of the technologies work, um, behind it, any of the
technologies work in front of it, you can put any app on top of it.
Um, and you know, that, that's how, that's how it works.
W. Curtis Preston: and so, you know, we're talking NAS, we're talking
block, we're talking object on the back end and the same on the front end.
Do you translate?
So can I have object on the back end and NAS on the front end?
Vice versa.
Dave Zabrowski: Um, well, it, so I think the, the answer is, it depends, and
I know you don't like those answers.
Nobody likes those answers,
W. Curtis Preston: You know, I was a consultant for, I was
a consultant for 20 years.
I'm fine with that phrase.
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah.
That's the, that's the unfortunate answer.
Um, it kind of depends on the configuration, uh, but generally speaking.
Your object storage is more your second tier.
Uh, sometimes it's active archiving, which is a, which is a kind of a tier two plus,
you know, if you think of, um, if you think of video streaming, for example, um,
if, if someone let's, let's say a famous actor is in the news for whatever reason.
Those videos, those movies that they have been in, that haven't been that popular.
All of a sudden, those need to be presented very quickly.
And oftentimes that comes outta your second tier out of your active archiving.
So it does depend on that generally though, the, the object store is,
is unstructured data, which is focused on, on cost and performance.
Your first tier is performance and then cost generally.
W. Curtis Preston: And I, I saw a really good presentation years ago.
I believe it was with the actual Active Archive folks, right.
The, the Active Archive Alliance.
And it was actually the folks from, uh, Entertainment Tonight.
And they were talking about exactly the scenario that you described of,
of how that basically the moment some famous person starts trending they
start pulling all of that stuff.
Right.
So that they're able to have that readily available and, um, you know,
to, to, to produce other videos from it.
Right.
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah, well, I mean, if the whole, the whole
media entertainment industry is really going through a golden era.
and it's, it's a lot of, it's driven by technology with the high density
cameras, with a lot of the machine learning and artificial intelligence
that's laying on top of the production.
And then that stuff is really an exciting area.
It's going through, uh, a complete change, uh, where the, the production,
I mean, they're producing on average or your typical set per day is producing
between 10 and 20 terabytes of data.
. Um, and at any given time, there's like 10,000, you know, shoots that
are going on, uh, in, in the world.
So there's just massive amounts of data and that data has to be processed.
It has to be rendered, uh, and then all these AI tools that go on top
of it, which is, you know, natural machine learning, you know, facial
recognition, phon recognition, all this.
Is just generating massive amounts of data.
And that data has to be in perpetuity.
It's not like if you think about a security application, massive
amounts of data, but they only keep it for a short period of time.
Right.
And then it falls off.
So from a storage perspective, that use case is important.
but it doesn't have, you know, perpetuity, whereas the movies have perpetuity and
it's a, it's a really, it's an exciting area for us and something that, uh, you
know, we're, we're obviously knee deep into, uh, from a Datacore perspective.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Taking the media and entertainment industry
as an example, do you see then that people tend to have a vast majority
of their data stored in object?
I know previously I think you talked about sort of the cold,
the warm, the hot tiers, right.
Um, do you see a good chunk of your data then on the cold tiers that
when people are using Datacore or is it depending on the application?
It's a huge
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah, I think the way to think about it then Prasannas is,
you know, let's say in, in the 2000 era, you know, 80% of your data was that was
being produced, was structured data.
Right.
Right now it's the exact opposite and getting more.
So, so if you think about like, if you, you know, and you guys
have one of these smart watches, every time you take a step literal.
You're producing unstructured data.
This video that we're using with Zencaster, that's
producing unstructured data.
Everything is producing unstructured data and all of the new apps
are producing unstructured data.
So that's where we see the market, uh, exploding, um, and
the structured data still there.
I mean, you still need, you know, databases and you still need,
you know, think of eCommerce.
I mean, there's a tremendous amount of structured data in the eCommerce space.
But for us, you know, we, we, we have the structured space.
That's, that's the core of, of, of the company.
Uh, but it's really, you know, the growth engine is on the unstructured side.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I was going to ask Dave, uh, I know you mentioned that you
had like a SaaS analytics company, right.
That you did, that you sold HPE, right?
Um, when it comes to Datacore, are there analytics that are built into the product
to help users and admins understand sort of workloads applications, like
where to place data, things like that.
Because as a software defined layer, right storage layer, right.
You're kind of removed from the underlying hardware and infrastructure.
And so identifying performance issues, understanding what's going
on may sometimes become more complex in these environments versus sort
of a self-contained appliance.
Dave Zabrowski: it it is.
And we do have those offerings, um, and, and that's become, let's call
it more or less industry standard.
Most of the vendors have those, some of the vendors that have a vertical stack.
They can actually go deeper into the hardware cuz they actually have
more specificity into the hardware.
You know, what we do is we jump from hardware to hardware.
So things like capacity analysis, you know, we can do, you know, SLA
forecasting, um, you know, that type of thing we call 'em insights.
It's basically, you know, data mining for purposes of optimizing,
you know, the infrastructure.
W. Curtis Preston: Historically speaking one, objection to software
defined anything has been, well, the reason why I buy, you know, proprietary
appliances is because it's faster.
That they're able to tweak the hardware and make it perfect for that hardware.
Whereas with you, the performance will be all over the place based
on what I decide to put behind it.
So how do, how do you, how do you respond to that?
Dave Zabrowski: No, that that's a, that's a true statement.
I mean, it depends if, if someone's in a, you know, super, super high performance,
you know, application, um, a monolith solution, a vertical monolith solution,
often time, is there better solution?
Is there better?
I answer, um, But with that, of course, they're gonna spend more money on it
and they're gonna get vendor lock in.
So, you know, sometimes customers make that decision to do that, um,
and go and go that vertical monolith.
Now history has shown, um, that, that over time that's not a good solution
for infrastructure, generally speaking.
I mean, that's, if you look back at and pick any technology, But, you know, for
a product cycle or too, you know, for the right applications, that's fine.
You know, and the way I look at it, I'm, you know, I've been a CEO for 21
years now and, you know, I mean, nobody has a hundred percent market share.
So, you know, my, my, my focus with my team is let's, let's go to
those areas where we do have a high value that we bring to the company.
And if somebody a actually really values that monolith vertical stack.
That's great.
Let 'em, you know, let 'em have that and we'll go on and serve other customers.
We have plenty of customers to serve.
W. Curtis Preston: You know, your approach reminds me very much of
sort of the way we think the way we see things at Druva as well, right.
Where, you know, we're doing SaaS based backup of large environments.
Right?
You can't do that for everyone.
Dave Zabrowski: Right,
W. Curtis Preston: You know, if you've got my usual phrase is if you've got
30 petabytes of data in a T1 line, we're probably not your, you know,
the company you need to be talking to.
Right.
Um, but it's the same kind of approach, like you said, nobody
has a hundred percent market share.
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah.
And even if you look at best in class statistics on close rates, the best
companies in the world are closing 30%,
W. Curtis Preston: right.
Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski: and, and, and, and the companies that report numbers higher than
that are probably fudging the numbers.
Right.
So, I mean, that's just the reality of our business, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Before I know Curtis, you wanna talk about data
protection and backup and all the rest before we switch to that, can you talk
a little bit about container storage?
I know you guys recently did an acquisition.
Just kind of curious about that and what you guys see there.
Dave Zabrowski: sure.
So, so we're actually the leaders in container attached storage.
Um, when I came into the company four years ago, there were a lot of very
smart, uh, engineers and architects.
That came from this high performance computing market had really
pioneered software defined storage in the early days of Datacore.
And we have a ton of patents around this and, and they had this idea that we could
apply some of this high performance into a container, uh, native storage solution.
Um, so we actually created a skunkworks project for about,
about a year and funded.
And gave them the opportunity to prove that, that it could actually
be a better mouse trap in this Kubernetes container environment.
And that turned out to be true.
So in 2019, we actually went out and looked at, uh, partnering with
companies cuz traditional Datacore is not in the Kubernetes space.
We're not in the open source community.
Uh, a lot of our management team have had experiences and that myself
included, but it's not something that was DNA to the company.
So we went out and looked, uh, we actually found, uh, Maya data who were
the pioneers of what's called open EBS.
That project was part of the CNCF, the cloud native compute foundation, which
is the governing body around Kubernetes.
Um, and at that time, Kubernetes had just basically Google had just thrown
some number of hundreds of engineer.
At that, uh, Kubernetes.
And it was pretty clear that Kubernetes was gonna be the,
the container orchestration, uh, framework, uh, of the future.
So those things all kind of converged.
And then we ended up actually putting an investment into Maya data.
We put money into them.
We actually merged our two teams.
We, uh, had cross license rights, cross technology rights.
We created a separate board of directors.
I was on that as was Insight venture Partners.
Um, and we worked with them collaboratively for about a year and
a half, and then just acquired them in November, uh, of this past year.
And now they're a hundred percent part of Datacore.
Um, so what we've seen is the open EBS that, that open source product
has really, really taken off.
I mean, we're, we're now over a million downloads per month, uh, for that product.
Um, so it's one of the fastest growing parts of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Datacore has released our enterprise grade version of that, uh, this past quarter.
And then we'll continue to evolve that, but that market is very, very exciting.
It's a market that if you look at core, you look at edge, you look at cloud, you
know, for most workloads going forward.
Um, that solution is the best solution.
It's the lightest.
It's the most agile and it's the cheapest.
And I'm a firm believer that that container native storage
position of ours is gonna do great things over the coming years.
We actually already have an installed base of customers.
And so what we see is new applications in, uh, core cloud and edge, uh, And they will
be, those applications will be done based upon the container native storage stack.
And one of the most surprising things to me, if I look back on
our hypothesis in 2019, we kind of thought it would be the top of the
pyramid, the companies that had scale.
That could afford to bring on the Kubernetes trained engineers and
then born in the cloud companies.
So that was our business plan at the time.
Those two markets, well what's happened is it's, it's all markets.
I mean, everyone, it's, it's crazy.
Like if you look at the CNCF stats, uh, all geos, so Europe is
actually leading the us, believe it or not in CNCF, uh, deployments.
Uh, Asia's right there with them, but all, all regions, all verticals.
And, and basically all use cases are, are being consumed with Kubernetes.
I, I was traveling, I just came back from Europe.
I was traveling in the Rhine valley and, you know, Southwest Germany,
like manufacturing, you know, Mecca of Germany, you know, very, very established
companies producing, you know, kind of like not cutting edge stuff, but
you know, good manufacturing stuff.
And I talked to the CIO there.
One of our customers who's been a customer for.
I was talking about the future of containers.
So have you thought about, will you, when will you, and he's like, well, we got half
of our applications already ported over to, to Kubernetes and, and we're using
open EBS, you know, it was hilarious.
Um, so that's what we found on the container native storage
side is that it's, it's coming.
Most of the let's call them the, you know, the easier applications have
already been ported to kubernetes, the harder applications, which
require the persistent state.
Those have been ramping up over this past year.
We'll see that accelerate.
And, you know, I think in two to three years, it will be the exception that
new applications will be written that won't be leveraging the Kubernetes.
And I don't know, I've seen numbers as high as 80%.
I mean, who knows, but I, I just think it's, you know, anytime you
have something that is the cheapest.
The lightest weight, the most agile.
And it's based on an open framework that doesn't have lock in, feels
like that's a formula for success
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Well, let let's, um, and by the way, just, uh, uh, CNCF, that's the
cloud native computing foundation.
Um,
Dave Zabrowski: That's the governing body of, of, you know, Kubernetes let's
call it and the community around it.
W. Curtis Preston: Just in case, uh, any of our listeners weren't
familiar with that particular acronym.
Uh, let's just round out here talking about data protection.
Now it looks like this, uh, anti ransomware piece.
It looks like it's, it's powered by your object storage, formerly known as Caringo.
It's funny.
I was, I was browsing it not knowing about the Caringo acquisition.
And the first thing I saw was Swarm.
I was.
That's a branded term.
And then I realized, oh, that's that's Caringo's term.
So this is a sort of on demand, disc based backup for the primary.
Right.
That that's sort of being managed by your whole thing, but apparently powered
by object storage in the back end.
You wanna just, and this is what you were referring to in the front,
uh, the first few minutes where you were talking about the time machine,
which by the way, I'm pretty sure is another branded term, but, um, you
Dave Zabrowski: It probably is.
Well, basically it just, we work in partnership with the backup vendors.
So we are not a backup vendor.
Just to be clear.
We sit, we sit aside of the backup vendors.
As I mentioned, you could actually, you know, U utilize Datacore
right out of the Veeam, UI.
But we, we have partnerships with Commvault and Cohesity
and, and others that are coming.
um, but basically, you know, they're, we're, we're basically
doing what they want us to do.
So if they want us to back up, um, from the unstructured data, uh,
that's what we do and, uh, we'll time stamp it and, and protect it
and make it available when they want.
And that's it.
So it's, uh,
W. Curtis Preston: really just basically backup storage or
storage for backup and recovery.
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: I, I guess earlier I, I, I got.
Idea.
And maybe we're talking about a different part of the product that if I was attacked
by a ransomware, that you basically had this ability to just easily put me back
to before the ransomware attack, without involving a third party backup product.
Am I misunderstanding?
Dave Zabrowski: no, we, we work with the backup vendors, but the immutability
basically will, will actually protect the, the, the data itself.
And.
Yeah.
And if you think of the active archive example I gave you before, you know, on
the one hand, it's actually, it's tee up data for people that it's not deep
glacier, you know, it's something that people want on a, on an as needed basis.
So we have to have performance it's, you know, so it's not like, you know,
you call in and get it three days later.
Um, and then when it comes to, to backup, basically you wanna just roll back.
Um, there's a, there's a concept of concept that we talk about here called
continuous data protection, is essentially the same, you know, the same idea.
You know, that again, that was some of the patents from some of
the earlier, you know, Datacore expertise, but it's the same idea.
You basically keep, keep track of things on a timestamp basis.
When you detect, um, some sort of violation, uh, you just go back to
T whatever, uh, from that violation and just, just restore the data.
It's, it's, it's very, very simple in concept.
It's, it's obviously more challenging from a technical perspective
than that, but concept is easy.
W. Curtis Preston: it, it would seem like you would do that part without
the third party backup vendors.
I, you understand
Dave Zabrowski: We do we do.
We do.
Yeah.
We, we do do that.
In fact, if you have a, if you just have a, you know, Datacore
on its own, um, absolutely.
With our UI, you set that up and it can do it, but, but more, more often, I mean, I
would say the standard is there's backup vendors in the market that we work with.
That's that's more the, I would say the typical use.
W. Curtis Preston: Is the CDP functionality, is it part of
the core product or is that something extra that you pay for?
Dave Zabrowski: No, it's part of the core.
W. Curtis Preston: Okay.
All right.
So you could, you could have that and it is, and it is CD.
So it is continuous.
I can go back to literally any point in time, not a
particular snapshot that I took.
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah.
Correct.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: And I'll throw out a name, Curtis, because I know
we talked about time machine, right.
You and I would love it.
Right.
TiVo and the DVRs.
Right?
Dave Zabrowski: See, on the DVS
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Um, my TiVo rest in peace.
Um,
um,
Dave Zabrowski: That's like, one of those technologies is like, how did that fail?
You know, it's like web van.
It's like, wait a minute.
How did web van fail?
You know, you think,
W. Curtis Preston: yeah,
I'm, I'm not actually familiar with web van, but, uh, definitely
familiar with Tivo longtime Tivo customer and I've recently retired.
My Tivo I'm I've now moved to YouTube TV.
Dave, thanks a lot for, you know, coming on here and, um, you know, I, I, um, I,
I am super jelly of, although I'm, I'm jealous of the weather of the water.
I am not jealous of the weather everywhere else that you have,
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah, but the thing is in Fort Lauderdale, you know, little
known fact, I mean, we're cooler than the rest of the nation in the summer.
Believe it or not, it rarely gets above 90.
Rarely gets a button.
Now you live in Orlando.
That's different.
Fort
W. Curtis Preston: Well, I lived in Orlando.
I live in San Diego.
Now.
I think I'll take, I'll take our weather over your
Dave Zabrowski: you're you're spoiled.
No, you're
W. Curtis Preston: If it, if it, if it, if it hits 90, we're shutting down like this,
just cuz nobody here has air conditioning.
Right?
Dave Zabrowski: Yeah, no, I know that I lived, I lived in, uh, Southern Cal
for about 10 years and, uh, I used to used to think like if you had dials
and you could change the weather, you wouldn't touch the dials ever in
Southern California, but it's good.
Thank you.
And, uh, for, for your time gentlemen, and, uh, best of luck,
if there's any follow up I can have, uh, please, please ping me.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, absolutely.
Prasanna, thanks again for your great questions
Prasanna Malaiyandi: as always.
I try and nice meet to meet you, Dave, and thanks for putting
up with my questions too.
Dave Zabrowski: That's great
W. Curtis Preston: and, uh, thanks to our listeners.
Make sure to subscribe so that you can restore it all.