The only advantage of the Uber in that scenario is you

can get drunk and not worry about it, but I don't think the Lambda function,

you know, is gonna help with that.

Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it All podcast, I'm your host, W.

Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.

Backup and have with me, my garage lighting consultant, Prasanna Malaiyandi.

How's it going, Prasanna?.

I'm good, Curtis.

Although I think shortly you will become my garage lighting consultant.

You think, so you think it's gonna be like

a, like a, what do you call it?

A, the tables will turn.

You think

Or it's like when the, what is it when

the student becomes a master

Yeah, this is, this is not one of those areas though.

Where you, where you, you know, pulled out one of your, your

extensive YouTube experiences, as I

recall,

so I think it's fair to say that you did this project and then

you talked to me after it was all done

had you reached out before I would've?

Yeah, I've done quite a bit of research on garage lighting, so

of course you have, of course you have, how many YouTube videos

have you watched on garage lighting?

At least 30

This is what I'm talking about.

We're back, we're back to you being a random expert in stuff that I have no idea

why you're an expert in, but yeah, I did.

I did this when a little willy-nilly I just sort of, I, you know, I've

been needing that light in there.

This is in my woodworking room that as you, that you know, that I have

built and now, and I, I, I figured that it would be a good idea if there

was good lighting in a place with all

Sharp tools.

Yeah.

I was actually gonna think if you need like, uh, task lighting as well, or if

there's enough, because depending on like, you don't want the light behind you when

you're on a table, saw trying to cut a piece of wood, you know, you'll get the

I usually close my eyes when I use a table saw.

Should I not do that?

And this is like, one of your fingers is

That one, there you go.

That finger I'm not flipping 'em off viewers that are viewing both these

fingers have been injured in power tools.

My wife gets very angry at me when I display my, my injuries.

Um, and yeah, so this finger, uh, it actually had an evulsion, which is

a, a laceration that removes flesh.

Um, that was not good.

So, yeah, that was many years ago, you know?

And

it's been an awfully long time.

Yeah.

Learned a lot.

Uh, let's see.

The last power tool injury was only.

A, um, a nail gun, a shooting, a nail into my head.

and that's been a couple years.

Right.

yeah, it's been a couple of years.

Yeah.

And, and the, the hilarious part was I did it, like, after telling my

granddaughter don't touch this tool because it could do really scary

yeah.

And then I send it, I try to send a nail through my, I don't

think it made all the way through, but it definitely cuz I was holding a piece

of wood and shooting a nail into it.

And the, the nail went, it took a corner,

the nail, it bent a corner and it went into my

finger.

Yeah.

Always be careful around power tools and make sure

you wear your safety goggles.

All the things, um, you know, always back up your data

always wear your safety glasses and um,

sure you have plenty of lighting.

we ha we make sure you have plenty of lighting.

We have a, another cool guest today.

This is one of those people.

Another person who, uh, he has a unique vantage point in that he has

known me for a really long time.

He first got to know me as a customer, meaning he was a customer of mine.

I was a consultant, um, at a company that he used to work.

He, now I am super jelly.

He is now retired and, um, is like, you know, hopping on cruises left and right.

So I really, I dislike this guy, but he's but he's a really good guy.

And, uh, you know, he's been around like me a long time.

So, you know, he's got a few backup stories to tell, welcome

to the podcast, Stuart Liddle.

Hi, how are you doing?

Thanks.

Good to be here.

I have

a

and by the way that, yeah, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Go.

I have a question for you Stuart, when you retire

from the backup industry, right.

Is it kind of like a spy where it never gets turned off?

Like those skills that you're always thinking about when you're on like

a cruise it's like, I wonder if they back up this data, what would happen?

Yeah.

I, I, I have those thoughts from time to time, but you know, that

it's kinda like, uh, a headache.

I wish it would go away real quick.

you know, but, but yeah, I mean, I've been, I've been doing it since like

the early seventies and I started out as a programmer in the Air Force

because I was gonna get drafted.

and I signed up for the Air Force, which may or may not have been a mistake, but

They still had the draft at that point.

when I was

when I went

in.

Well, yeah, I mean, I got, I got my draft notice the day after I, uh, signed

up and that was in 73, 72 or 72 72.

Yeah.

So for the record, um, I was in like second

grade, I throw that out there.

and

so, so I

that I get to feel young Stuart, so,

there.

Okay.

There you go.

Um, so make me feel old.

Yeah, that's great.

Um, so, so yeah, I was doing cobalt programming on punch cards

when I was in the Air Force.

So, and our, and you know, and our backups of those programs

were the punch cards that we used.

And God helped you if you dropped them.

would they actually make two copies of punch cards?

Like if they,

You know, that never happened, but well,

they, they didn't do that.

I mean, I, it, you know, I wasn't thinking backups at the time.

So if you, if you had a program that you'd written, um, you had the punch

card deck, you could make changes to it, and then you could load it into

the, into the computer and then you could put it on tape if you wanted to.

So that could be, you know, and I'm talking real to

real, the stuff they showed

. W. Curtis Preston: Did you ever,

I did.

Yeah.

I used that as well.

Um, and that was actually cooler, you know, for doing, doing quick stuff.

Oh, okay.

Quick story.

Quick story.

When I was in high school, I, I went to a high school with, in Seattle with

Bill Gates' older sister, and she and I were in the same calculus class.

And Bill Gates and I were in the same boy scout troop,

Oh

and yeah, really?

Yes.

Yes.

And, and Bill Gates went to a school called Lakeside, which was in the

Seattle area, but he had a, um, there was a place in Seattle called Computer

Center Corporation, which had some DEC, 10 gear and stuff like that.

And my high school had a computer programming class and our

teacher took us to that place.

And we did some, um, I think it was, um, Fortran programming or maybe basic.

And we were using punch tape at the time for that.

But, but when we went in there, apparently that was one of bill gates Hangouts, and

he was not well thought of by the people that managed that data center, because

he would typically come in and do things to make their lives miserable, like

crash the computers and stuff like that.

So just, there's a bit of trivia for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Typical high schooler, but look where he is now, you know, a divorced billionaire

that's about, as much in the way of bill gates stories I can tell.

That's interesting.

We talked earlier about, um, something that happened very

early on in my after military career,

um, which was, I went to work for a large bank in Seattle that doesn't exist anymore

and not because of this incident, but, um,

That's good to hear.

They, they, uh, they had, they had a situation that one

of the guys came to me one time and I hadn't been on that job for

very long, maybe a month or two.

And, um, this guy came up to me and he says, Hey, we need some help.

Um, we just had the last tape copy of this information get overwritten.

they only had three copies, you know, the.

Grandfather father and son, whatever.

I don't know what, whatever they wanted to call it, but, but in any case, they

needed to have this data brought back and they asked for me to help with it

along with a couple of other people.

And basically the only information they had on that data was all on printouts.

You know?

So here's the latest printout that we have and here are the

columns of data and whatnot.

Can you help us out?

And we had to figure out a way, okay, we need to have data entry people type in

stuff from the printouts and then put it together in the right order and stuff.

Yeah.

So that was my first, I guess, data recovery project that I ever worked on.

And how long that

never thought

of it.

I, it only, I think it only took us.

Um, well I think the data entry took a while.

I don't recall exactly about that, but I know that the people that I was working

on this with, we each had a piece of it to write, to pull the data from whatever was

gotten in through data entry, into, um, a, the, the format that it needed to be in.

I, and I, and I think that part may have only taken a couple or three days,

but the actual data entry part could have taken quite a bit longer, but

we were, we were able to get it done.

So

So they, so they had multiple tapes of it,

but somehow all three had been

overwritten

Yeah.

Yep.

And it was, and it was based on a certain period of time, you know?

So like after seven days the grandfather got over it and then after 14 days,

the father got over that kind of thing.

And then it's funny, that is not a data restoration story.

That is a data reentry story.

that's like the worst case scenario, right.

right.

Yeah, well, we don't have printouts anymore.

Nobody's gonna be a printout.

Um, unless you're like a, a CPA, they like to print out paper

and have it hanging around.

Um, but yeah, it, it reminds me of my, my first data, you know,

restoration nightmare, because.

Oh,

also had, when we had this outage, it was, it

was, it was a purchasing database.

And when we had the outage, I went to go look for the tapes.

And I was told to look at the logs.

It, they, that these were unique systems and this was dump.

And I was told to look at the logs and I was told to look for these certain errors.

And if these errors were there, then go to the previous backup.

Well, I kept going and I kept going and I kept going and

the errors were always there.

And, uh, eventually I found a backup that was, you know, that was valid

and it was just over six weeks old.

And, uh, our retention period was six weeks.

Right.

And, you know, I remember just wanting to crawl under, and, and that, you know,

speaking of speaking of dudes going on Alaskan vacations, uh, this morning,

I'm literally looking at on Facebook.

Another friend of mine, that is the guy that saved my bacon on that day.

His name's Joe Fitzpatrick, another guy whose name comes up

once in a while in the podcast, he doesn't even remember this event.

Right.

Um, I just remember that he, he pulled up the Unix, you know, command prompt, which

at that time for me was still like magic.

I was only in maybe a couple of months and he did some stuff with

F S C K or something, and somehow got the drive to a point where

we could get something off of it.

And we only lost.

Two days worth of purchase orders in this database.

And to me, that became, you know, the, the, the defining moment in my career.

Like, I'm like, that's not gonna happen to me.

And to Joe, it was just a Tuesday.

So to him, it doesn't, he doesn't even remember this story.

It's like this single handedly, like the, the single most defining moment of my

career and Joe doesn't even remember it.

And now he's off, he's off to Alaska sending me pictures.

Like you've been sending me from your Alaska cruises

Yeah.

so

So

do you remember the first time we worked together?

yeah.

Yeah, it was, it was at Amgen.

Um,

And was Thousand Oaks

to help

or was in Seattle?

It was in thousand Oaks.

Okay.

All right.

Well, okay.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

You're right.

There was a class that you did in Seattle.

To the people that were there just after the merger.

Right.

They had, yeah, it would've

yeah.

And so you did a class on NetBackup and because they were using

NetBackup at, um, Amgen and you did a class there on NetBackup.

I remember.

I, I think that's what happened.

yeah.

The, the, the funny thing is, you know, like I was not a NetBackup instructor, but

it was like, this is how I use NetBackup.

That's what I remember if I was gonna

do.

That was in 2002, I believe.

Oh, it was a few years ago.

How do you remember that year?

I'm so bad at years.

were, there were certain things that happened in certain years.

I mean, that's, that's, that's one of 'em, you know, it's like, that's when

I, as part of that merger, they took a group of people at, at the Seattle

office and they said, You can either go to work for us in thousand Oaks

or you can get laid off in October.

You're like, I think I'm gonna move to Oxnard Camarillo.

yeah, well actually it was thou um, uh, Camarillo, but that's okay.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Close enough.

But, um, yeah,

um,

what was Curtis like back then?

I only know Curtis now, what was he like back then?

he was, he was just as funny and, and interesting as he is now.

I'll I'll, I'll just go

with

I was I as devastatingly handsome as, as I am now,

Well, you know, I'm, I'm not the person who would be able

to give a, a good, uh, assessment

way, speaking of being devastatingly handsome,

we are the bearded trio today.

The bearded and headphones trio, two of us with gray beards one,

not so much, although there's some

great.

There's some gray in there.

Um,

Thinking about the I'm pretty sure it was the Seattle days.

There was a boss and I think you and I have talked about this recently,

but there was a boss that you had, and I'm pretty sure he was

there and, or in Thousand Oaks.

Darn if I can remember, but the name, the name, Scott rings a bell and he

was the one that he wanted backup retention of two weeks and no more.

Do you remember this?

I, I don't remember that.

I know the guy you're talking about and actually he, he was one of the people

who was involved in the transition from the company that I used to work

for that got a, um, merged into Amgen.

And he later became a director in Seattle and then went back to Thousand

Oaks, um, you know, at a higher level.

But you don't, you don't remember this

thing about the two weeks?

I don't remember the two weeks.

I don't remember the

cuz I remember it very distinctly cuz it's the

only time in my entire career when I had someone say something

that to me sounded so ill advised

Yeah.

Well,

okay.

Does, does that sound as ill advised as treating all backups equally?

um, I I'm gonna say more ill advised, but I, I

know what you're saying about.

Yeah.

So is that, was that something else that you ran into?

Hmm.

Oh, I ran into that when I was consulting, I found a, you know, there

was a big, um, oil and gas company in Texas that , that said dev test and prod.

It doesn't matter.

It all gets treated the same.

And I'm like, you guys are insane.

This is, this is

crazy

talk.

if I just

have the,

budgets.

yeah,

I mean, as long, yeah, if you don't care about money,

number one, and number two, if you basically, as long as you're not treating

dev test and prod like dev, right.

As long if you're treating dev test and prod like prod,

mm-hmm

you know, and you have a solid plan and everything for

everything, but I would still that even if you, even if you've got a system that's

capable of backing up and restoring all of that, you at, you still need priorities

Yes.

in, in a disaster recovery situation, you're not gonna

recover dev and test before you recover

prod.

Right.

even prod, you're, you're not gonna recover

all those systems at the same time.

You should have segments, right.

Um, Yeah,

Like, so, I mean, you know, another part of that is

they didn't have a, uh, a CMDB,

So what's a CMDB for our listeners.

Yeah.

Configuration management database.

In other words, you got all your servers and all your applications

in this database, and you say what they are, whether they're dev

pros, prod, or test, and then you.

You prioritize them like, like Curtis was saying, and you can, you can

find them because you know, their location, you know, their name, you

know what they do, all of that stuff.

Um, you got serial numbers on all of the hardware, asset tags on all the hardware.

They didn't, they didn't really have that.

They had, they had it, but they didn't, it wasn't fully populated

with all the stuff they really needed.

So

so, Hmm.

I have another distinct memory from someone in

Oaks.

Oh,

No from someone in Seattle, again, I could be wrong,

but my memory is that it was someone in Seattle talking about migration.

You were migrating off of Netware.

Um, and there was a guy that was a Netware lover.

And I remember

about too.

I remember him saying that it was job security, that

he, he knew, he knew that it was way harder to use than everything else

and that nobody else knew it, but him, but he didn't see a problem with that.

I know the guy you're talking about and he, he actually,

uh, bought a place in Idaho when I was, you know, before I moved there.

And, uh, yeah, we've, we've kept in touch, but yeah, I, I know his name.

Yeah.

Old

but yeah, but we see that, we see that a lot in, in.

Technology.

We see it in backup systems where someone a, a new and interesting and possibly

much better backup system comes along.

But then you got the guy that knows NetBackup.

And so he doesn't wanna let go.

He's got all this, you know, knowledge of having run the,

the backup system for so long.

Um, yeah.

Uh, wait, that guy was you I'm talking about you

but it doesn't even have to be just backup.

So even

no, no.

moving to like VMware, right.

Virtualization and your server admins are like, what am I gonna do now?

Yeah.

Yep.

oh, oh,

oh, that's right.

So is, is it going to,

It's happening.

it gonna be like Symantec and, and, uh, Veritas

I sure as hell, hope not.

Uh, cuz I re I remember, I remember going to Veritas Vision.

Back when Veritas had a vision, they went to Veritas Vision, it

was a year after the acquisition.

And I remember saying it appears that you've spent an entire year

painting everything yellow and black.

Right.

That's literally, that's literally all that they had done for the entire year.

Oh, probably

And, and I, I, I don't think I was being unkind.

It is just that, that, that did not go well, like, and you know, and

they parted ways and now there's Veritas and now there's Symantec.

I'll throw out our disclaimer Prasanna.

And I work for different companies.

Prasanna work for zoom.

I work for Druva, and this is not a podcast of either company.

The things that you hear on here are our opinions, nothing more, and, uh, be sure

to rate us ratethispodcast.com/restore.

And also, you know, if you like to talk about backup, restore, archive,

security protection, privacy, cetera, we'd love to have you on just, uh,

contact me at wcurtispreston@gmail or @wcpreston on Twitter.

You can DM me.

I accept all DMS and, uh, we can chat.

Let's talk about some other interesting things that you remember over the

years in terms of adapting to new, you know, new ways of doing backups or, you

know, cuz you've, cuz you've seen and in 20 years you've seen the move from

tape to, well from, from, from punch card to tape, from disk from disk to

cloud, you know, what was that like?

Um, you know, it's interesting when I was, let's

just take Amgen as an example.

When I first got there, everything was going to DLT and we were using,

um, a certain offsite storage vendor to, you know, pick up the things

and take 'em off to some other site.

Um, and then it went to, um, uh, so that was physical tape.

And then we went to virtual tape.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Hang on.

So DLT for the, for those of you that, that haven't been around,

that was digital linear tape.

That was the predecessor to LTO.

So it was a, it was a linear tape.

The way LTO is as opposed to heli scan tape, which is a

completely different thing.

Did you ever use any helical stuff like D DDS or eight millimeter, uh, or AIT?

we, we did have some, and, and at the same time

we transitioned off of DLT to LTO.

We transitioned off of those as well.

Gotcha.

We did have AIT.

Yeah.

So we transitioned to that.

And then we also had gotten into virtual tape libraries and

which

big vendors.

if you're new to this world, somebody's listening to this going.

I'm sorry,

what what is a, what is a virtual tape library?

Stuart Stuart.

it's a disc based system that emulates writing to tape and it

And And why in hell would somebody do that?

supposedly it was faster and easier to work with, but

but but why would a disc that I get, why you'd use disc?

Why would a disc pretend to be tape?

Because the backup software primarily dealt with tape

and didn't know about writing to disk

Yeah, it was a, it was a bandaid situation.

Right.

And I remember many years ago, several years ago, I was sitting,

sitting, chatting with a gentleman by the name of Mark Staimer.

And I'll have to, I'll have, now I'll have to tweet to him about this

episode, but Mark Staimer and I made a bet one year, and this was when I

was a big fan of VTLs at the time.

And he's like in five years, Nobody's gonna be buying VTLs like it was something

he's like, there's gonna be fewer VTLs sold than, than the alternative.

And I was like, I bet you, you know, we, I, as I recall, I, I, I owe him dinner.

He is the thing was that basically it was a time when backup products

really didn't know how to handle writing to disk very well.

And so we needed to, and I, and I can think of one big backup.

I'm gonna call it protocol that really didn't know how to write to tape.

And it's one, I'm sorry that didn't know how to write to disk.

And it's one that you would've, you would've been exposed to there at

Amgen, cuz I remember helping with it.

Do you remember it?

Tar

No,

no, that's right.

You can write the

I'll give you a hint.

Uh, the thing that used it rhymes with uh, Schmett app.

okay.

Yeah.

Do you remember?

Do you remember?

the way you backed up?

What was that?

Oh, geez.

Now.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, there you go.

There you go.

That's right.

NDMP didn't know how to do anything else, but

that yeah.

right.

the only way to get data off your net app.

Yep.

Yep.

yeah.

And so, and so disc pretended to be tape and I, I

think, I think they still sell that stuff, but I don't, I mean, I know

that quantum does, I know that, um, and does data domain still do,

Data Domain still supports VTL.

Yep.

for all three of its customers, that uses it.

no, I, so when I, so I used to be at EMC

at the time, right after the data domain acquisition, I joined EMC.

And I remember hearing stories though that the big selling point for data

domain initially, like you're saying, it's you go into those accounts with

tape customers and be like, Hey, here's a very simple, de-duplicate

applying deduplication appliance.

You just swap out your tape drives or tape library with this.

And you're all good to go and look at these amazing cost

savings that you get all the

deduplication.

So that, that was the next phase, right.

Was,

Yeah.

was

Going to yeah.

And,

And

you, you used a lot of that stuff back in the

oh yeah, we used a lot of that stuff.

We went from, we went to data domain and uh, then we ended up with

strictly, uh, NetBackup appliances, so

with, with NetBackup, dedupe integrated into it.

yeah.

Yeah.

And then replicating to a remote site using that.

Right, right

So it.

it it basically eliminated the need for sending stuff off

site to, you know, with tape

So you actually lived what, what, I'm gonna call backup Nirvana.

Right?

Because we talked about this a lot, but I, but I very rarely

met people that actually did it.

And that was that they went tapeless with a de-duplicated replicated system.

You had the onsite back and the offsite back and nobody touched a tape and

no, man, there was no man in a van.

But that was only good at certain sites that would've allowed

it due to bandwidth issues or, um, you know, in certain, uh, European states

that wouldn't necessarily allow it.

What, and what was the challenge there?

Um, I, I believe there was like, um, in Europe and in the EU,

they have certain data, uh, privacy laws that don't allow you to move

things over across borders or something

Oh, okay.

Well, I, I would just assume that you would do it within the border,

but yeah, that, that's definitely a

Well, If you like Switzerland, not part of the EU and has

their own set of laws on that stuff.

I think they're, they're one of the ones that we couldn't really do

it to, unless we had two sites in Switzerland, which I don't think we did.

We only had one.

So, but

inside

might be joining NATO though.

there you go.

I think there's a good shot there.

Um, okay.

So yeah.

So if the laws allowed it, uh, and things like that, then you would do that.

Mm-hmm

um, and what, how much better was that from

comparing it to the tape world?

To what you, what you had before, you know, so you had the tape world, you

had the tape plus data domain world.

And then you went with this appliance world.

How much better or, or was it better?

Was it

more

Yeah.

Huge, huge amount better.

Um, the, the big problem with doing restores of, of files of course,

is bandwidth across the wan.

How long is it gonna take to restore a big file?

That kind of thing.

But I think it's still worked out to be better than say, and, and

we always did have the option.

Here's the option of at the remote site, if that's the only copy of the data,

copying it to tape and shipping the tape to the, to the site where you really

needed to restore it, you know, that that cuz never underestimate the, uh, the

bandwidth of a 747 full of DLTs or LTOs.

That's right.

That's right.

Never underestimate the B bandwidth of a truck is my usual thing, but yeah.

But yeah, plane full of

LTOs is pretty huge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

was there something you found though that

was lacking with this new solution versus what you had before?

Cause I think everyone understands the pros of going, what sort

of a backup appliance based approach versus older tape style.

But was there something that you found was lacking with this approach

or that you wish it could do that?

um, I, I think the only thing I wish I could do is

to, to, to be able to be more of, um, quick restore across the WAN

is, is probably the biggest thing.

But for the most part, yeah, it's, it was pretty nice having that because you didn't

have to deal with somebody constantly saying, well, I, I forgot I couldn't get

into the office because of the snowstorm.

So I couldn't get the tapes offsite, and then you have a disaster, right.

Just

don't have to worry about that.

you were able to have different retention on your primary

and then your secondary, cuz you, you mentioned that there would be backups.

It would only be at that secondary cuz you could solve the problem by having

the same size systems on both sides.

Right?

Cause

then if you're doing a restore from the, the place where you're backing

up, you would restore from the,

Yeah.

You could

restore from the

server.

But that, but that's a lot more expensive.

If yeah, but, but if, yes, I, um, but I don't think there

was different retentions on that.

It was the same retention and we, if we needed to back it restore

something quickly, we could do it from the local copy rather than

the remotely replicated copy.

Why would you ever restore it from the

remotely replicated copy.

If you had a problem with your, you know, primary site

going down and, uh, you know, the backup system being compromised

somehow, then you would want do that..

Okay.

See, this is a test.

I know

no, not a test.

It's just, I didn't, uh, um, I didn't, um, I wasn't there, man.

Isn't dare man.

okay.

Oh, you,

Um, and I didn't ever have to administer those

NetBackup appliances in production,

so we talked about now you went from tape to

sort of VTL to backup appliances.

Did you ever have to worry about, like, what do you do with applications

that are moving to the cloud while you were there at Amgen?

Yeah, I did.

And unfortunately I was not one of the main people that got into that.

So I, my experience with the cloud based stuff is not as extensive as some of

the other people that I worked with.

So, um, yes, we did that.

And, and in fact, there's a lot of applications that ended up at,

uh, AWS and, you know, things like in fact, um, one of my coworkers

ended up going to work there.

So.

Um,

Gotcha.

And, and what was the, what was the general feeling of that?

Was it, was it because you might have been in some of those, was it like

saying, Hey, well, we definitely, well, we definitely gotta back that stuff

up or, or was there a feeling of like, well, it's the cloud, so we're good.

no.

I think the, um, the feeling was that that people thought that, that it was a

good thing to use and they didn't really take into account the full expense of

that when they were talking about it, they were just looking at it from the

standpoint of, Hey, we can reduce our data center footprint if we put the

stuff to the cloud and virtualize it and not necessarily realizing that in

some cases you're gonna be spending as much if not more on stuff like that.

So,

Yeah, subscription based pricing for

hardware is essentially what that is

the

exactly.

So going back to an earlier conversation we had in the

podcast where the, uh, person was afraid of their job getting sort of obsolete.

Were you afraid of that when they were starting to move to the cloud?

And were you thinking, oh man, is this going to mean I'm

out of a business or out of a

no, no, not at all.

And I think it primarily was because of the fact that there was still

applications that they wanted to keep in house on prem and, uh, they didn't

want to, uh, put that out to the cloud.

So no, there was still that.

And then there's also, again, that, that cost factor, I think, because

if, if we got involved with it properly, we could point out that,

Hey, this is still cheaper, you know, but, but I think that's changing.

I haven't.

I haven't been involved so much with it recently.

You guys probably know more about that,

At what's changing.

um, the, the pricing for, for virtualization and cloud based stuff,

I, I don't know.

I would say you now have more options.

Like you can pick cheaper tiers of storage.

mm-hmm

you can try to optimize and spin down, like

instances when they're not in use or allow them to be preempted.

There is Lambda functions, which means you don't necessarily run a server.

You're just running code when it needs to run.

So they've given you more options.

I don't necessarily know if it's cheaper.

right.

But it's

now up to the developer to optimize for those costs.

you think Prasanna?

Well, it, yeah, I.

I think it is cheaper.

If you use the cloud, the way cloud can be used.

Like you can't do it, you can't do a Lambda function in a data center.

The concept of running a Lambda function.

is that you, you get to do this for next to nothing.

And if it's something that you do infrequently, or there, there, there is

a crossover point, right, where you're paying by the Lambda function, but it's

super, super cheap, but at some point you cross a boundary and now, well, this

would be cheaper if I would just rent a VM for a certain number of hours per day.

Um, and so I, I think that the, the people that continue to struggle with

cloud costs are people that don't, they, they don't treat the cloud like that.

They, they just, they just treat the cloud as another data center.

And so they, they say, well, we have a thousand VMs over here.

We got a thousand VMs over there.

We got 20 terabytes of storage over here.

We got 20 terabytes of storage over there, and that is the guaranteed

way to have your costs skyrocket.

Doesn't matter what the cloud vendor is.

If you're renting your hardware, cuz that's what you're doing, right.

You're renting your hardware.

And, and I know I make this analogy a lot, but it's like going from owning a car and

you go, gee, I don't want, I don't want the troubles of owning a car anymore.

So I'm going to rent a car from Avis all the time.

right.

I, I, I don't want to do, I don't wanna do oil changes.

I want that to be Avis' problem.

So I'm gonna rent a car from Avis 24 7 and have it sitting in my driveway.

But I'm gonna, but, but renting a car is an incredibly expensive way to have a car.

It's great if you need it for a day or even a week, or you need a car where

you happen to be, which isn't where you live, that's what Avis is for.

And that's the way the cloud should be.

You should buy little pieces.

And if what you're doing is just running a, a server 24 by seven, then it's going

to be more expensive than having that same exact server sitting in your site.

Um, but I'm sorry, I jumped up on a soapbox there,

but

take your analogy one step further and say

that Lambda is the equivalent of Uber.

In your example.

Agreed.

Lambda is the equivalent of Uber and Uber is a great cheap way to

do, to do certain things, right.

But if you take Uber all day, Is it gonna be even more

expensive than renting that car?

Right?

Shoot, actually, you don't even have to take Uber that much.

you know, you could take, take, take couple Ubers a day and you're gonna

start to be wondering, you know, if you should have a rental car,

uh, is just, you know, again, this is where the analogy falls apart.

The only advantage of the Uber in that scenario is you can get

drunk and not worry about it, but I don't think the Lambda function,

you know, is gonna help with that.

Um, so, okay.

Um, Stuart, is there anything that you, you know, like if you had had

your druthers, if you could have waved a magic wand, is there anything that

you would've wanted to have, you know, from a backup and recovery perspective

that, that you didn't get when you were doing things back in the day?

oh, geez.

What was you mean beyond the Nirvana of site to site

Yes.

Beyond the Nirvana of site to site replication.

Uh, wow.

Oh, well, okay.

Um, full automation of the, uh, the process of, of upgrading.

I mean, upgrading from one version to of.

NetBackup to another, or, you know, having clients updated when you have to deal

with different, um, uh, support groups, you know, like windows and Unix and

VMware, you know, by, by, by, by telling you know, somebody, Hey, you best have

your systems all on the latest version of NetBackup or you're gonna have problems.

And they look at you and say, oh, you know, that's a project, so we're gonna

have to take some time with that.

And then just like throw up your hands and yeah, I wish I could

have had that kind of thing.

That would've been great.

Yeah.

And, and that is a real challenge for, because no one wants to

upgrade their backup server.

Right.

And, and your clients, they don't wanna upgrade their, their backup client because

it's just, it's just, they don't, they don't really get any benefit out of it.

Right.

well, they don't get any perceived benefit out

of it,

benefit out of it,

right?

Until something breaks.

then they're like, why didn't you

So that,

how come you didn't know about this?

solving all the tape problem and everything that this

was what you were left with, was that maintenance, that ongoing maintenance.

That ongoing maintenance and, and upgrading the

backup servers was not a big deal because it was just our group that

was, you know, involved with it.

So us doing it was not a big deal, but to tell other people in other groups

with different managers that, Hey, you've got a thousand Unix servers

out there that need to be upgraded to a newer version of NetBackup.

They're like, man, , we'll just let it go.

that, and, and again, I, I swear I did not give

you this question just so I could say this, but this is one of the

beauties of SaaS based backup is that you don't have that problem.

Right.

You're never upgrading the backup server and, and we even solved the, the,

the updating of the client that, that could be done by the software itself.

And you can, you know, schedule it I'd, I'd like it to just

be completely automatic.

But I think that a lot of companies don't want that.

Right.

They want some control over when that happens so that they know that it's

happening, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't have had to, um, you wouldn't have

had to spend a lot of time upgrading the servers and upgrading the clients.

Cuz magic just would've happened.

But um, but Hey, but now you're gone.

This is, this is a secret.

This is a secret to backup.

Success is leaving the job all together.

Now, now I'm gone, but let me just put in a shameless plug and say

to anybody out there, who's listening.

If you're interested in hiring me as a NetBackup admin,

Absolutely

me.

Stu Stuart knows his stuff and he's got grandkids to pay for.

yeah.

That's right.

How many, how many grandkids you got going on there?

three, so far

Three so far.

but two, two here in Denver and one in Seattle.

Yeah.

Cuz you now live in Denver.

You you've been following your, you've been following your grandkids around.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is that.

That may be a future.

That may be my future as well.

Uh, right now my grandkid,

uh, I, my office is their former bedroom and their other

bedroom is now right above me.

So I don't have to travel anywhere to see my grandchild.

Stuart, so Stuart, I wanna say, you know, thanks for coming on.

I mean, it's been great to,

to, you

know, we talk about you so many times, your name has come up on this podcast.

So many times as like the guy that told me to put a testing.

Chapter into my book and all of that.

Right.

Um,

Yeah, your name does come up quite often.

Stuart and it's great to finally meet you.

and not, and not just because, you know,

we like to giggle at your name

Yeah.

well, nice.

for the, for those listening and not reading, uh, it is

Liddle with, with Ds, uh, Stuart Liddle, not little, uh, he's not, he's not the

mouse, but, uh, anyway, so, and, uh, and,

Prasanna's not a cat.

Prasanna's not a cat, uh, and Prasanna,

thanks your questions as well.

I should say this was a pleasure and I hope I

wasn't poking too much fun at you Curtis and asking Stuart to, uh,

reveal all the mysteries about Curtis

No one, no one knows all the secrets.

Um, and, uh, I want to thank you again to our listeners.

Remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all.