Transcripts
Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it All podcast.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm your host, Prasanna Malaiyandi.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And with me, I have my lovely guest who is all scratched up and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:looks like he was in a bar fight.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis Preston,
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:for those watching on the video on backupcentral.com , you
W. Curtis Preston:can see my arm, my hand.
W. Curtis Preston:There's my hand.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah, I was at a bar fight yesterday.
W. Curtis Preston:Bar fight with a, with a set of stairs.
W. Curtis Preston:As of five minutes ago, I have, I'm at about 90% of cleaning
W. Curtis Preston:my wood shop out of all of the various little pieces of scraps.
W. Curtis Preston:And by the way, when you use power tools on vinyl flooring, , it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:just splinters everywhere.
W. Curtis Preston:oh my God.
W. Curtis Preston:It's just, it's not like, it's not like dust.
W. Curtis Preston:It's like, I don't know how, what to call it.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, it's dust, but it's like pixelated dust.
W. Curtis Preston:So it's, it's just very bulky, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It doesn't lay on the floor like dust without even sweeping it up.
W. Curtis Preston:It creates giant piles, very quickly.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's what I'm in the process of trying to rid my, my shop of is,
W. Curtis Preston:is, uh, that anyway, but you're, but you're, you're leading the show
W. Curtis Preston:today, so what are, why, why, why is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:up?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So today is, I don't know, Curtis, let's see.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Has it been, let's see.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We've known each other for a while and we always talk about how
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you've been in this space forever.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I do mean forever, But today, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's a big.
W. Curtis Preston:for a while now, I've been saying coming up on 30 years.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's no longer the 15 or 20 plus years in the industry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's now 30, the big three.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:years.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:By the time
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so how does it make that feel you?
W. Curtis Preston:uh, you know, uh, I mean, you know, I, I, I'm old.
W. Curtis Preston:What can I say?
W. Curtis Preston:? What can I say?
W. Curtis Preston:I felt Yeah, go ahead.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Now, aren't you glad though you're not sitting there
Prasanna Malaiyandi:still like swapping out tapes like you used to do in your first job?
W. Curtis Preston:Oh dude.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, except for that time when I got paid a ridiculous
W. Curtis Preston:amount of money to swap tapes.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, we've told that story a couple times where I once got paid
W. Curtis Preston:$10,000 to load up a tape library.
W. Curtis Preston:, this is the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Take the money.
W. Curtis Preston:swapping moment.
W. Curtis Preston:Take the money and run.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You know what I bet though, today what you would
Prasanna Malaiyandi:end up doing is you take the $10,000 and then you'd go spend like $500
Prasanna Malaiyandi:hiring some college kids to basically
W. Curtis Preston:You know what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you.
W. Curtis Preston:That Outsourcing.
W. Curtis Preston:Outsourcing, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm, you know, as we've discussed on the podcast, I'm kind of a
W. Curtis Preston:DIYer, so I would probably still, I would, I, I would want to keep
Prasanna Malaiyandi:tedious like that.
W. Curtis Preston:What's that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:tedious like that though, would you really?
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, it was so tedious.
W. Curtis Preston:It took the reason why it was so, it was so much money.
W. Curtis Preston:It was because I was in there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, by the way, that money came from amazon.com, not a sponsor.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I was in Amazon putting in their first enterprise wide backup system.
W. Curtis Preston:This was 1998, and my bill rate as a backup expert was 250 bucks an.
W. Curtis Preston:And it took, it took me a week to do that, to ba They basically,
W. Curtis Preston:they bought this big tape library.
W. Curtis Preston:They bought all these tapes to go with it.
W. Curtis Preston:And um, and it took me a week to unpack and label the,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:say you had to label was the one that took a while.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:You had to, I, I had to go print labels, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I had to get labels, I had to pull the little sticker off, and then I had to
W. Curtis Preston:put them on, and, and they gotta be on, just so you know, or it doesn't work.
W. Curtis Preston:And you know what I, what I did what I always say at the end of the story,
W. Curtis Preston:Because I've told this sir a few times, is at the end what Amazon got, uh, as
W. Curtis Preston:advice was, Hey, just so you know, they sell these with the barcodes already
W. Curtis Preston:on them, for the, for the future.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, by the way, and by the way, this was, this was before Amazon sold stuff, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So we didn't buy the tapes from Amazon.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, we would've, we would've paid retail back in the day.
W. Curtis Preston:What
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Fries electronics?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh uh, no, I don't think so.
W. Curtis Preston:We were in, we were in Seattle.
W. Curtis Preston:Pre, pre.
W. Curtis Preston:Who would you have bought tapes from back then?
W. Curtis Preston:What?
W. Curtis Preston:C D W, maybe
Prasanna Malaiyandi:CDW outpost.com.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:I just don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, I can't remember the world before Amazon, you know?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's funny that you mentioned that I was driving down the, uh, Stevens
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Creek by my house the other day and there is actually still a mom and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:pop computer store that still exists.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that I remember.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:B, going to to buy parts for my first PC couple decades ago,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:more than a couple decades ago,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:still in the same location.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't know what they sell these days.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't know how they stay in business, but.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The thing I think would be interesting to our listeners is as you've gone
Prasanna Malaiyandi:through all these changes, right, or seen all these changes, how did you keep up?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:With the change in technology and not feel sort of like a dinosaur, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That you're about to become obsoleted.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And how do you sort of like, it is a big shift though, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Moving from one technology to another as new things are coming up and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sometimes people feel like, I don't know how to make that leap into that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:new technology, into the next thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:How, what can they do to sort of help them with that transit?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay, so let's go way back in the day.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I know everyone's heard the, the stories about you working at a bank,
W. Curtis Preston:At a bank, 1993, the year was 1993.
W. Curtis Preston:My oldest daughter, the singer of the, uh, theme song for this
W. Curtis Preston:podcast is negative one years old.
W. Curtis Preston:She's, but a glimmer in my eye at that moment, I was fresh out of the Navy right.
W. Curtis Preston:Had little to no experience with computers, and I, um, leveraged my wife,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, to get my first job in backups.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, I, I often say that like, um, That the career up until, up
W. Curtis Preston:until the point that I wrote the book, the first book, which was in 99.
W. Curtis Preston:My career was complete happenstance, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so I was, I was in Delaware because the Navy took me to Philadelphia, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The na I was in the Navy on, on the u s s Constellation, Macy rest in peace.
W. Curtis Preston:, um, she went from, from San Diego to Philadelphia to go into dry dock.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I was in the Navy, uh, getting out of the Navy.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, right now, 30 years ago, I would've been on what we call
W. Curtis Preston:terminal leave, which is you get, basically, you get, you take all your
W. Curtis Preston:saved up leave, and then you leave.
W. Curtis Preston:You just don't come back to the ship.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And then you, you just get paid for all your vacation and you leave.
W. Curtis Preston:I was a fresh graduate of the National Radio Institute of America . Right.
W. Curtis Preston:I took one of those correspondence courses that you saw on the back of.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, what was that?
W. Curtis Preston:Pop, pop Popular Science.
W. Curtis Preston:Is that, is that the name of the magazine?
W. Curtis Preston:I think it was called Popular Science.
W. Curtis Preston:And you'd have this ad like Build Your Own Computer.
W. Curtis Preston:And I took that because it was a correspondence course and
W. Curtis Preston:I could take it out to see.
W. Curtis Preston:And um, so I did that.
W. Curtis Preston:I built a 2 86 computer and that was all I, I think it was dos,
W. Curtis Preston:I think it was a DOS computer.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, that was the limit of my experience.
W. Curtis Preston:And then I got the job as the backup guy and I had to, I mean, I had
W. Curtis Preston:to bone up really quickly on Unix.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it was all Unix back then, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It was, um, uh, at and t system.
W. Curtis Preston:Five, three Uh, and we had seven Altrix Machine, deck.
W. Curtis Preston:Digital.
W. Curtis Preston:Digital.
W. Curtis Preston:Remember, digital equipment corporation, a k a deck, seven altrix machines in
W. Curtis Preston:Lake seven, uh, three And that was the entire computing environment when I
W. Curtis Preston:came in, which is amazing to think about that for a 35 billion company, right?
W. Curtis Preston:They, they had a mainframe that there was that world, and then there was
W. Curtis Preston:this handful of Unix computers, which exploded the day after I got there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is your phone probably has more computing power
Prasanna Malaiyandi:than all those systems combined
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I know it has more storage capacity than my entire data
W. Curtis Preston:center did, or at least it has roughly.
W. Curtis Preston:I think I have a 256 gigabyte iPhone and we had 300 gigabytes of storage space
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Isn't that crazy to think about that in the last 30 years.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's
W. Curtis Preston:the way, that was 300 gigabytes at the end of my.
W. Curtis Preston:when we got there, we would've had nothing.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because the, each Altrix machine had its own eight millimeter, which those
W. Curtis Preston:back then, those were a gigabyte or two, like they, they weren't very big.
W. Curtis Preston:And um, the three they only had quick 80, which was 80 megabytes.
W. Curtis Preston:That was a tape drive.
W. Curtis Preston:And then we had the, we had one eight millimeter tape drive
W. Curtis Preston:that we shared amongst them.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Which was, which was RFS mounted.
W. Curtis Preston:We've talked about that before that it was like N F F, it was a pre predecessor
W. Curtis Preston:to nfs, but you could mount devices.
W. Curtis Preston:And so we would RFS mount, you know, the tape drive, we had
W. Curtis Preston:seven machines seven days a week.
W. Curtis Preston:We would do a rotating full one day a week on each different machine.
W. Curtis Preston:And um, then, um, And then we would, you know, and then we'd do an incremental
W. Curtis Preston:every day on those little quick eighties.
W. Curtis Preston:But yeah, so that whole, that whole thing when I got there, that was 20
W. Curtis Preston:gigabytes, , the whole data center.
W. Curtis Preston:It was by the time I was done that it was like 300 we bought and like
W. Curtis Preston:literally the last few months we bought a new machine, which was an HPT 500.
W. Curtis Preston:I remember.
W. Curtis Preston:Which was, uh, it was a monster and it was a hundred gigabytes
W. Curtis Preston:all on one server.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you're probably thinking, oh my God,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:how do I back this thing up?
W. Curtis Preston:Well, that's exactly what I said.
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, it came, it came with a dat drive, right?
W. Curtis Preston:There was like four gigabytes.
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, okay.
W. Curtis Preston:So that's 25 tape changes.
W. Curtis Preston:To do a full, so I, I basically, so, so that machine was, I guess it wasn't
W. Curtis Preston:in the last few months, I guess it was in the last year or so, because
W. Curtis Preston:that machine was what allowed me to justify the purchase of my first
W. Curtis Preston:spectral logic, uh, tape libraries.
W. Curtis Preston:That's how I first came to do Molly.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, you know, and our, and the fine folks over at Spectra Logic,
W. Curtis Preston:not a sponsor that, um, you know, Uh, that, that also came as a guest on the
W. Curtis Preston:podcast, but yeah, that's what I used.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, you talk about changes in technology and how do I, how did I adapt?
W. Curtis Preston:It was kind of the whole, like necessity is the mother of invention.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Necessity is also the mother of adaptation.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so I will, I'll tell you the, as I adapted, I know I wanted, As we were going
W. Curtis Preston:to this, this concept of a centralized area where all the tape would be, cuz we
W. Curtis Preston:had a tape library, and by that I meant we had a room where tapes went, right?
W. Curtis Preston:We had in those, we had channel attached nine track tape drives.
W. Curtis Preston:If you don't know what that looks like, they're the old ass things that you see.
W. Curtis Preston:In movies from the fifties.
W. Curtis Preston:Those big giant, they're, they're refrigerator sized.
W. Curtis Preston:They're bigger.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes, they're, yeah, it's a reel to reel.
W. Curtis Preston:They're bigger than a refrigerator.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and we had three or four of those in there, and we had
W. Curtis Preston:a bunch of right line cabinets.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you know what right line is?
W. Curtis Preston:They're, they're, um, you know, a very high end, um, cabinet, but like metal
W. Curtis Preston:cabinet maker, and they have like, they have these, like moving cabinets.
W. Curtis Preston:So like, you can, you can fit a lot in square square space.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, that's what we had.
W. Curtis Preston:And I wanted to put all of the, the, the, the Spectra tape Libraries.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't remember what the, the brand was, but they were,
W. Curtis Preston:they were like a few U high.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:and then they, you know, they fit in a rack and you know,
W. Curtis Preston:the deep rack and then they were like a few U high and I needed, I eventually
W. Curtis Preston:needed like 10 or 12 of them, and I wanted to put them all in one space.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so they're all together.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I wanted data security.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:I didn't like this idea of tapes.
W. Curtis Preston:You were just floating all over the place, which is what that
W. Curtis Preston:was what we did it back then.
W. Curtis Preston:The tapes just hanging out, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Literally sitting on the top of the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:On desk
W. Curtis Preston:Um, what's that?
W. Curtis Preston:Or on a desk or whatever.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so we wanted to put it across the, across, I said across the
W. Curtis Preston:street, literally across the hall.
W. Curtis Preston:But that was.
W. Curtis Preston:50, 75 feet away from the servers, maybe a hundred feet in the wrong place.
W. Curtis Preston:And all we had was SCSI,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh no.
W. Curtis Preston:By the way, SCSI two, mind you, the which we began
W. Curtis Preston:to call slow and skinny SCSI because they came out with fast wide SCSI.
W. Curtis Preston:so all we had was slow and skinny SCSI.
W. Curtis Preston:They had fast wide SCSI that could go that.
W. Curtis Preston:But my servers didn't have fast wide SCSI.
W. Curtis Preston:They had SCSI two, and so we bought these boxes from a company called lan.
W. Curtis Preston:The fact that I still remember that is crazy.
W. Curtis Preston:But that was the name of the company and basically they were SCSI, two
W. Curtis Preston:Tokai , fast wide, ultra SCSI adapters.
W. Curtis Preston:And we had one, we had one on each end.
W. Curtis Preston:So we'd, we'd we'd up Reve to ultra wide SCSI, have a hundred foot
Prasanna Malaiyandi:date over
W. Curtis Preston:and then down Rev, right.
W. Curtis Preston:And Spectra Logic was like, Hey man, this don't work.
W. Curtis Preston:This ain't our fault.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:And they're like, if we, if you ever prop, if you ever have a problem with
W. Curtis Preston:the tape library because of those boxes.
W. Curtis Preston:You're gonna ha, we're gonna ask you to bring that tape
W. Curtis Preston:library back across the hall.
W. Curtis Preston:Plug it in with a regular SCSI two cable.
W. Curtis Preston:You know what?
W. Curtis Preston:Never happened, never happened.
W. Curtis Preston:Those pair land boxes were rock solid,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's a surprise.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and that's old, that's old electrical signal stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:That's not fiber, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That's, that stuff's clunky, right?
W. Curtis Preston:But those things were perfect.
W. Curtis Preston:Never once did I have to crawl under the floor to disconnect a para box, replace
W. Curtis Preston:the para box, troubleshoot it, never once.
W. Curtis Preston:So those things were perfect.
W. Curtis Preston:. Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And so we just adapted over time, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And, and, and of course also in this, before the tape library thing happened
W. Curtis Preston:was when my first Shell script broke.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, we talked about this on a podcast, I think just last week, where I
W. Curtis Preston:started out with shell scripts and I didn't think I could get budget for,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, a, a commercial solution.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, I remember going to my boss, Susan Davidson, shout out to her.
W. Curtis Preston:She, she's out there somewhere and, um, she, um, I just said,
W. Curtis Preston:listen, I can't, I can't keep up that, by the way, that's a key.
W. Curtis Preston:That was a key is being okay to say, I can't do it right.
W. Curtis Preston:I can no longer keep up with what's happening.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm getting too scared.
W. Curtis Preston:We're gonna lose data and it's gonna be my fault.
W. Curtis Preston:And she's like, well, aren't there?
W. Curtis Preston:Isn't there, like software you can buy and I'm like, I can spend
W. Curtis Preston:money Um, and I remember that my very first and the company was,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, company called Software Moguls.
W. Curtis Preston:The product was called SM r c, and on that shelf behind me, while you can't
W. Curtis Preston:see it on that shelf, behind me is a cd.
W. Curtis Preston:That is SMR from back in the day.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, uh, I, I got that, uh, so I was able to buy that.
W. Curtis Preston:I remember that it was $16,000.
W. Curtis Preston:Just remember that my first.
W. Curtis Preston:Purchase of a piece of backup software like that was $16,000.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and the competing solutions were like quarter million dollars, like Bud
W. Curtis Preston:Tools, like a quarter million dollars.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, because we wanted to use tape, tape drives in each server.
W. Curtis Preston:, basically, we, we, we had a, we had a shitty network, and so we didn't
W. Curtis Preston:want to, we, we knew we couldn't do network based backup, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And so we wanted tape drives on each server.
W. Curtis Preston:And that meant, in their words, they were media servers.
W. Curtis Preston:And media servers were a server price versus a client price.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's more expensive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was gonna ask you like how you even did vendor selection,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:if you remember back then.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And it looks like price was a big aspect of that.
W. Curtis Preston:Pri pri.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, basically we had some, you know, it was like, here are the,
W. Curtis Preston:here are the oss we have, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Databases weren't an issue yet.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, because those, you still, nobody had agents for Sybase or whatever, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, you, you still scr, you did a, you either put it in backup mode or you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Shut it
W. Curtis Preston:dump and sweep or whatever, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so it's like, Hey, we have Solaris, we have a I x, we have.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, uh, I think we got rid of the system, five systems, and we have
W. Curtis Preston:Alteryx and we have a deck Unix system.
W. Curtis Preston:Now, um, you know, you needed, you needed to handle all of those, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and you needed to support local tape drives.
W. Curtis Preston:So Arcserve was out, Arcserve was the other big product that
W. Curtis Preston:was back then, Arcserve, they wanted a centralized backup.
W. Curtis Preston:and everything over the network, I'm like, look, we have a, we have, we still
W. Curtis Preston:have thick net under the floor right?
W. Curtis Preston:We have vampire taps.
W. Curtis Preston:For those of you that have grown up in a world of, of 10 based tea, um,
W. Curtis Preston:vampire taps, it was coax cable and you literally t screwed into the cable
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:It's like a saddle tap on a plumbing line, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You just literally pierced the cable.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, bits are just falling out all over the floor, . So
W. Curtis Preston:we're like, we're not doing that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So after all this time working on backup, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Then when did you start getting like interested in the disaster
Prasanna Malaiyandi:recovery side of things?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because, at the same time, like somewhere in that job, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You did start to then focus on disaster recovery as well.
W. Curtis Preston:Well it was, it was a necessity for the job.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, basically we did a DR test every six months and you
W. Curtis Preston:know, we would put everybody.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, in, in the place.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, we do it over the weekend cuz downtime during the week wasn't acceptable.
W. Curtis Preston:And then, um, and we didn't have a sandbox or the cloud or whatever you, you had
W. Curtis Preston:to literally shoot a server in the head.
W. Curtis Preston:right?
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I guess not.
W. Curtis Preston:Literally you had to shoot a server in the head.
W. Curtis Preston:Figuratively.
W. Curtis Preston:I learned a lot of valuable lessons from that back then, right?
W. Curtis Preston:This idea of having someone else do it.
W. Curtis Preston:This idea of having great documentation, um, documentation
W. Curtis Preston:is, you know, that's easy to follow.
W. Curtis Preston:An easy to update.
W. Curtis Preston:And just, just that concept of doing regular recovery testing.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, we, we, we didn't have, we didn't have to worry about regular recovery
W. Curtis Preston:testing with files and stuff because we did like 10 restores a day.
W. Curtis Preston:We had like 12,000 employees who were apparently complete morons
W. Curtis Preston:because because 0.01% of them every day were, was screwing up something
W. Curtis Preston:and we were having to restore it.
W. Curtis Preston:So literally like 10 restores a day.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And maybe that's why I got really good at backup because, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Of the restore side, simplify.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you know, what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I wonder if it's interesting that today things just kind of work.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I wonder what the percentage is that people do restores these days, and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:maybe that's where doing restore testing becomes really valuable.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because like you were saying, you do 12 a day, you're gonna get really good at it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's just sort of like muscle memory.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But if you're only doing it once every month or so, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you lose.
W. Curtis Preston:and I, I make a similar comment about, you know, you
W. Curtis Preston:kids today, so everybody's on solid state devices these days, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That stuff just doesn't fail.
W. Curtis Preston:Like the stuff we were on back in the day, we were on individual servers
W. Curtis Preston:running on individual hard drives.
W. Curtis Preston:No.
W. Curtis Preston:No raid.
W. Curtis Preston:What's raid
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We were talking about disaster recovery,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And how you got interested.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And then we were also talking about how people today don't necessarily
Prasanna Malaiyandi:have the same type of, like, they're not doing restores all the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:time because discs aren't failing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Things are more reliable, things are more robust, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so you lose touch of those things.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I don't think that we were doing DR testing
W. Curtis Preston:every six months because we were altruistic or amazing or anything.
W. Curtis Preston:It was because we were a bank and the O C C required it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, And you know, it's sort of like if you are in the biotech
W. Curtis Preston:world, you know what validation is?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, validation is a giant pain in the butt.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, for those of you that don't know what it is, I'm not even
W. Curtis Preston:gonna bother explaining it, but, you know, and so they're just
W. Curtis Preston:really good at processes like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, we just had, we just got good at.
W. Curtis Preston:Doing testing.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I don't think moving forward in my career, I don't think I ever
W. Curtis Preston:worked at another company that did DR.
W. Curtis Preston:Testing the way they did, or even anywhere near as frequently, or, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So you've been doing sort of server backups, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Files.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You've been looking at Dr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And DR testing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:At some point in your career, you started looking, I'm guessing,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:at applications and databases.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And that must have been sort of a completely different world when you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:first approached it versus what you were doing with server backup and file backup,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, the biggest one for me at the time was Oracle.
W. Curtis Preston:And Oracle.
W. Curtis Preston:Once you figured out how to put it in the backup mode, Oracle backup was a cinch.
W. Curtis Preston:, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, if you were good at scripting, if you were good at scripting,
W. Curtis Preston:nobody had an Oracle agent.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:There was no rman.
W. Curtis Preston:There was something before Rman, but it's it name, it's name escaped to me.
W. Curtis Preston:But there, there, there was no rman there, there was just, you had the
W. Curtis Preston:alter table space begin back up.
W. Curtis Preston:By the way, nowadays you could just say alter database, begin back up.
W. Curtis Preston:So much easier.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I had to, I had to query the database, ask for the names of all the table spaces.
W. Curtis Preston:Then put each table space in backup mode, um, and then we
W. Curtis Preston:could do the backup, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That was pretty easy-peasy.
W. Curtis Preston:And then you had to, uh, and we would also do a log switch at the end to
W. Curtis Preston:make sure that we, you know, we had the latest logs and then we'd back them up.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, sql SQL Server wasn't a thing, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So we had Sybase, which for those don't know, is the OG SQL server,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was gonna say, yeah, . Not a lot of people know
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, SQL Server was originally Sybase and they were originally gonna co do it,
W. Curtis Preston:and then, yeah, that didn't work out.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, so Cy, there was Sybase that we had Informix, um, Informix.
W. Curtis Preston:Informix had a hot backup mode, but it, but it created downtime, so you
W. Curtis Preston:could tell Informix to stop right.
W. Curtis Preston:Because Oracle's hot backup mode, you could continue operating right?
W. Curtis Preston:And it would just change how it did redo logs.
W. Curtis Preston:Informix would literally stop rights to the database.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:And, and sql, we couldn't fig, the only way to do SQL or Sybase
W. Curtis Preston:back then was a dump and sweep.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and there was a company.
W. Curtis Preston:Mm.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh oh and and Sybase backup had a feature that if you were doing it to
W. Curtis Preston:tape and the tape filled up and you were waiting to swap tapes, cuz it
W. Curtis Preston:supported the concept of, you know, putting a database on multiple tapes,
W. Curtis Preston:the, it would hang the database.
W. Curtis Preston:So if you're doing backups and you were doing backups manually, cuz
W. Curtis Preston:that was the only way to do it.
W. Curtis Preston:If you were doing backups and you forgot to, to notice that the tape was full
W. Curtis Preston:and then that needed to be swapped out, it would literally hang the database.
W. Curtis Preston:Like the database would just, and there was a company, their name I forgot,
W. Curtis Preston:but there was a company who solved that problem and they became, it's
W. Curtis Preston:sort of like, um, You know, Veeam, when Veeam first came out, and they
W. Curtis Preston:were really the first ones going after VMware, they solved a problem No.
W. Curtis Preston:That nobody else was solving at the time.
W. Curtis Preston:It was like that, but for Buffer Sybase.
W. Curtis Preston:And they became, and I remember that that company got acquired by,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, ca, but I don't remember their,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I guess in this transition though, like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:going back to the themes of like, what do people need to know?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because even today, right, this probably still applies if you're very heavily
Prasanna Malaiyandi:focused on virtualization when you're switching to applications and databases,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's a little bit of a scary world because everything's so different.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But like what are some, I guess, hints or like best practices
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or tips you can give people?
W. Curtis Preston:Well it, I think the hardest part is, To not
W. Curtis Preston:put your head in the sand Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So there, there's a, there's, so I, I'm gonna say there's two extremes, right?
W. Curtis Preston:One is jumping on every single new technology the moment it comes out,
W. Curtis Preston:and then letting it consume your life.
W. Curtis Preston:To figure out, let's say if all you care about is backup, uh, which is,
W. Curtis Preston:that's pretty much, that was my, it's been my job for a long time.
W. Curtis Preston:That's all I cared about.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, how do I back this thing up?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, there have been so many applications and application,
W. Curtis Preston:like things that have come out since, um, You know, and, and, and also, I
W. Curtis Preston:dunno about applications, but use cases.
W. Curtis Preston:So, you know, first we were just backing up the OS and then people started saying,
W. Curtis Preston:well, how do you restore a server?
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:And then we, you know, and then it's like, well, we're gonna
W. Curtis Preston:talk about bare metal recovery.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, and um, then it was, well, we've got a way to back up databases,
W. Curtis Preston:but then that wasn't good enough.
W. Curtis Preston:And so we had to start looking at like agent-based backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and then a then there was a big swing
W. Curtis Preston:against agent base backup.
W. Curtis Preston:We've talked about that a few times.
W. Curtis Preston:DBA DBA versus agent based Backed up.
W. Curtis Preston:Then what began like.
W. Curtis Preston:10 plus years.
W. Curtis Preston:The only thing that was consuming all my time was the problem of tape.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, the, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:shining problem.
W. Curtis Preston:shining problem and the fact that everybody in
W. Curtis Preston:the world misunderstood tape.
W. Curtis Preston:Everybody thought the tapes were too slow in reality, they were too
W. Curtis Preston:fast, and the fact that they were treating them like they were too
W. Curtis Preston:slow was making it actually worse.
W. Curtis Preston:That went on for, for quite a long time, made me a lot of money.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, you know, paid, paid the bills for a while,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm sure you dove into virtualization, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Things had to be done differently, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so I know on the podcast just the other day, we were
Prasanna Malaiyandi:just talking about V C B, right?
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, yeah, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And those sort of
W. Curtis Preston:the.
W. Curtis Preston:For me personally, I got virtualization.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, like it, it just, I was like, this is amazing.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I also got that it completely broke backups.
W. Curtis Preston:And again, that was another thing where you just like, if you,
W. Curtis Preston:all you care about is backups.
W. Curtis Preston:You worked and you figured out before, before, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Vendors offered solutions, right, to
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:, I was working with customers where it's like, I don't want to go
W. Curtis Preston:change my whole backup product, just cuz I started using VMware.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:um, you know, Veeam may be a great product, but I, I don't
W. Curtis Preston:want to use, I don't want to use one product for my virtualization and
W. Curtis Preston:another product for my servers, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That, and by the way, that has been one of my mantras, right,
W. Curtis Preston:is simplicity whenever possible.
W. Curtis Preston:I'd much rather buy one product that's decent in everything than
W. Curtis Preston:to buy three products that are great at three things, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and especially if you, if you can meet your requirements with the one product.
W. Curtis Preston:. I would do that any day of the week.
W. Curtis Preston:So we were, we would do things, it's about adapting, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So we would do things like, Well, we, we went to monthly full backups
W. Curtis Preston:instead of weekly full backups.
W. Curtis Preston:We went to, uh, a rolling month schedule so that you were never doing, um,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, and also with VMware you had a lot of work to make sure you weren't
W. Curtis Preston:doing two fulls on the same client, I'm sorry, a VM that was on the same
W. Curtis Preston:virtualization server at the same time, cuz that would just kill the box.
W. Curtis Preston:We did crazy stuff like that.
W. Curtis Preston:That was a lot of work.
W. Curtis Preston:, right.
W. Curtis Preston:But it was easy for me to grok, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It was like, I understand the problem, the solutions are complicated and just a
W. Curtis Preston:lot of work, but I understand the problem.
W. Curtis Preston:And then what happened?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was gonna say apps and VMs
Prasanna Malaiyandi:. W. Curtis Preston: But apps, again,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's like, I either, I, I basically, a new app is relatively easy to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:handle from a backup perspective.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're either gonna do a dump it, a sweep, you're gonna shut it down, or
Prasanna Malaiyandi:there's gonna be an agent, or there's gonna be some way, like with Oracle to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:put it in hot backup modem backup live.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's not, that's not that hard.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, the.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But like, when you start doing something crazy like the cloud,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:that's when, and then, and we'll then we'll
W. Curtis Preston:talk about containers, right?
W. Curtis Preston:When you start basically saying, you know what, we're not gonna
W. Curtis Preston:have, we're not gonna have computers anymore, we're not gonna have servers.
W. Curtis Preston:We're gonna do this.
W. Curtis Preston:I remember the first time I heard serverless, I was
W. Curtis Preston:like, what the hell is that?
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:And they're like, well, well, there's this server,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's just
W. Curtis Preston:Serverless always starts with a server.
W. Curtis Preston:What's that?
W. Curtis Preston:It's just not your server.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's not your server and you're not managing right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're just running code and you're good to go.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But I think you're right though.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's even for me, like going from on-premises technology to thinking
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about the cloud, it's like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:, your mind blows up, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just the complexity, all the different cases, but also all the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:cool things you can now start to do once you're running in the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it's funny when you say that the first thing that
W. Curtis Preston:happens in my mind is all the cool ways that you can create data that
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know how we're gonna back up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because it's c so well let, let ask, see what you think about this.
W. Curtis Preston:Most people that go into the cloud, as I make quotes in the air, they're
W. Curtis Preston:just doing lifting and shift.
W. Curtis Preston:would you say most people More than half?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I would say more than half.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I would also say that those early customers who started adopting cloud very
W. Curtis Preston:It was 90%
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, well it was 90% and the other thing is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that was all shadow IT back then.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You didn't have the central IT folks managing the IT and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the cloud infrastructures.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It was a department being like, Hey, I gotta get this project done.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I can't go to it because it's gonna take 'em a year to procure
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the budget to go through things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Let me swipe my credit card and spin up some resources on the cloud and get going.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Going back to your point, right, it's like all those places in the cloud,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that data may exist and how do you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:back.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's, for me been my big complaint with the cloud, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, I, I love the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, it's, it's so, it's like, you know, how do you hate virtualization?
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:How do you hate the cloud?
W. Curtis Preston:I do think it's, um, a little oversold overbought, right?
W. Curtis Preston:People think, oh, I'm gonna go to the cloud cuz it's cheaper.
W. Curtis Preston:It, it could be depending on how you use it, but it most likely won't be right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Have you seen the recent article bought article?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:There's, uh, recently there was a tweet by the company that sells base camp.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh, and they basically looked at their AW s bill, broke it down, compute
Prasanna Malaiyandi:storage, and then they made a comparison to what if we just ran it on premises?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so that's what they're starting to do now, is how can we now shift
Prasanna Malaiyandi:back to premises because it's cheaper.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And maybe it is, maybe it depends on how you use the cloud, right?
W. Curtis Preston:If you refactor and you look at each, you know, if you do what
W. Curtis Preston:Drew, by the way, we didn't
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, we did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was just, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:We're gonna have to fire the new
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:.So since we are talking about the cloud and since Curtis just brought up the name,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:uh, we both work for different companies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis works for Druva.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I work for Zoom.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:This is not a podcast of either company.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The opinions that you hear are our owned also.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:If you like what you hear and you wanna come join us, please reach out, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:at WC Preston or w Curtis Preston at gmail and join in the conversation.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We love to have guests.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We're friendly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think, uh, people seem to want to come back every once in a while, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah, come join in if you think we're totally wrong or you wanna provide
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your thoughts, opinions, let us know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And finally, make sure to rate us@ratethispodcast.com slash.
W. Curtis Preston:Wonderful job persona.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And leave a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:comment.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Leave some, Leave some, notes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because Curtis, love Curtis and I love to read the comments.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So going back, we were talking about the cloud and how, uh, protecting
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it and spinning it up and also about the costs and re uh, bringing.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So, so for me, the only thing I care ever.
W. Curtis Preston:. Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Literally the only thing I care about is are we getting this on tape?
W. Curtis Preston:That's, that's, it's an old phrase that Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Are, you know, are we backing this stuff up?
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And when I look at the typical usage of the cloud, two things bug me.
W. Curtis Preston:One is most everybody's doing it wrong, right?
W. Curtis Preston:They're just, they're just, they're just renting VMs is, is all they're doing.
W. Curtis Preston:And if that's all you're doing, you're doing it wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway.
W. Curtis Preston:The second is that the, the other guys . Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:The other guys are doing it great.
W. Curtis Preston:They're just, they're using this and they're using the serverless.
W. Curtis Preston:This and the, you know, um, they're using Pass and SAS and ias and um,
W. Curtis Preston:and they're using things like r ds, DynamoDB, um, where they're creating data.
W. Curtis Preston:That data is only stored in a server slash app that you do not own.
W. Curtis Preston:and they're not backing it up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:By default, they're not packing it up.
W. Curtis Preston:by default, they're not backing it up.
W. Curtis Preston:Some of the apps.
W. Curtis Preston:By default actually do back up.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I, I was doing some research and I think RDS is one of those where if
W. Curtis Preston:you're using rds by default, it would create a snapshot like once a day.
W. Curtis Preston:And that snapshot takes up storage in your account.
W. Curtis Preston:You pay for it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I, I think that at least that, but by default, even that default
W. Curtis Preston:is in your account, in your region.
W. Curtis Preston:And we know what I think about that, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Bad, bad, bad.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or, or it's, or it's the other thing that everyone sort of, and I know we haven't
Prasanna Malaiyandi:talked about SaaS yet, which is something we should talk about next, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But a lot of people also think, Hey, if I have high availability provided
Prasanna Malaiyandi:by like AWS S three or DynamoDB, there's no need for backup, but.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's not true.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Backup is used for recovering from different types of disasters, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:One of which is sure a data center goes down or whatever else, but there
Prasanna Malaiyandi:are other purposes as well, like user corruption, malicious activity, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:All these other things that you need protect against that high
Prasanna Malaiyandi:availability does not give.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, uh, yeah, high availability and things like mirroring just
W. Curtis Preston:makes the corruption more efficient.
W. Curtis Preston:right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, so.
W. Curtis Preston:That bugs me.
W. Curtis Preston:The, you know, the, the SASS thing bugs me.
W. Curtis Preston:I talk to people.
W. Curtis Preston:It's just, it's just, it is the most common misconception that I
W. Curtis Preston:run into in the common IT world or the current IT world, is that
W. Curtis Preston:backup is part of the SaaS offering,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and SaaS offering Could be Microsoft 365
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or one of these other offerings.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and the thing is, uh, it so isn't right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, and, and the thing is, you know, it could be
W. Curtis Preston:something like GitHub, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You need to back up your GitHub repositories or, or replicate
W. Curtis Preston:them or something, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You need it.
W. Curtis Preston:Just what happens if GitHub just disappears tomorrow, by
W. Curtis Preston:the way, that happens, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That absolutely happens.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and there are storage vendors and cloud vendors that just disappear.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I think the best one that I have, I don't know if you can remember the name.
W. Curtis Preston:This is, uh, the storage.
W. Curtis Preston:What?
W. Curtis Preston:No, not that one.
W. Curtis Preston:I was thinking of the cloud storage vendor that was in San Diego
W. Curtis Preston:that was supposed to be like s3, but for the, for the enterprise.
W. Curtis Preston:Steven Foskett worked there.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, their name's completely gone, but they decided, you know what?
W. Curtis Preston:This business sucks.
W. Curtis Preston:We're outta here, and they said, you guys got two
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, I remember that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yes, I do remember that company.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't remember the name, but yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, uh, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Sorry.
W. Curtis Preston:If you got like four petabytes of data here, because that was their
W. Curtis Preston:thing, is they were gonna be the large storage vendor and sorry if you got
W. Curtis Preston:four petabytes and you know, we only got so much bandwidth and everybody
W. Curtis Preston:else is trying to get off right now.
W. Curtis Preston:Luckily, someone stepped in and provided some.
W. Curtis Preston:Some sort of took over and, but they could have just that stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:All could have, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That can happen.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I mean, it's not gonna happen to Microsoft per se, but it could, there are.
W. Curtis Preston:, I don't wanna malign them anymore than I already have recently, but there is a
W. Curtis Preston:large vendor that completely decided to just abandon a current business line.
W. Curtis Preston:They're not going out of business, but they're not, we're not doing that anymore.
W. Curtis Preston:And the amount of notice, how much notice did their customers get?
W. Curtis Preston:Persona?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Zero.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Zero.
W. Curtis Preston:Sorry, we're down and we're not coming back up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Holy
Prasanna Malaiyandi:feel bad for the
W. Curtis Preston:this, I feel bad for the customers.
W. Curtis Preston:I really do.
W. Curtis Preston:But the but the point is, back up your stuff, man.
W. Curtis Preston:It's your data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No one else is going to care about it if you don't care about.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So that's, as we made the transition into the cloud, that's, and that's
W. Curtis Preston:continuing to be my challenge is when I see this really popular app, um, that
W. Curtis Preston:creates data, you know, even if it's just configuration data, that stuff takes time.
W. Curtis Preston:There's a, there's cost to that configuration data.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but I think the final, as I look at, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:These changes that have, that I've had to adapt to over the years.
W. Curtis Preston:The final one is containers.
W. Curtis Preston:Now, I dunno about final.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:But the current, the current final one, I don't know what's after containers,
W. Curtis Preston:but this idea that we're gonna have an ephemeral os as I make quotes in the air,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I remember talking to you the first time about containers
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and backup and you being like, oh my gosh.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh my gosh.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz everything up to this point.
W. Curtis Preston:, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Literally everything up to this point has been either put in an
W. Curtis Preston:agent or talk to an API to back up the thing, whatever the thing is.
W. Curtis Preston:Now, we haven't, we, we have a thing where you can't put agents
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:and I back that up and then it didn't help that,
W. Curtis Preston:the initial response from the, um, From the container community was, if
W. Curtis Preston:you have persistent storage on your container, you're doing it wrong.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:That was the initial response I got.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:So that's the current, that's the current Charlie Foxtrot and it'll get better.
W. Curtis Preston:But currently, you know, the backup solutions are few and far between.
W. Curtis Preston:Druva has one of them.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:But to, to go back to the question that you asked in the beginning.
W. Curtis Preston:of how do you, you know, how do you keep up date, up to date?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And how do you not freak out also?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Who?
W. Curtis Preston:Who says I'm not freaking out?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, . Well, I think some people will get so
Prasanna Malaiyandi:overwhelmed sometimes, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They're like, I don't even know, like how to even take that first step.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, I would just say one is you need information.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, and you need to surround yourself with information as much as you can.
W. Curtis Preston:That means listening to podcasts like this one.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it means reading blogs.
W. Curtis Preston:It means following Twitter feeds.
W. Curtis Preston:, um, you know, it means, uh, LinkedIn is becoming my favorite, one of
W. Curtis Preston:my favorite resources lately.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Follow people on LinkedIn.
W. Curtis Preston:Find out interesting people that are active in threads, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, don't be afraid to ask questions.
W. Curtis Preston:I remember, I'll talk about Foskett again.
W. Curtis Preston:Steven fos.
W. Curtis Preston:Gestalt it.com.
W. Curtis Preston:And I remember sit, sitting, having a lunch in the middle of
W. Curtis Preston:Times Square with Stephen Foskett and going, what is the cloud?
W. Curtis Preston:I've been hearing this thing , I've been hearing this.
W. Curtis Preston:Hear this thing a lot.
W. Curtis Preston:You gotta be, you gotta be okay asking those stupid questions,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Be
W. Curtis Preston:If you're, if.
W. Curtis Preston:If you're not okay doing that, you're not gonna adapt.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, if you want to go and, you know, if, if, if, if you have a little bit
W. Curtis Preston:of pride, maybe you go and research.
W. Curtis Preston:You do a little nowadays you got Google.
W. Curtis Preston:We didn't have Google , we didn't have Google.
W. Curtis Preston:Did you always have Google?
W. Curtis Preston:Like how long have you been
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:You didn't always have Google.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Back then we had CIS admin magazine.
W. Curtis Preston:Damn it.
W. Curtis Preston:We had CIS Admin Magazine and we had Unix Review Magazine, and
W. Curtis Preston:you got those and you read those.
W. Curtis Preston:That was the first, that was the first public, the first thing that ever
W. Curtis Preston:published me was the CIS Admin magazine.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you, you just read a lot.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, go read it.
W. Curtis Preston:Read.
W. Curtis Preston:It's a great resource.
W. Curtis Preston:It's also a cesspool.
W. Curtis Preston:Bs, but it . There's some interesting, I was just having an interesting
W. Curtis Preston:discussion with somebody over, um, you know, backing up 365.
W. Curtis Preston:It just, just don't, it, it, it can be a vortex of nonsense,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but there's also a lot of good articles and other things you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:can find
W. Curtis Preston:are, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The other thing I would also say is probably
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like go to conferences and talk to people, meet people, meet other
W. Curtis Preston:a What's A com?
W. Curtis Preston:Com com.
W. Curtis Preston:What'd you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I've, I've heard there's this new thing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about, that's like virtual and hybrid as well for conferences.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right?
W. Curtis Preston:I went to reinvent last month.
W. Curtis Preston:60,000 people.
W. Curtis Preston:Drew of us, sent 30 people, 20 of us went home with either the flu or covid.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So much fun.
W. Curtis Preston:So what was that?
W. Curtis Preston:Tell me again about how great conferences are
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, there, there are virtual
Prasanna Malaiyandi:conferences as well, but there's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like resources you can go to to learn about these topics.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, I, but you, you gotta find somebody for each topic.
W. Curtis Preston:Make a friend in that space, right.
W. Curtis Preston:. Um, like, like you are, you are my guy for things cloud, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You, you know, the tech side of the cloud much better than I do.
W. Curtis Preston:And when I, you know, when I have a, when I have a question about
W. Curtis Preston:something, you're, you're my guy.
W. Curtis Preston:You need that for everything, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I've got some people for security, I've got some people for networking.
W. Curtis Preston:Get those people.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and, and LinkedIn I think is a great Twitter.
W. Curtis Preston:Twitter used to be where you could find this kind of thing.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:LinkedIn, I think is a better way to find that person.
W. Curtis Preston:Find a hashtag, see what's going on in the hashtag, follow that person,
W. Curtis Preston:comment on their stuff, comment.
W. Curtis Preston:Don't just like it, comment on their stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:Get to know them, you know, follow them.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, connect with them and they can be your resource.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or the other thing I would also say is if you're working in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:an organization or a company, right, and there are groups who are looking at some
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of this tech, just kind of poke them, ping them, ask them questions, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Provide your expertise and say backup or disaster recovery.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Ask the questions you normally would do for the other workloads and sort
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of get them to start thinking because, hey, maybe they haven't started
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to think about what do I do for backup with containers, or how do I
W. Curtis Preston:What do you mean?
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe there?
W. Curtis Preston:They have absolutely not thought about backup
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:There have been so many new technologies
W. Curtis Preston:and new ways of doing things and backup has never been discussed.
W. Curtis Preston:Like it's always been me raising my hand in the meeting
W. Curtis Preston:going, oh, I'm just curious.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, you know, um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, you, you've got to continually adapt there.
W. Curtis Preston:There are some things.
W. Curtis Preston:You can develop mantras over your ti over your time, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You know, um, I, I, you know, I live in this crazy world where everything
W. Curtis Preston:of value needs to be backed up.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't give a crap what you think, right?
W. Curtis Preston:If your data is, if your data is valuable enough to create in the first place,
W. Curtis Preston:and it's valuable enough to back up.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I do believe strongly and at least the 3 21 rule, if what you're
W. Curtis Preston:doing for data protection doesn't meet the 3 21 rule, then it's not backup.
W. Curtis Preston:By my definition.
W. Curtis Preston:So everything needs to be backed up.
W. Curtis Preston:It needs to be backed up and, and if it's not 3 21, then it's not back up.
W. Curtis Preston:There are things you can do past that.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't disagree.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, like the veeam's thing of the 3, 2, 110, I don't disagree with that.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just saying gotta have at least the 3 21.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's why I poke it.
W. Curtis Preston:Things like 365 and Salesforce and stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz they don't, they, they got the three, that's all they got they,
W. Curtis Preston:they got no, they got no two, no one.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Crazy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Crazy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So years to 30.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:30 down, 30.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:More to go.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, let's see.
W. Curtis Preston:I, you know, it's funny, I didn't think of, I will be the almost, I'll be a
W. Curtis Preston:little older than my mother-in-law if I.
W. Curtis Preston:And she seems really old.
W. Curtis Preston:I love her, but she seems really old.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't, yeah, I don't, I don't see me making it to 87.
W. Curtis Preston:But anyway, , by the way, I just had, you know, I just had a birthday, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So I just had a birthday.
W. Curtis Preston:So I'm now 57, even if I look much older due to the receding hairline and all
W. Curtis Preston:the gray, >uh, and the very gray beard.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it's a, it's a mountain of saw with a little bit of pepper.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's all good,
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, I don't know about 30, 30 years to go, but
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, thanks for sharing your experience
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and advice for our listeners.
W. Curtis Preston:Thanks.
W. Curtis Preston:Anytime.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And to our listeners, thanks for listening and please remember