Backup practitioner tells stories from the trenches
Someone that knew Bill Gates when he was a boy in on the podcast this week, although we only talk about Bill Gates for a moment. He has 30+ years in backup experience and tells us what it's been like to adapt to all of the backup changes over the years. His first backup was to punch cards and punch tape, and he was in the same Boy Scout troop as Bill Gates. Fans of the podcast know his name already, as it comes up randomly on the show as a friend of Curtis. But this is the first time Stuart Liddle has graced us with his presence.
Like Mr. Backup, his career starts with a data loss story that actually involved people having to re-enter data. We discuss a lot of configuring and running backups, including deciding on retention periods, treating all backups the same (or not), virtual tape libraries and other dedupe systems, and how important a change management data database (CMDB) is. We also talk about the danger of becoming entrenched in a specialty like backup, knowing only one specialty or product. We talk about how it's not good for you or your company.
Finally we talk about the different way people are using the cloud today for IT and backup, and how that affects cost. Curtis and Prasanna use a great analogy that helps it make sense.
This week's episode is fully of useful information.
Mentioned in this episode:
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The only advantage of the Uber in that scenario is you
W. Curtis Preston:can get drunk and not worry about it, but I don't think the Lambda function,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, is gonna help with that.
W. Curtis Preston:Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it All podcast, I'm your host, W.
W. Curtis Preston:Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup and have with me, my garage lighting consultant, Prasanna Malaiyandi.
W. Curtis Preston:How's it going, Prasanna?.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm good, Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Although I think shortly you will become my garage lighting consultant.
W. Curtis Preston:You think, so you think it's gonna be like
W. Curtis Preston:a, like a, what do you call it?
W. Curtis Preston:A, the tables will turn.
W. Curtis Preston:You think
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or it's like when the, what is it when
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the student becomes a master
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, this is, this is not one of those areas though.
W. Curtis Preston:Where you, where you, you know, pulled out one of your, your
W. Curtis Preston:extensive YouTube experiences, as I
W. Curtis Preston:recall,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so I think it's fair to say that you did this project and then
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you talked to me after it was all done
Prasanna Malaiyandi:had you reached out before I would've?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, I've done quite a bit of research on garage lighting, so
W. Curtis Preston:of course you have, of course you have, how many YouTube videos
W. Curtis Preston:have you watched on garage lighting?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:At least 30
W. Curtis Preston:This is what I'm talking about.
W. Curtis Preston:We're back, we're back to you being a random expert in stuff that I have no idea
W. Curtis Preston:why you're an expert in, but yeah, I did.
W. Curtis Preston:I did this when a little willy-nilly I just sort of, I, you know, I've
W. Curtis Preston:been needing that light in there.
W. Curtis Preston:This is in my woodworking room that as you, that you know, that I have
W. Curtis Preston:built and now, and I, I, I figured that it would be a good idea if there
W. Curtis Preston:was good lighting in a place with all
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sharp tools.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was actually gonna think if you need like, uh, task lighting as well, or if
Prasanna Malaiyandi:there's enough, because depending on like, you don't want the light behind you when
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you're on a table, saw trying to cut a piece of wood, you know, you'll get the
W. Curtis Preston:I usually close my eyes when I use a table saw.
W. Curtis Preston:Should I not do that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And this is like, one of your fingers is
W. Curtis Preston:That one, there you go.
W. Curtis Preston:That finger I'm not flipping 'em off viewers that are viewing both these
W. Curtis Preston:fingers have been injured in power tools.
W. Curtis Preston:My wife gets very angry at me when I display my, my injuries.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and yeah, so this finger, uh, it actually had an evulsion, which is
W. Curtis Preston:a, a laceration that removes flesh.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, that was not good.
W. Curtis Preston:So, yeah, that was many years ago, you know?
W. Curtis Preston:And
W. Curtis Preston:it's been an awfully long time.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Learned a lot.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, let's see.
W. Curtis Preston:The last power tool injury was only.
W. Curtis Preston:A, um, a nail gun, a shooting, a nail into my head.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and that's been a couple years.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, it's been a couple of years.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and the, the hilarious part was I did it, like, after telling my
W. Curtis Preston:granddaughter don't touch this tool because it could do really scary
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And then I send it, I try to send a nail through my, I don't
W. Curtis Preston:think it made all the way through, but it definitely cuz I was holding a piece
W. Curtis Preston:of wood and shooting a nail into it.
W. Curtis Preston:And the, the nail went, it took a corner,
W. Curtis Preston:the nail, it bent a corner and it went into my
W. Curtis Preston:finger.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Always be careful around power tools and make sure
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you wear your safety goggles.
W. Curtis Preston:All the things, um, you know, always back up your data
W. Curtis Preston:always wear your safety glasses and um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sure you have plenty of lighting.
W. Curtis Preston:we ha we make sure you have plenty of lighting.
W. Curtis Preston:We have a, another cool guest today.
W. Curtis Preston:This is one of those people.
W. Curtis Preston:Another person who, uh, he has a unique vantage point in that he has
W. Curtis Preston:known me for a really long time.
W. Curtis Preston:He first got to know me as a customer, meaning he was a customer of mine.
W. Curtis Preston:I was a consultant, um, at a company that he used to work.
W. Curtis Preston:He, now I am super jelly.
W. Curtis Preston:He is now retired and, um, is like, you know, hopping on cruises left and right.
W. Curtis Preston:So I really, I dislike this guy, but he's but he's a really good guy.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, you know, he's been around like me a long time.
W. Curtis Preston:So, you know, he's got a few backup stories to tell, welcome
W. Curtis Preston:to the podcast, Stuart Liddle.
Stuart Liddle:Hi, how are you doing?
Stuart Liddle:Thanks.
Stuart Liddle:Good to be here.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I have
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a
W. Curtis Preston:and by the way that, yeah, go ahead.
W. Curtis Preston:Go ahead.
W. Curtis Preston:Go.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I have a question for you Stuart, when you retire
Prasanna Malaiyandi:from the backup industry, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Is it kind of like a spy where it never gets turned off?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like those skills that you're always thinking about when you're on like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a cruise it's like, I wonder if they back up this data, what would happen?
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:I, I, I have those thoughts from time to time, but you know, that
Stuart Liddle:it's kinda like, uh, a headache.
Stuart Liddle:I wish it would go away real quick.
Stuart Liddle:you know, but, but yeah, I mean, I've been, I've been doing it since like
Stuart Liddle:the early seventies and I started out as a programmer in the Air Force
Stuart Liddle:because I was gonna get drafted.
Stuart Liddle:and I signed up for the Air Force, which may or may not have been a mistake, but
W. Curtis Preston:They still had the draft at that point.
Stuart Liddle:when I was
Stuart Liddle:when I went
Stuart Liddle:in.
Stuart Liddle:Well, yeah, I mean, I got, I got my draft notice the day after I, uh, signed
Stuart Liddle:up and that was in 73, 72 or 72 72.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So for the record, um, I was in like second
W. Curtis Preston:grade, I throw that out there.
Stuart Liddle:and
Stuart Liddle:so, so I
W. Curtis Preston:that I get to feel young Stuart, so,
Stuart Liddle:there.
Stuart Liddle:Okay.
Stuart Liddle:There you go.
Stuart Liddle:Um, so make me feel old.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah, that's great.
Stuart Liddle:Um, so, so yeah, I was doing cobalt programming on punch cards
Stuart Liddle:when I was in the Air Force.
Stuart Liddle:So, and our, and you know, and our backups of those programs
Stuart Liddle:were the punch cards that we used.
Stuart Liddle:And God helped you if you dropped them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:would they actually make two copies of punch cards?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like if they,
Stuart Liddle:You know, that never happened, but well,
Stuart Liddle:they, they didn't do that.
Stuart Liddle:I mean, I, it, you know, I wasn't thinking backups at the time.
Stuart Liddle:So if you, if you had a program that you'd written, um, you had the punch
Stuart Liddle:card deck, you could make changes to it, and then you could load it into
Stuart Liddle:the, into the computer and then you could put it on tape if you wanted to.
Stuart Liddle:So that could be, you know, and I'm talking real to
Stuart Liddle:real, the stuff they showed
Stuart Liddle:. W. Curtis Preston: Did you ever,
Stuart Liddle:I did.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:I used that as well.
Stuart Liddle:Um, and that was actually cooler, you know, for doing, doing quick stuff.
Stuart Liddle:Oh, okay.
Stuart Liddle:Quick story.
Stuart Liddle:Quick story.
Stuart Liddle:When I was in high school, I, I went to a high school with, in Seattle with
Stuart Liddle:Bill Gates' older sister, and she and I were in the same calculus class.
Stuart Liddle:And Bill Gates and I were in the same boy scout troop,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh
Stuart Liddle:and yeah, really?
Stuart Liddle:Yes.
Stuart Liddle:Yes.
Stuart Liddle:And, and Bill Gates went to a school called Lakeside, which was in the
Stuart Liddle:Seattle area, but he had a, um, there was a place in Seattle called Computer
Stuart Liddle:Center Corporation, which had some DEC, 10 gear and stuff like that.
Stuart Liddle:And my high school had a computer programming class and our
Stuart Liddle:teacher took us to that place.
Stuart Liddle:And we did some, um, I think it was, um, Fortran programming or maybe basic.
Stuart Liddle:And we were using punch tape at the time for that.
Stuart Liddle:But, but when we went in there, apparently that was one of bill gates Hangouts, and
Stuart Liddle:he was not well thought of by the people that managed that data center, because
Stuart Liddle:he would typically come in and do things to make their lives miserable, like
Stuart Liddle:crash the computers and stuff like that.
Stuart Liddle:So just, there's a bit of trivia for you.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Typical high schooler, but look where he is now, you know, a divorced billionaire
Stuart Liddle:that's about, as much in the way of bill gates stories I can tell.
W. Curtis Preston:That's interesting.
Stuart Liddle:We talked earlier about, um, something that happened very
Stuart Liddle:early on in my after military career,
Stuart Liddle:um, which was, I went to work for a large bank in Seattle that doesn't exist anymore
Stuart Liddle:and not because of this incident, but, um,
W. Curtis Preston:That's good to hear.
Stuart Liddle:They, they, uh, they had, they had a situation that one
Stuart Liddle:of the guys came to me one time and I hadn't been on that job for
Stuart Liddle:very long, maybe a month or two.
Stuart Liddle:And, um, this guy came up to me and he says, Hey, we need some help.
Stuart Liddle:Um, we just had the last tape copy of this information get overwritten.
Stuart Liddle:they only had three copies, you know, the.
Stuart Liddle:Grandfather father and son, whatever.
Stuart Liddle:I don't know what, whatever they wanted to call it, but, but in any case, they
Stuart Liddle:needed to have this data brought back and they asked for me to help with it
Stuart Liddle:along with a couple of other people.
Stuart Liddle:And basically the only information they had on that data was all on printouts.
Stuart Liddle:You know?
Stuart Liddle:So here's the latest printout that we have and here are the
Stuart Liddle:columns of data and whatnot.
Stuart Liddle:Can you help us out?
Stuart Liddle:And we had to figure out a way, okay, we need to have data entry people type in
Stuart Liddle:stuff from the printouts and then put it together in the right order and stuff.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:So that was my first, I guess, data recovery project that I ever worked on.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And how long that
Stuart Liddle:never thought
Stuart Liddle:of it.
Stuart Liddle:I, it only, I think it only took us.
Stuart Liddle:Um, well I think the data entry took a while.
Stuart Liddle:I don't recall exactly about that, but I know that the people that I was working
Stuart Liddle:on this with, we each had a piece of it to write, to pull the data from whatever was
Stuart Liddle:gotten in through data entry, into, um, a, the, the format that it needed to be in.
Stuart Liddle:I, and I, and I think that part may have only taken a couple or three days,
Stuart Liddle:but the actual data entry part could have taken quite a bit longer, but
Stuart Liddle:we were, we were able to get it done.
Stuart Liddle:So
W. Curtis Preston:So they, so they had multiple tapes of it,
W. Curtis Preston:but somehow all three had been
Stuart Liddle:overwritten
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Yep.
Stuart Liddle:And it was, and it was based on a certain period of time, you know?
Stuart Liddle:So like after seven days the grandfather got over it and then after 14 days,
Stuart Liddle:the father got over that kind of thing.
W. Curtis Preston:And then it's funny, that is not a data restoration story.
W. Curtis Preston:That is a data reentry story.
W. Curtis Preston:that's like the worst case scenario, right.
Stuart Liddle:right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, well, we don't have printouts anymore.
W. Curtis Preston:Nobody's gonna be a printout.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, unless you're like a, a CPA, they like to print out paper
W. Curtis Preston:and have it hanging around.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, it, it reminds me of my, my first data, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:restoration nightmare, because.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:also had, when we had this outage, it was, it
W. Curtis Preston:was, it was a purchasing database.
W. Curtis Preston:And when we had the outage, I went to go look for the tapes.
W. Curtis Preston:And I was told to look at the logs.
W. Curtis Preston:It, they, that these were unique systems and this was dump.
W. Curtis Preston:And I was told to look at the logs and I was told to look for these certain errors.
W. Curtis Preston:And if these errors were there, then go to the previous backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I kept going and I kept going and I kept going and
W. Curtis Preston:the errors were always there.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, eventually I found a backup that was, you know, that was valid
W. Curtis Preston:and it was just over six weeks old.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, our retention period was six weeks.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, you know, I remember just wanting to crawl under, and, and that, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:speaking of speaking of dudes going on Alaskan vacations, uh, this morning,
W. Curtis Preston:I'm literally looking at on Facebook.
W. Curtis Preston:Another friend of mine, that is the guy that saved my bacon on that day.
W. Curtis Preston:His name's Joe Fitzpatrick, another guy whose name comes up
W. Curtis Preston:once in a while in the podcast, he doesn't even remember this event.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I just remember that he, he pulled up the Unix, you know, command prompt, which
W. Curtis Preston:at that time for me was still like magic.
W. Curtis Preston:I was only in maybe a couple of months and he did some stuff with
W. Curtis Preston:F S C K or something, and somehow got the drive to a point where
W. Curtis Preston:we could get something off of it.
W. Curtis Preston:And we only lost.
W. Curtis Preston:Two days worth of purchase orders in this database.
W. Curtis Preston:And to me, that became, you know, the, the, the defining moment in my career.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, I'm like, that's not gonna happen to me.
W. Curtis Preston:And to Joe, it was just a Tuesday.
W. Curtis Preston:So to him, it doesn't, he doesn't even remember this story.
W. Curtis Preston:It's like this single handedly, like the, the single most defining moment of my
W. Curtis Preston:career and Joe doesn't even remember it.
W. Curtis Preston:And now he's off, he's off to Alaska sending me pictures.
W. Curtis Preston:Like you've been sending me from your Alaska cruises
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:so
Stuart Liddle:So
W. Curtis Preston:do you remember the first time we worked together?
Stuart Liddle:yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah, it was, it was at Amgen.
Stuart Liddle:Um,
W. Curtis Preston:And was Thousand Oaks
Stuart Liddle:to help
W. Curtis Preston:or was in Seattle?
Stuart Liddle:It was in thousand Oaks.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
Stuart Liddle:Well, okay.
Stuart Liddle:Wait a minute.
Stuart Liddle:Wait a minute.
Stuart Liddle:You're right.
Stuart Liddle:There was a class that you did in Seattle.
Stuart Liddle:To the people that were there just after the merger.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:They had, yeah, it would've
Stuart Liddle:yeah.
Stuart Liddle:And so you did a class on NetBackup and because they were using
Stuart Liddle:NetBackup at, um, Amgen and you did a class there on NetBackup.
Stuart Liddle:I remember.
Stuart Liddle:I, I think that's what happened.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:The, the, the funny thing is, you know, like I was not a NetBackup instructor, but
W. Curtis Preston:it was like, this is how I use NetBackup.
W. Curtis Preston:That's what I remember if I was gonna
W. Curtis Preston:do.
Stuart Liddle:That was in 2002, I believe.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, it was a few years ago.
W. Curtis Preston:How do you remember that year?
W. Curtis Preston:I'm so bad at years.
Stuart Liddle:were, there were certain things that happened in certain years.
Stuart Liddle:I mean, that's, that's, that's one of 'em, you know, it's like, that's when
Stuart Liddle:I, as part of that merger, they took a group of people at, at the Seattle
Stuart Liddle:office and they said, You can either go to work for us in thousand Oaks
Stuart Liddle:or you can get laid off in October.
W. Curtis Preston:You're like, I think I'm gonna move to Oxnard Camarillo.
Stuart Liddle:yeah, well actually it was thou um, uh, Camarillo, but that's okay.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah,
Stuart Liddle:yeah, yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Close enough.
Stuart Liddle:But, um, yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:what was Curtis like back then?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I only know Curtis now, what was he like back then?
Stuart Liddle:he was, he was just as funny and, and interesting as he is now.
Stuart Liddle:I'll I'll, I'll just go
Stuart Liddle:with
W. Curtis Preston:I was I as devastatingly handsome as, as I am now,
Stuart Liddle:Well, you know, I'm, I'm not the person who would be able
Stuart Liddle:to give a, a good, uh, assessment
W. Curtis Preston:way, speaking of being devastatingly handsome,
W. Curtis Preston:we are the bearded trio today.
W. Curtis Preston:The bearded and headphones trio, two of us with gray beards one,
W. Curtis Preston:not so much, although there's some
Prasanna Malaiyandi:great.
W. Curtis Preston:There's some gray in there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
W. Curtis Preston:Thinking about the I'm pretty sure it was the Seattle days.
W. Curtis Preston:There was a boss and I think you and I have talked about this recently,
W. Curtis Preston:but there was a boss that you had, and I'm pretty sure he was
W. Curtis Preston:there and, or in Thousand Oaks.
W. Curtis Preston:Darn if I can remember, but the name, the name, Scott rings a bell and he
W. Curtis Preston:was the one that he wanted backup retention of two weeks and no more.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you remember this?
Stuart Liddle:I, I don't remember that.
Stuart Liddle:I know the guy you're talking about and actually he, he was one of the people
Stuart Liddle:who was involved in the transition from the company that I used to work
Stuart Liddle:for that got a, um, merged into Amgen.
Stuart Liddle:And he later became a director in Seattle and then went back to Thousand
Stuart Liddle:Oaks, um, you know, at a higher level.
W. Curtis Preston:But you don't, you don't remember this
W. Curtis Preston:thing about the two weeks?
Stuart Liddle:I don't remember the two weeks.
Stuart Liddle:I don't remember the
W. Curtis Preston:cuz I remember it very distinctly cuz it's the
W. Curtis Preston:only time in my entire career when I had someone say something
W. Curtis Preston:that to me sounded so ill advised
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Well,
Stuart Liddle:okay.
Stuart Liddle:Does, does that sound as ill advised as treating all backups equally?
W. Curtis Preston:um, I I'm gonna say more ill advised, but I, I
W. Curtis Preston:know what you're saying about.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So is that, was that something else that you ran into?
W. Curtis Preston:Hmm.
Stuart Liddle:Oh, I ran into that when I was consulting, I found a, you know, there
Stuart Liddle:was a big, um, oil and gas company in Texas that , that said dev test and prod.
Stuart Liddle:It doesn't matter.
Stuart Liddle:It all gets treated the same.
Stuart Liddle:And I'm like, you guys are insane.
Stuart Liddle:This is, this is
Stuart Liddle:crazy
Stuart Liddle:talk.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:if I just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:have the,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:budgets.
Stuart Liddle:yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, as long, yeah, if you don't care about money,
W. Curtis Preston:number one, and number two, if you basically, as long as you're not treating
W. Curtis Preston:dev test and prod like dev, right.
W. Curtis Preston:As long if you're treating dev test and prod like prod,
Stuart Liddle:mm-hmm
W. Curtis Preston:you know, and you have a solid plan and everything for
W. Curtis Preston:everything, but I would still that even if you, even if you've got a system that's
W. Curtis Preston:capable of backing up and restoring all of that, you at, you still need priorities
Stuart Liddle:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:in, in a disaster recovery situation, you're not gonna
W. Curtis Preston:recover dev and test before you recover
W. Curtis Preston:prod.
Stuart Liddle:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:even prod, you're, you're not gonna recover
W. Curtis Preston:all those systems at the same time.
W. Curtis Preston:You should have segments, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, Yeah,
Stuart Liddle:Like, so, I mean, you know, another part of that is
Stuart Liddle:they didn't have a, uh, a CMDB,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So what's a CMDB for our listeners.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Configuration management database.
Stuart Liddle:In other words, you got all your servers and all your applications
Stuart Liddle:in this database, and you say what they are, whether they're dev
Stuart Liddle:pros, prod, or test, and then you.
Stuart Liddle:You prioritize them like, like Curtis was saying, and you can, you can
Stuart Liddle:find them because you know, their location, you know, their name, you
Stuart Liddle:know what they do, all of that stuff.
Stuart Liddle:Um, you got serial numbers on all of the hardware, asset tags on all the hardware.
Stuart Liddle:They didn't, they didn't really have that.
Stuart Liddle:They had, they had it, but they didn't, it wasn't fully populated
Stuart Liddle:with all the stuff they really needed.
Stuart Liddle:So
W. Curtis Preston:so, Hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:I have another distinct memory from someone in
Stuart Liddle:Oaks.
Stuart Liddle:Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:No from someone in Seattle, again, I could be wrong,
W. Curtis Preston:but my memory is that it was someone in Seattle talking about migration.
W. Curtis Preston:You were migrating off of Netware.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and there was a guy that was a Netware lover.
W. Curtis Preston:And I remember
Stuart Liddle:about too.
W. Curtis Preston:I remember him saying that it was job security, that
W. Curtis Preston:he, he knew, he knew that it was way harder to use than everything else
W. Curtis Preston:and that nobody else knew it, but him, but he didn't see a problem with that.
Stuart Liddle:I know the guy you're talking about and he, he actually,
Stuart Liddle:uh, bought a place in Idaho when I was, you know, before I moved there.
Stuart Liddle:And, uh, yeah, we've, we've kept in touch, but yeah, I, I know his name.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Old
W. Curtis Preston:but yeah, but we see that, we see that a lot in, in.
W. Curtis Preston:Technology.
W. Curtis Preston:We see it in backup systems where someone a, a new and interesting and possibly
W. Curtis Preston:much better backup system comes along.
W. Curtis Preston:But then you got the guy that knows NetBackup.
W. Curtis Preston:And so he doesn't wanna let go.
W. Curtis Preston:He's got all this, you know, knowledge of having run the,
W. Curtis Preston:the backup system for so long.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, wait, that guy was you I'm talking about you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but it doesn't even have to be just backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So even
W. Curtis Preston:no, no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:moving to like VMware, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Virtualization and your server admins are like, what am I gonna do now?
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Stuart Liddle:oh, oh,
Stuart Liddle:oh, that's right.
Stuart Liddle:So is, is it going to,
W. Curtis Preston:It's happening.
Stuart Liddle:it gonna be like Symantec and, and, uh, Veritas
W. Curtis Preston:I sure as hell, hope not.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, cuz I re I remember, I remember going to Veritas Vision.
W. Curtis Preston:Back when Veritas had a vision, they went to Veritas Vision, it
W. Curtis Preston:was a year after the acquisition.
W. Curtis Preston:And I remember saying it appears that you've spent an entire year
W. Curtis Preston:painting everything yellow and black.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:That's literally, that's literally all that they had done for the entire year.
Stuart Liddle:Oh, probably
W. Curtis Preston:And, and I, I, I don't think I was being unkind.
W. Curtis Preston:It is just that, that, that did not go well, like, and you know, and
W. Curtis Preston:they parted ways and now there's Veritas and now there's Symantec.
W. Curtis Preston:I'll throw out our disclaimer Prasanna.
W. Curtis Preston:And I work for different companies.
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna work for zoom.
W. Curtis Preston:I work for Druva, and this is not a podcast of either company.
W. Curtis Preston:The things that you hear on here are our opinions, nothing more, and, uh, be sure
W. Curtis Preston:to rate us ratethispodcast.com/restore.
W. Curtis Preston:And also, you know, if you like to talk about backup, restore, archive,
W. Curtis Preston:security protection, privacy, cetera, we'd love to have you on just, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:contact me at wcurtispreston@gmail or @wcpreston on Twitter.
W. Curtis Preston:You can DM me.
W. Curtis Preston:I accept all DMS and, uh, we can chat.
W. Curtis Preston:Let's talk about some other interesting things that you remember over the
W. Curtis Preston:years in terms of adapting to new, you know, new ways of doing backups or, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, cuz you've, cuz you've seen and in 20 years you've seen the move from
W. Curtis Preston:tape to, well from, from, from punch card to tape, from disk from disk to
W. Curtis Preston:cloud, you know, what was that like?
Stuart Liddle:Um, you know, it's interesting when I was, let's
Stuart Liddle:just take Amgen as an example.
Stuart Liddle:When I first got there, everything was going to DLT and we were using,
Stuart Liddle:um, a certain offsite storage vendor to, you know, pick up the things
Stuart Liddle:and take 'em off to some other site.
Stuart Liddle:Um, and then it went to, um, uh, so that was physical tape.
Stuart Liddle:And then we went to virtual tape.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Hang on.
W. Curtis Preston:So DLT for the, for those of you that, that haven't been around,
W. Curtis Preston:that was digital linear tape.
W. Curtis Preston:That was the predecessor to LTO.
W. Curtis Preston:So it was a, it was a linear tape.
W. Curtis Preston:The way LTO is as opposed to heli scan tape, which is a
W. Curtis Preston:completely different thing.
W. Curtis Preston:Did you ever use any helical stuff like D DDS or eight millimeter, uh, or AIT?
Stuart Liddle:we, we did have some, and, and at the same time
Stuart Liddle:we transitioned off of DLT to LTO.
Stuart Liddle:We transitioned off of those as well.
W. Curtis Preston:Gotcha.
Stuart Liddle:We did have AIT.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:So we transitioned to that.
Stuart Liddle:And then we also had gotten into virtual tape libraries and
W. Curtis Preston:which
Stuart Liddle:big vendors.
W. Curtis Preston:if you're new to this world, somebody's listening to this going.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm sorry,
W. Curtis Preston:what what is a, what is a virtual tape library?
W. Curtis Preston:Stuart Stuart.
Stuart Liddle:it's a disc based system that emulates writing to tape and it
W. Curtis Preston:And And why in hell would somebody do that?
Stuart Liddle:supposedly it was faster and easier to work with, but
W. Curtis Preston:but but why would a disc that I get, why you'd use disc?
W. Curtis Preston:Why would a disc pretend to be tape?
Stuart Liddle:Because the backup software primarily dealt with tape
Stuart Liddle:and didn't know about writing to disk
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it was a, it was a bandaid situation.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And I remember many years ago, several years ago, I was sitting,
W. Curtis Preston:sitting, chatting with a gentleman by the name of Mark Staimer.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'll have to, I'll have, now I'll have to tweet to him about this
W. Curtis Preston:episode, but Mark Staimer and I made a bet one year, and this was when I
W. Curtis Preston:was a big fan of VTLs at the time.
W. Curtis Preston:And he's like in five years, Nobody's gonna be buying VTLs like it was something
W. Curtis Preston:he's like, there's gonna be fewer VTLs sold than, than the alternative.
W. Curtis Preston:And I was like, I bet you, you know, we, I, as I recall, I, I, I owe him dinner.
W. Curtis Preston:He is the thing was that basically it was a time when backup products
W. Curtis Preston:really didn't know how to handle writing to disk very well.
W. Curtis Preston:And so we needed to, and I, and I can think of one big backup.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm gonna call it protocol that really didn't know how to write to tape.
W. Curtis Preston:And it's one, I'm sorry that didn't know how to write to disk.
W. Curtis Preston:And it's one that you would've, you would've been exposed to there at
W. Curtis Preston:Amgen, cuz I remember helping with it.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you remember it?
Stuart Liddle:Tar
W. Curtis Preston:No,
Stuart Liddle:no, that's right.
Stuart Liddle:You can write the
W. Curtis Preston:I'll give you a hint.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, the thing that used it rhymes with uh, Schmett app.
Stuart Liddle:okay.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you remember?
W. Curtis Preston:Do you remember?
W. Curtis Preston:the way you backed up?
W. Curtis Preston:What was that?
Stuart Liddle:Oh, geez.
Stuart Liddle:Now.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Okay.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah, there you go.
Stuart Liddle:There you go.
Stuart Liddle:That's right.
Stuart Liddle:NDMP didn't know how to do anything else, but
Stuart Liddle:that yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the only way to get data off your net app.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Stuart Liddle:Yep.
Stuart Liddle:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And so, and so disc pretended to be tape and I, I
W. Curtis Preston:think, I think they still sell that stuff, but I don't, I mean, I know
W. Curtis Preston:that quantum does, I know that, um, and does data domain still do,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Data Domain still supports VTL.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:for all three of its customers, that uses it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:no, I, so when I, so I used to be at EMC
Prasanna Malaiyandi:at the time, right after the data domain acquisition, I joined EMC.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I remember hearing stories though that the big selling point for data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:domain initially, like you're saying, it's you go into those accounts with
Prasanna Malaiyandi:tape customers and be like, Hey, here's a very simple, de-duplicate
Prasanna Malaiyandi:applying deduplication appliance.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You just swap out your tape drives or tape library with this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And you're all good to go and look at these amazing cost
Prasanna Malaiyandi:savings that you get all the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:deduplication.
W. Curtis Preston:So that, that was the next phase, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Was,
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:was
Stuart Liddle:Going to yeah.
Stuart Liddle:And,
W. Curtis Preston:And
W. Curtis Preston:you, you used a lot of that stuff back in the
Stuart Liddle:oh yeah, we used a lot of that stuff.
Stuart Liddle:We went from, we went to data domain and uh, then we ended up with
Stuart Liddle:strictly, uh, NetBackup appliances, so
W. Curtis Preston:with, with NetBackup, dedupe integrated into it.
Stuart Liddle:yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:And then replicating to a remote site using that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, right
Stuart Liddle:So it.
Stuart Liddle:it it basically eliminated the need for sending stuff off
Stuart Liddle:site to, you know, with tape
W. Curtis Preston:So you actually lived what, what, I'm gonna call backup Nirvana.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because we talked about this a lot, but I, but I very rarely
W. Curtis Preston:met people that actually did it.
W. Curtis Preston:And that was that they went tapeless with a de-duplicated replicated system.
W. Curtis Preston:You had the onsite back and the offsite back and nobody touched a tape and
W. Curtis Preston:no, man, there was no man in a van.
Stuart Liddle:But that was only good at certain sites that would've allowed
Stuart Liddle:it due to bandwidth issues or, um, you know, in certain, uh, European states
Stuart Liddle:that wouldn't necessarily allow it.
W. Curtis Preston:What, and what was the challenge there?
Stuart Liddle:Um, I, I believe there was like, um, in Europe and in the EU,
Stuart Liddle:they have certain data, uh, privacy laws that don't allow you to move
Stuart Liddle:things over across borders or something
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I, I would just assume that you would do it within the border,
W. Curtis Preston:but yeah, that, that's definitely a
Stuart Liddle:Well, If you like Switzerland, not part of the EU and has
Stuart Liddle:their own set of laws on that stuff.
Stuart Liddle:I think they're, they're one of the ones that we couldn't really do
Stuart Liddle:it to, unless we had two sites in Switzerland, which I don't think we did.
Stuart Liddle:We only had one.
Stuart Liddle:So, but
Stuart Liddle:inside
W. Curtis Preston:might be joining NATO though.
Stuart Liddle:there you go.
W. Curtis Preston:I think there's a good shot there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, okay.
W. Curtis Preston:So yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So if the laws allowed it, uh, and things like that, then you would do that.
Stuart Liddle:Mm-hmm
W. Curtis Preston:um, and what, how much better was that from
W. Curtis Preston:comparing it to the tape world?
W. Curtis Preston:To what you, what you had before, you know, so you had the tape world, you
W. Curtis Preston:had the tape plus data domain world.
W. Curtis Preston:And then you went with this appliance world.
W. Curtis Preston:How much better or, or was it better?
W. Curtis Preston:Was it
W. Curtis Preston:more
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Huge, huge amount better.
Stuart Liddle:Um, the, the big problem with doing restores of, of files of course,
Stuart Liddle:is bandwidth across the wan.
Stuart Liddle:How long is it gonna take to restore a big file?
Stuart Liddle:That kind of thing.
Stuart Liddle:But I think it's still worked out to be better than say, and, and
Stuart Liddle:we always did have the option.
Stuart Liddle:Here's the option of at the remote site, if that's the only copy of the data,
Stuart Liddle:copying it to tape and shipping the tape to the, to the site where you really
Stuart Liddle:needed to restore it, you know, that that cuz never underestimate the, uh, the
Stuart Liddle:bandwidth of a 747 full of DLTs or LTOs.
W. Curtis Preston:That's right.
W. Curtis Preston:That's right.
W. Curtis Preston:Never underestimate the B bandwidth of a truck is my usual thing, but yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:But yeah, plane full of
W. Curtis Preston:LTOs is pretty huge.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:was there something you found though that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:was lacking with this new solution versus what you had before?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Cause I think everyone understands the pros of going, what sort
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of a backup appliance based approach versus older tape style.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But was there something that you found was lacking with this approach
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or that you wish it could do that?
Stuart Liddle:um, I, I think the only thing I wish I could do is
Stuart Liddle:to, to, to be able to be more of, um, quick restore across the WAN
Stuart Liddle:is, is probably the biggest thing.
Stuart Liddle:But for the most part, yeah, it's, it was pretty nice having that because you didn't
Stuart Liddle:have to deal with somebody constantly saying, well, I, I forgot I couldn't get
Stuart Liddle:into the office because of the snowstorm.
Stuart Liddle:So I couldn't get the tapes offsite, and then you have a disaster, right.
Stuart Liddle:Just
Stuart Liddle:don't have to worry about that.
W. Curtis Preston:you were able to have different retention on your primary
W. Curtis Preston:and then your secondary, cuz you, you mentioned that there would be backups.
W. Curtis Preston:It would only be at that secondary cuz you could solve the problem by having
W. Curtis Preston:the same size systems on both sides.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Cause
W. Curtis Preston:then if you're doing a restore from the, the place where you're backing
W. Curtis Preston:up, you would restore from the,
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:You could
Stuart Liddle:restore from the
W. Curtis Preston:server.
W. Curtis Preston:But that, but that's a lot more expensive.
Stuart Liddle:If yeah, but, but if, yes, I, um, but I don't think there
Stuart Liddle:was different retentions on that.
Stuart Liddle:It was the same retention and we, if we needed to back it restore
Stuart Liddle:something quickly, we could do it from the local copy rather than
Stuart Liddle:the remotely replicated copy.
W. Curtis Preston:Why would you ever restore it from the
W. Curtis Preston:remotely replicated copy.
Stuart Liddle:If you had a problem with your, you know, primary site
Stuart Liddle:going down and, uh, you know, the backup system being compromised
Stuart Liddle:somehow, then you would want do that..
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
Stuart Liddle:See, this is a test.
Stuart Liddle:I know
W. Curtis Preston:no, not a test.
W. Curtis Preston:It's just, I didn't, uh, um, I didn't, um, I wasn't there, man.
W. Curtis Preston:Isn't dare man.
Stuart Liddle:okay.
Stuart Liddle:Oh, you,
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I didn't ever have to administer those
W. Curtis Preston:NetBackup appliances in production,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so we talked about now you went from tape to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of VTL to backup appliances.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Did you ever have to worry about, like, what do you do with applications
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that are moving to the cloud while you were there at Amgen?
Stuart Liddle:Yeah, I did.
Stuart Liddle:And unfortunately I was not one of the main people that got into that.
Stuart Liddle:So I, my experience with the cloud based stuff is not as extensive as some of
Stuart Liddle:the other people that I worked with.
Stuart Liddle:So, um, yes, we did that.
Stuart Liddle:And, and in fact, there's a lot of applications that ended up at,
Stuart Liddle:uh, AWS and, you know, things like in fact, um, one of my coworkers
Stuart Liddle:ended up going to work there.
Stuart Liddle:So.
Stuart Liddle:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Gotcha.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and what was the, what was the general feeling of that?
W. Curtis Preston:Was it, was it because you might have been in some of those, was it like
W. Curtis Preston:saying, Hey, well, we definitely, well, we definitely gotta back that stuff
W. Curtis Preston:up or, or was there a feeling of like, well, it's the cloud, so we're good.
Stuart Liddle:no.
Stuart Liddle:I think the, um, the feeling was that that people thought that, that it was a
Stuart Liddle:good thing to use and they didn't really take into account the full expense of
Stuart Liddle:that when they were talking about it, they were just looking at it from the
Stuart Liddle:standpoint of, Hey, we can reduce our data center footprint if we put the
Stuart Liddle:stuff to the cloud and virtualize it and not necessarily realizing that in
Stuart Liddle:some cases you're gonna be spending as much if not more on stuff like that.
Stuart Liddle:So,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, subscription based pricing for
W. Curtis Preston:hardware is essentially what that is
W. Curtis Preston:the
Stuart Liddle:exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So going back to an earlier conversation we had in the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:podcast where the, uh, person was afraid of their job getting sort of obsolete.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Were you afraid of that when they were starting to move to the cloud?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And were you thinking, oh man, is this going to mean I'm
Prasanna Malaiyandi:out of a business or out of a
Stuart Liddle:no, no, not at all.
Stuart Liddle:And I think it primarily was because of the fact that there was still
Stuart Liddle:applications that they wanted to keep in house on prem and, uh, they didn't
Stuart Liddle:want to, uh, put that out to the cloud.
Stuart Liddle:So no, there was still that.
Stuart Liddle:And then there's also, again, that, that cost factor, I think, because
Stuart Liddle:if, if we got involved with it properly, we could point out that,
Stuart Liddle:Hey, this is still cheaper, you know, but, but I think that's changing.
Stuart Liddle:I haven't.
Stuart Liddle:I haven't been involved so much with it recently.
Stuart Liddle:You guys probably know more about that,
W. Curtis Preston:At what's changing.
Stuart Liddle:um, the, the pricing for, for virtualization and cloud based stuff,
W. Curtis Preston:I, I don't know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I would say you now have more options.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like you can pick cheaper tiers of storage.
Stuart Liddle:mm-hmm
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you can try to optimize and spin down, like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:instances when they're not in use or allow them to be preempted.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:There is Lambda functions, which means you don't necessarily run a server.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're just running code when it needs to run.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So they've given you more options.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't necessarily know if it's cheaper.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:now up to the developer to optimize for those costs.
W. Curtis Preston:you think Prasanna?
W. Curtis Preston:Well, it, yeah, I.
W. Curtis Preston:I think it is cheaper.
W. Curtis Preston:If you use the cloud, the way cloud can be used.
W. Curtis Preston:Like you can't do it, you can't do a Lambda function in a data center.
W. Curtis Preston:The concept of running a Lambda function.
W. Curtis Preston:is that you, you get to do this for next to nothing.
W. Curtis Preston:And if it's something that you do infrequently, or there, there, there is
W. Curtis Preston:a crossover point, right, where you're paying by the Lambda function, but it's
W. Curtis Preston:super, super cheap, but at some point you cross a boundary and now, well, this
W. Curtis Preston:would be cheaper if I would just rent a VM for a certain number of hours per day.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so I, I think that the, the people that continue to struggle with
W. Curtis Preston:cloud costs are people that don't, they, they don't treat the cloud like that.
W. Curtis Preston:They, they just, they just treat the cloud as another data center.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they, they say, well, we have a thousand VMs over here.
W. Curtis Preston:We got a thousand VMs over there.
W. Curtis Preston:We got 20 terabytes of storage over here.
W. Curtis Preston:We got 20 terabytes of storage over there, and that is the guaranteed
W. Curtis Preston:way to have your costs skyrocket.
W. Curtis Preston:Doesn't matter what the cloud vendor is.
W. Curtis Preston:If you're renting your hardware, cuz that's what you're doing, right.
W. Curtis Preston:You're renting your hardware.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and I know I make this analogy a lot, but it's like going from owning a car and
W. Curtis Preston:you go, gee, I don't want, I don't want the troubles of owning a car anymore.
W. Curtis Preston:So I'm going to rent a car from Avis all the time.
W. Curtis Preston:right.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I don't want to do, I don't wanna do oil changes.
W. Curtis Preston:I want that to be Avis' problem.
W. Curtis Preston:So I'm gonna rent a car from Avis 24 7 and have it sitting in my driveway.
W. Curtis Preston:But I'm gonna, but, but renting a car is an incredibly expensive way to have a car.
W. Curtis Preston:It's great if you need it for a day or even a week, or you need a car where
W. Curtis Preston:you happen to be, which isn't where you live, that's what Avis is for.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's the way the cloud should be.
W. Curtis Preston:You should buy little pieces.
W. Curtis Preston:And if what you're doing is just running a, a server 24 by seven, then it's going
W. Curtis Preston:to be more expensive than having that same exact server sitting in your site.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but I'm sorry, I jumped up on a soapbox there,
W. Curtis Preston:but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:take your analogy one step further and say
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that Lambda is the equivalent of Uber.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:In your example.
W. Curtis Preston:Agreed.
W. Curtis Preston:Lambda is the equivalent of Uber and Uber is a great cheap way to
W. Curtis Preston:do, to do certain things, right.
W. Curtis Preston:But if you take Uber all day, Is it gonna be even more
W. Curtis Preston:expensive than renting that car?
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Shoot, actually, you don't even have to take Uber that much.
W. Curtis Preston:you know, you could take, take, take couple Ubers a day and you're gonna
W. Curtis Preston:start to be wondering, you know, if you should have a rental car,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, is just, you know, again, this is where the analogy falls apart.
W. Curtis Preston:The only advantage of the Uber in that scenario is you can get
W. Curtis Preston:drunk and not worry about it, but I don't think the Lambda function,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, is gonna help with that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so, okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, Stuart, is there anything that you, you know, like if you had had
W. Curtis Preston:your druthers, if you could have waved a magic wand, is there anything that
W. Curtis Preston:you would've wanted to have, you know, from a backup and recovery perspective
W. Curtis Preston:that, that you didn't get when you were doing things back in the day?
Stuart Liddle:oh, geez.
Stuart Liddle:What was you mean beyond the Nirvana of site to site
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Beyond the Nirvana of site to site replication.
Stuart Liddle:Uh, wow.
Stuart Liddle:Oh, well, okay.
Stuart Liddle:Um, full automation of the, uh, the process of, of upgrading.
Stuart Liddle:I mean, upgrading from one version to of.
Stuart Liddle:NetBackup to another, or, you know, having clients updated when you have to deal
Stuart Liddle:with different, um, uh, support groups, you know, like windows and Unix and
Stuart Liddle:VMware, you know, by, by, by, by telling you know, somebody, Hey, you best have
Stuart Liddle:your systems all on the latest version of NetBackup or you're gonna have problems.
Stuart Liddle:And they look at you and say, oh, you know, that's a project, so we're gonna
Stuart Liddle:have to take some time with that.
Stuart Liddle:And then just like throw up your hands and yeah, I wish I could
Stuart Liddle:have had that kind of thing.
Stuart Liddle:That would've been great.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and that is a real challenge for, because no one wants to
W. Curtis Preston:upgrade their backup server.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and your clients, they don't wanna upgrade their, their backup client because
W. Curtis Preston:it's just, it's just, they don't, they don't really get any benefit out of it.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Stuart Liddle:well, they don't get any perceived benefit out
Stuart Liddle:of it,
W. Curtis Preston:benefit out of it,
Stuart Liddle:right?
Stuart Liddle:Until something breaks.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:then they're like, why didn't you
W. Curtis Preston:So that,
Stuart Liddle:how come you didn't know about this?
W. Curtis Preston:solving all the tape problem and everything that this
W. Curtis Preston:was what you were left with, was that maintenance, that ongoing maintenance.
Stuart Liddle:That ongoing maintenance and, and upgrading the
Stuart Liddle:backup servers was not a big deal because it was just our group that
Stuart Liddle:was, you know, involved with it.
Stuart Liddle:So us doing it was not a big deal, but to tell other people in other groups
Stuart Liddle:with different managers that, Hey, you've got a thousand Unix servers
Stuart Liddle:out there that need to be upgraded to a newer version of NetBackup.
Stuart Liddle:They're like, man, , we'll just let it go.
W. Curtis Preston:that, and, and again, I, I swear I did not give
W. Curtis Preston:you this question just so I could say this, but this is one of the
W. Curtis Preston:beauties of SaaS based backup is that you don't have that problem.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You're never upgrading the backup server and, and we even solved the, the,
W. Curtis Preston:the updating of the client that, that could be done by the software itself.
W. Curtis Preston:And you can, you know, schedule it I'd, I'd like it to just
W. Curtis Preston:be completely automatic.
W. Curtis Preston:But I think that a lot of companies don't want that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:They want some control over when that happens so that they know that it's
W. Curtis Preston:happening, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't have had to, um, you wouldn't have
W. Curtis Preston:had to spend a lot of time upgrading the servers and upgrading the clients.
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz magic just would've happened.
W. Curtis Preston:But um, but Hey, but now you're gone.
W. Curtis Preston:This is, this is a secret.
W. Curtis Preston:This is a secret to backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Success is leaving the job all together.
Stuart Liddle:Now, now I'm gone, but let me just put in a shameless plug and say
Stuart Liddle:to anybody out there, who's listening.
Stuart Liddle:If you're interested in hiring me as a NetBackup admin,
W. Curtis Preston:Absolutely
Stuart Liddle:me.
W. Curtis Preston:Stu Stuart knows his stuff and he's got grandkids to pay for.
Stuart Liddle:yeah.
Stuart Liddle:That's right.
W. Curtis Preston:How many, how many grandkids you got going on there?
Stuart Liddle:three, so far
W. Curtis Preston:Three so far.
Stuart Liddle:but two, two here in Denver and one in Seattle.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz you now live in Denver.
W. Curtis Preston:You you've been following your, you've been following your grandkids around.
Stuart Liddle:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:That is that.
W. Curtis Preston:That may be a future.
W. Curtis Preston:That may be my future as well.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, right now my grandkid,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, I, my office is their former bedroom and their other
W. Curtis Preston:bedroom is now right above me.
W. Curtis Preston:So I don't have to travel anywhere to see my grandchild.
W. Curtis Preston:Stuart, so Stuart, I wanna say, you know, thanks for coming on.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, it's been great to,
W. Curtis Preston:to, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, we talk about you so many times, your name has come up on this podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:So many times as like the guy that told me to put a testing.
W. Curtis Preston:Chapter into my book and all of that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, your name does come up quite often.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Stuart and it's great to finally meet you.
W. Curtis Preston:and not, and not just because, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:we like to giggle at your name
Stuart Liddle:Yeah.
Stuart Liddle:well, nice.
W. Curtis Preston:for the, for those listening and not reading, uh, it is
W. Curtis Preston:Liddle with, with Ds, uh, Stuart Liddle, not little, uh, he's not, he's not the
W. Curtis Preston:mouse, but, uh, anyway, so, and, uh, and,
Stuart Liddle:Prasanna's not a cat.
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna's not a cat, uh, and Prasanna,
W. Curtis Preston:thanks your questions as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I should say this was a pleasure and I hope I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:wasn't poking too much fun at you Curtis and asking Stuart to, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:reveal all the mysteries about Curtis
W. Curtis Preston:No one, no one knows all the secrets.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, uh, I want to thank you again to our listeners.
W. Curtis Preston:Remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all.
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