Mr. Backup reflects on 30-year career
Today (Jan 23) marks 30 years to the day that W. Curtis Preston joined the backup industry. Fresh out of the US Navy and wanting to make a name for himself, he joined MBNA, a 35-billion dollar credit card company as "the backup guy." Within seven years he would write the industry's first book dedicated to backup, and since that time, he's gone on to be the world's leading expert in backup and recovery. What were backups like in 1993? How have things changed over the years? And how did he apapt to all of those changes? Prasanna takes the lead as host for this episode, asking Curtis a number of very insightful questions. Be sure to join us for this very special episode.
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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
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