Who is W. Curtis Preston?

Curtis making a point

W. Curtis Preston is available as a consultant and expert witness in the areas of storage, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and associated products and services.

Preston has specialized in storage, backup, and recovery since 1993 and has been and end-user, consultant, and analyst.  Most recently he has joined the team at Druva, a data protection as a service company.  He’s written four books on the subject, Modern Data Protection, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery.

Preston has provided expert witness services for many cases, including multiple patent infringement cases and a few insurance cases.

History

W. Curtis Preston started his career in backups as “the backup guy” for MBNA, at that time the second-largest credit card company.  He managed the backups as they grew from 15 to 250 servers, and from 2 operating systems to 5 operating systems, running Informix, Oracle, Sybase & other applications.  Windows was just beginning to grow in the data center.  Believe it or not, a $35B company in those days had a total of 300 GB in the entire data center.

He left MBNA to join Collective Technologies in 1996, which was a large consulting company that made a lot of money in the .com days.  In February of 2001 he started his first company called The Storage Group, and they specialized in backup & recovery system design, implementation, and management. The Storage Group was acquired by GlassHouse Technologies, where Preston was the VP of Data Protection for five years.  At the time they were the largest independent provider of professional services in the infrastructure space.

He then started another company called Truth in IT, Inc and ran that company for five years before selling it to Ekovox.  He then worked as an analyst at Storage Switzerland for two years, publishing many blogs, articles, and webinars.

He was the Chief Technical Evangelist for Druva, a Data Protection as a service (DPaaS) company from 2017 to 2023.

He now hosts The Backup Wrap-up podcast, and also makes guest appearances on many other podcasts.

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2 comments
  • Pedantic feedback from a musician listener…

    I do always enjoy your podcast and am the type of person who actually appreciate’s all the distinctions Curtis makes in his use of different terminology. I’ve always thought, if we have different words, let’s use them for different reasons and not just conflate them endlessly. So count me in for the (Archive!=Backup) camp.

    Anyway, I am both a linux sysadmin and a musician, professionally. I have a keen interest in long-term data integrity as regards backups. With countless arrangements/compositions, recordings other digital musical artifacts, I like to be sure that the data I have in several years is the same as what I originally stored. I’d love to hear more discussion about modern ways to mitigate data corruption. I took notes during the episode about M-Disc, but mainly use ZFS for check-summing and snapshots with cloud syncing for my offsite copies.

    Final note – hate to end on a correction but it needs said. In your most recent episode on Archive and Retreival, you discussed the musical term ‘Legato’ as somehow meaning ‘slow’ as opposed to Staccato. That is frankly incorrect. They are performance instructions that tell the musician how a series of notes should be phrased. Staccato means ‘separate/distinct’ while Legato means ‘connected’. The name Legato is actually quite fitting for a networking company.

    Thanks for sharing your insights via the podcast, Keep up the great work!

    • Thanks for the compliment and the correction.

      I am an AMATEUR musician (mainly a singer. I used to play an instrument or two, but not now). I do know the difference between staccato and legato, but it’s been a while. 🙂 You are absolutely correct. I will say that legato notes are longer and drawn out (and thus connected), vs staccato, which happen very quick. So yea… strictly speaking legato does not mean slow. I still think it’s a funny name for a backup company. 🙂

      For giggles (especially at this time of year), feel free to check out my rendition of “Oh Holy Night” from 12 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8E6xoloBnw
      If you REALLY want a laugh, see me in full Elvis garb singing “In LTO,” a parody of “In the Ghetto.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15JZzWFSKzo