Datacore becomes leader in container-attached storage
Datacore has been one of the storage industry's best-kept secrets for a long time, quietly growing a dedicated customer base in Fort Lauderdale. Their CEO, Dave Zabrowski, joins us on this episode to explain their background, and tells us about how their technology and some savvy business decisions resulted in them owning Open EBS, the most popular container-attached storage platform. Datacore is a software-defined storage product that virtualizing pretty much any kind of storage into any other kind of storage, giving you exactly what you need, without vendor lock-in. Join us on this podcast to hear what's special about Datacore.
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Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it all podcast,
W. Curtis Preston:I'm your host, W Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup.
W. Curtis Preston:And I have with me, my DIY commiserator Prasanna Malaiyandi.
W. Curtis Preston:How's it going Prasanna?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh, I wish I did not have to commiserate.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I wish I could cheer or celebrate, but.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I wish you could come over and help me.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So for the listeners or the viewers of the podcast, Curtis is finally
Prasanna Malaiyandi:started his project to redo the floors.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And he started this weekend.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:He's been prepping and doing all sorts of work before this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:He finally started and he
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And then I,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:up just a little bit.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, I laid a couple of rows and then I realized I
W. Curtis Preston:was actually laying them backwards.
W. Curtis Preston:It would've worked it would've just made the whole job worse.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, harder.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it at the beginning, which is
W. Curtis Preston:did.
W. Curtis Preston:I caught it in the beginning.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, it was because there's this guy that I'm using to help me out.
W. Curtis Preston:He has this, um, his name's Joe Letendre, he's actually up in the Midwest.
W. Curtis Preston:And he, he actually has a service where like, he, he helps you lay
W. Curtis Preston:out your stuff and all this stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and I needed did that.
W. Curtis Preston:And I watched a bunch of videos, but so much time passed because.
W. Curtis Preston:Everything that's happened in this house in the last few months
W. Curtis Preston:that I had forgotten, uh, a really important, uh, part, which is
W. Curtis Preston:which side of the, of the LVT
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so simple, right?
W. Curtis Preston:which side goes towards the wall.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, uh, I, I had the, uh, I had the tongue.
W. Curtis Preston:Let's see, I had the groove.
W. Curtis Preston:Facing out instead of the, because to me, if you, for those of you that ever
W. Curtis Preston:looked at L V T like there's a, there's a tongue and a groove, but to me, the
W. Curtis Preston:groove looks like a tongue because it's sticking out really obvious.
W. Curtis Preston:It looks like it's a tongue, but it's not a tongue.
W. Curtis Preston:That's the groove.
W. Curtis Preston:The tongue is the part that looks good.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't understand why that is, but anyway, so, but, so it's good now.
W. Curtis Preston:I've, I've got, I've gotten two rows, uh, laid and the first row is the absolute
W. Curtis Preston:hardest, uh, cuz you gotta get it.
W. Curtis Preston:You gotta measure it just so to get it, you know, to, to exactly everything.
W. Curtis Preston:And so, you know, uh, now I just have to deal with the fact
W. Curtis Preston:that my knee is 56 years old.
W. Curtis Preston:Knee padding and, and Motrin is what it's better living through chemistry.
W. Curtis Preston:I throw out our usual disclaimer, Prasanna and I work for different companies.
W. Curtis Preston:He works for Zoom.
W. Curtis Preston:I work for Druva.
W. Curtis Preston:This is not a podcast of either company and the opinions that you hear are ours.
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W. Curtis Preston:If you wanna talk about the kind of stuff we like to talk about, backups,
W. Curtis Preston:archives, uh, security storage, uh, you know, barbecue, uh, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:scuba diving.
W. Curtis Preston:scuba diving, uh, @wcpreston on Twitter or.
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W. Curtis Preston:. Uh, so let's bring on our guest today.
W. Curtis Preston:He has been in the it industry since the late nineties running HP's enterprise
W. Curtis Preston:server business for a while, which means I might have actually been a
W. Curtis Preston:customer of him back in the day, before founding a startup that was actually
W. Curtis Preston:acquired by HPE for the last four years.
W. Curtis Preston:He's been the CEO of Datacore, a software defined storage
W. Curtis Preston:company in Fort Lauderdale.
W. Curtis Preston:Welcome to the podcast, Dave Zabrowski.
Dave Zabrowski:I'm glad to be here, Curtis and Prasanna.
Dave Zabrowski:Nice to have you.
Dave Zabrowski:I, I, uh, I have bad memories of doing my own floors.
Dave Zabrowski:Way, way, way before I had any money, I rented a ceramic saw and
Dave Zabrowski:it was like, it was a disaster.
Dave Zabrowski:So yes.
Dave Zabrowski:Good, good for you.
W. Curtis Preston:on, um, I'm doing luxury vinyl tile, and I will also
W. Curtis Preston:have bad memories, but I, you know, I'm in it, I'm in it to win it.
W. Curtis Preston:You know what I
Dave Zabrowski:yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:Well, Curtis, you know, when you get to be our age, you gotta be like
Dave Zabrowski:the pharaohs who built the pyramids quote, unquote, built the pyramids,
Dave Zabrowski:you outsource that stuff, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, a good, a good buddy of mine, this breakfast place
W. Curtis Preston:that I go to all, all the time.
W. Curtis Preston:I I've been going there 20 years and I was talking to him about DIY
W. Curtis Preston:stuff and he he's a Curtis Curtis.
W. Curtis Preston:He goes, my dad taught me something a long time ago.
W. Curtis Preston:Be really good at what you do so you could pay other people to do what they do.
W. Curtis Preston:and I'm.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, that's just that's.
W. Curtis Preston:That is a way to live your life.
W. Curtis Preston:That
Dave Zabrowski:Haven't learned that lesson yet.
W. Curtis Preston:
Speaker:haven't learned that yet.
W. Curtis Preston:
Speaker:It's coming up though.
W. Curtis Preston:
Speaker:This, this, this one hurts, uh, nowhere near as painful as my last DIY project.
W. Curtis Preston:
Speaker:If you can believe this, actually, uh, put solar up on my roof, if
W. Curtis Preston:
Speaker:you can believe that that was, that
Dave Zabrowski:I'm afraid of Heights.
Dave Zabrowski:I wouldn't, I wouldn't dig that project at all.
W. Curtis Preston:no.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I don't, I'm not gonna say I dug it, but, but yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway, uh, and ultimately ended up having to call the guy towards the
W. Curtis Preston:end of the project, cuz I, I wanted to finish by the end of the year cuz I
Dave Zabrowski:The call of shame.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:The call of shame.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Well the worst part, the worst part and listeners will know this
W. Curtis Preston:already, but the worst part was like, he charged me like it was.
W. Curtis Preston:$800 to finish, uh, which was the fi I had put all the, uh, all the
W. Curtis Preston:posts in, and then he just had to put the, the panel just had to put
W. Curtis Preston:up the panels and do all the wiring.
W. Curtis Preston:And so he charged me $800 for that.
W. Curtis Preston:His team came out and they were done in a, like a day.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and I said, just curious, um, for the part that I had done already, how
W. Curtis Preston:much more would you have charged me?
W. Curtis Preston:To do that part.
W. Curtis Preston:He's like, oh, another $300.
W. Curtis Preston:I spent months, it took me months doing it because it's up high.
W. Curtis Preston:You can't work in the afternoon cuz you know, I live in Southern California.
W. Curtis Preston:It's hot as hell up there.
W. Curtis Preston:And anyway, so sometimes DIY is not the way they go, but um,
W. Curtis Preston:we're just, we're glad you're here.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and thanks for, uh, also commiserating with me here.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah, of course
W. Curtis Preston:I, I I've been aware of Datacore, you know, a
W. Curtis Preston:lot longer than you've been there.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, how, how long have they been around?
Dave Zabrowski:Datacore since 1998.
Dave Zabrowski:They were founded by 11 founders.
Dave Zabrowski:If you can believe that.
Dave Zabrowski:And they came outta the high performance computing business, believe it or not.
Dave Zabrowski:Fort Lauderdale Boca Raton area in the heyday was, was one of the places
Dave Zabrowski:for high performance computing.
Dave Zabrowski:And, uh, they came out of that world and, uh, built a company that was
Dave Zabrowski:very successful, very profitable, and barely anybody knew about it.
Dave Zabrowski:so they, they were very much technologists and not marketeers that's for.
Dave Zabrowski:Wonderful.
Dave Zabrowski:Wonderful people.
Dave Zabrowski:Wonderful founders.
Dave Zabrowski:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, by the way, super jelly, uh, love Fort Lauderdale.
W. Curtis Preston:I actually grew up in Orlando.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, um, I, the, the scuba diving in Fort Lauderdale is, is amazing.
Dave Zabrowski:I was just doing it on Sunday.
Dave Zabrowski:It's spectacular.
Dave Zabrowski:I, I spent almost my whole career in Silicon valley, so it's it's,
Dave Zabrowski:it's nice to go on the ocean when it's actually above 60 degrees.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, I mean, you know, you're, you're looking at 80, 85, right?
Dave Zabrowski:yep.
Dave Zabrowski:For sure.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis is so
W. Curtis Preston:um, Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Super jealous.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz you know, the temps that we're dealing with out here.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, what, why don't, why don't you give a, an overview?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I know it's a software defined, uh, storage company, but you
W. Curtis Preston:you've really looks like you've.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, in the last couple of years you've really been looking at this
W. Curtis Preston:problem of, uh, ransomware and, and cyber attacks and things like that.
W. Curtis Preston:So why don't you give an overview of Datacore?
Dave Zabrowski:Sure.
Dave Zabrowski:Sure.
Dave Zabrowski:So my last company, as you mentioned, it was in the cloud
Dave Zabrowski:analytics consumption space.
Dave Zabrowski:We had a SaaS product.
Dave Zabrowski:We sold that to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2017.
Dave Zabrowski:And if you're familiar with that, uh, with HP's lineup called GreenLake, that's
Dave Zabrowski:essentially where cloud cruiser ended up going and, and growing that, uh, HPE
Dave Zabrowski:was our largest customer at the time.
Dave Zabrowski:And, um, in fact, many of our Cloud Cruiser employees, that was the name
Dave Zabrowski:of the company, um, are still there and take on more and more responsibility.
Dave Zabrowski:So that, that was a really interesting experience.
Dave Zabrowski:And, uh, and a good partnership with HPE.
Dave Zabrowski:So Antonio was president at the time and shortly after we acquired, he became CEO.
Dave Zabrowski:So, uh, so that's good.
Dave Zabrowski:So Datacore, as the software defined storage, we really focused on a vision
Dave Zabrowski:that we called at the time, Datacore one.
Dave Zabrowski:And what that meant was a single solution for all your storage needs
Dave Zabrowski:based upon a virtualized approach.
Dave Zabrowski:One of the things that was very obvious to me prior to my cloud company,
Dave Zabrowski:uh, we had, uh, I was in the storage business, um, in 2002, I left it.
Dave Zabrowski:And when I exited the company in 2017, I came back into the storage business and
Dave Zabrowski:poked around and not much had changed.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, it was, uh, kind of an innovation, you know, desert, if you will.
Dave Zabrowski:A lot of the big guys that were big in 2002 were still more
Dave Zabrowski:or less doing the same thing.
Dave Zabrowski:Wasn't a lot of innovation.
Dave Zabrowski:So I got in touch with the founder and managing director of Insight
Dave Zabrowski:Venture Partners, one of the most successful software, but investors,
Dave Zabrowski:gentleman named Jeff Warren, I got to meet him through a friend.
Dave Zabrowski:And he said to me that there was this unknown unheard of company down
Dave Zabrowski:in Fort Lauderdale called Datacore.
Dave Zabrowski:That actually had some pretty cool things.
Dave Zabrowski:And, and they were on the, the, the hot side of the spectrum.
Dave Zabrowski:They were doing very high performance computing, as I mentioned,
Dave Zabrowski:that was the foundation of it.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, and the hypothesis was that there was an opportunity to actually
Dave Zabrowski:develop a broader offering, uh, based upon a virtualized approach
Dave Zabrowski:that would cut across the spectrum from hot to warm, to cool, to cold.
Dave Zabrowski:And so that's what we did.
Dave Zabrowski:That's what became Datacore one.
Dave Zabrowski:We actually organically released a few products.
Dave Zabrowski:Uh, we actually had some acquisitions that have been quite successful
Dave Zabrowski:in the, uh, object unstructured side, as well as on the container,
Dave Zabrowski:uh, native attached storage side.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, and then as it relates to ransomware, which was specific to
Dave Zabrowski:your question, you know, that evolved over the last several years where,
Dave Zabrowski:you know, ransomware was kind of, it was almost one of these random things.
Dave Zabrowski:And if you were a CEO of a company, you didn't think much about it a few years
Dave Zabrowski:ago and you'd hear, you know, one of your buddies got, got hit with it and you kind
Dave Zabrowski:of commiserated with them, but then it got to the point where it wasn't, uh, it
Dave Zabrowski:wasn't an, if it was when and how bad.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, and that's really, that really changed.
Dave Zabrowski:It reminded me a lot in the server business.
Dave Zabrowski:Uh, when I was running the server business at HP, uh, it was, you know,
Dave Zabrowski:where it was all about nines, how many number of nines you could get.
Dave Zabrowski:And so you're trying to get that server not to fail.
Dave Zabrowski:Facebook and Google came along and they basically said let's design an
Dave Zabrowski:architecture that plans on it failing.
Dave Zabrowski:And so that's what ended up with the, the next generation of servers.
Dave Zabrowski:And so that's really the, the reality is ransomware is going to hit you.
Dave Zabrowski:And it's just a question of, you know, how bad and, and when, um, so we ended
Dave Zabrowski:up the, one of the acquisitions we made was a company called Caringo, which
Dave Zabrowski:was also a relatively under the radar company based out of Austin, Texas.
Dave Zabrowski:Happened to have one of the best hybrid object stores, uh, in the industry.
Dave Zabrowski:Just not a lot of people knew about it.
Dave Zabrowski:And we were, uh, fortunate enough to partner with them.
Dave Zabrowski:We acquired the company about a year and a half ago.
Dave Zabrowski:And since then they had some real good architecture for
Dave Zabrowski:immutability and, and ransomware.
Dave Zabrowski:And since then we've built that out even further.
Dave Zabrowski:We actually have partnered with a lot of the backup vendors, you know, Veeam
Dave Zabrowski:and CommVault and Cohesity and others to bring an offering that basically, you
Dave Zabrowski:know, we just call it a time machine.
Dave Zabrowski:It's basically you just, you just know whenever it happens,
Dave Zabrowski:we don't do the actual detection.
Dave Zabrowski:Obviously we partner with other people that does the actual detection of it.
Dave Zabrowski:And, but what, when it is detected.
Dave Zabrowski:Basically just reset the clock to the, you know, the nanosecond or
Dave Zabrowski:whatever of, of, uh, right before it was attacked and then you re restore.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, so that's what our, that's what our solution does.
Dave Zabrowski:And it's, it's been very popular because of the, the dynamics in the market where,
Dave Zabrowski:you know, everybody's budget now in the it world has this budgeted and it's
Dave Zabrowski:been, it's been very successful for us.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I just wanted to go back to kind of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Datacore the foundation of it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I am sure a lot of our listeners are like, why would I even
Prasanna Malaiyandi:need software defined storage?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Could you sort of go into the benefits, the reasons why you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:would want that versus some of the traditional offerings out there.
Dave Zabrowski:Sure.
Dave Zabrowski:Sure.
Dave Zabrowski:So if you look at all the infrastructure in the data center, every single
Dave Zabrowski:technology used to be proprietary hardware with a very, very thin software stack,
Dave Zabrowski:oftentimes proprietary as well on top it.
Dave Zabrowski:And then all those industries actually migrated into a commodity based hardware
Dave Zabrowski:with software stack on top of it.
Dave Zabrowski:So the value pushed up from hardware into software.
Dave Zabrowski:Well, storage has not done that, and it's hard to believe we're sitting here
Dave Zabrowski:in 2022 and, and the majority of the storage industry still is proprietary.
Dave Zabrowski:And the benefits basically are no different than benefits you
Dave Zabrowski:get in the other infrastructure.
Dave Zabrowski:Basically, you, you get on, you get on cheaper hardware, you basically
Dave Zabrowski:have investment protection backwards.
Dave Zabrowski:So you now can move and optimize existing infrastructure, which was extremely
Dave Zabrowski:helpful during the COVID recession.
Dave Zabrowski:We had a lot of business where we were able to go in with our
Dave Zabrowski:software defined approach and leverage existing infrastructure
Dave Zabrowski:that had been underutilized.
Dave Zabrowski:And then it's future proof.
Dave Zabrowski:So you don't have vendor lockin.
Dave Zabrowski:Basically can move from, from vendor to vendor.
Dave Zabrowski:And then when new, when new technologies come like NVMe over fabric, for
Dave Zabrowski:example, you know, you're basically just Futureproof cuz, cuz that's, that's
Dave Zabrowski:the beauty of software defined storage.
Dave Zabrowski:So it's kinda like a, you know, think of it as a storage virtualization
Dave Zabrowski:layer and it's very flexible.
Dave Zabrowski:When we do, um, surveys of our customer, We always ask them
Dave Zabrowski:why we win and why we lose.
Dave Zabrowski:And one of the main reasons why we win is just that you can support
Dave Zabrowski:heterogeneous environments, backward looking and forward looking.
W. Curtis Preston:And so what we're talking about is when, when they
W. Curtis Preston:buy Datacore, what are they buying?
W. Curtis Preston:Are they buying just software?
W. Curtis Preston:Do you do an appliance?
W. Curtis Preston:And then you put stuff behind the appliance.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, how's work.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:So they, so specifically they buy from us the software.
Dave Zabrowski:They can have their own hardware installed.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, oftentimes we are part of a new project, either a, a new deployment or
Dave Zabrowski:an expansion of an existing deployment.
Dave Zabrowski:In which case we are put on new hardware that hardware can be bought
Dave Zabrowski:by the customer, or oftentimes they go through a partner, a resell it partner.
Dave Zabrowski:Uh, we tend to be focused on mid-market is where our sweet spot is.
Dave Zabrowski:And a lot of the mid-market customers have, uh, partners, integrator
Dave Zabrowski:partners or managed service partner.
Dave Zabrowski:That they, that they actually provide that, that bundled
Dave Zabrowski:service, but it's very simple.
Dave Zabrowski:It's a very simple install.
Dave Zabrowski:It's not complex at all.
Dave Zabrowski:You basically just load up the hardware, get the hardware running,
Dave Zabrowski:and then you install the software in a matter of, you know, an hour
Dave Zabrowski:or two you're up and running.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And because you're sort of decoupled from the hardware.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Is there a lot of tuning the customer has to do or that the partner has
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to do in order to sort of optimize the performance or is that all
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of smarts that you guys have built into your software offering?
Dave Zabrowski:It's both.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, we have configurations, we have best practices.
Dave Zabrowski:You know, we do industry benchmarks.
Dave Zabrowski:We offer those to our customers, but it depends.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, a lot of applications are very, very specific to, uh, internal
Dave Zabrowski:requirements, in which case they would actually tune those, uh,
Dave Zabrowski:to those internal requirements.
Dave Zabrowski:We do have a solution architect, uh, function in all of our major geos
Dave Zabrowski:that helps customers with this type of thing, best practice sharing.
Dave Zabrowski:And if they do need to tune it specifically, uh, we'll help them do that.
W. Curtis Preston:and then what can you put behind a Datacore
W. Curtis Preston:engine from a storage perspective?
Dave Zabrowski:And literally anything.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, what, whatever, whatever you want, you stick behind it.
Dave Zabrowski:And any, any of the technologies work, um, behind it, any of the
Dave Zabrowski:technologies work in front of it, you can put any app on top of it.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, and you know, that, that's how, that's how it works.
W. Curtis Preston:and so, you know, we're talking NAS, we're talking
W. Curtis Preston:block, we're talking object on the back end and the same on the front end.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you translate?
W. Curtis Preston:So can I have object on the back end and NAS on the front end?
W. Curtis Preston:Vice versa.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, well, it, so I think the, the answer is, it depends, and
Dave Zabrowski:I know you don't like those answers.
Dave Zabrowski:Nobody likes those answers,
W. Curtis Preston:You know, I was a consultant for, I was
W. Curtis Preston:a consultant for 20 years.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm fine with that phrase.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:That's the, that's the unfortunate answer.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, it kind of depends on the configuration, uh, but generally speaking.
Dave Zabrowski:Your object storage is more your second tier.
Dave Zabrowski:Uh, sometimes it's active archiving, which is a, which is a kind of a tier two plus,
Dave Zabrowski:you know, if you think of, um, if you think of video streaming, for example, um,
Dave Zabrowski:if, if someone let's, let's say a famous actor is in the news for whatever reason.
Dave Zabrowski:Those videos, those movies that they have been in, that haven't been that popular.
Dave Zabrowski:All of a sudden, those need to be presented very quickly.
Dave Zabrowski:And oftentimes that comes outta your second tier out of your active archiving.
Dave Zabrowski:So it does depend on that generally though, the, the object store is,
Dave Zabrowski:is unstructured data, which is focused on, on cost and performance.
Dave Zabrowski:Your first tier is performance and then cost generally.
W. Curtis Preston:And I, I saw a really good presentation years ago.
W. Curtis Preston:I believe it was with the actual Active Archive folks, right.
W. Curtis Preston:The, the Active Archive Alliance.
W. Curtis Preston:And it was actually the folks from, uh, Entertainment Tonight.
W. Curtis Preston:And they were talking about exactly the scenario that you described of,
W. Curtis Preston:of how that basically the moment some famous person starts trending they
W. Curtis Preston:start pulling all of that stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:So that they're able to have that readily available and, um, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:to, to, to produce other videos from it.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah, well, I mean, if the whole, the whole
Dave Zabrowski:media entertainment industry is really going through a golden era.
Dave Zabrowski:and it's, it's a lot of, it's driven by technology with the high density
Dave Zabrowski:cameras, with a lot of the machine learning and artificial intelligence
Dave Zabrowski:that's laying on top of the production.
Dave Zabrowski:And then that stuff is really an exciting area.
Dave Zabrowski:It's going through, uh, a complete change, uh, where the, the production,
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, they're producing on average or your typical set per day is producing
Dave Zabrowski:between 10 and 20 terabytes of data.
Dave Zabrowski:. Um, and at any given time, there's like 10,000, you know, shoots that
Dave Zabrowski:are going on, uh, in, in the world.
Dave Zabrowski:So there's just massive amounts of data and that data has to be processed.
Dave Zabrowski:It has to be rendered, uh, and then all these AI tools that go on top
Dave Zabrowski:of it, which is, you know, natural machine learning, you know, facial
Dave Zabrowski:recognition, phon recognition, all this.
Dave Zabrowski:Is just generating massive amounts of data.
Dave Zabrowski:And that data has to be in perpetuity.
Dave Zabrowski:It's not like if you think about a security application, massive
Dave Zabrowski:amounts of data, but they only keep it for a short period of time.
Dave Zabrowski:Right.
Dave Zabrowski:And then it falls off.
Dave Zabrowski:So from a storage perspective, that use case is important.
Dave Zabrowski:but it doesn't have, you know, perpetuity, whereas the movies have perpetuity and
Dave Zabrowski:it's a, it's a really, it's an exciting area for us and something that, uh, you
Dave Zabrowski:know, we're, we're obviously knee deep into, uh, from a Datacore perspective.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Taking the media and entertainment industry
Prasanna Malaiyandi:as an example, do you see then that people tend to have a vast majority
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of their data stored in object?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know previously I think you talked about sort of the cold,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the warm, the hot tiers, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, do you see a good chunk of your data then on the cold tiers that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:when people are using Datacore or is it depending on the application?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's a huge
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah, I think the way to think about it then Prasannas is,
Dave Zabrowski:you know, let's say in, in the 2000 era, you know, 80% of your data was that was
Dave Zabrowski:being produced, was structured data.
Dave Zabrowski:Right.
Dave Zabrowski:Right now it's the exact opposite and getting more.
Dave Zabrowski:So, so if you think about like, if you, you know, and you guys
Dave Zabrowski:have one of these smart watches, every time you take a step literal.
Dave Zabrowski:You're producing unstructured data.
Dave Zabrowski:This video that we're using with Zencaster, that's
Dave Zabrowski:producing unstructured data.
Dave Zabrowski:Everything is producing unstructured data and all of the new apps
Dave Zabrowski:are producing unstructured data.
Dave Zabrowski:So that's where we see the market, uh, exploding, um, and
Dave Zabrowski:the structured data still there.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, you still need, you know, databases and you still need,
Dave Zabrowski:you know, think of eCommerce.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, there's a tremendous amount of structured data in the eCommerce space.
Dave Zabrowski:But for us, you know, we, we, we have the structured space.
Dave Zabrowski:That's, that's the core of, of, of the company.
Dave Zabrowski:Uh, but it's really, you know, the growth engine is on the unstructured side.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was going to ask Dave, uh, I know you mentioned that you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:had like a SaaS analytics company, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That you did, that you sold HPE, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, when it comes to Datacore, are there analytics that are built into the product
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to help users and admins understand sort of workloads applications, like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:where to place data, things like that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because as a software defined layer, right storage layer, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're kind of removed from the underlying hardware and infrastructure.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so identifying performance issues, understanding what's going
Prasanna Malaiyandi:on may sometimes become more complex in these environments versus sort
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of a self-contained appliance.
Dave Zabrowski:it it is.
Dave Zabrowski:And we do have those offerings, um, and, and that's become, let's call
Dave Zabrowski:it more or less industry standard.
Dave Zabrowski:Most of the vendors have those, some of the vendors that have a vertical stack.
Dave Zabrowski:They can actually go deeper into the hardware cuz they actually have
Dave Zabrowski:more specificity into the hardware.
Dave Zabrowski:You know, what we do is we jump from hardware to hardware.
Dave Zabrowski:So things like capacity analysis, you know, we can do, you know, SLA
Dave Zabrowski:forecasting, um, you know, that type of thing we call 'em insights.
Dave Zabrowski:It's basically, you know, data mining for purposes of optimizing,
Dave Zabrowski:you know, the infrastructure.
W. Curtis Preston:Historically speaking one, objection to software
W. Curtis Preston:defined anything has been, well, the reason why I buy, you know, proprietary
W. Curtis Preston:appliances is because it's faster.
W. Curtis Preston:That they're able to tweak the hardware and make it perfect for that hardware.
W. Curtis Preston:Whereas with you, the performance will be all over the place based
W. Curtis Preston:on what I decide to put behind it.
W. Curtis Preston:So how do, how do you, how do you respond to that?
Dave Zabrowski:No, that that's a, that's a true statement.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, it depends if, if someone's in a, you know, super, super high performance,
Dave Zabrowski:you know, application, um, a monolith solution, a vertical monolith solution,
Dave Zabrowski:often time, is there better solution?
Dave Zabrowski:Is there better?
Dave Zabrowski:I answer, um, But with that, of course, they're gonna spend more money on it
Dave Zabrowski:and they're gonna get vendor lock in.
Dave Zabrowski:So, you know, sometimes customers make that decision to do that, um,
Dave Zabrowski:and go and go that vertical monolith.
Dave Zabrowski:Now history has shown, um, that, that over time that's not a good solution
Dave Zabrowski:for infrastructure, generally speaking.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, that's, if you look back at and pick any technology, But, you know, for
Dave Zabrowski:a product cycle or too, you know, for the right applications, that's fine.
Dave Zabrowski:You know, and the way I look at it, I'm, you know, I've been a CEO for 21
Dave Zabrowski:years now and, you know, I mean, nobody has a hundred percent market share.
Dave Zabrowski:So, you know, my, my, my focus with my team is let's, let's go to
Dave Zabrowski:those areas where we do have a high value that we bring to the company.
Dave Zabrowski:And if somebody a actually really values that monolith vertical stack.
Dave Zabrowski:That's great.
Dave Zabrowski:Let 'em, you know, let 'em have that and we'll go on and serve other customers.
Dave Zabrowski:We have plenty of customers to serve.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, your approach reminds me very much of
W. Curtis Preston:sort of the way we think the way we see things at Druva as well, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Where, you know, we're doing SaaS based backup of large environments.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:You can't do that for everyone.
Dave Zabrowski:Right,
W. Curtis Preston:You know, if you've got my usual phrase is if you've got
W. Curtis Preston:30 petabytes of data in a T1 line, we're probably not your, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:the company you need to be talking to.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but it's the same kind of approach, like you said, nobody
W. Curtis Preston:has a hundred percent market share.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:And even if you look at best in class statistics on close rates, the best
Dave Zabrowski:companies in the world are closing 30%,
W. Curtis Preston:right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:and, and, and, and the companies that report numbers higher than
Dave Zabrowski:that are probably fudging the numbers.
Dave Zabrowski:Right.
Dave Zabrowski:So, I mean, that's just the reality of our business, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Before I know Curtis, you wanna talk about data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:protection and backup and all the rest before we switch to that, can you talk
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a little bit about container storage?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know you guys recently did an acquisition.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just kind of curious about that and what you guys see there.
Dave Zabrowski:sure.
Dave Zabrowski:So, so we're actually the leaders in container attached storage.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, when I came into the company four years ago, there were a lot of very
Dave Zabrowski:smart, uh, engineers and architects.
Dave Zabrowski:That came from this high performance computing market had really
Dave Zabrowski:pioneered software defined storage in the early days of Datacore.
Dave Zabrowski:And we have a ton of patents around this and, and they had this idea that we could
Dave Zabrowski:apply some of this high performance into a container, uh, native storage solution.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, so we actually created a skunkworks project for about,
Dave Zabrowski:about a year and funded.
Dave Zabrowski:And gave them the opportunity to prove that, that it could actually
Dave Zabrowski:be a better mouse trap in this Kubernetes container environment.
Dave Zabrowski:And that turned out to be true.
Dave Zabrowski:So in 2019, we actually went out and looked at, uh, partnering with
Dave Zabrowski:companies cuz traditional Datacore is not in the Kubernetes space.
Dave Zabrowski:We're not in the open source community.
Dave Zabrowski:Uh, a lot of our management team have had experiences and that myself
Dave Zabrowski:included, but it's not something that was DNA to the company.
Dave Zabrowski:So we went out and looked, uh, we actually found, uh, Maya data who were
Dave Zabrowski:the pioneers of what's called open EBS.
Dave Zabrowski:That project was part of the CNCF, the cloud native compute foundation, which
Dave Zabrowski:is the governing body around Kubernetes.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, and at that time, Kubernetes had just basically Google had just thrown
Dave Zabrowski:some number of hundreds of engineer.
Dave Zabrowski:At that, uh, Kubernetes.
Dave Zabrowski:And it was pretty clear that Kubernetes was gonna be the,
Dave Zabrowski:the container orchestration, uh, framework, uh, of the future.
Dave Zabrowski:So those things all kind of converged.
Dave Zabrowski:And then we ended up actually putting an investment into Maya data.
Dave Zabrowski:We put money into them.
Dave Zabrowski:We actually merged our two teams.
Dave Zabrowski:We, uh, had cross license rights, cross technology rights.
Dave Zabrowski:We created a separate board of directors.
Dave Zabrowski:I was on that as was Insight venture Partners.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, and we worked with them collaboratively for about a year and
Dave Zabrowski:a half, and then just acquired them in November, uh, of this past year.
Dave Zabrowski:And now they're a hundred percent part of Datacore.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, so what we've seen is the open EBS that, that open source product
Dave Zabrowski:has really, really taken off.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, we're, we're now over a million downloads per month, uh, for that product.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, so it's one of the fastest growing parts of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Dave Zabrowski:Datacore has released our enterprise grade version of that, uh, this past quarter.
Dave Zabrowski:And then we'll continue to evolve that, but that market is very, very exciting.
Dave Zabrowski:It's a market that if you look at core, you look at edge, you look at cloud, you
Dave Zabrowski:know, for most workloads going forward.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, that solution is the best solution.
Dave Zabrowski:It's the lightest.
Dave Zabrowski:It's the most agile and it's the cheapest.
Dave Zabrowski:And I'm a firm believer that that container native storage
Dave Zabrowski:position of ours is gonna do great things over the coming years.
Dave Zabrowski:We actually already have an installed base of customers.
Dave Zabrowski:And so what we see is new applications in, uh, core cloud and edge, uh, And they will
Dave Zabrowski:be, those applications will be done based upon the container native storage stack.
Dave Zabrowski:And one of the most surprising things to me, if I look back on
Dave Zabrowski:our hypothesis in 2019, we kind of thought it would be the top of the
Dave Zabrowski:pyramid, the companies that had scale.
Dave Zabrowski:That could afford to bring on the Kubernetes trained engineers and
Dave Zabrowski:then born in the cloud companies.
Dave Zabrowski:So that was our business plan at the time.
Dave Zabrowski:Those two markets, well what's happened is it's, it's all markets.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, everyone, it's, it's crazy.
Dave Zabrowski:Like if you look at the CNCF stats, uh, all geos, so Europe is
Dave Zabrowski:actually leading the us, believe it or not in CNCF, uh, deployments.
Dave Zabrowski:Uh, Asia's right there with them, but all, all regions, all verticals.
Dave Zabrowski:And, and basically all use cases are, are being consumed with Kubernetes.
Dave Zabrowski:I, I was traveling, I just came back from Europe.
Dave Zabrowski:I was traveling in the Rhine valley and, you know, Southwest Germany,
Dave Zabrowski:like manufacturing, you know, Mecca of Germany, you know, very, very established
Dave Zabrowski:companies producing, you know, kind of like not cutting edge stuff, but
Dave Zabrowski:you know, good manufacturing stuff.
Dave Zabrowski:And I talked to the CIO there.
Dave Zabrowski:One of our customers who's been a customer for.
Dave Zabrowski:I was talking about the future of containers.
Dave Zabrowski:So have you thought about, will you, when will you, and he's like, well, we got half
Dave Zabrowski:of our applications already ported over to, to Kubernetes and, and we're using
Dave Zabrowski:open EBS, you know, it was hilarious.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, so that's what we found on the container native storage
Dave Zabrowski:side is that it's, it's coming.
Dave Zabrowski:Most of the let's call them the, you know, the easier applications have
Dave Zabrowski:already been ported to kubernetes, the harder applications, which
Dave Zabrowski:require the persistent state.
Dave Zabrowski:Those have been ramping up over this past year.
Dave Zabrowski:We'll see that accelerate.
Dave Zabrowski:And, you know, I think in two to three years, it will be the exception that
Dave Zabrowski:new applications will be written that won't be leveraging the Kubernetes.
Dave Zabrowski:And I don't know, I've seen numbers as high as 80%.
Dave Zabrowski:I mean, who knows, but I, I just think it's, you know, anytime you
Dave Zabrowski:have something that is the cheapest.
Dave Zabrowski:The lightest weight, the most agile.
Dave Zabrowski:And it's based on an open framework that doesn't have lock in, feels
Dave Zabrowski:like that's a formula for success
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, let let's, um, and by the way, just, uh, uh, CNCF, that's the
W. Curtis Preston:cloud native computing foundation.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Dave Zabrowski:That's the governing body of, of, you know, Kubernetes let's
Dave Zabrowski:call it and the community around it.
W. Curtis Preston:Just in case, uh, any of our listeners weren't
W. Curtis Preston:familiar with that particular acronym.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, let's just round out here talking about data protection.
W. Curtis Preston:Now it looks like this, uh, anti ransomware piece.
W. Curtis Preston:It looks like it's, it's powered by your object storage, formerly known as Caringo.
W. Curtis Preston:It's funny.
W. Curtis Preston:I was, I was browsing it not knowing about the Caringo acquisition.
W. Curtis Preston:And the first thing I saw was Swarm.
W. Curtis Preston:I was.
W. Curtis Preston:That's a branded term.
W. Curtis Preston:And then I realized, oh, that's that's Caringo's term.
W. Curtis Preston:So this is a sort of on demand, disc based backup for the primary.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:That that's sort of being managed by your whole thing, but apparently powered
W. Curtis Preston:by object storage in the back end.
W. Curtis Preston:You wanna just, and this is what you were referring to in the front,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, the first few minutes where you were talking about the time machine,
W. Curtis Preston:which by the way, I'm pretty sure is another branded term, but, um, you
Dave Zabrowski:It probably is.
Dave Zabrowski:Well, basically it just, we work in partnership with the backup vendors.
Dave Zabrowski:So we are not a backup vendor.
Dave Zabrowski:Just to be clear.
Dave Zabrowski:We sit, we sit aside of the backup vendors.
Dave Zabrowski:As I mentioned, you could actually, you know, U utilize Datacore
Dave Zabrowski:right out of the Veeam, UI.
Dave Zabrowski:But we, we have partnerships with Commvault and Cohesity
Dave Zabrowski:and, and others that are coming.
Dave Zabrowski:um, but basically, you know, they're, we're, we're basically
Dave Zabrowski:doing what they want us to do.
Dave Zabrowski:So if they want us to back up, um, from the unstructured data, uh,
Dave Zabrowski:that's what we do and, uh, we'll time stamp it and, and protect it
Dave Zabrowski:and make it available when they want.
Dave Zabrowski:And that's it.
Dave Zabrowski:So it's, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:really just basically backup storage or
W. Curtis Preston:storage for backup and recovery.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I guess earlier I, I, I got.
W. Curtis Preston:Idea.
W. Curtis Preston:And maybe we're talking about a different part of the product that if I was attacked
W. Curtis Preston:by a ransomware, that you basically had this ability to just easily put me back
W. Curtis Preston:to before the ransomware attack, without involving a third party backup product.
W. Curtis Preston:Am I misunderstanding?
Dave Zabrowski:no, we, we work with the backup vendors, but the immutability
Dave Zabrowski:basically will, will actually protect the, the, the data itself.
Dave Zabrowski:And.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:And if you think of the active archive example I gave you before, you know, on
Dave Zabrowski:the one hand, it's actually, it's tee up data for people that it's not deep
Dave Zabrowski:glacier, you know, it's something that people want on a, on an as needed basis.
Dave Zabrowski:So we have to have performance it's, you know, so it's not like, you know,
Dave Zabrowski:you call in and get it three days later.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, and then when it comes to, to backup, basically you wanna just roll back.
Dave Zabrowski:Um, there's a, there's a concept of concept that we talk about here called
Dave Zabrowski:continuous data protection, is essentially the same, you know, the same idea.
Dave Zabrowski:You know, that again, that was some of the patents from some of
Dave Zabrowski:the earlier, you know, Datacore expertise, but it's the same idea.
Dave Zabrowski:You basically keep, keep track of things on a timestamp basis.
Dave Zabrowski:When you detect, um, some sort of violation, uh, you just go back to
Dave Zabrowski:T whatever, uh, from that violation and just, just restore the data.
Dave Zabrowski:It's, it's, it's very, very simple in concept.
Dave Zabrowski:It's, it's obviously more challenging from a technical perspective
Dave Zabrowski:than that, but concept is easy.
W. Curtis Preston:it, it would seem like you would do that part without
W. Curtis Preston:the third party backup vendors.
W. Curtis Preston:I, you understand
Dave Zabrowski:We do we do.
Dave Zabrowski:We do.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:We, we do do that.
Dave Zabrowski:In fact, if you have a, if you just have a, you know, Datacore
Dave Zabrowski:on its own, um, absolutely.
Dave Zabrowski:With our UI, you set that up and it can do it, but, but more, more often, I mean, I
Dave Zabrowski:would say the standard is there's backup vendors in the market that we work with.
Dave Zabrowski:That's that's more the, I would say the typical use.
W. Curtis Preston:Is the CDP functionality, is it part of
W. Curtis Preston:the core product or is that something extra that you pay for?
Dave Zabrowski:No, it's part of the core.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
W. Curtis Preston:So you could, you could have that and it is, and it is CD.
W. Curtis Preston:So it is continuous.
W. Curtis Preston:I can go back to literally any point in time, not a
W. Curtis Preston:particular snapshot that I took.
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah.
Dave Zabrowski:Correct.
Dave Zabrowski:Correct.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I'll throw out a name, Curtis, because I know
Prasanna Malaiyandi:we talked about time machine, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You and I would love it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:TiVo and the DVRs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Dave Zabrowski:See, on the DVS
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, my TiVo rest in peace.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
W. Curtis Preston:um,
Dave Zabrowski:That's like, one of those technologies is like, how did that fail?
Dave Zabrowski:You know, it's like web van.
Dave Zabrowski:It's like, wait a minute.
Dave Zabrowski:How did web van fail?
Dave Zabrowski:You know, you think,
W. Curtis Preston:yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:I'm, I'm not actually familiar with web van, but, uh, definitely
W. Curtis Preston:familiar with Tivo longtime Tivo customer and I've recently retired.
W. Curtis Preston:My Tivo I'm I've now moved to YouTube TV.
W. Curtis Preston:Dave, thanks a lot for, you know, coming on here and, um, you know, I, I, um, I,
W. Curtis Preston:I am super jelly of, although I'm, I'm jealous of the weather of the water.
W. Curtis Preston:I am not jealous of the weather everywhere else that you have,
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah, but the thing is in Fort Lauderdale, you know, little
Dave Zabrowski:known fact, I mean, we're cooler than the rest of the nation in the summer.
Dave Zabrowski:Believe it or not, it rarely gets above 90.
Dave Zabrowski:Rarely gets a button.
Dave Zabrowski:Now you live in Orlando.
Dave Zabrowski:That's different.
Dave Zabrowski:That's different.
Dave Zabrowski:Fort
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I lived in Orlando.
W. Curtis Preston:I live in San Diego.
W. Curtis Preston:Now.
W. Curtis Preston:I think I'll take, I'll take our weather over your
Dave Zabrowski:you're you're spoiled.
Dave Zabrowski:No, you're
W. Curtis Preston:If it, if it, if it, if it hits 90, we're shutting down like this,
W. Curtis Preston:just cuz nobody here has air conditioning.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
Dave Zabrowski:Yeah, no, I know that I lived, I lived in, uh, Southern Cal
Dave Zabrowski:for about 10 years and, uh, I used to used to think like if you had dials
Dave Zabrowski:and you could change the weather, you wouldn't touch the dials ever in
Dave Zabrowski:Southern California, but it's good.
Dave Zabrowski:Thank you.
Dave Zabrowski:And, uh, for, for your time gentlemen, and, uh, best of luck,
Dave Zabrowski:if there's any follow up I can have, uh, please, please ping me.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, absolutely.
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna, thanks again for your great questions
Prasanna Malaiyandi:as always.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I try and nice meet to meet you, Dave, and thanks for putting
Prasanna Malaiyandi:up with my questions too.
Dave Zabrowski:That's great
W. Curtis Preston:and, uh, thanks to our listeners.
W. Curtis Preston:Make sure to subscribe so that you can restore it all.
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