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August 03, 2023
A New Standard of Bare-Metal DRaaS with Continuity Centers | GTwGT Podcast #70
Continuity Centers, is a leader in disaster recovery solutions, providing companies with the tools and services they need to ensure business continuity, even in the face of unforeseen disruptions. In this episode, we have a conversation with Greg Tellone, CEO of Continuity Centers, an entrepreneur from an early age we walk about building computers in the late 80s, setting…
Continuity Centers, is a leader in disaster recovery solutions, providing companies with the tools and services they need to ensure business continuity, even in the face of unforeseen disruptions. In this episode, we have a conversation with Greg Tellone, CEO of Continuity Centers, an entrepreneur from an early age we walk about building computers in the late 80s, setting up possibly the words first remote backup using laser based ethernet and spending his early days in the backup industry leading to a foundational career around MSP and Cloud Backup. Continuity Centers is reshaping the industry by leveraging cutting-edge technology, including their innovative Bare Metal Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution. We delve into Continuity Centers' vision, their mission to redefine disaster recovery, and the various ways they are utilizing technology to safeguard business operations.
Bare-metal is changing the face of Disaster Recovery as a Service... Continuity Centers Cloud IBR is a unique stepping stone into the world of DRaaS!
Continuity Centers, is a leader in disaster recovery solutions, providing companies with the tools and services they need to ensure business continuity, even in the face of unforeseen disruptions. In this episode, we have a conversation with Greg Tellone, CEO of Continuity Centers, an entrepreneur from an early age we walk about building computers in the late 80s, setting up possibly the words first remote backup using laser based ethernet and spending his early days in the backup industry leading to a foundational career around MSP and Cloud Backup. Continuity Centers is reshaping the industry by leveraging cutting-edge technology, including their innovative Bare Metal Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution. We delve into Continuity Centers' vision, their mission to redefine disaster recovery, and the various ways they are utilizing technology to safeguard business operations.
Continuity Centers was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Woodbury, New York.
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☑️ Technology and Technology Partners Mentioned: Continuity Centers, Disaster Recovery, Bare Metal DRaaS, Innovation, Business Continuity, Data Security, Disaster Recovery Solutions.
☑️ Web: https://www.continuitycenters.com ☑️ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/continuity-centers ☑️ Interested in being on #GTwGT? Contact via Twitter @GTwGTPodcast or go to https://www.gtwgt.com
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Transcript
RAW
a recovering geek so I'm not I'm not just a geek but I'm you know in the in the phases of recovery from being a geek you know I have some brilliant people that are are creating all this and they're like oh we could do this we could do that I'm like no let's just keep it simple hello and welcome to episode 70 of great things with great Tech the podcast highlighting company is doing great things with great technology my name's Anthony spiteri and in this episode we're exploring the world of disaster
recovery and business continuity with a leader in managed I.T Services disaster recovery and business continuity services that company is continuity centers and I'm joined by Greg Talon the CEO of continuity centers welcome to the show Greg thank you Anthony thanks for having me excellent so hey Greg just before we dive into the unique approach that you guys do in terms of Dr with your your Cloud ibr I just want to give a shout out to the show so if you love great things with great Tech and would like to feature in future episodes you
can click on the link on the show notes or go to GTW GT and register your interest this is a reminder all episodes of gtwjt are available on all good podcasting platforms Google Apple Spotify all hosted and distributed by Spotify podcasts and as a final reminder head to YouTube go to gtwgt podcast hit the like And subscribe button and you'll get all of these episodes coming and past now with that out of the way Greg let's talk about yourself firstly and a really interesting life in it um all the way back from when you were
12 you were telling me but you know we'll get to continuity send us a little bit later on and what that company does what I'm really intrigued in what you were doing at 12 years old making money in it sure so uh when I when I turned about 12 I got my first back then it was an apple 2E and the buddy of mine around the corner he was a computer geek like me uh we started soldering chips in to upgrade memory we were doing things that you know completely voided the manufacturer warranty uh but we knew we could build
stuff so we we learned a lot about you know how the the circuit boards worked how technology worked uh and then around 12 years old was when I started ordering parts from I think it was a company called JD Micro Devices uh it was basically a you know a physical book that you would look through this is you know way free the internet uh and you'd go through the book we'd order all the parts and we'd assemble them and I'd sell them actually to well friends and family but my my dad who is a a sergeant
in the NYPD had a whole bunch of top friends who all wanted to buy computers because it you know technology was going to be the next big thing uh and I sold you know dozens of these these IBM clones you know to the NYPD officers that were friends with my dad which was really cool wow it's pretty cool like at 12 years old that's you know I thought I started early like I was I was doing similar things probably I guess you know I think we're about what we would call a school generation behind about five
years different in age and I was selling computers when I was out of high school um to my high school friends um you know selling IBM clones and in those sort of early days of of the of the internet in 97 but this was even before then and I guess the difference there is that those PCS who are getting you're right like you just wouldn't have gone into a PC shop to get the parts that were quite nice the motherboard the sound card whatever it was you were ordering these clone Parts off of off a magazine which is pretty crazy what what
systems were they were they I like were they 286s at the time or what was sort of generation of PC were they yeah 8086s and 286s uh so that would be the late 80s is when I started doing that so about 86.87 okay so basically we're buying you know 64k uh worth of RAM and it was like I think it was nine chips eight eight chips plus one for parity I think it was and you had to actually plug them in and you know each chip was an individual just to get 64k it was uh it was not a turnkey Solution by all means and you
realize some people today just don't even know what it is to actually install a bit of memory onto a computer let alone you know 64k and eight bits with the parity chip like it it's crazy how things were and we sometimes forget um everything's such a black box these days we forget what it was like back in those days but okay so you're doing these things at 12 like what so what did you did you quit school because you were selling so many computers or what what was the thing then eventually but not
not at that age so I did go to High School uh so in high school I would actually take the bus to this guy's house who lived in the same town as me and he ran a business out of his house that uh built and sold PCS and he had you know big customers they were buying 20 to 50 to 100 PCS at a time so I would take the bus after school go to his house work for you know a four hour shift assembling PCS troubleshooting installing the OS uh you know doing board level repair people brought their PC to his house to get fixed so I did
that for most of High School uh and then went to another company towards the end of high school where I was doing the same thing but now in an actual commercial building assembling I actually started in the shipping Department because he didn't know how much I knew and within a few months you know I was basically helping the tech do stuff and they were you know they were all at least 30 years old which was you know old back then I was you know of course 16 17.
very old yeah yeah they were all old people but it was cool because I got to work with a lot of different people at such a young age and that's when I went to to college for one year uh myit the New York Institute of Technology and I didn't didn't really love it they were teaching uh one of the classes I think was Cobalt and I was like what's a Cobalt I was like I've been working with PCS you know for seven years now and I've never heard of cobalt um so they were a little bit outdated at the time so that was about 1991. uh I
would say they were a little bit behind the times in in what technology you know was doing I I was actually the turning point for me was my professor pulled up in the parking lot next to me and he was driving this really old beat up car and I was driving like you know like a one or two year old really nice car because I was making a lot of money in Tech it came very natural to me it was easy yeah and I was like wow what's this guy going to teach me uh so yeah you yeah you were like you were not in the negative
negative lot but you were kind of hustling from a young age right in terms of oh yeah yeah technology yeah but doing that when I say that with the greatest respect because you're doing that from the point of view of your of your passion right so you love computers and you could see a value and being able to take that and actually make some entrepreneurship even back then so there's there's no harm in that but yeah that realization must have been pretty like visceral for you as well yeah it was you know he uh he was doing
what he did you know he had been around a while he he knew stuff that I would never learn because he had been in the industry much longer but where I saw the industry going was not you know it wasn't Cobalt back then you know that was I kind of looked at that as out to pasture and I knew that you know I was learning dos and you know scripting uh there was a lot of stuff to learn uh that's actually when I started working with Novell netware uh so I I had a network at my house uh actually in high school a buddy of mine and I went to
Princeton University to a ham Fest uh so a ham radio is what a ham Fest is I think it has nothing nothing to do with bacon and we went there and we found these 10 megabit laser ethernet beams which are about four three or four foot long and a you know about eight inch by eight inch Cube like that and it was a 10 megabit laser ethernet beam but they said they were broken we bought them we took them home for a couple hundred bucks uh my buddy was really good with electronics I had also taken Electronics in high school uh so we were you know
pulled out the you know the volt meter and we were testing things we repaired the the power it was just a power issue I think someone had plugged it into like a 110 outlet uh or 220 outlet instead of 110 and it didn't Auto you know negotiate back then so we fixed that and we mounted it on the roofs of our parents house and we had a 10 megabit laser ethernet beam connecting our two homes 10 megabit laser ethernet how like what and what like 93 92 like what year uh yeah I would say exactly right around then it was right after high school I
think yeah holy moly that's you would have had probably one of the best internet setups of anyone almost anywhere in the world at that point at that time yeah outside of Academia right yeah back then we were still using uh bbs's actually uh is what we did bulletin board systems uh a friend of mine hosted one at his house you know he had like eight phone lines and eight modems and so we were a bunch of you know super Geeks so you were deep into it right in that real early days of the cusp of the internet so what what
when you know 95 96 because I know obviously you started a business in 99 we'll get to that but you know what were you doing in those middle years of the early internet days the real sort of early days of Internet so I think it was 1992 uh it was the year after I graduated high school and left College I interviewed at a company Cheyenne software do you remember that name I don't know and I feel like I probably should but tell me about them tell everyone else about them they're the original makers of arcserve the teapot
wow okay then I probably should have known about them right Cheyenne software they were headquartered out of Long Island New York where I grew up about 20 minutes from my house in Roslyn is where they were and it I went in on the interview and I was 19 so I was you know one of the youngest people they had ever interviewed and the woman said I see you have Arc serve on your resume she said where have you used Arc serve I said oh well I used it at my house to back up my Novell netware uh Network and and I said
because a couple of years ago in high school I had a hard drive crash and I lost a lot of data I said so I decided I never wanted to go through that so at one of the swap meets I bought a copy of Ark serve for like a dollar I think so I was basically admitting to pirating their software which I didn't realize at the time yeah and I bought a used tape drives some some used tapes and I started backing up my network and then what was really cool is because I had the laser ethernet beam we created vtls I don't even think they were called that
back then but I was doing offside Dr to my friend's house over the latest stop stop it right so you you could have actually been the very first person to do ethernet based off-site Dr of anyone in this planet potentially I don't know I'm just putting it out there but it's possibility but definitely over laser ethernet I definitely overlays it but just in general because if you think about even back then hell think about even back in 2008 nine whenever it was people were still using dial up and ADSL
for their off-site backups that is this was yeah this was prior to ADSL we were still using phone lines at that point because ADSL came in a couple years later into my life uh so she's interviewing me I I tell her that and she's she says I'll be right back she comes back with like a half a dozen texts and they start hitting me with questions and I'm like oh yeah you just unload the nlm from you know network loadable module you do this you do that and you know I was explaining how I use the software how I troubleshoot it how I
did all my upgrades and I've been using it for several years at that point and needless to say they hired me on the spot I skipped the training session usually you come in you do like a three-month training to learn the product I skipped that I went right to the phones and I was doing you know worldwide international support for their arcsurf uh tape backups uh product um about a year later I I went into the os2 world I became os2 certified I had already done my Noel Network years ago back in the windows 3-1 sort of 395 days
my mate who actually who's a really good friend of mine and really got me into computers more than anyone I think else right um he was saying you've got to check out this Linux thing I'm like okay cool yeah where's where's the GUI I can't do anything in here but I think it's okay whatever then he goes okay we'll try this so I remember my computer which was my pride and joy he basically wipes whatever Windows version was on and he put os2 warp on it right and I remember loading it up and it loaded and I'm like
what the hell is this crap like in my head so bad I'm like dude take it off like get it off there right but that and so I never I never ever touched os2 again until basically I realized that effectively even the operating system that I'm using today on my Mac is effectively what has become of that software anyway right but I love those too it was I didn't I didn't give it I didn't give it ads basically well how can you play Windows how can he play how can he play uh Doom like that was my question well he definitely dual booted
so I used os2 for business stuff and then windows for the and again and we did play a lot of games Cheyenne software the average age was probably about 25 years old in the company so while I was the youngest person they had ever hired at the time I I didn't uh there was a lot of young people there and it was really cool we played a lot of games very cool atmosphere uh you know shorts and tank tops to work very very technology like very you know Silicon Valley type thing for the 90s yeah which was cool after that uh I then
went to McKinsey and Company uh the management consulting firm in Manhattan and that was my you know now my my first my first New York City job so traveling to the city doing the train every day which you're not from New York but if you've come from Long Island to New York City it's a lot of it's a big commute to do every day you know between driving to a train to the city to the subway uh but it was a really cool company I worked with some of the smartest people I've ever met in life you know these guys
knew what they were doing and that's where I really honed in on my my network skills but that's also where I got into networking on a high level like in the beginning I was I had I had a two and a half megabit arcnet Network in my home back you know when I was a kid uh so that I could Network all my my PCS but when I got uh when I went to McKinsey and Company we started doing uh worldwide networking so I was managing and built out a network of about 143 I think it was International locations uh all over a frame relay network using
back then it was I think it was Bay networks or no wealthy wealthy router so that's how I got into IP and learned how to do routing player two layer three uh but what I did there were Disaster Recovery was they needed a Dr plan that was like a new thing and I'm like well I've done this so um so I was uh lead on that project and I interviewed SunGard and IBM Recovery Services and IBM had a really nice facility I think they still do uh in New York in Sterling forest and it was just beautiful location uh you
know overlooking a lake up in the mountains and it was the best the most beautiful Dr site I'd been to versus some of the other ones that were more you know in this in a commercial type atmosphere so that's not why we picked them but we picked them because we did use a lot of IBM products at the time so I built out Dr for the entire network side of things I got it the there was another team who did all the AIX and all the IBM specific stuff um so I built that Dr uh with IBM for a McKenzie and Company
uh then after I left there I started my first company and that was g-tel networks which was essential that was 1999 and essentially what I wanted to do is I wanted to take all of my years of of I.T experience so all my Dr experience and put together a flat rate package for small businesses and we we came up with what we called the fixed price agreement and it was a flat rate all you can eat for your company each company had their own you know rate that we'd specify but it encompassed everything so from help desk
to on-site to upgrades Etc you know excluding just the cost of basically hardware and Licensing yeah and this is in 2000 right so this didn't really do nothing this isn't really come into play until probably 10 years later was when it was really become popular as an MSP that's what you did you offered the fixed price contracts per head per user whatever it was so it wasn't the norm back then was it was it was it just ad hoc situations back then for the situation or it was completely new uh it was and it was
something that I had a business coach at the time who was a customer of mine from my previous you know employment and he said he was actually teaching CPAs how to to not charge by the hour and instead charge a flat rate for all you can do as a CPA and he said you can do the same thing there's no difference he goes instead of you charging hourly like everyone else does differentiate yourself and he we called it an FPA the fixed price agreement so it was about a decade ahead of of our time it was the MSP yeah
yeah [Music] I was gonna ask how do you you've kind of almost answered it there but what was your transition from being Gate Tech networking to wanting to start a business how did you make that jump what was the realization you had to start the company yep so I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur it was uh even back in in grade school I have a an autobiography that I wrote in like the eighth grade that says by the age 25 I'll be you know uh I'll be an entrepreneur I'll learn at least one business I had laid out that
map you know in grammar school um and you know you kind of forget about it but it goes it helps the point uh it reinforces the point that if you write things down it'll help them come to fruition and I basically written down a lot of that uh you know visualization yeah visualization and also that's a more tactile version of the visualization I just watched the Arnold documentary and he talks about visualization quite a bit in that documentary yeah yeah yeah I have to see that yeah so I I I'd always wanted to and I
had always been already so like I said at 12 years old I was building and assembling yeah so I was an entrepreneur you know even before that I delivered you know papers as a kid so I was always you know hustling to to to to work and but I loved technology it you know it came really easy uh and that's where uh starting this firm I said you know this is you know time for me to go out on my own I've gotten a good about five six years of you know corporate experience in two very different companies and I
decided to uh to to start up on my own uh and I did it without any investment uh you know I spent a few hundred dollars to uh incorporate and and that was it I was you know we were we were you know within a year a million dollar company so it was a pretty good start that is a very good start did you have any did you have any anchor customers there you must have had a few customers on the boil there or which I owe netany from when you decided to start the company uh they were I definitely I knew a lot of people uh I didn't have any customers
but because of all the people I knew that I had done worked with over the years uh you know I reached out to them oh I still had all of my arcserve experience that was still uh a predominant you know a piece of software in the market back then it was I think Legato and Arc server were the two top ones um so I basically just you know called around to friends and and got introduced to people who needed I.
T support and in the you know in the late 90s early 2000s this was all you know still very new there was no there were no msps there was no organisms there's no organized really uh business for this for the small business it was uh just a lot of one-man consulting firms like myself um and we you know I grew it up to you know maybe you know half a dozen employees you know within a year or so yes okay so the the time that time frame overlaps a little bit with continuity centers right this is all been you know yourself and so how does continuity
centers come into play um because continuity centers itself has started around 2000 right 2000 yep so in 2000 early 2000 I had met three gentlemen who wanted to start a business continuity site and their idea was we opened up locations that have uh offices built out desks chairs phones PCS printers everything you need that if something happens to your building you send them to our facility and we'll get you back in business and that was their conceptual idea but they hadn't they had no idea how to implement the technology
portion so I said I can do that so they originally the way it started it is they started the company and subcontracted the work to me all I T work so I built out the network I built out and then I built out services and that's really how the the I.T part of continuity centers came about was a customer basically one of the services was you bring in your tapes once a week once a month whatever you want you store them in our facility and we would quarterly annually monthly we would take all those tapes put them in and run
restores and recover your entire environment something that most customers never do they never tested their tapes you know they just back them up and you know hope they work so our service was basically tape restoration validation we would take all the tapes restore them get your environment up and running your people would come in and sit at the desks that we built out and you could run your company for the day and and see it work so that's how Disaster Recovery as a service came about for us this is well before draz
was you know a term thing yeah so okay so this is so I've got that in my head so you you started your company and then the continuity centers guys effectively brought you on as a consultant Outsource see were you still kind of doing that initial company under the guise of continuity centers or were you working for continuity research centers outright and had gotten rid of a company or sold off the company so everything was still I was at GTA was a subcontractor to continuity centers for about a year and about a year into
the relationship when the finances was you know 80 Revenue was being subcontracted to g-tail and only maybe 20 you know for the seats was staying there uh that's when the partners approached me and said you know this is this is your game you know this this was a neat idea but we see you this is you we see you running this and taking over and basically we worked out a deal where I bought the three of them out uh and we did a you know a couple year payment plan and I bought them out over the following years but effective
immediately as soon as the buyout started I became uh 100 Opera you know owner and operator of it 2010 uh yeah the first partner I think I bought out and oh two and it ended in 07 and then the second two partners started and uh oh 405 and went to 2009 or 10. and then like 20 yeah 2010 is when I actually uh uh sold off all of my old gmail clients the traditional fixed price agreement customers I sold that business off to focus 100 on continuity centers okay so let's talk about that time around 2010 so obviously you know I
know I was well in it in 2010 understanding you know the platforms that we had the Opera the operating systems the infrastructure backup software virtualization storage all that kind of games so continuity centers what services were you offering even back then in 2010 so by 2010 and maybe a little bit before that as well uh that's where uh people were buying and paying about two thousand three thousand dollars a month for a T1 uh to get 1.
54 megabits of bandwidth you know from you to us dedicated point to point uh and we would do real-time replication of your most Mission critical systems um one of the products we used back then was Double Take which was the love double tag cut my teeth on a lot of double type products yeah yeah we used we were Double Take partner for a bunch of years um and so we were doing the real-time replication again it still wasn't called draziat uh I don't think that was more like the late teens that that term came about but we were essentially doing
Disaster Recovery as a service so we would replicate all your systems to equipment that uh we owned so we were doing multi-tenant type replication um actually real multi-tenant in that VMware we weren't using yet I think that was like 2012 to 15 is when we started using VMware and that revolutionalized you know how we could do about the tenancy um so double take uh then we partnered with a company called the sigra who does backup software we were partnering with them for a few years and and something uh you know I learned over the years is
basically any software can do decent backup you know whether it was OCT serve double take uh you know whether it's replication or backup there was a lot of software that was good at getting the data from point A to B but the magic was the magic of Disaster Recovery is the actual recovering from the disaster getting the systems up and running and you know we we had 100 page run books of how to recover you know server a you know using double take or a sea graph yeah it wasn't easy yet it was it was very manual you know there wasn't a
lot of scripting available for stuff like that this is way before you know rest API calls and the ability to you know to script everything uh so it was a lot of that uh and then I was also at the time I was the the chair of the Long Island chapter of the contingency planning exchange which was not-for-profit for uh bringing people together we had you know we'd put bringing together a few hundred people bring in speakers uh you know it was it was mostly not technology it was mostly business continuity planning how do you
keep your people running your your business running uh and Technology was you know a part of it but a small part um so I got involved a lot in in business continuity over those years and one of the events we were hosting it was at CA headquarters so CA formerly known as Computer Associates we were in their headquarters they were letting us use one of their venues and a few of the guys came up and said hey uh uh you should check out our arcserv D to D platform uh disc to disc is you know with the the backup was and that was our
first for foray into uh a product that had a better sir you know better capabilities than some others and we partnered with them it worked out well what was neat about the relationship is I lived about 15 minutes from the headquarters so they would bring me in on a quarterly basis and I would sit down with the head of product and his entire development team and we would whiteboard out exactly what I needed to do this the software to do and they would write software you know to do what I wanted that's a brilliant access you
can't understand how important that is and how much that is how hard that is to actually get in any form of software relationship with the vendor right being able to be as plugged in as that as to say hey we need XYZ and then for them to turn it around in a matter of weeks or whatever it might be it was basically I had the about the second largest software manufacturer in the world writing software for me uh and even though it was publicly available to everyone you still needed to know how to do it and that's where you know at this
point we've been doing this for over a decade I personally have been doing it for several decades so creating a business model around it was was where we you know we were really focused now on on 100 drazz yeah and then a few years later I think it was uh we had always looked at veeam we looked at veeam over the years and veeam was great at backing up VMS that was what it was known for um but the multi-tenancy wasn't there the the Dr wasn't wasn't there for what we needed yet uh until well basically when ransomware
started to take over uh the headlines and you know became you know everywhere um we had some brushes you know we had in 2019 we had a half a dozen customers hit with ransomware and I was going to ask what time frame you were talking about but yeah you're talking about 2018 19 when it really started to pick up right yeah yeah well for us it was 19 and it was six customers within like a six month period and Ark serve you know while we did recover everyone and didn't lose data it was not a warm and fuzzy
feeling it was a you know we were we were just as nervous as the customers were and we didn't want to be in that position and that's when we we said you know what are we going to do different what's the next best thing and that's where we we called our friends at veeam again and said hey uh come on in and talk to us uh we had Marty Williams and uh Chris Lynch uh and some people I used to work with uh Wendy that I used to work with at uh at Cheyenne so people I'd known for you know over 20 years uh
came in we sat down and they talked about immutability and yeah and one of my first questions to them when they walk in is they said I don't want to back up to Windows anymore I only want to back up to Linux and that was one of the things I missed about a sigra a sigra was a Linux back-end and I always felt secure that that's that new environment and that's not surprising giving you a background right your networking novel os2 like I'm not surprised that that's where your kind of mind set
yeah it's just it's it's so much more secure and it's so much easier to secure than Windows um so that's when Marty had said uh he said oh well we have Linux and in V10 coming out in a couple of weeks you know actually in a few months he said we'll have immutability and I was sold on the spot uh so the end of 2019 uh we started testing V10 beta by 2020 February I think it was when it came out we started a campaign to move every single customer over to veeam and the the that's also
the the main reason is immutability as well as the Linux repository awesome and hey I think you know from that point of view um you know now you've got M365 backups and services um you've got a whole bunch of backup services that you you'd expect but we've only got like about seven minutes left I really want to talk about Cloud ibr because I think this is a this is a paradigm shift and terms of how someone is actually doing Dr service leveraging object storage leveraging bare metal and veeam Technologies but also to wrap that
all around and the reason why great things with great Tech exists you guys doing the legwork at the top to create a UI and an Automation and provisioning and procurement process to be able to put it all together so a company can buy a full service off you without really putting and laying out a lot of money for a Dr solution so quickly go through what cloud ibr is and a very very quick overview of how to put together how it works and what the value is sure so um our good friends at backblaze who we had been partnering with for doing all
of our offload of data from our primary storage over there to there to the capacity tier as veeam calls it they actually came to me with the idea they said hey we've been you know working on some ansible scripts to do automated recovery but we think this could be turned into a product is that something you think you can do uh and it just so happened a friend of mine who I hadn't spoke to for in over a decade reached out and he was always a developer I said what do you you know you're still developing he said yeah so we put
together a development team and I had never done development you know he's been doing his whole life we had daily scrums and Sprints and all these different epics and jira and all the stuff I had never seen and in no time we were able to take basically Decades of Knowledge from my head and dump it into code and automate it via ansible rest API with veeam uh some python you know basically all of the technologies that we need to use there's a lot of Powershell that veeam uses and we made the most simple
easy to use interface that we could think of it's kind of like when you buy a home router and you're setting it up it's got a few tabs that you go through to configure the settings and what it allows a customer to do and what we really wanted to Target was the customers who can't afford what we do you know draz is not inexpensive you know it's thousands of dollars a month at minimum and 10 to 20 to 50 000 a month is not out of the you know ballpark people you know our customers do that so we wanted to create something
that any size company could get similar results so it's not a replacement for drugs but what it does is it allows them to go in they enter in their their backblaze bucket their veeam encryption Keys their vlans default gateways some VPN accounts and they they buy that it's 99 a month for the for the entry level version it gets the message to the software and they at any time they want they click recover now and it could be a test or a real recovery and what the software does is it reaches out to Phoenix NAP
who is who we use for the bare metal infrastructure we provision X number of servers for them uh one is a Windows Server we install veeam on it the other one is esxi host and we stand those up all scripted and automatic and we add their backbase bucket scan it with veeam and start restoring all their servers onto the bare metal well down simple but to put it all together that's the magic and The Innovation right that you guys have been able to bring to Market because there hasn't been too many that have been able to put
it together like this and actually offer the service as as fluently as what you guys have so you know very quickly what why do you think you guys are able to get it out many of you mentioned the years of experience in your head but yeah maybe just yeah how did you crack it so you know it's one of the terms I tell people for years it's kind of a play on Disaster Recovery is uh I'm a recovering geek so I'm not I'm not just a geek but I'm you know in the in the phases of recovery from being a geek yeah and it's
knowing what this those small businesses and mid-sized businesses need as opposed to what I want to create for them so because I've been delivering these the service for decades and I'm hearing from them what it is they want what it is they need I already knew the requirements I already knew what that what would make it simple for them versus a bunch of really smart people just sitting in the room and saying let's make a product that does XYZ and we go through that internally you know I have some brilliant people that are are
creating all this and they're like oh we could do this we could do that I'm like no let's just keep it simple let's do what the the small businesses want we can always make it more complicated but let's start with something that that gets you back in business and that's that's what the product does basically is it recovers your environment with one click gives you VPN gives you sends out encrypted emails to all your you know employees with their credentials so it's Dr in a box for a company who's not
looking to spend thousands of dollars a month and the key part of this and I think the thing that's made this possible is the rise of bare metal services right like what Phoenix amp has offered I had sushi Cloud on here early actually late last year now the rise of bare metal services against the public hypervisors has meant that you just don't buy in a VM anymore you can buy a whole server because the the relative consumable cost of that has come down but also more importantly the ability for the automated part of the
bare metal to be exposed to a business like yours has become a reality and so you guys have tapped into the apis that pnap offer to be able to build this with your own IP together with them together with back players and put it all together as one packaged bit of software that's the magic in it right but I feel like the bare metal part is the part that we've been waiting for in the industry for a while so in about 30 seconds tell us a little bit about the bare metal aspect of this so you know you we could do it virtually
but the nice part about doing it with bare metal is it gives the end user the ability to to pay zero throughout the year you know so they have zero costs because the hardware is just sitting there and you can use it anytime you want so you only pay for it when it's brought up as opposed to it with draz and VM uh you need to you know to in order to commit to having that equipment available for you you're paying that that fee throughout the year so here we're just using inventory that's there and ready you know ready for the taking
you only pay for it when you use it um it you know it's been a great partnership with Phoenix now you know they have you know the the inventory to handle you know hundreds and hundreds of recoveries so it it just made it you know easier than using you know virtual yeah and I think that's the beauty of it so you've put together an amazing service um you know we didn't really dig into it as much as I wanted to but I think the point is is that Dr service you've kind of evolved this from your career you
started all the way back with the lasers you get ethernet you've you've you've done this through the novel um into your cigarette days and then in that first managed service company that you had and the early days of continuity Center but this is the next evolution of that so I love I love the revolution I love the fact that you're so passionate about this space and it's been with you since since you were a young kid right um but yeah I'm going to put a bit of a few notes down with regards to
continuity centers just as a final reminder if you love great things with great Tech please head to the website gcwgt.com or gcwjt podcast this has been episode 70 of great things with great Tech thanks Greg and thank you to continuity samples foreign
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