RAW TRANSCRIPT
welcome to season 2024 of great things with great Tech the podcast highlighting company's doing great things with great Tech and now episode 76 excellent Andy so before we dig into next sand and the Beast I'm really excited to talk about the Beast which is you know what you what you've been really known for amongst other things um which is a great name for a sand by the way but we're definitely going to dig into that and the origins of that a little bit later on if you love great things with great Tech would like to
feature in future episodes you can click on the link on the show notes or head to jtw j.com and follow those links as a reminder you can get to the podcast on all podcast platforms Apple Google Spotify or hosted and distributed by anchor.fm which is now Spotify podcast and don't forget to go to YouTube hit the like And subscribe button to get all future episodes and all of the back catalog now 73 episodes deep and with that Andy Let's uh let's talk a bit about yourself um you've got quite an
interesting history you you've you've been at nexan for a while but you had taken a break but before that just give me a little bit of background about yourself um and then in the lead up to you joining nexan and then we will'll dive into the history of nexan itself but a little bit about you to start with no problem um so way way way back um I actually used to be an analyst programmer um so I used to be cutting code uh from analyst programmer through to project management um after project management I
effectively sold my soul to the devil and moved into sales and progress progress through my sales career which has got a balance between vendor with the likes of sequent through to acquisition by IBM the Veritas is from very small to very very big and also from the reseller side of things as well so I co-owned a reseller here in the UK and also helped run a reseller for another large entity so it's quite a varied background yeah interesting so yeah so you know you said that you mentioned that you started off as as a
coder um so what what what does Drive I mean look I I started as a coder myself but I'm definitely not a coder now I saw the light and went into infrastructure but you how do you make that jump to go to effectively what ends up being a worldwide sales role with a with a with a vendor um I'd like to say a lot of a lot of good planning um but in reality a lot of it was down to to luck and opportunities that arrived and I think one of the one of the skills that I had way back was the ability to communicate
and interpret between What I Call tech geek speak and business speak so I was able to effectively bridge that Gap in terms of communications and that really led me the on the path from analyst program to project management through to sales so being being able to articulate something that's highly complex in a simple and easy to understand manner is is probably what led me down that PA yeah that's quite interesting and actually to be fair I would I would argue that the most the skill that programmers don't have
the most and developers have the most is actually social skill so there's always there always needs to be an intermediary in there to effectively you know bridge the gap between what they do what they understand and and you know their customers their Partners whatever it might be even their incumbents right so it's kind of interesting so yeah maybe ultimately you weren't cut out for that because you had this greater purpose which it was that communication skill that you say so it's quite interesting
so yeah good stuff there so in terms of nexan so nexan was founded in 1999 uh by Gary Watson and his Partners so to UK company actual fact I'm trying to think back on my 73 episodes I haven't had a lot of UK companies on probably four or five right so it's good to get another company out of the UK obviously you know I'm very Pro UK being a ex Colony here in Australia I love my UK my my British friends so always going to support that um but maybe if you can talk a little bit I know you weren't
around for the start of nexan but take us through a little bit of the founding that you're aware of and you know why the company was started and what the value prop was for nexan at the beginning so effectively nexan actually you know had its origin had its DNA prior to 1999 as a UK entity it was effectively two entities two sets of people coming together from two entities which were originally called trim and spring Tech those two entities were effectively RAID controller technology and metal fabrication work to come
together to form nexan in 1999 nexan as a company name uh was at the time a synthetic company name to get the URL so next generation storage area networks sense that from and effectively at its simplest nexan was really driving disruption into the storage sector and doing things differently and doing things which other organizations could said couldn't be done and that really started by leveraging what at the time was commodity Drive technology called ATA or Serial ATA Drive technology and wrapping those into a raid array so
fundamentally taking commodity Drive technology rering it in terms of um excellence in terms of engineering which will come back to later and in terms of uh you know in terms of protecting those data sets with raid algorithms to drive the density reliability and price point in the marketplace and that's really where nexan started and it really drove differentiation and really set the DNA for nexan as a company and from that point all the way through from driving ATA into the into the marketplace and the original names of the product way
back were ATA boys and ATA beasts that's where it all really me and then it went from ATA to Serial ATA so so SATA boy SATA beast and then it's evolved over there but the the differentiation has not only started with the ATA technology it continued all the way through to things like like autom made autom made you know nexan has a company released probably about 15 18 years ago now and you know it was way ahead of its time in terms of being able to spin drives relative to utilization yeah now what that delivered
from a business benefit perspective was significant reductions in power usage and therefore heat output if you take let's say a disco dis backup environment perhaps behind v as an example then effectively they typically are tend to be very busy during the night doing their backup stuff but during the day they can be a lot quieter so if you can automatically and non-disruptively spin that drive technology down you can start to save significant P amounts of power and cooling now that was 15 18 years ago we roll forward to today where the cost
of power and the cooling driven by geopolitical events suddenly becomes even more important today and and and that's the journey we've C we we've continued to drive forwards on which is driving disruption as a privately held company and we still remain one of the few privately held storage manufacturers designers in in the world end to end end we we continue to drive that differentiation with our Channel part Partners out into the marketplace typically into the data center space across all verticals so
whether that's from retail to Scientific to government every vertical in between I was going to say you know going back to that F first part around the ATA and the fact that you were pioneering high density storage um with the ATA beast in 2004 that's absolutely ahead of its time you know what I mean like I think back then it was the big guys the main sort of your Del HPS your net apps were sort of there thereabouts um doing their thing with their big giant monoliths and you know storage controllers and
whatever they might be so for nexan to be thinking already in that way in 2004 actually was very much ahead of its time because you know I really I've obviously been you know working in this space for well now well over 20 years as a systems platform infrastructure engineer and architect I didn't really get a notion for high density Scarlet storage until maybe 2008 sorry 20 I'm going to say 2010 actually really 20101 is when we really thought about how can we not just think about a a single you know shelf or
an array how do we scale it for for cost for power consumption everything that you talked about only became relevant for me you know during that time let alone 2004 right so you know what what vantages did you have as a as a first mover what did nexan have you know that made it you know think of that in Innovative way in 20045 ultimately you know the the data volumes in in the world are ever increasing that's that's a given and you know driving cost Efficiency Enterprise class capabilities into this space was way
ahead of its time nobody else was doing it at this stage and you know kudos to the engineers the original Engineers of nexan you know the engineering Excellence I would say over engineering of the product to drive reliability um has been an absolute foundation and continues to be the very DNA of nexan so I mean we've got equipment in the data center space eight nine years old still running still under maintenance you know I I I had an email yesterday where a client you know we track on our UI you know how many days
without a reboot of a simple rid device and that you know it's reporting 841 days without a reboot and and that's the key point with nexan is the the engineering uh in terms of reliability and resilience in terms of managing heat managing vibration drives the reliability so the drive failure rates of the drives that we're using are absolutely unheard of compared to a lot of the multi-billion dollar conglomerates out there that's that's a fair point right and I'm guessing that you're you're not using drivers that any
different right they using commodity drives that you're picking up are they are they actually are they Enterprise grade discs so they are Enterprise grade drives um and you know we are very careful in terms of the certification and qualification of those drives but there are only a limited number of manufacturers in that Marketplace yeah that's it you know the way you package the way you manage vibration the way you manage heat dissipation on these arrays is really the magic Source relative to drive reliability now with
Drive capacities getting bigger and bigger and bigger you know okay we've got raid F raid five raid six one parity drive two parity drives per raid set but where you start start talking about 20 terabyte drives you have to worry about Drive reliability because when you start hitting rebuilds the data volumes are so so big now you have to worry about the rebuild times and the load that rebuild is placing on your controllers yeah which which was a big concern always for us when I was you know working on those platforms and you
know the the biggest pain that I ever had with the storage system was when we did actually go for a non you know conformant sort of popular big four sort of storage system and they did promise the world but where we did fall over was with the rebuild times and we did have drive drive failures unfortunately and you know I remember some of these rebuilds was ZFS based right um and these rebuilds were taking like months literally months right and then in that time maybe another disc fails and then you're really on edge because then
you've only got one more disc left before orell breaks loose and then there would be late that would be put on top of the the disc stack and then you know performance would suffer so you're right it's very important to consider Drive reliability when you're talking about raid sets in this way it's it's actually to be fair something I haven't really thought about for a while now because I've now been seven years off the tools so to speak so I don't need to worry about that as much but all the memories
come come flooding back in a good way because I did I did I love playing around with storage systems designing them and seeing what we're out there so it seems like back in the day maybe I should have been looking nexan versus these other ones that we looked at right um just on that so where would you say nexan sweet spot has been where did you start off in terms of you know were you more secondary storage were you primary storage and has that evolved o over the years as well I think you're exactly right you know in the early days of
nexan we really did position ourselves as secondary storage we did really position ourselves again you had these very expensive uh primary St storage system so we we we chose with our ATA and Serial ATA technology to position ourselves as tier 2 tier three storage over the journey since 1999 the portfolio of offerings that we have has expanded to the point at which you know we're probably you know one of the very few companies in the world where we have a portfolio of software offering of of storage offerings combined with software
where we can actually talk to a client about their data needs their workflows and data Integrity requirements and then darling recommend the appropriate solution from our portfolio so we're not we're not constrained by this is what we've got to sell so we're going to try and force fit that we're typically having conversations about the client data set the workflow their integrity requirements their security requirements and then dialing in what's appropriate that's that's a really good way so yeah
the broad scope of products and the options that you have allows you to talk to a variety of customers at various levels but I think it's great that you start with that Integrity because I think to a certain extent well not to a certain extent it is the most important factor when I think considering a storage platform because you know you can have speed you can have performance you can have everything under the Sun but if you haven't got that data Integrity part if you if you can't trust your to actually store the data correctly and
not have issues you know with corruption that's you might as well not have it right so I think that's really good that you focus with that Integrity as as your as your almost your go-to when you're talking to customers um and I think also getting back on it was in 2000 you talked about autom made um that was in 2007 and in 2007 it would have been if I can be a little bit bit controversial it would have been a bit like hippie like right to be thinking about um green storage back in 2007 right a little bit out
there type of thing like how did how did you had the company position itself back then because honestly it probably wasn't a real concern back then the eco-friendliness of of of the data center at that point you know way back then you know a petabyte of of storage was a huge amount of storage I mean it doesn't feel like it today um but but for example some of the lab environments some of the clients who've got large amounts of data on next hand even back in those days the the the sheer volume of data even though the
cost per kilowatt hour of electricity was way lower the volume of what they were driving still drove significant Savings in terms of using autom made yeah it's only now we roll forward X number of years and the cost per kilowatt hour has gone crazy that people are suddenly sitting and going actually this is a huge problem so you know it it it it's quite interesting how it's gone full cycle yeah and actually to be fair I don't think I mean I remember some of the early data centers I did a data
center migration back in it must have been 20067 so this time frame that you're talking about where literally we moved into a new Data Center and we I was going underneath the the flooring and this yanking power three phases from anywhere I could find it basically because no one was metering the power you know what I mean didn't it wasn't a thing back then and that was 67 and I even I I kind of think that you know power started to become an issue around again that 2011 2012 1 where you know the cost started to become okay now
we've got to start to regulate it because densities are incre increasing we're going to pack more into into a rack it's like going to be it's 40 Ru we could do 60 Ru racks now let's see how much we can pack in so obviously today it's all about that like everything as from a utility point of view understanding of power consumption as a data center operator and infrastructure guys critical um the public Cloud obviously takes that away from you but still charges you as part of their structure their fee structure as's a
reason why you're paying cents cents per whatever right because there is all of these costs that go into delivering that service so yeah it's very important and then a lot of the green energies that you see a lot of the renewable data centers that are popping up it's huge today and you know spinning dis obviously um I was reading today you know they're they're expensive they got lots of little Parts in them and they run hot like you were saying they they these things have got moving Parts
they're mechanical so by n by Nature by physics they generate heat where else ssds and nvmes don't generate as much heat but that then this causes other issues Downstream as well with that as well all right so take us through a little bit of um take us through you mentioned obviously you got to write write array of um products um take us through that so what what do you have in terms of the products that you go to market with you mentioned the hardware and the software so take us through your flagships and I think you've got the
unity is Unity the operating system that goes across all them as well so effectively we we have three uh solution sets three pillars we have our raid building blocks so you've mentioned one of those earlier which is the Beast um which is I think it's on it sixth or seventh generation we've kept the names you know because you know people love the names and people keep buying it but behind the scenes it's effectively sixth or seventh generation so we have a portfolio of raid building blocks which dependent on
what the client needs can could be all flash could be allat could be a combination u in terms of connectivity to the outside world they're typically block storage devices whether that's ice scy and or fiber channel so dependent on what a client needs we we have a portfolio of raid building blocks that can deliver against that need we then uh moved to assurion um assurion came by way of acquisition next and acquired a company called evertrust in 2005 okay and assurion is all about data integrity and data security data compliance so for
clients who absolutely must have 100% certainty of their data sets auditing compliance that could be anything from Radiology images you know in terms of I don't know Cardiology images all the way through to mortgage applications and everything in between so you got full traceability then effectively that's where the assurion comes in with in effect worm capabilities behind highly secure highly Reliant and then we have the unity offering which is at its simplest a unified storage platform with all of the Enterprise grade features
that you know most people at this point in the marketplace can't afford so it has all of those capabilities in terms of snapshots replication in terms of block file access in terms of immutability in terms of S3 etc etc so dependent back to understanding the client's need from a data Integrity point of view from a workflow perspective and actually what they're trying to achieve we can dial anything in from a simple raid building block all the way through to a unified storage platform all the way through to hardened
data integrity and everything in between yeah and you mentioned software is is there a software element to this where people can install a software on some commodity Hardware or is that not an option so there's a software element with all of those solution Stacks so if we look at the raid controllers on our building blocks that's our magic Source that's our software it's our algorithms everything designed by us if we look at the assuring absolutely that's the acquisition by way of ever trust in 2005
and absolutely the software wrap on that which then leverages our raid building blocks in a hardened State brings those two together and then the unified storage platform is another software on top of our building blocks again yeah get it good stuff so so talk a little bit about we did mention at the top that you this is your your second stint at nexan right so um there was an acquisition that happened in 2018 um so store Centric acquired an exam from what I could tell um what what was the deal there and you know where has where did
the company go from 2018 to 2023 and I think there was an element or something that happened this year as well which has you shifted the company direction again and obviously brought you back so actually my my journey with with nexan uh predates me joining nexan for my my first chapter um you know I mentioned uh the earlier part of this conversation uh that I also um operated and co-owned a couple of resellers in the UK yeah and it's during that time from my reseller world that we actually signed up nexan as a vendor and
started selling nexan so we actually had experience of selling nexan and seeing the reliability seeing the satisfied customers etc etc it was you know it was so that was really my lead up to joining nexan and at that time heading up AIA at nexan so over the course of the following six seven years um you know we built the team out in AAL we grew the business you know the the Loyalty from the customers was amazing because I touched on the reliability again because no vendor is going to tell you their their systems are unreliable reliability
is a post sales experience so once people have typically experienced the reliability of nexan they typically buy more and more and more because they know how reliable it is so effectively over those number of years you know we grew the team and and about six years into my time a company called imation acquired nexan um it was about a year after that that I I I left nexan and over those following years nexan was owned by ITI and then store Centric um you know and you know ultimately I think it was about a year or so ago now store hit
Centric hits and challenges um but the good news is nexan survived despite those experiences with imation and store Centric and you know what we're finding now is the love the passion for nexan not only from a an end user perspective from a partner perspective but from the employee perspective there's a huge amount of love for nexan so with we're seeing myself included people coming back because we do love it and we think there's a a huge place in the marketplace for privately held storage companies which are disrupting the
marketplace people want a difference people don't want to just keep going to the multi-billion Dollar conglomerates they want something different you know let's call us a boutique relative to the multi-billion but we're special and to that point I think it's you know quite admirable and special that a company has managed to survive since 99 in this day and age of it the landscape is such that that's not the case you know so you know you see you know there there's great examples of storage companies that have
come in been disruptive and sell and then get swallowed and then you know their Tech lives on in some way but they lose the name they lose the culture they lose the customer interaction what makes them what made them special to start with so the fact that you know 24 years later nexan still has that is is quite significant and I think that's a testament to you know the the culture but also more importantly the technology like you said that I love that anecdote about the post resiliency um scenario where you know every vendor will talk
about you know resiliency and and reliability but it's only in the post sale that you actually come to believe that and and find out brilliant I love that that's really good I've I've not heard that said before but hey it's pretty um it's pretty obvious right but yeah um let's talk talk a little bit about um you know the move from obviously starting with ATA you know SATA high density spinning dis how has the Advent of nvme and Flash change the way that nexan has had to to to be in
the market you know because you know from that point of you the whole concept of where you guys probably started has shifted a lot because of this shift in technology and the cheapness I think I mentioned before when we're preing from the show I think I read an article saying that flash has almost reached the price point for spinning discount which it's taken a while but it's finally going to flip right and it's only going to get cheaper and cheap and therefore densi in fles go up as well so it's a whole new paradigm in
terms of what we're dealing with so how nexan dealt with that from a technology and Innovation and I guess even Market point of view so you know it comes back to our approach which is to understand the data set understand what's trying to be achieved um if we look at the data sets the data sets will typically determine the technology that should be leveraged so nvme all flash SSD is amazing from random read IO it is absolutely amazing and perfect for that but when we start to look at sequential data patterns
sequential reads and sequential RS whether that's move it whether that's dis to dis backup whether that's surveillance whether that's lab data it doesn't matter what it is then SATA is price per gig still way ah head of EnV and me and all flash so it's really important to understand what is the client's data set and what are they trying to achieve we can accommodate both we could do all flash we could do all SATA we can do a combination of the two so the great news is we can actually
understand what they're trying to do and Achieve that we're not going to come in and say flash is the answer for everything now back to the autom made conversation flash is amazing for the power redu ction and therefore the cooling in the data center so that's that's a great tick in the box so autom made relative to all flash probably a little value but where you start talking about huge huge data densities of data and effectively SATA makes a lot of sense there then automate still has a play SATA still has a play and you know
what if I go back to my programming days you know everybody said the main frame's dead tape libraries are dead and all the rest of it there's not they're not they've just found their place in the marketplace so I don't I don't see SATA dying nvme all flash will find its space and sat will find and they will coexist yeah that's that's a that's a refreshing Outlook I think on that on that question because obviously on this show I've had a lot of um storage companies that are
you know that way inclined in terms of all Flash and whatnot and you know they would go the other way for obvious reasons I think it's it's kind of like they have to but it's good to hear that you know you're next keeping the options open again basically listening to the client listening to the use case which is very very important uh let's let's let's finish on we've got about 10 minut nine minutes left I want to touch on a very pertinent use case that obviously you know crosses over you know my
industry backup data protection which is um imitability S3 and and randomware so how how has nexan been able to address you know this increasing I guess conscious Consciousness on being protected at the storage layer in in the face of cyber attacks and malicious intent and even accidental deletion because ultimately we've all realized that data is super critical to our businesses so I think I think ransomware has been um a huge marketing thing over the last few years and when you start to look at people's positioning vendors
position in of ransomware immutability you know you you can very quickly see weaknesses in their offroads you know typically you're going to need air gaps true physical air gaps you know the these hackers are very very clever and they can work their way into the backup and Recovery regimes which are typically the parachute for the IT department so you know so effectively uh and again I'm I'm going to I'm going to touch on this slightly which is you know watch the space in terms of nexan because because in terms of our raid
building blocks yes we have immutable capabilities in terms of uh unity and in terms of our assuring devices but one of the things we're looking at at the moment is because we own the code on the our raid controllers because we own that that's our IP we can do magic that other people can't do so one of the things we're looking at with our rate building blocks is to actually Harden that to the point at which there's a physical air gap in terms of people being able to uh change the environment and do the the
environment I'm smiling at the moment because you know what we're talking about and we're hopefully going to be uh launching very soonish will actually give you true immutability on your raid build block so you could do a ve backup your snapshots and you there is such an air gap that you know it really is truly immutable that's actually quite intriguing actually because I I have a you know if you think about Theo for a hacker if I was a hacker the first thing and the easiest way to to kill something
on a disc is to basically delete the raid set right exactly easy done you know and then you if depending on what type of raid set it is anything but a mirror effectively gonna gonna lose it right so so what you're saying is yeah go ahead you imagine me being able to stop you doing that because I own I own the code I own the raid set I own the I own the raid array I own the controllers you imagine me being able to stop anybody from doing that it doesn't matter what network access you've got imagine if I was able to put a physical
disruption layer so you could still keep using the raid array for your dis dis backup environment or for whatever you want but I can stop anybody from connecting to that device and doing disruptive stuff yeah that that's fundamentally super Innovative and I don't haven't heard of it before so I think if you can get that out to Market you're going to be doing really well because I think if I think about the the marketplace and you know the question it we always get 32 one rule of backup three copies you know two different
medium one offsite and then there's also the zero that comes in which is validated immutable um the immutability is actually the complex part It's usually the expensive part as well if you get it wrong and then you have to kind of work with um the software layers on on two fronts you got to work with say for us it be the ve layer then you got to work with the object storage layer and work with the with the versioning and object lock there um and then typically speaking you know it's been the realm of the public Cloud as
well which is something that we can finish on where the public cloud is seen as a b and Endor but something like this this technology that you're kind of alluding to and you know that's awesome that we're talking about here as a bit of an exclusive is that that changes that that Paradigm a little bit because all of a sudden I think people coming on Prem they worry about that sort of thing where everything is is is encapsulated and contained on Prem for them and that lessens the it widens the blast rate
radius because you know now one guy can get in locally and do a lot of damage where else if it's separate if it's on a public cloud and we're relying on the public Cloud immutability at least it's out of our hands to a certain extent but there's pluses and minuses in that all the way so is is that is that something that you think will obviously you do think it'll be quite big but you know what what's your Market approach to that how are you going to take that to Market so you know it's live and fluid
at the moment in terms of the conversation so that's working its way through but safe to say we're hugely excited about it we're hugely excited about it and we think it's going to be completely disruptive in the marketplace because this is not something anybody else can do no and back to the DNA of nexan in terms of driving Innovation into the marketplace at an affordable price point that's what we're doing here again yeah that's that's that's very cool I think ransomware and it all goes
back to your earlier point about data Integrity right that's ultimately what we're talking about when we're talking about ransomware cyber attacks malicious intent um it's all about making sure that the data remains you know in place with Integrity with validation if something bad happens and anything that you can do along the way to make that more um more um hard a lot harder for the bad guys to actually impact any damage is a good thing so and again to your point it's because you own this end
to end that you can do some really cool and Innovative stuff on that so that's pretty cool um is there anything else just to wrap up we've got about a minute left you know is there anything else where do you see this whole industry going we've talked about you know the cloud 2023 definitely been a year where repatriation has come into play as a buzzword so we see people pulling from the public Cloud on premises obviously I would assume you guys have taken advantage of that you are going to take advantage of that where do you see that
going in the next sort of two to three years again you know X number of years ago now the answer was the cloud now what's the question um you know and if you look at the public Cloud at its simplest it's the same servers it's the same storage it's the same networks that everybody else is running just in somebody else's garage um so I think you know there was obviously the mass adoption of the public Cloud I think we starting to land in a place now where effectively it's a multicloud hybrid
Cloud world yeah you know where people again back to back to the needs of the data and the organization and the killer apps that are fundamentally leveraging this data you know there are workloads which are perfect for the public Cloud there are workloads which are perfect for the private cloud and then the the hybrid nature between the two and then the multicloud management as well so you know yes we're seeing organizations which are 100% pure Crow and we're seeing people which are 100% on premit everything in between and I
think we're going to land in a place where it's effectively a multicloud hybrid Cloud excellent hey great great summary of that and I'm really I'm really glad we chatted I love NEX nexan story I love the name I love where it came from I love the fact that the culture of the company has been there for 23 years and that's why like you said you existed um and you've been able to to thrive in a very comptitive landscape so thanks a lot for being on the show just as a reminder if you love
great things with great Tech um please hit me at Anthony pereral jtw JT podcast on Twitter or actually it's X Now isn't it we call it X um or YouTube and thank you for being on the show Andy thanks to nexan and we will see you next time on great things with great Tech thank you