From Mainframes to AI: The Data Storage Journey with Troy Wright

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There's electronic devices everywhere, and if you can figure out how to gain information from them, it's important.
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Yes.
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It's important to our health, important to understand traffic flow through a building or something like that.
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Ways to improve our lives is coming from that IoT.
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So people are building with technology that produces data so we can improve our lifestyles and improve our businesses.
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Today I have the pleasure of having a chat with Troy Wright, who is the Principal Systems Engineer at Pure Storage.
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We're going to talk all things storage compute, what's happening in industry in those areas.
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We're catching up today at Cisco Live the booth we're running.
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So, troy, welcome to the podcast.
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Thank you, happy to be here For those who are listening.
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Do you mind just spending a few minutes to tell us a little bit about your career and your journey in the industry and what led you to your current role as Principal System Engineer, peer Storage Sure.
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I'm actually coming into my 28th year working for storage vendors.
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Yeah, so a long time.
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I started off with a degree in IT and sort of came up through a customer support sort of role and I spent a few years in management, support management, that sort of stuff.
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I spent probably 10 years in Sydney.
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I had an international stint up in Hong Kong for another five years, but now I'm back in Australia working for Pure Storage, where I've been for nine years.
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Wow.
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Yeah, so in the pre-sales role it's a systems engineer, so we sort of help our customers design solutions based around the data that they have.
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Right right, and for those who aren't familiar, can you provide an overview of Pure's mission and explain what differentiates you guys from other data storage companies in the industry?
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Sure.
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So Pure Storage.
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We set out to disrupt the storage industry to really deliver storage solutions that meet the customer's requirements, and there's a multitude of ways that we do that, and there's a multitude of ways that we do that.
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I guess the most prevalent way these days is people are looking for some cybersecurity for their data, and we provide those solutions.
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We provide both on-prem and in-cloud based solutions as well, and you probably see a lot of trend these days around AI and how much data plays in AI, and we build a lot of solutions around those stacks as well.
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Yeah, great, and you know.
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Considering your history in working with storage for so long, do you mind telling us a little bit about the trends you've seen in the data storage industry?
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You know over your life cycle and you can talk about it from how storage started through the other vendors, and where you are today, and particularly.
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Maybe you could also then touch on the rise of cloud storage and the demand for high-speed data access.
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I think one of the bigger trends from when I started was we moved away from mainframe.
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So, mainframe storage was a big thing where you didn't have much of it, didn't have much storage and you had to use it very well.
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We moved on to virtualization, where we actually saw a lot of machines and sprawl of servers come out and everyone wanted a copy of their data.
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So for us in the storage industry, we saw a big explosion in the amount of data, the amount of virtual machines that we saw out of there, and it was that was a big trend for us, and being able to work with companies like vmware, yes, and and dealing with how do you, how do you provide storage in multiple copies and and for the performance levels that they need.
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We saw a bit of a trend moving towards commoditization of storage, but what we're seeing now and what we do at pure storage is is we realize that you need some, some specialties in there, that you need to move faster than the industry to be to differentiate yourself, and that's that's what we do at pure, and driving a lot of that is AI.
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Yes.
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Yeah, of course.
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AI and cyber resilience.
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It's very interesting in that area.
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People, you have to protect your data, but you need to access your data.
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Of course, of course, and so if I think about, when you started the journey, the type of files that might have been stored compared to what it is today, we talked about media rich content before.
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We traditionally talked about mainframes.
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You know low data consumption, but today we, you know, no one deletes anything.
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To be honest, right, it's restoring the only thing.
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It's not really restoring from delete, it's actually just restoring from a failure, but generally people are not deleting data.
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Did you see this trajectory as well?
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Oh yeah, when I started, everything was in a database.
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It was only used by the big organizations.
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It was structured, it was manually entered by people.
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Now we have the Internet of Things, we have devices generating data, we have people generating data.
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We have various types of data video, audio, you name it.
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It's growing exponentially, but people want continued access to it.
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Yes, they always want to be able to access it and businesses want to use that data, no matter what format it is, to get an advantage for their company yes it's definitely changing.
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Unstructured is is really massive in world.
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And is it fair to say, from what you're seeing of the amount of data that you're helping store for AI usage, is that really that unstructured data is becoming the source of that information?
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Yeah, in AI, people are trying to learn from that unstructured data and we see a small element of structuredness and metadata when was the photo taken, like GPS coordinates around that image or around that video, that sort of stuff.
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But that's a small percentage of it.
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What the industry is trying to do is how do we learn from the content within that image, from the content within that video or that audio?
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How do we take that and improve ourselves, improve our businesses?
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And that's the challenge that we're dealing with and that's why AI is so big.
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People think about it as chat, gpt or something like that right, Give me a recipe or a song or those sort of things.
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But companies are thinking about it differently.
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Is one of the other main sources of data that you're seeing today.
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Iot Can we just talk a little bit about IoT?
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Because, yeah, there's a lot of corporate data.
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We know that there's a lot of discussion by analysts that more future trend people, that we're going to run out of data, that AI is going to learn because eventually it'll consume everything possible, or at least so that it can access.
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But there was a discussion about OT or IoT becoming really that next data lake of information we can gather.
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You know, sensor data, temperature, all those things.
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Are you seeing some of your customers really storing that or moving towards more IoT storage?
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Yeah, definitely.
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If you just look at us now, we've got watches that are collecting data for us.
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It's sitting here, my heart rate's being collected with a watch.
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At the moment, I've got my phone sitting beside me.
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It's collecting data information about what I'm doing.
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But there's also cameras around.
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There's sensors on doors, there's you name it.
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There's electronic devices everywhere and that information if you can figure out how to gain information from that, it's important.
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Yes.
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It's important to our health, which is hence the watch, important to understand traffic flow through a building or something like that.
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Ways to improve our lives is coming from that IoT.
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So people are building with technology that produces data so we can improve our lifestyles and improve our businesses.
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So you're talking about a lot of storage, a lot of petabytes of data, right, we've gone through these transitions of just gigs to terabytes and out of petabytes, and obviously you see customers with much more than that, no doubt.
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But performance is important, right, because people want things to load quickly, they want to consume this structured data.
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Compute's going a long way to really break that down, but realistically, storage is real pivotal to that.
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So flash storage has become really an essential part of modern infrastructure.
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Can you talk a little bit about what Pure has done in advancing the use of flash storage and what uniqueness you guys have brought to that?
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I think you've also developed your own products around that A little bit different.
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Can you touch on a bit of that?
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Yeah, definitely If we take a look at performance in there.
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Big chunks of data.
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If you can't access it, it's worth nothing Of course.
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So if it took you a week to get it out of the shed, out the back, then you probably don't need it.
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So what we've had to do at Pure is we've had to disrupt the cycle and we actually build our own flash modules.
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Right.
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We don't take industry-off-the-shelf SSDs, for instance.
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We build what we call a direct flash module and we have a flash module on the market today.
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That's 75 terabytes in a single flash module.
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Now it's quite dense, but it's still at flash level performances.
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So it leads us to a lot of things.
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We get a lot of data stored on there.
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That's online, always online, always accessible, accessible.
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But we think about the other side of it is sustainability.
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Yes, the amount of electricity that we require to run our flash modules is is very low.
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Yes, um, it's good for the environment.
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So our density is driving a lot of other things around the world from sustainability.
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But electricity costs they're not getting any cheaper.
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We, we all live at home and we know our power bills are going up.
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Right 100%.
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Well, that's happening.
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In IT in general, the electricity that you require is increasing.
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So what we're doing at Pure Storage, by lowering the watts per terabyte, by lowering that, we're allowing customers to access data and gain value from it.
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It's great that you touched on that, because I was going to talk to you about sustainability and you've just touched on that because you know we have this continuous sprawl, shrinkage of equipment.
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There's a big drive by all vendors to do power consumption in a much more efficient way.
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On that, though, pivoting a little bit more.
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You know hybrid and multi-cloud strategies.
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Can you talk a bit about the role that storage technology plays in these environments and how they're evolving?
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Of course you sell to both sides of that coin, but can you talk about is the shift just there?
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Is it more that people just storing stuff in cloud and not worrying about it anymore?
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Can you talk a bit about that?
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Our customers are getting smarter and smarter and there was maybe an over-rotation to say that the cloud is the answer.
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Now they're actually going.
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Actually, cloud consists of lots of things.
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There's a private cloud.
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You can build the cloud yourself.
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It's about agility, like that, there's a public cloud and they have a certain level of agility, and there's a private cloud that you can build yourself.
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So clouds it's an interesting term.
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There was a traditional association with the public cloud around cloud Hybridization is a real thing and understanding how your application is being used, or how your data is being used and where the right place for it actually is, so your clients can access it, your business can access it at the right price at the right speed.
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Yes, there's lots of elements to it, but I think hybridization is is definitely um something that most businesses are looking at yeah, I like that hybridization.
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I haven't really heard that term much, but I do like that.
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That's exactly where people are going right.
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Everything's hybrid and it'll continue to be that way.
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We're not going to get rid of everything on site, but particularly we talk about operational people needing workloads, and even AI might even bring some of those workloads back, and sure, they need a lot of compute and power and all that.
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But I think there's going to be times when small workloads will be able to run back closer to the edge.
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On that, are you seeing the need for small edge instances?
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I mean, we're talking a lot about big data centers today, big corporates and cloud, but are you seeing some people wanting to do more smaller workloads closer to the edge?
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Well, yeah, it's funny, because what is big data right?
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Of course, and for one company big data is completely different to another company, and I think personally.
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For me, big data is when it's too big for you to manage yourself.
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So edge is can you run it yourself?
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Is it a size that you can handle within your own business?
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At a scale.
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Do you have the skill set internally?
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Do you have the resources internally to be able to do it?
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And if you do, then running at the edge is a really viable solution.
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But you may go through a journey and you may start in one location.
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But you may go through a journey and you may start in one location and, as you better understand how you're using those resources and what they're costing you, you need to move it.
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I think if you enter into any solution with, this is where it's going to remain for the rest of its life.
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It's not.
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It's a blind entry.
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You need to enter into something, knowing that it's ever-changing.
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Yeah, sure, sure.
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Data management certainly is becoming more and increasingly complex as Data Volumes Glow.
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We talked a lot about how they're happening.
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What are some of the biggest challenges businesses are facing in managing their data, and how have you seen customers address that?
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Yeah, so one of the things that we've identified at Pure Storage is that a lot of people's data sits in disparate platforms and those platforms have different operational processes on how to access it and how to manage that environment.
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And what we've done at Pure is actually we've built a single operating system across all of our solutions.
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So, operationally, it doesn't matter how your data sits or where your data sits.
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Our operational process is the same.
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So one operating system, regardless of your type of data, and that's simplifying it for our customer base.
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You think about some of the complexities that every customer has to deal with.
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If everything is different, everything that they touch is different.
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There's opportunity for error.
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There's opportunity for complexity.
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Anything we can do in the industry to simplify things is really good.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Off that as well.
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Can you talk a little bit about data security and compliance?
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You know being, you know, top concerns.
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I know one of the solutions that you're deploying for customers is really being able to restore, you know for cyber threats, but data security I mean ultimately data is the oil of everything right.
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So can you touch a little bit on that?
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You know what you're seeing as a concern that customers are trying to deal with.
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Yeah.
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So there's obviously things like crypto lockers and that sort of stuff, that if your data becomes compromised, how do you recover your business, and what we do at Pure is a restore point, but a rapid restore point, because every moment that any business is offline is is an issue.
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So, while at pure, we don't actually protect the perimeter, we're not a security company as such.
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We give our customers an ability to restore and restore rapidly into their business, so reduce the impact time.
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But as an industry, we need to all work together.
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There's got to be security vendors protecting the perimeter and access control vendors protecting the users, that type of thing.
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But our role really is around resiliency and rapid recovery.
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Yes, yes, there's been a lot of discussion around digital transformation, right, and that can mean multiple things to multiple people, but it's critical and is there some approaches that customers are seeing leveraging some of your technology to accelerate their digital transformation?
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Or, if I talk about data in general, is it more that the performance, the security, the distribution of it is that really helping with that journey?
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Yeah, digital transformation.
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You know what, when people embark on a transformation journey, an old trainer's thought was let's build a small instance and see how our transformation looks.
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Yes, and for a business, if you don't build it with a performance capability, it's bound to fail, like if you piecemeal something together and it doesn't perform the way you expect it to perform in production.
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The users and the testers are going to say actually, this isn't doing what we need it to do.
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So being an all-flash vendor and what we do at Pure Storage allows that if you're doing a transformation project whether that could be an operating system difference, an application change, something like that we ensure that we deliver it at high performance.
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So you get production-level performance.
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You get to see how your application or your transformation will actually work if you were to deploy it at scale, and it gives it the biggest opportunity for success to understand actually we can scale this.
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It's going to deliver a business, a difference to our business, and whereas people used to run it up on a laptop in the corner and see if transformation does actually work, that type of thing is bound to fail.
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Of course.
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Of course If I was to think about emerging technologies in the storage space.
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Are there some technologies or emerging tech that is driving some things in the space that really excites you If I think about, people think, oh, storage is storage, but there must be some things on the horizon that may or may not be able to talk about.
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But is there some stuff you want to talk on that?
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Yeah, so there's things that always drive us in the storage industry Density, of course, io density, power density, those types of things.
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We store more of our clients' data in a smaller footprint, at a lower cost and make it accessible to them.
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So that's definitely something that's driving it.
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But these days it's access patterns and how people are building their applications to access our data.
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So you see a lot of Kubernetes coming up these days, a lot of microservices, container-based platforms.
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Can we remove some of the extra layers that we have in terms of accessing our data?
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So different ways to access our data is where we're seeing a lot of growth.
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That involves both the network connectivity, whether that be Ethernet or fiber channel, but also the hypervisors and the operating systems that are accessing it.
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So having a system that can cater for all those things and allowing a customer to go on a journey through there while us, as a vendor, is delivering things like IO density and power density per terabyte, it's super cool.
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Yeah, we'd be super cool.
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And you're really referring there to the continuation of shrinking and more power performance.
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Where else can we fit into these things?
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It's fascinating engineering.
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People just think of it as the obvious, of it's getting smaller and using less power great.
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But the amount of engineering that goes behind that to really achieve that is pretty staggering.
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Right, it's massive, yeah.
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Who would have ever thought that you would build an archiving platform based off of Flash technology?
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That's true.
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And that's what we've done.
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We've found a way to deliver at archiving prices competitive and sometimes even tape competitive, using flash, using all the benefits of flash, the the low power, the high density, the high performance of flash, and and that's the innovation that we're delivered.
00:19:20.443 --> 00:19:21.366
It's, it's huge.
00:19:21.547 --> 00:19:28.470
Yeah, yeah, and if I was thinking about then we touched on and you're really the core and heart of people wanting to store data for AI.
00:19:28.470 --> 00:19:33.250
Right, we're going to talk about AI and machine learning because it's an important trend that everyone's talking about today.
00:19:33.250 --> 00:19:46.846
If I take a different view from from what you're seeing and working through is not only are you obviously providing storage for those workloads to do that, but but what's the plan around AI integration for some of your, your tool services?
00:19:46.846 --> 00:19:54.558
Is there some thinking at this stage that, again, you're allowed to talk about from a pure point of view, on helping customers navigate their environments?
00:19:54.880 --> 00:20:05.404
Yeah, so look, we are using AI internally for some intelligent services back to our customers, so giving them the ability to save time in their day.
00:20:05.404 --> 00:20:13.455
If you think about anything in technology, it has log files, it has dashboards, it has monitoring, reporting, that sort of stuff.
00:20:13.455 --> 00:20:22.548
And if you're new to the platform or it's, it's not your day-to-day job to deal with storage or deal with servers or deal with virtual machines.
00:20:22.548 --> 00:20:28.179
How can you use AI to actually help identify is?
00:20:28.179 --> 00:20:29.769
Is my environment healthy?
00:20:29.769 --> 00:20:31.615
Is my environment secure?
00:20:31.615 --> 00:20:32.981
How do I check that?
00:20:32.981 --> 00:20:44.207
And by delivering that and what we're doing at pure is delivering that through large language models to be able to ask a natural language based question and identify it is my environment okay?
00:20:44.207 --> 00:20:45.489
Is my environment okay?
00:20:45.489 --> 00:20:46.810
Is my environment secure?
00:20:46.810 --> 00:20:50.396
Do I have anything that I can improve on in my environment?
00:20:50.396 --> 00:20:52.720
Is all my data placed in the right location?
00:20:52.720 --> 00:20:57.477
Yes, all those simple questions that our business asks us as IT people.
00:20:57.477 --> 00:21:05.094
Now we can ask AI and it's using our data set, our personal data set, in a secure way to answer the question.
00:21:05.213 --> 00:21:13.346
Yeah, great, if I think about customers, the ones you sell to, obviously, enterprises or providers, et cetera.
00:21:13.346 --> 00:21:23.258
But are you seeing, and as we've talked about for a while, but storage as a service, you know, continue to gain popularity in market, or, you know, is it kind of declined, flattened out?
00:21:23.258 --> 00:21:27.715
And if so, could you discuss a bit about that trend and the business flexibility it provides?
00:21:27.715 --> 00:21:28.586
It's?
00:21:28.787 --> 00:21:29.851
still growing.
00:21:30.030 --> 00:21:30.332
Oh right.
00:21:30.452 --> 00:21:33.353
Yeah, yeah, it's a growing trend.
00:21:33.353 --> 00:21:37.025
Australia is quite well advanced in storage as a service.
00:21:37.025 --> 00:21:38.528
We do see.
00:21:38.528 --> 00:21:41.257
Personally, I don't know what's right.
00:21:41.257 --> 00:21:42.450
Is it access to money?
00:21:42.450 --> 00:21:44.251
Is it because they want the service levels?
00:21:44.251 --> 00:21:54.834
But what we're being asked and what we're delivering at pure storage is is sla based storage as a service.
00:21:54.834 --> 00:21:55.536
It's not just a commercial model.
00:21:55.536 --> 00:21:56.942
It's not just how much can you give us for a terabyte of?
00:21:57.001 --> 00:21:57.523
storage yes, it's.
00:21:57.683 --> 00:22:02.153
What else do I get when I, when I consume storage off of you?
00:22:02.153 --> 00:22:03.474
What do I get?
00:22:03.474 --> 00:22:04.856
A performance sla?
00:22:04.856 --> 00:22:08.103
Do I get a power consumption sla?
00:22:08.103 --> 00:22:09.184
Do I get an availability?
00:22:09.184 --> 00:22:16.818
All those slas are built into it and what it does is help those teams deliver back to their business.
00:22:16.818 --> 00:22:22.998
Hey, I'm meeting my sustainability goals tied to it, so we're ticking a lot of boxes along the way.
00:22:22.998 --> 00:22:26.913
But also consumption or a financing model is part of that.
00:22:26.913 --> 00:22:30.769
It's only pay for the storage I'm using.
00:22:30.769 --> 00:22:36.569
Don't go and try and buy five years worth of storage up front and hope we grow into it or hope we got it right.
00:22:36.569 --> 00:22:45.105
We'll just pay for what our business needs today and if we come up with an idea and we need more storage, we can just consume it, of course.
00:22:45.125 --> 00:22:46.930
Of course it makes sense, right?
00:22:46.930 --> 00:22:51.439
The model of scaling up and down is really beneficial to customers.
00:22:51.439 --> 00:22:53.373
The problem is not many people deliver it.
00:22:53.373 --> 00:22:55.333
It's a little bit like physical storage, right?
00:22:55.705 --> 00:23:02.078
You see so many physical storage places popping up because, people consume so many things and they've got nowhere to put it.
00:23:02.078 --> 00:23:13.858
You know the Christmas tree, et cetera, coming up to Christmas, so I thought I might mention that and putting it into storage and then leaving it there, right, but we don't throw things away either, similar to data, we just continue to do so.
00:23:13.858 --> 00:23:19.124
It's fascinating how business can use that scale up and scale down model, but I can understand what, why you're seeing it as an increasing on consumption.
00:23:19.625 --> 00:23:26.165
Well, I think part of the challenge that companies can't deliver it is they don't have the technology behind it.
00:23:26.165 --> 00:23:33.262
What we built at Pure is a technology that allows us to deliver storage as a service.
00:23:33.262 --> 00:23:39.623
We have an evergreen infrastructure platform, which means that our hardware doesn't ever go into support life.
00:23:39.623 --> 00:23:40.705
It's very modular.
00:23:40.705 --> 00:23:49.535
We can upgrade it and upgrade subcomponents within it, which allows us to make systems bigger and smaller as customers grow and shrink.
00:23:50.297 --> 00:23:56.154
If I then think about, you know, increasing pressures to maintaining uptime and resilience, you know.
00:23:56.154 --> 00:24:03.623
Can you have a bit of a word on what the best practices are you recommend for organizations who are building resilient data infrastructures?
00:24:03.623 --> 00:24:04.445
You know, at a high level?
00:24:05.194 --> 00:24:11.647
Yeah, it's an absolute luxury that we are very highly available storage platforms so those resilience questions are.
00:24:12.068 --> 00:24:14.357
They're in in, built into our platform.
00:24:14.357 --> 00:24:15.643
So we're lucky.
00:24:15.643 --> 00:24:17.991
We have these conversations with our customers all the time.
00:24:17.991 --> 00:24:19.577
It's about redundancies.
00:24:19.577 --> 00:24:23.731
It's about making sure you understand the difference between disaster recovery.
00:24:23.731 --> 00:24:25.499
Is my data center offline?
00:24:25.499 --> 00:24:33.084
Is my power grid offline, my getting hit by a natural disaster flood or cyclone or something like that and do I have somewhere else to go?
00:24:33.084 --> 00:24:38.963
A pure, where the availability and the resiliency built into our, our platforms is high?
00:24:38.963 --> 00:24:41.777
But you need those other capabilities.
00:24:41.777 --> 00:24:49.970
You need a place to restore to, a place to fall over to in the case of a disaster or something happens in your environment.
00:24:50.796 --> 00:24:53.480
And what is your business capable of tolerating?
00:24:53.480 --> 00:24:54.343
Is it I?
00:24:54.343 --> 00:24:56.868
I need to be in real time right now.
00:24:56.868 --> 00:25:00.181
A recovery point needs to be zero, or?
00:25:00.181 --> 00:25:04.237
Or can the recovery point be five minutes an hour or something like that?
00:25:04.237 --> 00:25:08.827
Um, and am I able to fail over to a public cloud, right?
00:25:08.827 --> 00:25:13.780
Or do I need to fail over within another data center within a jurisdiction?
00:25:13.780 --> 00:25:16.923
They're all the challenges that our customers go through.
00:25:16.923 --> 00:25:26.144
Yes, and we're building solutions for each one of them, depending on what their regulatory requirements are or their personal choices on how they want to do it.
00:25:26.394 --> 00:25:36.221
Each business needs to make that decision, considering the time that you've been working in this space, if you were to think about people who are aspiring to be tech people or leading into this industry?
00:25:36.221 --> 00:25:40.266
Have you got any advice for aspiring people coming into the industry to be involved?
00:25:41.096 --> 00:26:04.826
I think one of the things that I'd advise people is actually understand where your data is going, how it's all plumbed together Like people think that I save a file and it's mysteriously going somewhere, but how do things interconnect and understanding how the communication channels work, how things are saved, how they're protected, that sort of stuff, Understand what you're doing with your data.
00:26:04.826 --> 00:26:11.603
Similar to if you're into cars you understand how the engine works and how the brakes work and all that sort of stuff.
00:26:11.963 --> 00:26:17.505
You don't just if you're a car person, you don't just get in there and push the start button and drive from a to b.
00:26:17.505 --> 00:26:27.463
If you wanting to get into the data industry, understand what the data is, how you protect it, how you categorize it, how you control it, um, or there's a lot of things around it.
00:26:27.463 --> 00:26:29.428
It's very important to understand.
00:26:29.428 --> 00:26:34.182
I'll call it the plumbing, right, the plumbing of how data moves in our environment.
00:26:34.201 --> 00:26:40.405
I call it digital plumbing, yeah yeah, it's interesting because I don't know if it gets trained these days.
00:26:40.405 --> 00:26:45.301
I went through university quite some time ago, right, and we did go through.
00:26:45.301 --> 00:26:46.942
We were very short on memory.
00:26:46.942 --> 00:26:48.066
We were very short on memory.
00:26:48.066 --> 00:26:48.855
We were very short on cpu cycles.
00:26:48.855 --> 00:26:51.781
Everyone was taught right down to the bits and bytes.
00:26:51.781 --> 00:26:54.698
Um, now we have an abundance of these resources.
00:26:54.857 --> 00:26:59.257
Oh, we have for a long time I think they're getting harder and harder or more expensive these days.
00:26:59.257 --> 00:27:07.300
Yeah, so learning that, uh understanding all that plumbing is, is important, so if you're keen to get into it, it's a industry.
00:27:07.300 --> 00:27:11.884
There's lots of ways you can do it between communication, security, that sort of stuff.
00:27:11.884 --> 00:27:12.846
It's all around data.
00:27:13.275 --> 00:27:13.455
Yes.
00:27:13.455 --> 00:27:23.876
And if I was then to reflect on your career, what have been some of the most rewarding experiences that you've seen and what motivates you to continue your passion around data storage and infrastructure?
00:27:24.156 --> 00:27:27.986
I think the most rewarding thing is I work with customers.
00:27:27.986 --> 00:27:37.818
I'm helping people run their businesses and what we do with their information, how we enable their businesses to thrive.
00:27:37.818 --> 00:27:40.305
I think that's where you gain your reward.
00:27:40.305 --> 00:27:41.126
You sit there and go.
00:27:41.126 --> 00:27:43.798
We've actually made a difference to this company.
00:27:43.798 --> 00:27:52.362
They've taken something that was hidden away or inaccessible, hard to get to, and they've gained value from that data.
00:27:52.362 --> 00:27:53.625
They've turned it into something.
00:27:53.625 --> 00:27:54.836
They've completed a project.
00:27:54.836 --> 00:27:58.765
They've made it an environment, highly available, those sort of things.
00:27:58.765 --> 00:28:05.172
So you need to gain joy from other people succeeding, because that's what we do in this industry.
00:28:05.172 --> 00:28:08.557
We're supplying part of a solution, but our end customers are really the ones that we're working industry.
00:28:08.557 --> 00:28:12.099
We're supplying part of a solution, but our end customers are really the ones that we're working for.
00:28:12.099 --> 00:28:16.499
We're trying to deliver them solutions, so you need to gain joy from them.
00:28:16.618 --> 00:28:18.285
Yeah, and I think about this industry.
00:28:18.285 --> 00:28:19.650
We move a lot of data around.
00:28:19.650 --> 00:28:31.784
We're becoming core and fundamental to the way people live, learn and play, and I just think about, in your role, the amount of data that's being stored right and how that's, you know, being used for so many different variations.
00:28:31.784 --> 00:28:35.442
It's certainly very, very intriguing and you must be very rewarded to think about.
00:28:35.442 --> 00:28:40.042
You know what that's doing for people holistically right, businesses and personal, et cetera.
00:28:40.324 --> 00:28:43.284
Yeah, Well, you even look at your personal life.
00:28:43.284 --> 00:28:46.940
Our watches probably have more storage than computers 20 years ago.
00:28:46.980 --> 00:28:48.461
True, true.
00:28:48.461 --> 00:28:52.307
Look as we wrap up this great conversation.
00:28:52.307 --> 00:29:01.020
Is there any key messages or takeaways that you'd like to convey to the listeners of this around data storage, the industry, anything else that's front of mind?
00:29:01.481 --> 00:29:03.386
The internet is a good source of information.
00:29:03.386 --> 00:29:06.320
Do your research Whenever you're looking at initiatives.
00:29:06.320 --> 00:29:09.949
Don't just go and replace like for like in your businesses.
00:29:09.949 --> 00:29:14.727
Our industry is very good at vendors providing information.
00:29:14.727 --> 00:29:19.123
Engage our partners, Engage our vendors in the industry.
00:29:19.123 --> 00:29:23.105
They're willing to share the information, but take it all on board.
00:29:23.105 --> 00:29:25.162
I think it's important.
00:29:25.162 --> 00:29:27.598
We've got a unique industry like that.
00:29:27.598 --> 00:29:31.183
It's a lot of industries you don't get anything without paying upfront.
00:29:31.183 --> 00:29:33.327
In this one, we're very open.
00:29:33.327 --> 00:29:34.489
We share information.
00:29:34.489 --> 00:29:41.403
We share a lot of it upfront and if you're a good source of information.
00:29:41.423 --> 00:29:42.528
People keep pulling that information from you.
00:29:42.528 --> 00:29:43.029
Yeah, excellent, excellent.
00:29:43.029 --> 00:29:56.962
And then, look, I do have one question, which I do ask all attendees of the podcast is tell me about the most significant technology change or shift you've seen or been involved with in your career, and it doesn't have to be around storage or data management, but anything what's been so impactful to you in your time.
00:29:57.255 --> 00:29:58.821
I'm going to answer that slightly differently.
00:29:58.821 --> 00:30:01.805
I actually think, the most exciting one.
00:30:02.195 --> 00:30:02.276
And.
00:30:02.296 --> 00:30:03.541
I think that's what we're going through now.
00:30:03.541 --> 00:30:10.376
I think I find AI so exciting we're going through now.
00:30:10.376 --> 00:30:11.038
I think I find ai so exciting.
00:30:11.038 --> 00:30:12.199
Yes, um, it's most of us sitting there going actually.
00:30:12.199 --> 00:30:26.053
I I think I know how to use it, but I don't truly understand, um the potential of it and we're all learning so so quickly of how we can use it and you think you understand it.
00:30:26.153 --> 00:30:31.688
and tomorrow there's something better and it's moving so rapidly that it's making it exciting.
00:30:31.688 --> 00:30:44.266
Whereas a lot of other industry trends have taken a long time They've taken years to evolve, ai is moving so quickly and it's keeping us all on our toes right?
00:30:44.346 --> 00:30:49.165
It sure is, and for you, it's all about that data being the bloodline for it, right?
00:30:49.165 --> 00:30:51.295
So a fascinating conversation, troy.
00:30:51.295 --> 00:31:00.046
Look, I really appreciate the time for catching up with me here at the event Certainly very insightful around all things data and look forward to catching up sometime in the future.
00:31:00.046 --> 00:31:01.188
Thank you, great.