Name: Beyond the NAS Refresh: An Executive Fireside Chat on Reducing Risk and Modernizing File Infrastructure
Uploaded: 2026-04-02T19:16:07.926Z
Duration: 56 min 40 s
Description: Beyond the NAS Refresh: An Executive Fireside Chat on Reducing Risk and Modernizing File Infrastructure

Transcript for "Beyond the NAS Refresh: An Executive Fireside Chat on Reducing Risk and Modernizing File Infrastructure": Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining. We're just gonna give a few more minutes for everyone to hop on. Alright. Why don't we get started? Thank you everyone for joining today. I don't know where you are, but we have a rainy day here in Boston. But I'm still looking forward to the warm weather coming down the line. So excited to have you all here. We're gonna have a very important conversation today, really focused on what's happening in the market. I have a great panel lined up today. We have Jerry Carter, our chief technology officer at Nasuni. We have Nick Burling, our chief product officer at Nasuni. And, also, we would like to give a special welcome to Glenn Rinder. He's the vice president at Zwight Zollers, and we are super excited to hear his story and his advice for all of us to navigate this turbulent market we're in. My name is Parag Patak. I'm the vice president of product marketing here at Nasuni, and I'm excited to guide you through this wonderful talk today. We have broken this up into different sections to really help guide the conversation, but please use the q and a throughout to ask any questions you might have. Or if something one of the speakers says sounds interesting, we can deep dig deeper into that as well. We'll start off a little bit with just the welcome and framing of the challenge we're dealing with here, and then we'll have Nick and Jerry dive into the market realities and the operational consequences of the NAF deals that we are seeing in the market. We'll have Glenn jump in from a customer perspective. That's really where the strategy that we have meets the reality of the market and what you guys put in in place today. And then we'll end with really what executives should be prior prioritizing now as we think about, you know, the next NAS refresh, our strategy for file data platforms, and so forth. And we'll end with a q and a for all of you to ask any questions you might have as well. So with that said, Nick, I'd love to start this off by asking you, why are we having this conversation now? What's the importance of it today? Yeah. Absolutely. Hello, everyone. Thanks for spending some time with us. So, I mean, the reality here is as disruptions become much more visible and more consequential than than it has in the past. You know, if you look across our customers from small, medium, large, what used to be pretty routine planning around infrastructure cycles really has now created specific planning risk and gotten all the way up to board level executive attention. So given that, we thought it was important to have a conversation like this, and in particular, bring in the voice of of the market with with Glenn. He's been kind enough to spend some time with us. Because, really, this has become a strategic priority, not just business as usual. Thank you. And with that, I'll definitely share that this is not a product webinar. This is definitely a leadership conversation to discuss how we can navigate this together as partners. So with that said, Jerry and Nick, we wanna move into the market reality and why this matters now. Right? The NAS disruption is moving, as you said, beyond the infrastructure teams. Can you talk a bit about how this has become a strategic initiatives for CIOs, CTOs, and even VPs of ITs that are thinking about just their routine infrastructure decisions around NASA refreshes? Nick, Absolutely. do you want me to do you wanna hop in first? you start us off? Why don't you start us off? I I so I would I would kinda frame it like this. I think that I mean, from the reason why CTOs and CIOs, and this is is such a critical event in the moment, is that, look, NAS refresh has been sort of a planned business disruption. Like, it's it's it's something it's a change that you're injecting into the system voluntarily. You know? And it and storage, in particular, has been this pivotal pivotal infrastructure component that really requires coordination from all the other services, application owners, business criticality, business events that are going on. So there's a lot of planning. There's a lot of investment that goes on it. And and the thing that that really only made it Tenable was this sort of appearance of predictability in the cycle, which is I I think where Nick's gonna go as well. Like, this predictability of I know what my prices are gonna be. I know what my lead times are gonna be. I can get quotes, and then I can I can plan on it? And that predictability sort of made it tenable and gave it sort of the the fallacy of it's kind of a regular sort of cost of doing business, but it it really is a plan sort of change injection into the business, and there's opportunity costs and and other things that go with that as well. So, Nick, I'll let you kinda pick it up from there, but but that's how I see it. It's it's not new, but it's becoming such, a critical event to talk about because of the disruptions that we're seeing in supply chain and other areas too. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. And I'd layer in a couple other things. You know, the reality is even with this disruption, data growth isn't stopping. In fact, quite the opposite. Right? So we see, the rise, particularly in our world of unstructured data, which represents the vast majority of the data state within under enterprise, environments. You know, you see the massive increase in unstructured data was already driving pressure around budgets and throw on top of that the importance and strategic imperative around AI. Right? And, you know, our customers, IT teams, infrastructure runners are being asked to do more with less already. And so. now you throw this in the mix, and and I'll just reemphasize what Jerry said. The unpredictability is the thing that I hear the most. You know, you may not like the hardware refresh cycle, but if it's predictable, at least you can plan for it. And so that that unpredictability I mean, even literally, we hear stories of customers getting quotes with no guaranteed time line on delivery. I mean, I don't know how you can plan around that. So agree exactly with what Jerry said and then layer on top of that the fact that a lot of the the sort of environmental pressures around data growth, focus on still making data available for these AI projects, that's making this even more challenging for for the customers that we're talking with. Yeah. One thing one thing we keep hearing often, and we have validation from analysts that we speak to as well, Nick, is really around how this is not a cyclic challenge that has happened before, but more of a foundational challenge. Can you hit on that a little bit further? Yeah. I mean, if you look at what whether it's, you know, some of the tier one analysts that we talk with, you you read it in the in the press, you listen to the financial news, no one is predicting that this is gonna be over in the next three months, six months. Everyone that I've been listening to, reading to reading about, talking to, you know, minimum 18, but a lot of people actually really started to say, no. This is gonna be built into kinda how we operate going forward when you look at the continued capital expenditure, particularly within the hyperscalers that's driving a lot of this. Again, coming back to that imperative around around AI. And so when you think about something that isn't necessarily going to be a blip that you might be able to sort of work through over the next several months, you know, pinch here, squeeze there to find a way. But if you start start having to think about this as just reality going forward, what does that do in terms of how you think about your technology strategy around your your financial and capacity planning for all of the strategic projects you have in front of you? Yeah. That makes sense. Thank you. And, Jerry, just to follow-up on that, from what we're seeing in the market, how do you you know, from your perspective and your seat, how do you see what has changed the market operationally in terms of balancing priorities with budgets, balances, and the other IT priorities that are in your pipe today? Yeah. I look. I I think the unpredictability has made the planning that much more difficult, And so it it it becomes reactive. Can I get storage? As Nick talked about capacity growth, you know, you know, we are generally sort of wedded to particular paths and want to continue to invest in that storage. Capacity expansion can be somewhat unpredictable, I mean, particularly with some of the diversity things that are going on with with data generation inside the the enterprise. And so I think, you know, operationally, it's it's just making it that much more difficult to kind of operate according to whatever project management plan we did for for upgrading, for doing the refresh cycle. And then operationally, where that really turns out, where that really starts to show up is the opportunity cost. We have kind of our people that that would be working on just trying to execute on a project plan in an unpredictable environment, which means that they aren't really focusing on the the business strategy or the business outcomes that you're trying to drive. You're just doing things like trying to sort of manage when's my when's my refresh gonna show up. Like, have I I I plan for one window, but it it shows up late. So now I've gotta go back and replan another window. So it becomes yeah. I think it becomes very reactive. And and also, yeah, I think I like I said, it's just it's the opportunity cost of what are they not working on because of all the the chaos that they're having to to manage in terms of the planning cycle. I I think I I think it's essential for businesses to have agility, and that agility is not the same thing as as chaos. Like, agility is not that sort of reactive nature of of having to deal and to respond with an unpredictable sort of ever changing kind of environment. So I think it it really boils down to, you know, what are the teams not working on while we're trying to manage this very, difficult environment, and move in this sort of three year three to five year cycle from sort of one platform to the next and get everything to land cleanly so that the business can continue to run without disruption. Like, I just think that that's I I think that's a that's a change event that we don't necessarily have to inject into our businesses, and there's there's a better model. There's a better way to do it. But it's this kind of habit that's been ingrained in in storage administrators kind of over the year that every three or five years, this is just something that you have to do. You know, Yeah. it's sort of a it's, Yeah. you know, a repeating event that we voluntarily signed up for. Yeah. And I I'd layer on top of that too. It's not it's not just the challenge of trying to work through the business relationship with the hardware vendors, etcetera. Because, look, if they if they understand that they can't give you timelines, they might be willing to work with you, you know, extending patch a refresh window, etcetera. But, again, coming back to the data growth, if you're running out of capacity and the only way you can add capacity is by adding more hardware, you don't really have much of a choice. And, you know, that's gonna bleed directly into what we're gonna talk about later around what are alternative strategies. But but it's it's that that's the key thing. When business disruption and continuity gets factored into it, that's a different level of discussion than just a financial one around procuring, you know, the right hardware to to stay stay within the timelines for a refresh window. 100% agree with that. And I think one thing I wanna focus on is cost, which is a key part of this, obviously. But cost was something that we monitored and really talked about a lot even before this hardware NAS disruption that's happening in the market today. Can you talk a bit about the challenges of being on legacy NAS, the cost associated with it, and now adding this layer of chaos on top of that? How is that impacting our customers, our prospects, how they think about, the hardware refresh overall? Yeah. So, I mean, we talk about cost, but a lot of times what we see is you think just about, you know, your your NAS hardware. There's a lot more that goes around it than just that. You have to think more broadly around things like backup and disaster recovery. So the solutions that go around the hardware, the the file infrastructure that you're planning for. And so when you have disruptions related to, you know, one, that's gonna ripple through into others. And, again, that's gonna start to bleed into all of the other schedules you had in plan in terms of, you know, testing migration that you had to plan, particularly if you're leveraging other partners to help you with migration. So so, really, there's a sort of a a snowballing effect of that uncertainty and that disruption where cost is absolutely critical. Right? No one wants to see estimates for their hardware go up a 125, 200%. But, again, you come back to kinda business continuity, business process that that's all around that. Cost is definitely one problem, but it's it's one of many that starts to compound on top of each other the more this becomes unpredictable. Yeah. I I think, Nick, let me let me hop in on that one too because, you know, cost is one point. You talked about sort of the number of of solutions kind of within, you know, particular enterprises ecosystem to to handle, like, how do you manage, how do you protect those data. Every one of those is a stream of that unpredictability. Right? Yes. It's the lead time. It's the procurement. It's working with the vendors. It's sort of coordinating with the application owners and all of those. And so that just sort of compounds the complexity. And and I think this is like, from a cost perspective, I I am of the camp that the change is really structural. And we've been through, you know, we've been through sort of, you know, boom and bust cycles with with memory vendors before where it kinda boils down to the basic sort of supply and demand economics. This one feels different to me, and the reason the reason why it feels different is that we're not just talking about reallocating sort of like for like in in difference between DRAM and high bandwidth memory. Like, if you if you look at the actual sort of amount that's needed, it's like four x the wafers for, you know, per gigabyte when you look at high bandwidth memory versus DRAM. So so immediately, you're having to take more capacity away from DRAM just to create the same capacity within high bandwidth memory. You know, I think that if you look at at the margins on it, it's a multiple over what, you know, vendors would would be able to to charge and make it. I'm talking about the memory vendors. And then there's really, I mean, three primary vendors that generate sort of most of the memory technology. And so, yes, they're building more capacity, but I think and even some of the reports have said that one of those vendors has said that, you know, all of their capacity for 2026 was already spoken for. And another one said that they're probably not gonna get anything easing up into 2027. But, yes, they are building new fabs, but the economic incentive, as long as the AI demand continues to drive consumption of high bandwidth memory, the economic incentive for those vendors is to allocate that new capacity towards the higher margin project the products as well. So there is a bit of a I I believe there's a bit of a structural change to this. So it's not really a cycle that you can just kind of wait out to kind of get an extension. I think it is something that that is is an inflection point in this whole sort of storage refresh cycle, that's not going to, you know, go back to the to the old model. I think we have to ask the question of are we continuing to apply this this this older kind of refresh model that operated in sort of more predictable times? Does it actually carry over to this new model where the cost structures within memory fundamentally changing? Like, building new fabs is not keeping up with the accelerated sort of demand. You know, NVIDIA is putting out new chips every 18. Fabs are two to three years to go and build. So it you know, I I just think this one's different, and I think it's important to sort of take that into account when you're evaluating kind of the plans for these refreshes and understand that you're not just you're not just trying to negotiate the best price that you can get today. You kinda have to look and say, you know, am I am I really reducing my risk, or am I just kinda kicking it down the road? And and I and I think that, to me, is really the key conversation around this this refresh model in general. So, Parag, I I know I kind of added on a little bit more to Nick, but I'll I'll kind of let it go back to you and and drive the conversation where you want us to go. No worries. That was great. Thank you so much. Actually, we're gonna take a quick little break here and do a poll to see where our audience's minds are at with these challenges today. So you should see a poll on your screen. You can select more than one answer. We'd love to hear what you guys are seeing, what you guys are feeling. We should see the results soon. Alright. Okay. Hold on. Alright. Looks like it's it's balancing between all of them, but the good news is all of these things will be in conversation today that Nick, Jerry, and Glenn will talk about. But it's great to hear a pulse on where you are all feeling the pain today. Thank you for sharing that. So going back to this, I know, Jerry, you mentioned a lot about the kind of downstream impacts of the hardware refresh. Can we focus more on what leaders tend to underestimate in terms of the impact of the traditional refresh cycle on scaling, on employee morale, capacity anxiety, which you know is a real thing, and it's getting worse every day with this chaos that's happening. Can you speak to a bit on that as well as your experience with your peers and what's happening there? Yeah. I mean, I I think I I think the downstream impact is I you know, I've kind of mentioned it before, but and and Nick has alluded to it well, but I really think it's just I think it's the blast radius. I think this is plan change that's injected kind of into the business process. So, you know, the the question and and I've been in I've been in storage for been in storage for, you know, a really long time. And so whether it's a forklift upgrade or, you know, whether it's simply just, you know, having to expand capacity, it it always requires a tremendous amount of coordination across the business. And I think particularly as storage systems, you know, are providing more and more data, the number of application, customers, the number of kind of application providers inside of the enterprise that you have to coordinate to get that downtime because nondisruption is just it's it's really table stakes. So I, you know, I think it's kinda the the cascading effect of all of the planning. I think it's, you know, the testing cycles. You know, all my workloads are gonna continue to run, you know, as they did kind of on the old hardware as they do on the new hardware. You know, the the downtime windows that you have to be able to coordinate, kind of the coordination between application vendors, you know, how does your identity management work. All of those things, I think, are, you know, they're they're generally kind of where most of the time goes. The the budget is the budget and the hardware cost are what everybody sees, but it's the amount of time that it takes to actually execute these process. Look. There's a reason not not strictly just related to not strictly just related to the hardware cycles themselves of CPU vendors and drive vendors and everything like that, but nobody nobody wants to do this hardware refresh, like, on an annual basis for a very good reason. And in fact, you know, a lot of storage, a lot of storage customers in the past, like, they don't they really don't even wanna touch their storage, but once, you know, every couple of years because of all the validation, the coordination, kind of everything else that goes into it. And so, you know, it's just it's this it's this it it's this voluntary change event in the business that just takes the attention away from really the business outcomes and the business strategy and the business value that kind of as a company and an enterprise you're trying to build. So I I think that's kind of the that's the unseen cost. It's the I can make a plan. I can approve a budget, but then it's gonna take me, you know, months and quarters to be able to sort of get everything lined up. And now when you've got the unpredictability of lead times, like, just it just makes that cognitive and physical load on the organization just extend out farther and farther, which is time away from focusing on the things that are really, you know, driving success and revenue kind of in in those businesses and in the in the customer's environment. So that that's a lot of the feedback that I kinda hear, and that's sort of, you know, in the past as well as kind of in the future. There's some consistent things just around kind of the organizational cost of, of going through the cycle just on a on a regular basis. Makes sense. Just putting yourself in your peer's shoes. So suppose one of your friends who's also CTO comes to you and says they're did due for a roof refresh cycle. How would you guide them in trying to break away from this refresh cycle that happens every couple of years? And with this, you know, the the chaos that's happening today, the constant capacity anxiety that their teams are going through, what kind of guidance would you give them? How would you guide them through breaking free of that? So so I think I think you just have to evaluate the model in and of itself. Right? And so, you know, there's certain things about, you know, do should I really even be trying to kind of manage my my capacity sort of in a in a very sort of active way, or should I really be more concerned about sort of managing the performance envelope that I need and the amount of data in the working set that's needed to kinda drive those applications? And so, you know, can I find a way to sort of free myself from having to worry about, am I, you know, am I, like, 80? Am I getting at 90% capacity? Because what happens when storage systems that are on prem, you start to get that 90% mark, they just slow down because they need a certain amount of, like, free space to be able to kinda do the system processes. And so it's not just managing capacity from an application standpoint and to make sure that your end users have that, But it's really sort of thinking about, like, my system's gotta have a certain amount of excess capacity in order to run properly. So if I start to hit that window, then my performance slows down. And as the performance slows down, then my, you know, my, my ticketing system starts to fill up from from my customers and and, you know, within the enterprise, like those internal application customers. So I I would try to find a way to sort of, like, take problems that I shouldn't have to worry about, take them off the table, and and find a way to say, look. I I actually need to only focus on the data that is needed today to run the applications that I have running in house. And I wanna be able to manage and protect my data sort of separate from that, but that's not really where I want my focus to be. And I think, you know, simplification is is a great area to look at and and sort of think about the number of systems and participants in the ecosystem. And Nick really alluded to this before, like, okay. You gotta you gotta worry about capacity. You gotta add sort of additional capacity on the floor. You gotta think about backups. You gotta think about, you know, Doctor scenarios, in certain, you know, current environments. It's a very real thing that, you know, some of my peers are are having to deal with because of of disaster scenarios, sort of unplanned disaster scenarios. So you've got all of these different moving pieces, and you've got to worry about sort of how each one is managing. And it's a very complicated system and maybe even complex with a lot of variables. So I would look to to try to simplify and to focus on what it's needed to run my business, without having to worry about these sort of I I'm gonna call them tangential. They're very critical and essential kind of aspects of it. Like, I I need to make sure that my data is protected. I need to make sure that I have capacity to grow. But, really, those are the things that you continue to do to run the business, and I try to find a way to simplify that solution and reevaluate the model that we have. And and that, you know, is kind of one of the things I I love about the technology that I work with because I feel like it you know, it's it's very different from the world that I came from, which was was purely on on on prem storage. So, you know, hopefully, that, you know, simplification and sort of focus on what really drives business outcomes and and find kind of a vendor and a partner that can help to simplify and solve and take some of those other sort of tangential problems off your plate. Thank you. That's great. One last question before we let you go, Jerry. You mentioned risk. And Nick, you mentioned risk a couple of times too, so feel free to chime in. When you think about it from your seat, can you kind of bucket those into technology risk, business risk, cybersecurity risk, and how all this plays into that? Hey. Do you wanna hop in first? Sure. Yeah. So that's a great point. Right? So business risk, we've talked a lot about this. Obviously, financial impact, continuity if you don't have enough capacity to be able to meet the demands. But the other key piece, I'd I'd go back to what Jerry said around simplification because when you have systems that are fundamentally hardware constrained, you need to add more capacity, you gotta get more hardware. What tends to end up happening is you have these pockets of multiple implementations of that, which increases the surface area of what you're trying to manage, which also increases the attack surface of what you're trying to manage. And so from a risk perspective, the more complexity they have, the more opportunity there is for things to slip between the gaps. So it definitely expands beyond just do I have enough storage to meet the data demands for our use cases. It also goes out to, you know, how many people do I need managing this infrastructure? How many solutions do I need protecting the data that's across them? And how do I think about business continuity scenarios if there is some kind of an event? So so risk has multifacets, again, that kinda grow with the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. I'm glad that Nick mentioned, you know, the people because I I'm actually gonna take a little bit of a different slant. I know you asked about technology risk. I'm actually gonna talk about people risk. Okay. Because as organizational leaders, like, we have a responsibility to attract, develop, and retain talent. And, you know, one of the things that from an engineering standpoint, you know, one of the things that kinda drew me into the software industry was this ability to create, the ability to innovate, the ability to sort of move things forward with technology. And so the simplification that Nick talked about, you know, when we are kind of in this reactive refresh planning cycle, like, that's, you know, I mean, that's not the most rewarding thing to have to spend, you know, a certain percentage of your time on. And so I think, you know, just from the people that we have simplifying the solutions that they have to spend their time, managing and caring and feeding to be able to sort of continue to move the business forward, like, finding a way to sort of simplify that that that in time investment that our people have to make so that they can focus on the innovation that really drew them into the industry and driving the business outcomes, which is really, I think, you know, the compelling way to attract the the highest caliber of people, you know, into your organization. So, you know, and, you know, I just I think that we have to think about sort of the the impact on our people as well as the impact on our technology and our business because, really, you know, those three things kinda go together. So I would I would kind of encourage us also to sort of think about this just from a, you you know, just from an empowerment and from a a forward looking innovation standpoint, on how we drive our business forwards by being able to free up our people to really focus on that that innovation by simplifying the solutions that we're asking them to deploy and to maintain, and to be able to rely on for for getting their jobs done. Awesome. Jerry, I know we're right on time with you. So thank you so much for joining the chat. We will continue on. a pleasure, Parag. I appreciate it. Appreciate your insights. Thank you. Glenn, we're so glad to have you here. So this is the part where we're really gonna focus on all the stuff that we talked about, all the great insights that Nick and Jerry shared, and really get the customer perspective in here and understand from your seat how you're seeing this particular situation, you know, what advice you have for others. I'll guide you with certain questions, but feel free to add any insights you have. Before we do that, do you wanna just do a quick intro for the for the audience on who you are, what you manage today at your company? Yeah. I can do that. I'll also make sure that microphone is working. It was giving me little messages. Yeah. So I'm these days, they call me the CTO. I work for Hewitt Sellers. We're an engineering and architectural consulting company. So we design roads and bridges and theme parks and utilities and airports and just all kinds of things. So a lot of interesting work goes on inside here. We're a midsized firm, about 600 people in our industry. It's about midsize, 24 different locations. Company's been around for we're actually fifty years now, which, again, is fairly old for our industry. And I've been in the business for forty two years myself, two different companies in here at HC for, gosh, about thirty four years now. So it's about 600 users. We had a team of 11 or 12 of us that do the full range of IT support for the organization. Thank you. So you heard a lot about what Jerry and Nick have been talking about. Would love to understand you broke away from this hardware refresh cycle a while ago. Would love to understand your perspective on what kind of emotions, what kind of challenges you were dealing with when you were tied to hardware refreshes, and what you're feeling now and dealing with today that's, you know, the time that you're saving from all of that and where you apply that as well. I know that's a loaded question. We can break. it down, but let's have that conversation back and forth. Okay. Well, we'll take a start at it. And, yeah, we were I guess, it's years ago that we were basically looking at another hardware refresh recycle. The COVID we're kind of coming out of COVID, we had to sort of just delayed some decisions at that time, and and really we're looking at a a pretty large refresh of of hardware across our organization. I will point out that we had local file storage in every single location, and it was there for performance reasons. And that was one thing that was, like, ironclad for us. You know? The engineers and architects deal with very large, complex compound files, a lot of file IO, and they wanna be able to toss this data around like it's nothing, twirl around in the air, and look at it from different sides and whatever. You know, any any little delay is is not welcome. So we're very performance oriented, and that's sort of the thing that kept us going down that road. But a lot of other things had happened sort of in that time frame, right, that sort of brought to our attention really that there are a lot of outside forces, right, that can impact us, and having a lot of stuff based locally was sort of a liability there. You know? We could we could be shut down from, you know, business shutdown orders coming from cities. We had incidents where we had offices shut down in Houston because of hurricanes. We had power outages. We had something here in Dallas called Snowmageddon some years ago where the electrical grid was down for several days. And, you know, all most of our data was in our Dallas office at that point. It was the sort of the center of the universe for us. We felt like we could control it, but we couldn't reach it for three days. So, you know, in our sort of business, you know, that's that's a problem. Right? Time is time is literally money. And, of course, deadlines are important to our clients and all and all that as well. So when go ahead. Oh, I thought you were gonna comment on this. So that's a situation I think a lot of people have probably run into, but that's really you know, as we headed into this, okay. We're gonna let's go buy a bunch of new stuff and do the same thing we've done over again. But those things weighed in to our mindset and realized that we really needed to up our game, and we really needed to look for something that was going to be some more highly available, something that wasn't reliant on any particular office. We, of course, were faced with a threat of ransomware, and I do wanna mention because of the work we do for a lot of state agencies and federal agencies or whatever, everyone I'm sure is familiar with the idea of supply chain attacks, well, or the supply chain or we're the first cog in it. Right? So we get a lot of folks knocking on our door who are really looking for people that are down or upstream from us and more sophisticated, and they look at us as an easier target. And, again, this means we really need to be playing a more sophisticated game all over the place. And, fundamentally, I think that, first of all, meant to being able to recover from a malware or ransomware type incident quickly, which is something we've had done on the scale before, but it was, you know, we're talking a superhuman effort seven or eight years ago, and it was tapes, and it was like, oh my gosh. I'm glad we survived that. Let's not ever do that again. So all of those things kinda played into it. And, you know, we try to remind ourselves that we have to basically throw everything out the window that you learn every three to five years and learn it all over again and reevaluate all your decisions all over again. And we sort of proceeded to do that, and we we started out thinking, well, just maybe we'll use Nasuni just to stick some of our archival material up there because it's cloud. Cloud is is gonna be slow because that's what we had pigeonholed cloud storage as. But it'll be good enough for archive. At least you put it there, and it it won't be attackable. And, boy, did we learn, you know, as we got into it. There's a there's a lot more to it. And and and, really, how might how well these things aligned, really, with our business goals. And and, really, that's what it comes down to. At the end of the day, we don't run IT systems for our own entertainment. We run them in support of the business. We gotta have we we're. trying to provide a platform that allows our people to share large amounts of data all over the country, you know, at the drop of a hat because the expertise is in different offices, so the data is back and forth all the time. I mean, large amounts of it. Anytime, you know, you get to the end of a file server life cycle, you know, that last year, you're overcapacity. You're you're constantly fighting it because it never lasts as long as you think it's gonna last. For that, again, the the the fact of something not tied to an office so that, you know, we could access it from different places and have that that higher level avail of availability and the business continuity. Those things we begin to weigh a lot more heavily than we had weighed in the past before. And and that made it very clear that we needed to look at a different solution. We we found that Sunni had frankly, frankly, cloud source in general had come a long ways. We liked everything that we had seen about Nasuni. The the simplicity of the management was huge for us as well. So, again, I I run an in house IT team. Right? And so even the idea of dealing with NASs, you know, half the time you're dealing with people with an AutoCAD printing problem or you're dealing with, you know, this or that other little problem. It's very hard to find somebody who's got the level of technical skill that's needed to deal with that sort of equipment, who wants to work in our sort of environment. You know? They're gonna rather they're gonna wanna work for a hyperscale or they're gonna work someplace else where, you know, that kind of work is what they do all day. And and so it's harder and harder for me to find even hardware people. And just, you know, the the management of Nasuni is being unified and not managing 24 offices worth of file servers, huge. The fact that any of my guys can do you know, they all learned how to do recovery within the first few hours. It was great. So there were a lot of things that came together, and I guess I can stop for a moment while we deflect in another direction. That was great. No. Thank you for sharing all of that. I do have an interesting question for you. So suppose we just take you off as an Sunni customer for a second and put you in today's world where there's a lot of shortages around the NAS, costs are going up, supplies and quotes are very short. Tell me about what you'd be feeling and how you'd be dealing with this situation. I know you mentioned capacity anxiety, being a stakeholder to other parts of the business, risk exposure. Maybe walk us through, you know, what you think you'd be going through if you didn't necessarily have a solution like Nasuni? Okay. Yeah. And that's interesting because, you know, we sort of started that discussion, and I thought, these are all terrible problems that I don't have. So, you know, so in a way, you sort of have to think about it, but we are running into it in other places. What I'm we have three new offices that I'm bringing online in the next three to four months, alright, that are all in process now. One thing I'm not worried about is where am I gonna put their data. Right? Because that's an easy solution for me. That is that's in the bag. And so I'm but I am finding with our vendors, we're getting indeterminate delivery dates. When we place an order, like, it goes to a committee, and the committee gets back to us in a week or so to let us know if they're gonna actually process that order. That's happened to us recently in real life. You know, we're sort of back to the going back to the nineties, you're gonna swap meet under the bridge looking for hardware kind of days. I mean, these the anxiety associated with that is is not something I mean, even just at at the level we're at, which, you know, is not incredible, is is not pleasant. You know, everything that we got into cloud storage in general, and Asuni in particular for, all the things that we got into that before, three years ago, those things all still ring to true ring completely true in the current environment, even more so than they did before. And then you add to that the, the to even predict that you're gonna, a, be able to get it and how much it's gonna cost when you do get it and then deal with disrupting the business when you get that after the fact is some anxiety that I would just assume not have. Yeah. I think one of the myths in the market, Glenn, I'd share definitely is, you know, one, just moving to the cloud in Nasuni can be more expensive than just managing hardware. But, you know, as a customer, that's not true. Can you talk a bit about when you think about cost and especially adding on the extra layer of the NAS chaos happening right now, how you think about cost and how Nasuni helps there. I know we talked about unpredictability. We talked about, you know, predictability with Nasuni, for example. Maybe hit on those a little bit. Okay. Yeah. I mean, even even in the environment three years ago, which was pretty flush in terms of being able to get easy hardware and even VMware was was cost effective at that time for a small customer. But even in that even in that, it you you run the numbers, it makes sense. And, also, our financial people were particularly happy to see us move from a pretty large sort of CapEx oriented cyclical type, which drove them crazy because we're large, you know, large amounts of cash outlay to more of a predictable month to month operational model, you know, actually get a smile out of the out of the financial people, you know, when we told them we're gonna do that. One of the few things that I've probably done in the last thirty four years actually made the CFO smile. You know, it didn't happen a lot. And so I think just the way that our business works, you know, it just seems to work better. It sort of it it ebbs and flows with the with the the business that we have sort of matches the business we have, and all of that works very well. And, again, it's the whole capital thing is is a different game. Here's what else I could say about that. Oh, you know, today when yeah. And if you can't even get hardware, obviously, that's a thousand times worse. But even at that time, you just run the money and and particularly if you throw into it the cost of backup. And for us, the biggest constraint really almost in terms of doing storage was, you know, you can go out and buy a lot of cheap hard drives and throw hard drives on the network all day long, but that's not providing, you know, data storage that your company can use. You need to be able to we at least believe, you know, we're stewards of the data, and we need to protect that data. And so the constraint becomes, what can I back up? And if I look at that cost and then and and the fact that we were actually having a hard time doing it, because again, '24 sites I had half as many people as I had sites. So you got sites without IT people. And who's taking care of those backups? And I hate to admit it, but some of those were tapes. Tapes didn't get changed. You know, we did a combination of online backup and tapes. We like tapes for a bare metal restore, so we were kinda doing both. But tapes didn't get changed. Yep. They didn't have an IT person there. Archives disappeared because you know? And and I have a data retention issue. You know? I have to restore I have to retain data ten years after substantial completion of a project. So I'm looking at we call it twelve years because we usually don't know when substantial completion is on the IT end of things. So, you know, I can't have archives just not happen. You know? That's. a problem, and that's actually a a legal liability for us on down the road because I don't have the data that we're legally required to have. So, you know, just the fact of of trying to actually execute that in the sort of environment we were in, it it really wasn't happening. And I was deathly afraid. You know? If what if we did have a major significant I you know, don't use the r word. You know? What if that did happen? You know? And and and that was the day that you didn't have the tapes or the archive for that was missing with someone. So this was no longer really an acceptable risk, and we really needed to do something better. And and the immutable backup thing just like it's like, fantastic. You know? This is we are so I mean, I sleep at night now, right, which is not something I did for a long time. I'm laughing. Just, Glenn, I'm laughing because literally my first day at Nasuni when I spoke to customers, that's the one thing every customer told me is they sleep well at night. because of It's the funniest thing because it's it's we need T shirts with that 100%. Yeah. I would buy one of those. You know? I mean, that's, a side business. You got it. right? I just wanna ask you one last thing on this. Suppose not suppose. We know for a fact there are peers of yours that are in this current situation right now, and they're approaching a next refresh cycle. They're dealing with the cost, the supply issues. They're under levels of stress that are making them make decisions that may or may not be suitable for the growth and scale that they're looking for in the future, how would you advise them to kind of think more strategically about the situation, about the refresh cycle? Maybe some advice there from your seat. Okay. One of my first engineering professors I had years ago, I mean and, yes, I'm an old guy, and I digress, told us day one, in this business, you need to replace your knowledge half of it. They call it half life of engineering knowledge. Had to replace 50% of what you knew every five years. And you had to be prepared to throw that out the door and open yourself up to new ideas and learn new ideas and bring them in and reevaluate them at at a five year interval. And I've told that to the people that worked for me for all the years that I've had people working for me. And, frankly, I think now it's probably closer to three years. And so, you know, don't be afraid to step back and reevaluate. You know, I've done I I find myself doing things that three or four years ago I said I would never do because in that time, it didn't make sense, but it does now. So be don't be afraid to to to to change your way of thinking if it makes more sense now because the times have changed. And then also be sure, and if you wanna make the case to the people who control the purse strings, you know, define your success in terms of business goals. Talk about the reduced risk to the company. Talk about the reduced risk of of potential downtime or data loss or things like that that you can get with a more modern type system as well as the the the periodic disruption that you're not going to do because you're just gonna take your contract and add another increment of data to it and move on down the road. I think all of those things together will resonate with the folks who run the company, and you probably find it a lot easier to get into a more modern system like this. And we're certainly glad that we did. It's something that we we fought for a long time, and we are really glad that we made that change. Thank you, Glenn, for sharing those insights. So we're gonna move on to the last section here, which is really focusing on what we believe executives and IT leaders should focus on going forward based on the conversation we had here. So, Nick, I'll turn it back to you. Just given everything Glenn just shared with us, thank you, Glenn, again for that, what should IT leaders look to prioritize over the next twelve months as they're dealing with this chaos with the NAS market? Yeah. I mean, I think focus on kind of reconsidering that classic hardware refresh cycle mentality and think about what's a platform that's gonna support not just bridging through from where you are today to, you know, six months from now, twelve months from now, but really going forward in terms of enabling you to move away from some of these risks that that, you know, Jerry and Glenn have talked about so so eloquently today. So that'd be number one. Like and I think Glenn just said it exactly right. Like, don't be afraid to shift mentality and think about being able to articulate that in the context of business risk and what that could mean in terms of predictability continuity. Right? Because if all you do is focus on cost, you're missing a big part of the puzzle. And so anytime you're thinking about a kind of a shift in strategy, think about that both in terms of business risk, but also business opportunity. Right? So if you if you have a platform that can bridge you through challenges related to predictability of of of being able to scale your infrastructure to what the day to what the business needs, but then also, hopefully, getting past firefighting and and troubleshooting and now going more into strategic enablement. When you think about those AI projects, we have a phrase that we like to use a lot with customers is how do we how do we help you turn data from being a cost to be managed to an asset to be leveraged? Right? And so that's, I think, a shift in mentality. No. I appreciate that. I think both of you mentioned this in different ways, but you have a lot of stakeholders, Glenn. We're talking about procurement teams, you know, other c suite executives that you work closely with and partner with. How do you take this conversation to those teams so that they see the value in breaking away from the hardware refresh? So procurement obviously is heavily involved in many of these, especially given the costs and delays and all that happening right now. Any advice there in how to start those conversations, what to focus on? Yeah. We don't have a very large procurement organization, so I don't have to do a lot with that. It's mostly directly to the financial people. And, again, it's you know, OpEx versus CapEx is a big piece. And, again, I just when I have conversations with people who are not in IT, I I keep my terms in terms of business, and I talk about how many days can we be down. You know? What what if we could what if we could make it so that we could recover from a massive incident in a day? What's that worth to us? You know, what just take what we bill in a year and divide that up by a day, and just then there's a wild number for you, but it's it's a useful one. Yeah. So I I tend to term again, speak mostly in terms of business risks. Security is another big one for us, again, because of our clientele and how how does this support security. And then the collaboration is another one I tend to talk about. We do a lot of collaboration because our our our our expertises are distributed across the 24 different offices. So, you know, four, five, 10 offices maybe work on any any project and having centralized data that they can all get to and share easily is a is a direct impact on our profitability. So they can. see No. Thank you for sharing that. Nick, before we open up to Q and A from the audience, one last question for you before we end this. What would you say to those individuals who are still on the fence of letting go of the hardware refresh cycle and just kind of being stuck in that NAS refresh loop that happens every couple of years? It's pretty simple. Go talk to the other Gwens of the world. In in all honesty, it's something we do a lot. Right? I love we'll we'll frequently do panels with prospective customers and, you know, bring Glenn and and other people from their industry, and that's the best way that we can help them understand is to hear it directly from the people that have already made that decision. But but in all honesty, you know, don't not doesn't have to be through an Assuni sponsored event. Like, go talk to your peers. You know, we we have key customers in in most of the key industries that are getting impacted by this, And so they're gonna be the best people to be able to provide comfort and sort of guidance so you're not just listening to us tell you that it's possible, but hearing it directly from the practitioners themselves. Thank you. Totally love and agree with that. So, Glenn, Nick, and Jerry, of course, thank you so much for your time today. We do wanna open it up now to now any questions you might have in the audience. We'll keep tracking the q and a to see any of the questions that come in. We have a few already, so I'll just give a minute more to see if any more come in. Actually, while we're waiting, I can get started. This particular one, Glenn, is for you. It really focused on what do you what do you feel you should have asked earlier in your process before you moved to Nasuni? What were some of the challenges you're dealing with? What could you have done earlier to really help you in those situations? Well, I always like to think that, you know, I could have gone directly to the solution without having to bang my head on a few other things along the way. And I don't know. Maybe banging my head is part of my process. I'm I'm not sure. Maybe I have to go through there. You know? But say, maybe I'm a reformed hardware addict. I don't know. Anyway, probably, I would have probably been benefited by opening myself up to particularly cloud technologies and software as a service type technologies that that I really was not open to for a very long time. It's very much, you know, only I am the only one who can protect me. Only I will take care of myself. And we really had to develop relationships with different vendors and and really changed the whole way we're doing things. And it was an epiphany, you know, and it was a a road to get there. And probably if I'd started it sooner, it would've you know, we would've gotten there that much sooner, I would say. That's great. Nick, this one's for you. It's really focused on, understanding, again, it's conversations beyond their own functional areas. This particular individual is in the current situation that we're talking about. He wants to understand how does he think about getting out of this particular situation when he's under stress about the next refresh cycle in particular. It's much easier for them to say I think what I think what they're trying to say, it's much easier for them to just green light the refresh and. push this challenge down next couple years or next couple months and deal with it then versus dealing with it now. Yeah. I'd I'd say probably the the the best piece of advice I can give was sort of resist that urge for, you know, status quo and and think about it again because I think this is a a theme you've heard. But think about it in terms of a business case. Right? And this is one of the top things that we do with with all of our, prospective customers and even with customers that are already with us that are thinking about maybe expanding the different use cases is build the business case. And, you know, we can sit down and talk with you, and that's everything from understanding, you know, what's the impact of not taking action as well as what are the direct benefits of taking action and actually seeing a tangible road map for how you would execute on making that switch from a hardware centric to a software centric world. Like, that's that's where we really see it land. So it's not about technology and features. It's about business timelines and impact. Got it. Believe we have one more question. Nick, this one's again for you. I've been thinking about moving to the cloud. Cost, obviously, is top of mind. How do you say it's cheaper to move to the cloud than stay on hardware? Fair question. Yep. And it kinda comes back to, again, think about the entire business case. We have something we call an EBI, economic business impact of of making a decision to move with to a platform like the Sunnis. So there's a very simple thing. At the end of the day, cloud object storage is cheaper than hardware centric storage. Also, even more so in our case because we can actually work with the lowest tier of online object storage because of our caching technology. But Glenn said, you heard him mention it before, it's not just about storage. It's also about your backup. It's about disaster recovery, which are, you know, separate solutions that you have to procure, manage, and the risk that's associated with that. It's about person hours that are involved with managing a more complex environment, right, and being able to have a single platform with visibility across your entire data state versus multiple different solutions deployed in different places. And and then ultimately, thinking about the economic impact of business risk. Again, Glenn just said it. Like, if you are down for a day, you can kinda calculate what that impact is if your workforce, which depends on that data, isn't productive for that entire day. So so think about the whole story. Don't just sort of think it through through the sort of classic traditional tier one, you know, data storage perspective, but think about it in terms of what the whole solution can do to simplify, reduce risk, and then that becomes kind of the the right lens to look through. Perfect. Thank you again so much for all your questions, and thank you, Nick, Jerry, and Glenn for your time today. We really appreciate it, and this is a great conversation around what's really happening in the market and solutions for that. So once again, thank you everyone for attending, and we'll be in touch. Bye.