Protecting the Last Line of Defense With ExaGrid

Transcript

00:00:00 Antony Savvas: Hi there. Welcome to Across the Pond, the US. European podcast covering big technology events and announcements hosted by David Marshall, Neil Hughes and myself, Antony Savvas. In this show we have some very special guests. Exagrid is a leading player in the protection and management of backup data generated by both companies and service providers. If you are using a data backup and protection package from the likes of Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik or one of the many other vendors in that field, you need to store it on appropriate hardware and systems, and Exagrid supplies a portfolio of efficient systems to do it. Before we move on, let's introduce ourselves. David.

00:00:49 David Marshall: Hello everyone. I'm David Marshall. I own and operate the Modern Data Center news and information site Veeam dot com. And I'm obviously also a co-host here at Across the Tech pond and I'm on this side of the pond in the US, located in Austin, Texas.

00:01:06 Antony Savvas: Neil.

00:01:07 Neil Hughes: Hi, I'm Neil I, I'm in the UK here. I write for a company called Cyber News, and I also run a host of tech podcasts under the Tech Talks Network banner.

00:01:19 Antony Savvas: Excellent. Right. As mentioned, we have a couple of very special guests and they're the CEO of Exagrid and the Director of Business Development and Chief evangelist of Exagrid. Gentlemen, please introduce yourselves.

00:01:32 Bill Andrews: Yes, I'm Bill Andrews, I'm the president and CEO of the company, and I've been in this position for twenty one years with Exagrid.

00:01:40 Mark Crespi: Growing up, Mark Presby, I'm the director of business development and chief evangelist here at Exagrid. And I joined the company in two thousand and six.

00:01:48 Antony Savvas: Excellent. Again, welcome to both of you. So the viewers and listeners know the Across the Tech Pond team recently had the pleasure of visiting the Exagrid headquarters in Massachusetts, where you told us. Exogrid now supported the data backup workloads of every major backup vendor bill for the members of the audience that aren't so familiar with Exagrid. Could you first explain what Exagrid does, and secondly, then explain the significance of the news we heard at your headquarters, please?

00:02:17 Bill Andrews: Sure. So Exagrid is in backup storage, so we're the target storage for the backup applications, whether that's Veeam Commvault, net backup, Rubrik, Cohesity, haiku, Oracle, and direct SQL dumps over twenty five backup applications and utilities. And we have focus on the upper mid-market to the large enterprise in the corporate data center. So organizations that have at least fifty terabyte of data and up have about a thousand employees and up, but most of our customers are much larger than that as well. And also large MSPs around the world who are offering backup as a service Bas or doctor as a service to customers. And when you look at backup storage, there's really only three approaches. There's using primary storage from a Dell or an HP or a NetApp or even an Everpure behind your backup application. Uh, the challenge with that is it becomes very expensive very quickly because the longer the retention, the more usable terabytes you need, and it cascades very quickly. Uh, it's harder to manage because of the amount of storage required. It's network facing, so it's vulnerable to a security attack. Uh, so that's the first thing. The second is inline deduplication appliances where the appliance will, will try to deduplicate the data, meaning only change kind of save the changes from backup to back up to backup, which greatly reduces the storage. And you'll think of products like Dell Data Domain or HPE store once, or net backup appliances, etc.. The challenge with these is they do the deduplication this process in line on the way to the disk. Very compute intensive. So the backups are very slow. Longer backup windows. Uh, the restores are slow because you have to rehydrate the data. Also vulnerable to attacks because they're network facing uh, not necessarily inexpensive. Even though this, you know, this saving storage, uh, and their scale up, there's a front end controller with disk shelves. So you're not adding any processor, any memory, any networking as the data grows. So as the data grows, the backup window gets longer and longer and longer. So to edit out extra grid looked at that and said, neither one of those is a panacea. And we said, but boy, there's some benefits to primary storage disk. You don't deduplicate the data on the way to disk. So it's fast for backups, fast for restores. Hey, there's a benefit to deduplication appliances because they reduce the amount of storage, thus reducing the storage footprint and resulting cost. So hey, wait a minute. What if we had an integrated solution that offered the best of both worlds? So the Exagrid tiered backup storage approach is. The first tier is the front end is a disk cache landing zone. We do no work on the way in. The backups come in to us fast. The restores are fast because it's like writing the primary storage. And in fact, we're much faster than any primary storage because we do a half a dozen things no one else does. We do job concurrency. So jobs are done in parallel. We integrate to the backup apps for for for a front end load balancing, we use advanced protocols like Netbackup OST or Veeam Data Mover, which are much faster. Uh, we are tweaked for large backup jobs, which primary storage is not. It's a different workload to handle a huge backup job than it is some database transaction or some file. And I won't go through them all, but we do a lot of things like that. Also, the most recent backups, which is what everybody really wants to keep users productive, are sitting in that landing zone ready to be restored and an unduplicated form. So again, the restores are fast. We'll fully scale out. Each appliance has processor Memory, networking and disk. And if you double, triple, quadruple can trouble the data we double, triple, quadruple whatever the data. Uh, what we will do in that case is we'll do the same with process of memory networking and disk. Right? So, uh, we keep that, uh, resource load equal to the data load and therefore the backup window stays fixed length as you grow on. In addition to that, with the cybersecurity attacks, we have every cybersecurity feature you can imagine, uh, we have a security shield that lists about twenty things we do around the security. But one of the most important ones is how we recover from a ransomware attack, meaning that, uh, when you attack, you can wipe out a data domain, you can wipe out, uh, you know, anybody's primary storage, and you can even wipe out our landing zone. But we have a second tier that we de-duplicate the data from that landing zone into called the repository tier. And that keeps all of the data, including what's in the landing zone and a Deduplicated format. So if you attack the front end, the back end stays intact because it's non-network facing the threat actor can't see it, the threat actor can't access it, and we can do a restore. All the objects in that repository are mutable. We have a delayed delete policy so that if you institute a delete at the landing zone side, we don't know if that's an operational delete or a threat actor delete. So there's a time delay in number of days. You can set a policy before we will delete that data. And now we also have an AI powered auto detecting guard that watches deletes in the landing zone. And if anything is out of ordinary from your operational deletes, we will immediately alert it that they might be under attack and immediately start extending the delayed delete policy indefinitely until somebody comes in and says that wasn't an attack or it was an attack, and both the IT people and the security people have to log in. Both have to get a two F a push, and both have to say, clear this alert before we'll stop, you know, doing that.

00:07:58 Antony Savvas: We'll come back to more of this later in the podcast. But I want to get on to this exciting news we heard in Massachusetts. Could you briefly explain what that was and the significance of it, please?

00:08:07 Bill Andrews: Yeah. So the key is in today's subscription world, right? Everybody's tending to now, uh, they buy their, their, their storage as capital equipment because they use it for six years, seven years. But with their backup apps, they want the ability to be able to switch. So you'll see everybody use, uh, do a three year subscription. At the end of the three years, they lift their head and say, is the backup app I'm using still right for my workloads as it kept up with my new workloads and it gives me the ability to switch. So you have to support every backup application now because you don't know when a customer is going to switch and what they're going to switch from and to. So the big players, uh, are Veeam, as we all know, Commvault, IBM spectrum protect net backup Rubrik. Cohesity. Data protect. Right. Uh, and which we now, we support all of those, including the announcement being Cohesity Data Protect. So if a customer switches from Rubrik to cohesion or cohesity, the Veeam or Veeam to Commvault, they can keep the extra equipment, keep backing up and protect their investment.

00:09:09 Antony Savvas: Excellent. We'll come. No doubt we'll come back to that further as well. But David, you had a question.

00:09:15 David Marshall: Yeah. First, thanks for joining us. Uh, to both of you, bill and Mark. Uh, it's good to see you all again. Uh, Mark, from a business and product strategy standpoint, uh, as Bill just alluded to, now that Exagrid has extended support to Cohesity Netbackup data protect workloads, where does that leave? Uh, the roadmap is the priority still adding support for new backup platforms or, uh, is it doubling down on customer acquisition within the ecosystems you already support? Or is it shifting toward, uh, strengthening data protection and ransomware resilience like Bill was talking about? Uh, you know, those features just across the board? Where where do you see things headed?

00:10:00 Mark Crespi: Yeah. Great question David. So we've got, you know, the vast majority of the major backup applications at this point covered. Um, and we also support, as Bill mentioned, a host of other, um, you know, utilities, etc.. So I don't, we don't foresee at the moment, you know, adding a huge number of additional data protection sources to the platform. However, we're always, we're always watching the market. And as things evolve, we tend to get in front of them. Um, but what we're really focused is really continuing to deliver value in the key pillars of what customers are looking for, which is, which is a performance performance is still number one. So we're always looking for ways to, to continue our leadership and performance to security. Or, you know, the recent addition of AI powered auto detecting guard was, was a huge win for our customers because now the system is actually monitoring itself and proactively learning customers when something doesn't look right, we're always looking at ways to improve customers disaster recovery, protection, and ultimately economics. One of the things that flows out of the architectural review that that bill gave is we've solved the long term economics of backup. We've gotten rid of the rip and replace cycles. We've gotten rid of the end of life, um, conundrums that customers find themselves in. And once they're on an xgrid platform with a scale out architecture, we can help them predict their ongoing costs along with their data growth for years into the future. So we've ended that endless cycle of rip and replace, grow, break and replace that customers are facing, and that will remain our focus going forward.

00:11:38 Bill Andrews: I'd like to just add a couple things to what Mark said as well. We're going deeper with backup apps. So we're the only vendor that can further deduplicate Deduplicated data from Veeam. Commvault. Rubrik. Cohesity. You know, we, you know, Veeam does roughly two to one de-duplication and we take that up by a seven to fourteen to one or Commvault does four to five to one, and we take that up by another three to one, up to fifteen to one in order to. Behind those backup applications allow customers to use the Dedupe built in the backup app and for the Deduplicated. In addition, you know, we're pushing for more advanced features like Multi-hop, where we can go from A to B to C or A to B and C for a tertiary copy. With climate change, more and more customers are saying, I want a second copy. Maybe that second copy should be in the cloud, which we support. We allow you to replicate a copy into Amazon or into AWS, excuse me, into Azure, etc. and that allows for that. And the Multi-hop also allows for a third hop in for cyber security into a clean room environment. So you could do a third hop into a, to a second doctor site or a third hop into a clean room environment. So I think, you know, it's all of that stuff that comes around that you wouldn't get in standard primary storage or in an inline deduplication appliance.

00:12:56 Antony Savvas: Excellent. You want to come in?

00:12:58 Neil Hughes: Yeah. I was just going to ask you, can you outline who grids competition is? And one of the reasons I wanted to ask that is I think they might be some people watching and listening that might thinking might be thinking. You're living, operating in a very niche area, but there's some pretty big names in there. And secondly, could you give us an indication of the kind of growth that you're experiencing in tiered backup storage and in that market, because this is the market you specialise in as well.

00:13:25 Bill Andrews: Right? So first of all, our competition is the big four storage guys, Dell, HP, E network appliance and, and, and Everpure. And we see those the most why they're dominant in primary storage. And customers tend to just go to their primary storage vendor to buy their backup storage, right? So they can either buy primary storage or they're going to buy like Dell Data Domain or HPE stolen. So that's who we see the majority of the time. those for at least eighty five percent of the time we're in a net backup account. We'll also see net backup appliances. And in certain countries we will see Huawei. Uh, because Huawei can come in at a much lower price. Now, you're not going to see it in the United States. You're not going to see it in the UK. So a lot of reasons why we all know that it's not the case, but there are a lot of countries that would consider Huawei because it's a lower priced alternative. It's still in line de-duplication it's still slow, etc.. But, you know, it's it's the basic the big primary storage vendors that we tend to compete with the most, um, last quarter. So we're continuing to grow, which grew double digits. Again, it was our best quarter. Um, I, we don't say what our revenue is, but it's, it's, it's higher than most think. Um, it's, uh, we are cash flow positive every quarter for the last twenty quarters. We have no debt. And last quarter, we brought on two hundred and seven new customers. Fifty of those were data domain replacements. So we replaced Dell Data Domain fifty times just last quarter.

00:14:53 Neil Hughes: Wow. Oh.

00:14:56 Antony Savvas: Did you want to come back there, Neil?

00:14:57 Neil Hughes: No, I was just saying it's incredible that. And I think you're off the radar of many people listening there. And I'm curious on your view point Mark on on the kind of reaction you get from the market, the people that you're talking to.

00:15:11 Mark Crespi: Um, what type of reaction can you clarify just a little bit?

00:15:14 Neil Hughes: Yeah, just the, the people that you're talking to because as I said a moment ago, there's some people out there that are outside of this space, maybe business leaders that you're kind of off their radar a little bit. And of course, if you, if there is a battle there at all or, or there are more than aware of you.

00:15:29 Mark Crespi: Yeah. You know, what's important to us is, is that our partners and our customers are aware of us. And, um, they, they, uh, they recognize when we tell the story that we have the best solution for the market. We saw, we solve all of the, all of the challenges that have historically led. And you see it in our competitive win rate, our competitive win rate overall is, is hovering in seventy five percent range. When we actually do an evaluation, it's it's in the eight over eighty. Eighty three percent range. And that's who we really care about. It's the reaction that we want. Um, in terms of people underestimating us, um, in the broader market, we'll take it right. It allows us, it allows us to operate and go in and do fifty data domain replacements and. And to replace our primary storage brethren on a daily basis as well.

00:16:14 Bill Andrews: So we have five thousand two hundred active installed customers in one hundred eight countries now. Yeah. Um, and so that's a, you know, it's a lot of customers. It's not like it's twenty, thirty, forty customers. And those are active customers, those customers using us every day, right? A lot of customer companies make claims about, um, about how many customers they have and how most of them are not active anymore. These are fifty two, over fifty two hundred active customers. Ninety nine percent of them are on our yielding maintenance support, ninety nine point three percent to be exact. And we have a ninety six percent retention, which in the storage business is extremely high a because the product works and it. And it does do a better job than the other products on the market. B is because we support the hell out of it. We got a very different support model. Topic for another time, but, uh, so we just keep going and we're going to keep growing.

00:17:05 Neil Hughes: I love.

00:17:06 Antony Savvas: It. Thanks, Bill. Coming back to you, Mark, and you talked about partners in your last answer. Um, Exagrid is a channel first company with a vast majority of business going through channel partners and increasingly through managed service providers. The new version of the Exagrid system, I understand, includes a simple but very useful share quota feature for MSPs. It sounds simple. Maybe it was complicated to put together, but in relation to. But it's in relation to customer contracts. Could you explain how it works please?

00:17:37 Mark Crespi: Yes. Um, so that functionality is part of our ongoing roadmap, um, that we're delivering to our managed service providers. And it's allowed us to, to win some of the largest service providers in the world. And what the new functionality does is if I'm a managed service provider and I and I contract with a customer, I'm going to allow them to store a certain amount of data. Um, and we've added functionality to make the ability to view how much data a customer is storing, um, on the service provider platform by what we call share. So customer by customer and set quotas such that they can alert when a customer reaches or starts to exceed the quota for which they're contracted. And we made it very flexible so that the managed service provider can balance maximizing their revenue while their and their flexibility with the customer simultaneously. So it gradually escalates as the customer starts to exceed those quotas. So it's robust reporting. Um, it gives the managed service provider advance notice as the customer is approaching, um, that quota. And it allows them to be flexible in terms of where they draw the line with that customer in terms of billing changes and so on. Off.

00:18:50 Antony Savvas: Excellent. Sounds very useful. David, do you want to want you to come with a question?

00:18:54 David Marshall: Yeah. Uh, Bill, stepping back a bit. And you and I have talked about this, uh, a lot over the years, but as one of the industry thought leaders in this space, how do you see the backup storage market itself evolving? I know Mark alluded to this earlier that Exagrid now supports over twenty five backup applications from Veeam, Commvault and Cohesity. Now to haiku, Acronis, IBM Spectrum Protect. I mean, the list is, uh, you know, impressive given how consolidated this market already is around a handful of major players. Is there still room for new vendors to break in and challenge these incumbents, or do you think that windows largely closed?

00:19:36 Bill Andrews: So there's definitely another major shift. A couple major shifts happening right now. The first is, you know, the, the, the days of Dell Network or Dell Avamar and those types of products are going away, right? We see it every day in the customer's day. If a new customer again, remember we're not in the SMB, so we're in the upper mid market to the enterprise. So what I'm about to say is not down to the SMB, where you see a lot of Veeam and a lot of Acronis, but more up market. Uh, now if you look at any customer, they're, they're either looking at Veeam Commvault Rubrik a Cohesity data protect, it's a rare day they're looking at anything else. So those are the big four. Moving forward, you will see IBM Spectrum Protect, which used to be called TSM in the I in the mainframe workloads. So that's still there in the mainframe workloads and Netbackup, which is now owned by Cohesity. So Cohesity that backup has a huge enterprise base. Uh, and we are watching three things happen with that base. Some of those customers love the product and are staying with it. Some are switching to Cohesity Data Protect because both products are owned by Cohesity, and some are switching to Veeam to Rubrik or to Commvault. But when you really say where, if I project three, four, five years down the road, you walk in a most fortune, or let's say S&P five zero zero zero type accounts or S&P five hundred type accounts. What are you going to see? You're going to see Veeam, Commvault, Cohesity and Rubrik. The other big shift though is and I think Rubrik started this. And you see now with Veeam's acquisition, a very large acquisition of a security company, etc., Commvault continues to add more security. Everybody is is brought security into data protection and they're merging. And why? First of all, all of these backup apps have agents on all the servers. They can do more than just data protection. And secondly, what are you really trying to protect your data? So at the end of the day, those two should have merged long ago. But but it's happening now. And so you see all of those companies coming forward with very strong data protection, data resiliency, data recovery stories, and at the same time, strong cybersecurity stories.

00:21:46 Antony Savvas: Yeah, that's, uh, that's a very good point about that. I mean, we've, we've seen the, uh, the, uh, the portfolios on the security side wider and wider and wider. And it's something we're doing as well, which we hear about later. But, uh, Neil, you wanted to come back in with a question.

00:22:01 Neil Hughes: Yeah. A question for Mark here with twenty five minutes into a tech show without mentioning AI, which is almost against the law now. So we need to change that. I mean, we hear a lot about AI. It's dominating all the news feeds, but there's also a lot of providers making big promises, a lot of keynotes at tech events this year, especially when it comes to bundling AI into their solutions as almost an afterthought. But are there any impending AI moves by Exagrid on the horizon? Anything you can share with us?

00:22:30 Mark Crespi: Yeah, I'll defer Bill on impending, but I do want to draw some attention to the AI move we've already made, um, AI powered, um, retention time lock with auto detecting guard is actually an exceptionally important feature for our customers because we know that attackers are now attacking the backups. First, they realize that if they don't get rid of the backups, the customer will be able to recover and the ransom will not be paid. Um, and it just doesn't make any sense to not go after the last line of defense first so that you can actually have a successful attack. So having, um, bringing AI into a very pragmatic use by having it literally learn the data patterns that naturally occur during a backup rotation, because deletion and backup is not uncommon as data reaches your retention time time threshold, you retire it. That's a delete. So there's going to be normal delete operations that occur all the time. And without AI, it's very difficult to detect when those are not normal. So by having an AI LLM built right into the Exagrid that learns the normal patterns and can recognize when a pattern is abnormal and then extend the deletion prevention, the delayed delete um parameter Indefinitely until that customer has a chance to react is very, very important. It may often be the first notification in the environment that an attack is underway. So I think for us in the broader, you know, scope of AI is how do we bring AI pragmatically into this data protection, um, realm and use it pragmatically for things like AI powered detect guard and you want to touch on things down the road.

00:24:12 Bill Andrews: Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to try some two things. One is we built a neural network into the product. So this is just not an AI feature standing by itself. We now have a neural network built into the product. So we can add additional AI features as we go forward. Um, you know, Mark was talking about that abnormal delete. All of a sudden you're doing your weekly backups and you've got one hundred terabyte and it's, it's compressed and deduplicated. It's coming in at maybe, you know, thirty terabyte or whatever. And every week you're purging that out. So a thirty terabyte purge a week is kind of normal. You're doing other cleanups, you're doing other things, and then all of a sudden you see a request to to wipe out everything, right? You see a request for one hundred terabyte, excuse me, you know, one hundred terabyte delete. And you know, wait a minute, that's way outside the world. So what's going on here? And you immediately alert and you immediately start auto extending the the delayed delete policy. Imagine something else. That's one way to detect. There's another way to detect and and so I'll tell you that I'll tip I'll tip a little bit of future here down the road. No dates or anything. But let's say this. I know you guys love this. So I'm giving you one. So, um, the, the magic that all of a sudden all the data on the primary storage is encrypted by the threat actor. And now the backup app is picking up encryption and it's coming into the backup storage. What does that tell you? Why all of a sudden is all the data encrypted at once again? Hey, shut everything down. You're under attack. Or reverse that they come and they go after the backup storage and instead of deleting it, they encrypt it. So again, the primary, the primary storage behind the backup app or the data domains or the landing zone all of a sudden is encrypted and you detect, hey, somebody encrypting all the data here on the landing zone. It's either being sent to me by the backup app from the primary storage encrypted. That's another telltale sign something is going on, and I'll just leave that to wet to wet your whistle.

00:26:13 Speaker 6: Oh, this is when I want you to.

00:26:15 Antony Savvas: Continue, Bill. Anyway, um. Um. Neil, do you want to come back there? Did that wet your whistle? Have you got what you wanted there? You want to say something about that?

00:26:24 Neil Hughes: It really did. And a question I'd love to ask maybe bring more back in on this. And from the conversations that you're having and where we're heading, how much autonomy are customers comfortably giving AI in backup security? Because I think detecting suspicious, suspicious behavior is one thing, but our customers ready for systems to take protective action automatically when their recovery data could be under attack. Are you having those those kind of conversations or are people asking for this as well?

00:26:50 Mark Crespi: I, I thanks for the question. I think like everything else with AI, people are taking a cautiously optimistic look at these types of things. Um, there still seems to be a fear of it running amok. Right? So I, again, I think the challenge that customers face with all of this is they hear, um, AI mentioned in every single conversation, but they're looking for pragmatic, safely governed use cases for AI. Um, there's as much fear as there is optimism about AI running amok. There was an article that was released last night about one AI company autonomously, um, attacking another AI company. You know, it's, I think they're looking for pragmatic, safe, highly governed use cases. And it's great that a lot of our ecosystem partners are doing that in the backup software. And, you know, we'll continue to deliver things, um, in our lane that are pragmatic and governed like that.

00:27:45 Bill Andrews: If you look at beam's latest acquisition, right. And you may want to talk to them and, and do a do a session with them, you know, they're looking at the agent itself and saying, how do you know that's an authorized agent or an unauthorized AI agent?

00:27:59 Speaker 6: Yeah.

00:28:00 Bill Andrews: You're giving it a lot of power. You're giving it a power to check things, look at things, read things, you know, just all kinds of power move things, right? Is this real? Is this person real? Is this or is this person got a fake ID, you know?

00:28:14 Speaker 6: Right.

00:28:14 Antony Savvas: Um, what else would you both like to leave our audience with regarding how end users should approach backup data protection and management right now? I'll start with you, Bill.

00:28:25 Bill Andrews: So I think first of all, you've got to find the backup application that meets your workload, right? You have Kerberos, you have containers, you have, you know, databases, you have unstructured data, you have objects, you have blocks, you have files, right? So you've got to look and say, who's going to handle it? You might have still some, you know, Solaris and X servers. You might have some mainframe data, right? You've got to first make sure you list all the types of data you have, all the types of systems you have, and say, who can handle that the best? That's the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is who's got, you know, the security you need data is the is the treasure. Without your data, you can't run your corporation, right? Data is it? This is what it's all about. And so who can handle that? Uh, also who can handle the data growth, right? Everybody's data is, you know, exponentially growing. So who can handle that data growth when it comes to the storage? I think the days of just saying, I'm going to take what I use on the primary side and whip it hot behind my backup app. Why we're growing so quickly is customers are realizing you can't do that, right? That you have to do similarly, what are all the requirements? And, and people traditionally have not done requirements for the backup storage. They've just said, hey, I'll take some primary storage and put it behind there. What the heck? It's just storage. Now they're starting to talk about backup performance. Shorter backup windows restore performance to keep users productivity up. Uh, security and ransomware security keeping backup windows short through scalability. Right. Uh, you know, management of data growth again, so they're starting to create requirements also when they look at their backup storage.

00:29:58 Antony Savvas: Mark, did you want to come in there, mop up a little bit for us?

00:30:02 Mark Crespi: I would so bill covered a lot of stuff. So I'm going to focus on one area. Um, you know, he covered performance security and a number of things. One thing is, is don't view, um, your, your backup storage purchases is just a transaction, view it as an economic lifecycle. Look at, you know, yes, of course, what it costs up front. Um, can you save some money from what you were previously doing and so on. But the vendors should be able to help you project what it's going to cost in year two, year three, year four, year five. And there's going to be a couple of elements to that. Architecturally. Does the architecture lend itself to delivering lower, lower costs over time? Vet that out. Um, does the vendor's policies around maintenance and support and end of life and obsolescence. Does that meet your economic requirements? It's not a point in time transaction because once you buy it, you're stuck with its economic life cycle. So you should know that as soon as you put that storage in behind your backup software.

00:30:59 Antony Savvas: That's great. Yeah. Um, well, thanks for that Bill and Mark, and we hope we've generated plenty of interest among our audience. It just remains to say goodbye. Um, thanks for being here, Bill and Mark once again. And it's goodbye from me until our next across the tech pond very, very soon. Bill.

00:31:17 Bill Andrews: Thank you for having us. This was great. We always have fun with you guys.

00:31:20 Speaker 6: Yes.

00:31:22 Mark Crespi: Same. Thank you very much. And I look forward to seeing you guys in person. Maybe next World Cup.

00:31:26 Speaker 6: Oh oh.

00:31:29 Antony Savvas: We don't think we can take the pain anymore. Neil.

00:31:32 Neil Hughes: I would just like to thank everyone watching and listening. Remember, you can subscribe on Spotify, Apple podcast, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, the three of us are at all the big tech events. So if you're going to be going to any of those this year, please stop by and say a big hello. But a big thank you to both you, Bill and Mark, especially for leaving us that teaser. You're always leaving us wanting more, so we're looking forward to catching up later in the year.

00:31:56 Speaker 6: David.

00:31:58 David Marshall: Yeah. Bill and Mark, thank you both for taking time to talk with us today. As always, this has been a great conversation with the two of you, and it's clear Exagrid has a lot of really great momentum going on right now. So we appreciate you sharing your insights with us. And I want to thank everyone who's watching and listening at home right now. Uh, we hope you enjoyed this episode of Across the Pond. And finally, if you're a company that's watched this and thought, hey, we'd love to do something like this to reach out to any one of the three of us hosting the show, myself, Anthony or Neil, and we'll make it happen. And you can get your story in front of this fantastic audience as well.