How To Simplify Storage, Virtualization, And Recovery At Scale

[00:00:00] My guest today is the founder and CEO at Euronass. We recently met in Amsterdam as part of the IT Press Tour, and over the last 20 years, he has grown the company from NAS for the masses into a platform that aims to simplify hyper-converged virtualization.

[00:00:20] From SAF-based scale-out storage and instant backup and recovery for real-world teams that don't have a bench of Linux wizards on call. And today, I want to get into the customer pressure that has pushed Euronass beyond basic file services, and why many organizations are planning a path away from VMware, and how VM Import Wizard is lowering the switching cost without any dramas.

[00:00:48] And he will also explain how the GUI-driven SAF can actually cut setup times from a week to minutes, and why instant recovery changes, and how instant recovery changes how admins approach everything from patches to updates, and how a perpetual node model restores predictability, especially at a time where budgets are increasingly tight.

[00:01:13] And he'll also share how he still handles some of the support calls, and what this loop does for product quality, and where he sees the biggest opportunities, especially as AI workloads demand huge resilient storage. We're going to get our geek on today, so one for the techies, but it's a topic of increasing importance. So enough for me. Let me introduce you to my guest now. So thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

[00:01:43] We first met on the IT press tour in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago, but for people hearing about you for the first time, just tell me a little about who you are and what you do. So basically, we're Euronass. We are based in Germany, and even if the name mentions Nass, that's nowadays just a small part of our product portfolio.

[00:02:07] So basically, we are trying to make storage and virtualization as simple as possible for the normal standard user, because standard system administrator, his job should be dealing with the applications they have in their own environment, not so much how to deal with the storage or how to handle the virtualization. So that was our main goal. And we're on the market since 20 years, and over time, we've been constantly growing our portfolio.

[00:02:37] So from Nass up to hyper-converged or scale-out storage. And 20 years in this game is like a lifetime in many other industries. And as you said, you founded Euronass back in 2005, originally naming for Nass for the masses, which is a great line there. But how did that early vision, how did that evolve into the enterprise-focused portfolio that you have today? And what lessons did you also learn from your time at AMD and AdaptTech?

[00:03:06] How did that help shape the company and what you're delivering today? So, well, basically, when we started it, our idea was let's make things simple. And they are still simple, but it turned out that people especially need simple solutions for complex stuff. So it turned out that most of our customers were having issues with the complex technologies, and they needed them to be translated into a simple way to use them.

[00:03:35] And this is where we were kind of pushed by our customers to develop more and more and more what we actually didn't even want at the beginning. But, of course, it's nice to be in that position. So this helped us a lot. And when we talk about AMD or AdaptTech, one thing we learned was there are two things actually we learned. First of all, I'm a hardware guy who coincidentally ended up to have a software company.

[00:04:02] And this is actually a great thing because most of the software manufacturers don't have a relation to hardware. And especially if you are providing operating systems, as we do, you really need to understand the hardware as well. So if you work for the CPU manufacturer, you know exactly how CPU, motherboards, all these bus lanes, everything works. At the same time, if you work for AdaptTech, who is really very good in providing rate controller solutions, storage solutions, you learn a lot about the storage.

[00:04:32] So it helps us a lot. And the other thing that we learned from it was how not to treat the customer. Because if you're one huge corporation, the customer for them is just a number. So you're just getting some number and you're pulling tickets. And especially in an enterprise environment, people need someone they can trust because their whole environment depends on it. So they can't afford any downtime or anything. If something happens, they need someone to call and not pull the number and wait.

[00:05:03] And a couple of months ago, I think it was in August, I went to VMware Explorer in Vegas. There's a lot of talking from small to medium-sized businesses with the license increase. They were moving. And when I was talking to you in Germany, you were very direct in Amsterdam. You were very direct in saying that nobody is moving away from VMware because they want to. It's because they have to. So I'm curious, from what you're seeing here, how are customers approaching that transition?

[00:05:31] And what does your VM import wizard play in maybe lowering the barrier to exit? Because it's a big talking point at the moment, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not a live marriage with us. I mean, we need to be honest. I mean, sure, we have a very extensive feature set. We cover most of the things that VMware does. And we are even much better in certain things. But, you know, the people are not buying it because really of the features. They trust VMware.

[00:05:59] VMware is someone who has been there for decades and everybody likes them. The problem is that they feel blackmailed, more or less. So we are noticing customers who really don't feel very comfortable with it. And also you have some budget-driven institutions. So let's say you are some governmental institution and the ruling party changes every four years. So let's say you are buying a subscription for five years.

[00:06:28] You don't know which politician will be on power in the next five years. So at the end of the day, you will end up with your subscription expiring and your servers going down. So this is really something. But on the other hand, they're very afraid of switching to something else because we need to gain their trust. So what we provide is a free support and consultancy. So before they even switch to their environment, they will get full support from us.

[00:06:57] We'll have them in transition phase. Also, we have a VMware wizard, well, VM import wizard that will help them import the virtual machines with a few clicks. So we will automatically inject the drivers. We will create the virtual machine. They just need to point to the VM and import it. So this helps a lot. And usually what they are doing is they're running it in parallel for a few months. And then when they feel comfortable, they will switch to us. So that's the most common way.

[00:07:27] And one of the things that I love about your story and the journey that you've been on is when I was doing a little research, when you look from, I don't know, HA clusters to EVOS, your journey has always been one of adding capabilities that the customers almost push you towards. So what product milestone do you see as most transformative for your own house when you look back at that journey of being on? Yeah, I think there are two products.

[00:07:53] I would say EVOS is the hyper-converged virtualization because it combines everything we have from the storage and from virtualization perspective. But I think the biggest one and most, the greatest milestone or should I say it, is I think adding SAF functionality. Because this has catapulted us into a completely different environment. Where, for example, VMware vSAN.

[00:08:20] It's very difficult to replace vSAN environment for VMware customers. We can do this with SF. So basically they will get the same behavior they used to with vSAN. But of course at much lower cost. The other thing which is really even more growing, it's my impression, is the storage part. Because there's a huge demand on huge petabyte scale-out storage on the market.

[00:08:50] So you have, and you need, and also they need it manageable. Because the SF as such is a highly complex product. So many people are avoiding it because of its complexity. And by us adding this simplicity into it, we are really approaching also customers who would usually not even dare to touch SF in the past. For example, I just had a discussion with one university yesterday.

[00:09:16] Where they were just having 10 petabytes storage attached to a single server. Because they wouldn't dare to scale out or to do anything with it. So we are helping them now to extend the storage to have it on three different sites at the same time. And also to scale out as much as they like. So it's really, for me as a technician, it's really a nice thing we could have done. So yeah, absolutely.

[00:09:45] And when I met you in Amsterdam, you shared the story of a dentist who lost a day's work waiting for a VM restore. So can you tell me a bit more about how instant backup and recovery, how that changes that experience? And also why you think backup has become such a big differentiator for your platform. Because a big talking point right now, there's a lot, I think a lot of people have been through similar nightmarish stories. But tell me more about that. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:10:13] I mean, this is really one of the features that I'm most proud of. Is basically the problem with system administrators is if something happens, of course, everybody does backup. But the problem is that usually the backup takes ages to recover. So this dentist that I mentioned, it was a great example for it. They had like one terabyte or two terabyte. I can't remember anymore. Any longer.

[00:10:38] Two terabyte VM that they needed to restore from scratch over the network. And they had a gigabit line. So it took them hours. And when we saw this, we decided to develop this instant backup and recovery. It was a key point for us to develop it. Because now you can really create the backup within seconds and recover within seconds. And over time, we have also learned that most people don't even need to recover the whole virtual machine.

[00:11:05] They just have some corrupted files or some user deleted a file. Or they have got some corrupt database or similar. So we have added the functionality that you can actually mount these images, backup images immediately, and pull individual files from it. So basically, instead of recovering for hours, you can recover within seconds. And even let's say you have a broken Windows because you performed some Windows update. And surprisingly, it died after that.

[00:11:34] So you can create a backup image of your broken Windows, pull individual files from it, recover the last working version from your instant backup, and just copy the files back. So you can recover even the broken Windows within seconds without really any data loss. So I think this is really changing.

[00:11:56] I'm noticing with our customers, it really changed the way how they work because they are less scared of doing updates, installing patches or something, because they know they can rely on fast recovery. Not only recovery, but fast recovery. It's incredibly cool what you've done here. And I think we're living at a time at the moment where every new tech project is under close scrutiny for the ROI that it delivers,

[00:12:25] the measurable difference and measurable impact that it can deliver as well. And one of the things that stood out from your presentation on the IT press stores, you mentioned cloud providers almost begged you to develop a SAF solution, and that your GUI can now reduce setup time from a week to 20 minutes. That's right, a week to 20 minutes. So how have you simplified, Seth, for enterprises? And what feedback are you hearing from customers running it at a petabyte scale?

[00:12:55] It's breathtaking when you shared that, but tell me more about that. Well, I can maybe start with the story of one MSP we spoke with. And he said, what's your added value with SAF? And I said, well, we provide SAF and everything. He said, well, I have people doing SAF. I have programmers for SAF. Why would I take your product? And I said, okay, how long does it take for them to set up such environment? They said, well, it takes them like five to seven days, depending on how they are doing.

[00:13:25] And I said, yes, with us, you can do it within 20 minutes. So that would be our added value. Sure, I mean, you can set up SAF, but the reality is, how many companies out there really have SAF experts? How many are Linux gurus? And how many really are capable of doing this? And the other thing is, not only to set it up, it's to manage it as well. So it's, how can you set up something and you forget about it after one year?

[00:13:55] You know, it's just running. You don't care about it. And then you return in one year and wondering, what have you put in the command line and now it's not working. So basically our approach is really, everything is GUI driven. So you don't need a command line. You basically just have wizard. So let's say you're setting up the SAF cluster. You just, let's say, let's start with five nodes. You have five nodes. You just start, install it on five systems. Tell to the, one of the systems, the IP addresses of the other nodes.

[00:14:24] And it'll automatically set up the SAF cluster for you. Then if you decide to create the SAF drive, you just click on next, next, next. It'll ask you, what do you wish to use it for? Do you wish to use it as a Samba share? Do you wish to use it as NFS? Do you wish to use it as a block device like iSCSI on NVMe over fiber? Or you can use it as an S3 storage as well. And then depending on it, you will get a wizard with next, next, next. And it sets up everything.

[00:14:53] So no matter how many drives you have, no matter how your environment is, it'll automatically pick up the best options for you. And it'll create it in the background automatically. And really within a few minutes, you have a running SAF cluster with all the bells and whistles. And also one very important part is also the, if you have a standard SAF solution, for example, with S3,

[00:15:19] most SAF solutions are demanding from you to have some sort of high availability DNS server in the background that will try to switch and load balance this whole, you know, S3 request to the storage. From our side, you just select the IP address and we have some sort of high balancing proxy that will automatically balance all the storage requests between the nodes.

[00:15:46] So basically the complexity is reduced by 90%. The same thing with the, if you're setting up the normal SMB storage or ISCASI targets, it's basically the setup looks almost identical to the storage you're used to use. So there's, there's no discord, not this, you don't have a complexity as you would usually have with the SAF. It's like setting up a NAS server, basically.

[00:16:13] You just click on next, next, then you have your network share, you have your users, you have everything. So I think this is really something that helped us a lot and helps a lot to the customers as well. Incredibly cool. And when it comes to things like licensing costs and predictability, I think Broadcom's licensing changes at VMware did leave many customers frustrated, already well documented.

[00:16:40] But when it comes to yourselves at your own house, you've got a perpetual per node licensing model to protect all organizations from these kind of shocks. So tell me more about that and also how you balance that flexibility with predictable revenue for your businesses too. Well, to be honest, I think that it's more, what should I say? Basically, the most customers who have a high availability environment, they don't mind paying support.

[00:17:09] So basically, but they do mind feeling blackmailed. So if, when we are selling a high availability storage, let's say SAF or something, or for example, virtualization, virtualization, we're selling it since nine years. I can't remember any customer who is not willing to extend the support if he can afford it. But it's this affordability or predictability which is important.

[00:17:34] So if they don't feel blackmailed, so if there's really suddenly no budget for it, I mentioned, for example, governmental institutions where they're suddenly, you know, politician changed and they need to, you know, find a way how to get the new budget. So maybe sometimes it takes them for months to, you know, to get this budget or they just have this whole support hole.

[00:17:55] And they really want to have this freedom of their own deciding if they need to support or they don't need it. And it's, like I said, most of the time, it's not about, you know, they don't want to. It's most of the time if they can afford it. And with VMware, this subscription approach is, they really feel it like blackmail. And they are also scared because they don't know what will happen in the future with their company.

[00:18:23] Because it's really still a huge amount of money they need to reserve for every year. And it's not always doable for every company. It's okay if you're some huge company and corporation. But if you're some small community, for example, or even some small office or some small company, it's really difficult to predict, you know, your budget in the next five years.

[00:18:53] And something else that stood out to me from our conversation in Amsterdam is that after 20 years at the helm and in this industry, you said that you still handle some of the support yourself because you want that direct line into development. So tell me more about that, why it's important to you and how you maintain that culture of hands-on support, even as your own ass grows and how important is that approach to ultimately winning and keeping customers?

[00:19:20] Because I love the fact that you're still a techie at heart and you still roll up your slaves and get involved there. Yeah, I mean, I was always a technician and I stayed a technician. We have salespeople, we have marketing people, we have developers. But I feel most comfortable in a support role, which is kind of odd. But it does have its advantages. One of the main advantages is you listen to a customer. So you know exactly how the customer is using the product. This helps you to tell developers how to develop it.

[00:19:49] The whole portfolio that we have and all the features set that we said, it's quite extensive for such a company as ours. And the main reason for this is feedback from the customers. Because in a classical company, you have some tech support guy who escalates something to the developers. And developers don't take it seriously. The tech support guy just forwards it.

[00:20:15] And by me doing this, I have the authority towards everybody in the company. So if I say something needs to be done, then it really needs to be done. So by me poking my nose into the support, I think it makes the product much better. I kind of stopped this like 10 years ago for a few years. And then I realized that the quality of our products and support is fully declining. So I decided to go back to the support because of this.

[00:20:44] And success proved me right. So we have most of our customers are very happy to certify us with us. Yeah, your success certainly has proven you right. And you also have projected potential revenues of 30 to 40 million euros over the next three years. And strong growth driven by VMware alternatives and large set projects, for example.

[00:21:09] So what's your roadmap look like for sustaining a momentum like this? And where do you see Euronass's biggest opportunities over the next five years? Anything you can share around the road ahead? In the past, we would sell typically, let's say, up to five nodes. So let's say you have most customers, you have some smaller companies, you would say, let's say, buy two nodes, then you have like five nodes. Now with the SEF and all these enterprise environments,

[00:21:37] we suddenly have customers who are up to 60 nodes. So basically, we expect our revenue, of course, to grow dramatically because we're selling more. The other thing is we have many corporation partners, like, for example, Seagate. We are doing many projects and we have many such hardware vendors who are also approaching us where we are doing together solutions for their customers. So we are getting bigger from that perspective as well.

[00:22:05] And especially, of course, the VMware will be a really big problem for many customers in the next years. So at the moment, we are noticing that many customers are still buying subscription because they are just too afraid to switch immediately. But all of those customers are already looking for the plan B. So they are already using us in parallel in their environments, not maybe in the most productive environment, sometimes in just secondary environments.

[00:22:33] But I'm noticing that they are all planning to switch to us over the next few years. So completely to switch from VMware to us. And the MSPs that you have mentioned as well. So we really have many MSPs who are really working with us closely to develop tailored solutions for them. And this is, of course, a huge amount. We have some MSPs that are going up to 100 petabytes. Also, what we are noticing is AI development.

[00:23:02] AI needs a lot of storage and a lot of scale-out storage, especially. So we are having some common projects with some AI companies as well to help them build this storage for their solutions. That's exciting. And sometimes even in a combination with our Evos product, which basically, let's put it this way,

[00:23:29] you have a customer who needs to develop some AI. He's working on some AI project. They need storage. So our Evos covers this. We do the safe. And then they need flexibility to run their applications. So what we are doing is they can pass through the GPUs to our virtual machines. So they can run their applications within their virtual machines of our Evos.

[00:23:56] And with instant backup and recovery, for example, it helps them to really develop much faster because they can now backup their AI environment within seconds. You know, kill it for some reason or play with it or patch it. And then if it doesn't work, just roll back the last working version. So it gives them great possibilities to concentrate on their applications and not so much on us.

[00:24:21] So this is where we also see a huge gain in the next years. Exciting times ahead. I wish you the best of luck for the future there. And for anyone listening, maybe they want to find out more information about all things your owner, some of the things that we talked about. Maybe you have some videos somewhere of some demos and things that they can have a little watch. But where's the best starting point for everything? Where should they go? I think it's our website where they can inform themselves.

[00:24:49] Also, what we're offering to our customers is a free demo. So they quite often, well, most of the time, the customer will connect to our system. We will show them how the product works, show it in action. Also tailored to their environment quite often. So let's say if they use VMware, we can show them how to import the virtual machines from VMware or Hyper-V. Also, we advise them on this. We also have a YouTube channel that we're working. It's constant work.

[00:25:17] But we're constantly updating with explanations how the product has been used. And we are also planning to build a blog in the near future. We will be also explaining our technologies, but also general technologies about the stuff we developed, like a Ceph, for example, how to use a Ceph. Because most of the time, the customer is really looking for information on how to use something. He's not even necessarily looking for a product.

[00:25:47] And then they realize that there's a product like this and that they buy it. Awesome. Well, I will add links to everything to make it easy for people to find all the information and links to some of those videos so they can see exactly what it would look like as well. And for anyone listening, I would urge them to contact you, get in touch. But more than anything, just a big thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today, share your story on what is a national holiday in Germany.

[00:26:15] So I appreciate the time that you've taken to speak with me today. So thank you. Yeah, thank you for your time. And giving us opportunity to show our products. I think I've been listening to the story there. I think I personally was struck by how hands-on support culture can steer a roadmap. And how making Ceph usable through wizards and sane defaults, it removes a barrier that kept many teams stuck.

[00:26:41] And the instant backup and file recoveries are the kind of practical wins that move that ROI conversation from slideware to everyday operations. And yes, that licensing debate that we keep reading about this year, it matters. Predictable costs and freedom to choose support on your terms, that could be the difference between a stalling project and moving forward.

[00:27:08] So I'll add links to the YourNAS website where there's also demos and product walkthroughs. And please check out their YouTube channel for a few how-tos. But over to you. Are you actively building a plan B for your virtualization stack? And what would make you confident enough to flip the switch? It's all very well listening to us talk about it on a podcast. But what would make you flip that switch? Or have you already flipped that switch? Please share your experiences and questions with me.

[00:27:38] You can leave an audio message at the website techtalksnetwork.com. And you can also get me on LinkedIn, Instagram, just at Neil C. Hughes. But don't just hit follow or... But don't just hit follow, please. Let me know you've heard today's episode, what you thought, and any questions or insights or views that you would like to share. But that's it for today. So thanks for listening as always.