Brett Kelly Podcast Transcript
Brett Kelly joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Brett Kelly. Brett Kelly is the Head of R&D at 45Drives. He graduated from Dalhousie University with a degree in electrical and computer engineering. Brett has a lifelong interest in all things techie.
He began his engineering career in industrial control systems before joining 45 Drives as an R&D engineer in 2014. Brett hit the ground running at 45 Drives and was vital in the early growth of the company. He contributed to launching the 45 Drives product line, including Stornator, Stornator Hybrid, and the first generation of the All Flash Stornado.
Brett also drove the expansion of 45Drive’s supported software defined solutions such as the adoption and application of Ceph Storage with 45Drive’s hardware. His contributions have been key in 45 Drives achieving industry recognition as leader in SEP expertise. He remains vital to the development of new product development and service offerings.
Brian Thomas: Well, good afternoon, Brett. Welcome to the show.
Brett Kelly: Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: You bet. This is so fun and you’re hailing out of the. Great country of Canada or Nova Scotia. You’re on the far East end of the country. And that’s always fun traversing the globe, but don’t know if we had someone from Nova Scotia on the podcast yet.
So I will have to double check that. Haven’t had a ton of people from Canada, but I’m, I’m just trying to recall. Maybe not, but maybe you’re the first, but I will definitely get plenty.
Brett Kelly: Wouldn’t surprise me we’re, we’re trailblazers out here. Yes, you are.
Brian Thomas: I appreciate that. So, Brett, jumping into the questions, let’s talk about your career as an engineer.
You’ve served in various roles for many years, and now you’re the head of R& D at 45 Drives. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
Brett Kelly: Good question. Well, I don’t know how much of a secret this is. I’m sure a lot of the people you talk to give similar answers, but for me, really, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot of tenacity and determination, both in technical skills and my kind of personal growth.
As you start, you jump in thinking that your working life is just all, especially in my world, bits, bytes, and just technical things, but what The whole human element is a big part of it too. And growing yourself and working with others is a big, big part of that. So, you have to really be ready to push yourself further and what you think you can do.
And I know I did not start my time here at 45 Drives with the sole purpose of, of going ahead of R& D. I really got here to set out a goal to literally. Learn as much as I could and contribute as much as I could to this company and mix in a little bit of good luck, finding a great organization who cares about growing young talent.
And well, here we are today. I’d heard it had R and D. So yeah, I don’t know if there’s any secret sauce to it, but really just when you feel maybe like you’re on the wrong path or you don’t know what you’re doing and say, it’s all right. You keep going, have that tenacity, have that drive. And really kind of what inspires me to keep going on that is, is I just love solving puzzles.
I’ve, I’ve ever since I was a child, I just love to figure out how things work and how to, how to fix something that’s broken. And our, our workplace here gives us a lot of ample opportunity to do that, both, both in the technical side of things and, and the more complex world of, of humans and, and, and that side of things too, so.
That and the impact of what our company’s growth is doing to the area we live. Like you said earlier, you haven’t had anyone on from Nova Scotia because historically hasn’t had a bunch of economic growth and everything like that. So, seeing, being part of something that is growing and, and, and being a positive influence in our area of the world or my area of the world is, is, is really good, really gets me going.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you. And I appreciate you sharing. We love to hear the stories, right? The story, and that’s why we kick off this first question. Cause it’s a, it’s about the guests. It’s not about your product, right? We want to hear more. How you got from point A to point B in your career, point Z for that matter.
So I appreciate that tenacity, curiosity, wanting to get in and help. That’s just awesome. So, Brett, we’re going to switch gears. Let’s talk about your company now a little bit. Your company TAUS being the experts at solving data storage problems by offering affordable, high performance, high-capacity enterprise storage solutions.
For all industries, all size data requirements and software, it’s software agnostic. More importantly, you all pride yourself on your superior technical support team. Can you explain how this winning combination is building a strong brand for 45 drives?
Brett Kelly: Yeah, I’d love to. So 45 drives, like, like well said there, we, we provide enterprise level data storage solutions at affordable, high performance, high capacity, all that great stuff built with good open source powered.
Software defined solutions, and there’s a big draw on the market for that people. People love the flexibility and modularity that that gives you. We saw very quickly in our company’s growth that the personal touch in the enterprise storage world. Was kind of missing, especially when it came to customer service, both in the pre sale and post sale.
The legacy vendors, the legacy way of acting kind of followed all the typical tropes that you’d think of. Like pre-sale was kind of the, they, they promise you the world. And then post sale, if you ever needed technical service help, they’d give it to you, but it kind of left a bad taste in customer’s mouth.
It felt more like they owned you rather than you owned the solution that you bought from them. And through our growth here, we, we realized that, Oh, wow. Having a good personal touch to go along with your great rock-solid solution really put that over the line because face it problems happen, whether it’s user.
Generated or, or whatever things happen. Do you need to have some humans there to help smooth the process all out? Maybe someone doesn’t know what they want to buy. Maybe someone bought something and inherit it from a, from a a merger. And now they’ve got a Ceph cluster living there and they got to talk to the support team saying, does this thing work?
And the more that you can just have a, it almost sounds cheesy to say, but a good time talking to your service people of the company that you’ve bought all this gear from just leaves that lasting warm feeling in everyone’s belly. And they want to come back for more. So, we saw a huge gap there where the whole world was moving.
We’ve seen companies. Move towards the offshoring of technical service or now lately moving to more driven AI driven systems, automated only. If you try to talk to someone and really get some help, sometimes it’s a challenge just to find someone, right? So, removing that personal touch at a service we, we, we saw that as a huge opportunity for us to, to hop right in and, and offer what we offer best.
Just, just a good time and people who really care about giving you the service and attention that you desire deserve.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. We, we, we’ve seen it in the last, gosh, 15 years of offshore technical support, and that’s not worked out very well. In some cases it has, but. But you, you know, the deal, we both been on the receiving end of that, and that’s never fun.
And an AI, conversational AI has not yet been perfected. So it is tough to get to, it’s getting better, but it’s tough to get that personal touch, as you said. So I appreciate that share. So, Brett, talk to us about your Snapshield product and how it’s saving organizations from the ransomware trap that is catching businesses worldwide.
Brett Kelly:. Awesome. Yeah, this is one of our favorite ones to talk about. We are a data storage company first and foremost, and a technical service company along with that as well, too, but we live in an ever. Growing world where you need to be worried of your cybersecurity, your privacy of your data and everything like that, that is truly the lifeblood of, of people in general, but companies in particular, and having your data ransomware locked up by a by a nefarious party is, is killer to a business.
It’s just, it’s very hard to come back from now. This isn’t a new, new concept of protecting against network attacks and cyber security. So there are plenty of tools and, and, and tips and, and security guidelines to follow. And we said, we figured, well, if everything was so 100 percent perfect, well then, Why do we still hear about ransomware attacks?
Because it happens. Because it’s, no protection is perfect. So, what we set, set out to do was, was how can we help? From a data storage company’s point of view, we’re not going to go here and pretend to be cyber security experts, but what can we do to help? Everyone needs to help. You can’t just. Kick that off to the IT team or the cyber security team and say, Hey, just keep everything safe.
We all need to contribute. So, we built Snapshield and what Snapshield is, is a behavioral analysis tool. When I say behavior, I mean, it senses the behavior of ransomware, not necessarily people. A behavior analysis tool that lives on the server or the collection of servers that we sell. And it can sense when a ransomware attack.
Is encrypting data stored on the storage server and it happened. It’s very, very fast at recognizing this because it has a very, very noticeable trait on how it does that. And what we’re able to do is. Find, sever the connection from the machine or the machines that are, that this virus is attacking from, and we sever it from the its network connection from the server.
And therefore, preventing the ransomware attacks from attacking the data. So effectively stopping the attack. But then Using the copy on write file systems, the, the way that we keep snapshot point in time copies of your data for as far back as you want to keep it, we’re then able to know when the attack started, when we stopped it, and then give you a list of all your files that were potentially corrupted in the small amount of time before snapshot.
Pop the fuse and kick them out thus really turning a ransomware attack from like a, Oh man, this could bring the business down for a long time to a kind of just a another day’s job of, of someone opened the wrong email, lose access to their network share. They call it. IT knows already and says, no, you shouldn’t have done that.
Go get a coffee. We’ll clean this up for you. So what Snapshield is, is another detection layer in this, in this, what you should already have as a pretty detailed and full cybersecurity plan for your company. And it, and it, what acts as that last line of defense to snap the snap the fuse open if you will, should anything get through those walls that you have built around your company.
Thank you. I love this. This is
Brian Thomas: near and dear to me as a CIO who’s been through a couple of incidents, right? Because someone did click on a link. It, it, it’s one of those moments. It’s really a pucker factor moment for leaders in the IT organization, of course. So, I just love this product. I can’t say enough about it.
I went, had to go out and read more about it because. This is really, really cool. And this will, again, as you know, security is multilayered, right? You just can’t have, there’s not one solution that fits all. So I appreciate that we can add this to our toolkit and Brett last question of the evening here. We talk about emerging technologies here on this podcast.
I’m a technologist and you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging tech in your tech stack. If you could share with us today, just briefly maybe we can discuss your approach to technology such as SEP clustering and on-premise solutions to solve server zoo.
Brett Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. So, in this ever growing world of let’s put everything off into the cloud for convenience sake, that’ll solve all our problems.
There are some shortcomings to that too, that for various reasons, whether it’s privacy concerns, certain, certain industries cannot have their data on the cloud or have to have it in very specific geographic locations maybe it’s just the ingress, egress cost of having all your storage in the cloud the, the concept of having on premise storage is not going away.
People, people want their storage on site and they want to get that done that way. Now, server zoo is a term that we’ve kind of created here where people who do on prem storage end up just hacking and just hacking and adding more storage servers on when they need it. And, and you kind of grow this unorganized buckets of storage, if you will, like, Oh, that’s the accounting server.
And that’s, that’s the production server. Oh no, it’s on this server over here. And what we. Do here at 45 drives. And what we really want to bring to everyone is this concept that clustering can be for everyone. And clustering in this case is stringing a bunch of storage servers together to act like one big one.
And you get a bunch of advantages out of that. The advantages really are you get some high availability because everything can kind of keep themselves alive. Should anything go down, you get one big unified storage space. So. Things are tightly organized, and you can kind of reclaim the control of your data again by having it on prem, but still having the same kind of functionality that the cloud gives you, and that’s what we do with our Ceph solution, and now Ceph is a open source software defined storage product it’s been mature and used Everywhere in the world.
Now, a lot, a lot, a lot of organizations are using this both internally and as service to offer out and build their business upon. And what he offers is cloud like access into storage. It does S3 storage. When I say S3, it’s. Sounds just like Amazon S3 because it implements the same open protocol as that.
So what we’re, what kind of new emerging technologies we’re using in our tech stack is I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re new and groundbreaking, but it’s this idea of keeping your data on prem. Don’t use that old mantra of just storing everything in old. Single Dell servers and collecting everything into a nice organized cluster using something like Ceph and reclaiming and reowning your data.
Brian Thomas: I love that and I, I do certainly appreciate it. You, you, you all are the experts and I know there’s been a big push the last 15 years to move to the cloud and I think just about everybody now at least. The medium to large businesses are probably 80 percent in the cloud. Now I’ve been looking at some stats and you’re right.
There are certain things that make sense to keep on prem and some things go in the cloud, but I love your offering because. You are the expert in this area when it comes to storage fast storage, and then you start throwing in some really cool innovation, innovative tools like Snapshield on top of that, which helps us all feel better and sleep better at night.
So I appreciate that. And Brett, it was such a pleasure to have you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Brett Kelly: Thanks, Brian. This was a pleasure on my end too. Thank you so much.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Brett Kelly Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
