Transcript
Hi Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data and I'm here today talking with one of the most well known and well loved, uh, packages for storage that you can get your hands on for free, but you can also get it, uh, you know, supported way. I'm talking about Truenas and freenas and some of the historical variants thereof. Just hold on a second. We've got Ixsystems here with us to explain what's going on. Hey. Welcome, Mario. Welcome back to our show today. Love being with you Mike. Thanks for the getting together. All right. Ics systems is the, uh, the the packager and practitioner of Truenas and Freenas. Could you just run down for the audience the the 25 word elevator pitch of I exist? Yeah. Ics systems were the company behind Truenas, the world's most deployed starch storage software. Um, open source, so free to use forever. And, um, to help us with our passion of creating this free software and spreading it around the world. We sell appliances that are very highly rated. And, uh, as the Truenas community grows, so does uh ICS systems to help support bringing true data freedom to everybody. All right. So got the free got the free file system. We'll tell you how to download it at the end of this. Uh, and if you want it on a rock solid platform, they can actually come to you and get that, uh, by the guys who actually built it. So that's awesome stuff. Awesome stuff. Uh, and, uh, you know what we're going to talk about today? We've got a couple things we could talk about, but let's talk about, uh, what's on a lot of people's minds, which is, uh, you know, VMware and the Broadcom acquisition and all the odds that that's causing folks, and I won't I'm not going to say, you know, flight from VMware. But we have already noted, you know weekly the erosion of a lot of things, the increased licensing costs uh, alternatives coming out and, and you being, uh, coming from that open source perspective, what are you seeing in the market, uh, going on as people react to what Broadcom is doing. Yeah. Uh, you may remember, Mike that I uh at brocade uh know Broadcom and that whole thing really really well. And a lot of customers just know that that's how the game is played. Right. There comes a time where um technology is somewhat abundant. But in order for it to remain super profitable, well then business models like Broadcom's are are the way they are. You can think of it as almost being flipped upside down where we're, uh, using, uh, the world to, to essentially be the QA lab for, uh, what is software that's available for free. And then that gets hard enough to be able to, uh, commit to great SLAs with enterprise customers. And what we found here is, is that our audience and we did a poll, uh, more than 700 respondents, they came back and 80 over 20 rule, approximately 20% of them says, you know what, I'm sticking with VMware. And I might argue that's probably a little bit low in the sense that I think emotionally people are going to go out and look for their alternatives. But odds are a lot people are going to a lot more people are going to stay with that. And so Truenas isn't a, uh, compute platform. I mean, we can, uh, we can run containers on Truenas scalar, our technology. But generally speaking, it's not meant to be for that. And our poll essentially showed that it was KVM based hypervisors that people are evaluating and testing the most. And, um, I think, uh, that folks are going to need to save some money to afford their VMware bill because they should pay for it. There's value there. And we just want to let folks know that, uh, there are other infrastructure options that are lower cost to include trying it and testing it for free with Truth in IT. Right. So so people are no doubt looking at for a plan B at some point here, even if they're thinking they're going to stick with their VMware footprint or downsize or VMware or, or just hold it steady and start to explore other things which which the most, most people I talk to are sort of in that camp, you know, there's like it's like they can't really realistically dump their VMware footprint this year, but they're starting to say, like, maybe if we got that new project or we're looking at these other things or that and maybe we just don't need things like vSAN anymore and we can we can get rid of that. And, you know, look at look at some storage alternatives. Uh, we're doing that. So, uh, tell me, tell me a little bit about, uh, you know, the sort of the history of truenas in the virtualization environments. Does it work? Are lots of people using it that way in the past, historically? I mean, is it a is it a viable enterprise grade solution? Yeah. Um, well, I just I think virtualization aside, whether or not Truenas is viable, it's something that, uh, I when I worked for commercial proprietary companies, I would say, hey, this is the only thing that you can trust. Second score or the 21st century. Now, um, I as a marketer, it's kind of fun. I don't need to actually market anything. I just can just show the actual social proof. So the online reviews that we have, uh, with that are higher in rating and higher in number than a lot of the other vendors are just proving that it can work. And really, what I think the the question is, is more of a strategic one in that with demand down or demand up, obviously I causing us to need even more storage than this budgets, you know, flat and pricing. It's well known prices have to go up. We ourselves have told customers, while we are generally much less expensive than everybody else. So our prices are going up because the price of flash is going. Up. Right? So, um, it's my view that, uh, and a lot of times it comes down to sociology or at least people things. Right. There's this ideology that folks have. And I think what we're starting to see is more and more people embrace the open stuff, not because it's open, but because it's kind of the way it people work nowadays. You download stuff, you test it, you put the solutions together and QA it and such. And so I think we're seeing a little bit more of that activity, particularly in departments of larger organizations, where I think you'd say is where a lot of the I don't want to call it innovation, but people who have to solve a problem with it for less money go about doing it, uh, that way. And um, so yeah, I. Clearly virtualization is something that's going to continue to exist and we see almost storage playing more of a platform role so that any application, wherever the workload moves is where you want your storage to be. And we just know that something's got to change in order for you to store more for the same amount of money. Right. And it's not like they're going to make less data. And we've seen other workloads coming along, you know, hot topic, right? Ai workloads everyone needs now billions of node size models. And it's, you know, 30GB here and two terabytes there. And we've got to have it on Near-line flash in order to use it properly and stuff. So yeah, big topic. Um, definitely definitely. Storage is growing. Storage footprint is going to grow whatever this. So you're in a good place there. Uh, how do how do you, how do you talk to people who have who say like, well, I have these hot needs for these high end workloads. Uh, does does Truth in IT fit that or is is how should people think about truenas when they're looking at that? Yeah. Architecture. I got a split brain. One of the fun parts of this job is that, um, we fund our passion project for this open source thing by selling hardware. So just truenas independent of, um, the hardware that we sell. Um, we have examples of, uh, universities doing crazy stuff at the high end. And generally speaking, a lot of folks can get access to the same underlying commodity, off the shelf hardware models that are almost exactly the same as the storage appliances themselves. And we're not opposed to that. We love more people to come to us and buy our turnkey stuff. Uh, but, um, what we're seeing in terms of just the the flash stuff is that the speed in which things happen may not necessarily be tied in some of these workloads to the actual storage. And oftentimes people say, well, Truenas can't do that. Well, a lot of there's software and hardware depends on what hardware you're running it on. And uh, an example, we just released, uh, in late last year, our first, uh, highly available dual controller, uh, all NVMe Gen four box. So people would say is, okay, well, are you going after that high end? No. Uh, what we're saying is there's tool there if if you have, uh, if you're if you consider the infrastructure to be more like a tool to accomplish what you need to, to get done, um, we're seeing people, um, looking for ways because they have to find more creative ways to fund some of these things where, um, we. Where we have platforms that we've offered. But at the end of the day, most of our users are going to be taking some of the stuff that they already have. So what we're finding is like it's more collecting the stuff that no one's using rather than buying something new. And so amongst the the customers who are amongst the users of Truenas, in fact, most of them use stuff lying around. But we have a healthy set of people who just like to buy their own hardware. And their role in the industry, at least for us, is that they're proving out some of these use cases with smoking, uh, hot flash, uh, sort of things all commodity off the shelf. And we can look at those. And it's part of how our community works. When we can see somebody's been successful, we can now go tell everybody else that they can buy our hardware and be just as successful. We test and validate it. All right. So for that so in particular like that that I need everyone's talking about you've got some all SSD appliances which sound like they could perform pretty well. We weren't going to get to the tech specs here. Uh, but you've got a community that's also kicking the tires and using this all over the place for workloads such as that, because it is the thing that's available to research labs. And anybody who wants to wants to grow, grow a NAS thing, which is which is pretty interesting. Uh, how many, how many people, how many people do you, you know, are using truenas, by the way, how big how big is that community effort? Yeah, I think our, our vanity metric that we said, um, in our latest thing was we've had 15 million downloads. And of course, downloads can be be deceiving. I think a better way that I think of that is our own community engagement. So, um, we get in the neighborhood of, um, six 700,000 downloads per year, and that's been growing steadily what we found in our forums. And it's one that we weren't expecting to get so much engagement around VMware when we asked the question, the alternatives, um, we, uh, found that, uh, by asking the community that question, we we saw a lot of engagement. So I said, great, let's go. Historically, look at how engagement has been, uh, been going. And what we found is that we were doing about 800,000, uh, engagements per month on our forums in 2021, 2022. Flirting with the million mark 2023, where you'll probably see us clock in at close to 1.5. And we're just seeing an acceleration, especially this quarter, of people who are out looking for those things. And that's to to me, I like to tell the industry that because I'm hoping it gives other people permission for themselves just to go look at it. Because you mentioned Mike, there's nothing there. There's no harm in trying it. And if you're lucky, you don't. You're not forced to go with the contingency plan. Right. But I think we're seeing a lot of people actually building contingency plans about shifting some of these applications because, you know, they have to do something. And, um, yeah, we're hoping that, uh, more people can collaborate there and find ways to use it for free. All right. So just maybe let's sort of wrapping up question then. You know, we've talked about VMware. We're talking about Broadcom plan B for you know what you might want to do with your VMware footprint. Um you're seeing a lot of pickup there. Let's just say just finish with this like perspective on open source. Are you seeing people more acceptable or amenable to open source at that enterprise level now than than at any time in the past? Because that's kind of looks like what we're hearing. Or is it even a thing anymore? Do people even say, hey, is this open source or commercial or do they just it works. It's trusted. That's yeah. You know, we look at it. Well, I think maybe not unlike society, maybe the vocal minority might, um, change what our overall perception might be on it. At the end of the day, I do believe, and this is the main question we hope to answer, uh, for our commercial business is how we can help you feel more comfortable using an open source product. And I think. The people who make decisions these days. They they use lots of open technologies already. So I think the stigma that it's just open, given that we've gone from, you know, the people in charge today, I think are cool with open source. And frankly, I don't think people care one way or another. They just want to know that it works. They've got the SLAs and that someone's going to be there to help them when it breaks. And I think that's the thing where they think, well, an open company may not be able to do that, but, uh, I mean, for example, we just, uh, cracked the $100 million revenue, uh, or, um, bookings. Um, uh, Mark two years ago and we're growing there. We, uh, we've got a net promoter score in the 80s, which means we're probably doing an okay job as far as that goes. And I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing us get more vocal. If at the end of the day, it's not about, um, open or closed or free or proprietary or any of that, I think it's practical ways that you can, as an IT organization, serve your customers. And I'm telling you, no one's coming with money these days. They're coming with demands and not a lot of budget behind it. And we know that, uh, if you deploy, uh truenas, uh, in place of another one, they both work darn near the same. Like a lot of things. You're, uh, you're probably getting to the grocery store just as fast, whether you're in a Tesla or a a Toyota Corolla. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, yeah. So I guess I guess we'll just summarize that. So open source might not be the criteria anymore, just on its own. Uh, although some people might be thinking, look, what happens when I bought into those enterprise licenses and got stuck, right? I'm not going to be the guy who's going to fight it. I will say, though, like, if you want to, uh, save money to afford your VMware license, you can buy open storage, which costs less, and if they both work the same, hey, that's an answer, um, to it too. But yeah, we live we live in interesting times. And I think that, uh, this is a fun time to be in the information age because, uh, the there's just the growth is going to continue to happen and how we, how we, uh, address that is going to take some new ideas. And, um, I'm hoping that our community can come forward and continue to share with everybody else on how they're solving it. Um, because we tend to think of everything as a competition. But, uh, you know, uh, we're actually all trying to do the same thing. All right, all right, uh, if someone wants to learn a little bit more Mario about, uh, truenas. Maybe downloaded, like, millions of other people have, uh, what would you what would you suggest they go and start with? Yeah. Real simple. Go to Truenas dotcom. If you're wanting to look at our community editions, you can go to uh, uh, click there from the website. Or you can go to Truenas comm slash compare. And it'll compare the things for Truenas that they're most of our users just go uh, to downloading and trying the Linux based version. Historically, we've had a FreeBSD based version. We got Linux two, the Linux one works awesome. We just had our, uh, third, uh, the first major release of the third, uh, edition of that software. So it's looking good. Thanks as always, Mike, for, uh, for for the chat. And anybody who wants to try Truenas, we invite you to visit the website. All right. Thank you so much for being here today, Mario. Keep us up. Keep us up to date. Appreciate it. Mike. Thank you. All right. Thanks. Cheers. Bye.
