Our charismatic host, Todd Maxwell, with almost 20 years of experience in the data storage market, delves into the world of data storage solutions. Learn about key trends, technologies, and best practices for overcoming data storage challenges and optimizing data storage systems, including insights on different architectures, hardware types, and enterprise data management. Whether you’re an IT professional or simply curious about the evolving data landscape, this podcast offers valuable insights to keep you ahead of the competition.
Episode 1 – Welcome to Open-E
In the first episode, our host, Todd Maxwell, introduces Open-E in-depth, its mission, and the core values that drive its data storage solutions. He discusses the company’s journey in the tech industry, the challenges we’ve faced, and how we’ve positioned ourselves in enterprise data storage and data management solutions. Tune in to learn about Open-E experts’ approach to innovation, client relationships, and our vision for the future of data storage technologies.
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or read the transcript:
Well, hello, everyone! We finally got our first podcast show going! I mean, it took a lot of time because there were a lot of projects we were working on, and I just finally got the time to start working on these. Some of you are new, some of you have been around and know me very well. My name is Todd Maxwell, and I’ve been with Open-E for over 18 years. I do a lot with the company – everything from support to the pre-sales, post-sales, demos, and there’s a lot more! But forget about that.
I wanted to talk about the first podcast show. Even though there’s a lot of technical topics we’re going to go over in the future, especially with features and options, ideas, cool products, things of that nature… But the first one I wanted to really inform everybody how did Open-E start and who are the cast and crew who make up Open-E? So, let’s just begin!
Open-E started years ago, back actually in the 90s, with Kristoff Franek, who is the CEO still to this day, and Janus Bak, who is the CTO still to this day. And they were selling RAID controllers back in Europe in the 90s, and they grew it to number one. Then they started to think, you know: Hey, what if we made a software package that provides a GUI front end with the NAS functions to access shares and more? In the beginning, it didn’t go well, and they worked very hard to improve everything as they got feedback from their customers and resellers. Once they got it off the ground – they pushed further. Keep in mind they were working on their other day jobs to keep the income flowing while basically building this out of the garage! It grew, and they brought in Mirek Franek, Chris’s brother, who is a deep coder. So, with Janus as the product designer, plus many other talents with hardware and Mirek, who compiled the codes and sources, then Kristoff was able to hit the streets all over Europe to build the sales.
After a couple of years of doing this, it finally grew, and in 2008, they had interest with investors and were awarded a big chunk of change. Open-E stayed the course over the many hard years during the 2008/9 crisis. If you all remember the recession back then and the 2011 and 2012 during the RAM crisis due to the floods that manufactured the RAM. And everybody was hit back then. So it was a big setback for a lot of resellers that were system builders. It was a hard time.
In 2015, we launched our ZFS product, and this was a big change from our XFS file system from the other products that we had that used the RAID controllers. The new ZFS product called Open-E JovianDSS is used without RAID controllers. Though you can use a RAID controller in very rare instances, but normally, you want to use it without because of better performance, self-healing, rebuild is faster, and so on. At first, our resellers, some of them, were apprehensive to go with ZFS, while others embraced it as the new future! Eventually, over the years the others followed as well, and now it’s number one in 100% of our sales worldwide!
By 2020, we had reached over 90 countries worldwide in sales through our distributors, resellers, and end users, with over 80,000 installations worldwide! Not bad for a three guys startup! In 2021, Kristoff, Janus, and Mirek had made their final payment back to the investors. It served its purpose, they had to purchase it back as it was just not 100% theirs. Many of us have heard about these stories where the company is taken back to the original owners 100% so they can get that ship sailed correctly on their own. Without any other disruptions or other input as they might know the industry quite well. And isn’t that true with so many things in life where those owners take back the company, and next thing you know – BOOM – they take off and sales, and growth, and market, everything! So that’s just, you know, one of the things that are impressive about Open-E and its team.
During the years, Open-E has won awards for helping satisfy customers and supporting our resellers in ways to grow and expand their businesses, especially through our marketing team. We have an outstanding marketing team, and it took years to build it, but now we have it, and it’s helping our resellers all over the world to grow and help them grow, as well as to come up with new concepts and ideas. In the past, I did the training with Janus, which is called the Open-E Certified Engineer Course, and I was traveling all over Europe, the USA to our resellers and VIP customers which I believe help Open-E grow as well and connect with his customers.
Now, here’s a unique thing that you don’t hear too much. Many of our developers and support teams, and other divisions of the company have been with Open-E for over 15 years. For me it’s like I said – it’s been over 18 years, and just feels like a couple of years so far. I believe this is worth mentioning, and I think it’s important to know this because it tells you a lot about the company that not only do we work for but the product you’re buying from. So everything is developed in-house, there are no outside contractors, all support engineers are in-house including the 24×7 support. Open-E believes in keeping its employees and not renting them. It’s it’s like a family! I know it’s a cliche to say, but it’s true, and not too many companies in today’s world are like this. Typically, for example, CEOs and CTOs, developers, supports, and they go in and out of different companies, and this is so frequent. Also even with investors, you know, over a course of time, a company can have two or three capital infusions. I’ve seen up to five and six – it’s crazy, but it’s what it is in today’s world! But not Open-E! Our philosophy is a little bit different. We have a lot of new things coming in with Jovian, other things that are close to Jovian, that are coming in the future. So you might want to drop in once in a while to check out, especially on our website, to see what new features and options are coming.
By the way! Looking for speed – try the Mellanox 100GB! There are other products that they sell, I tell you – it’s a good product to have! We – engineers, the support team, developers – we love working with these products! There are other great products I like to plug in once in a while. A product that I think deserves some mentioning, especially with the connectX-6 and the connectX-7, the I/Os are really good, so check them out – Melanox. And they’re also in our hardware certification list.
All right, I got to end this because I got cases to work on! Remember, guys to back up no matter what! Ask yourselves: how fast can you restore that data? Right? It’s a different genre if you think about it! All right, now go out and fix something like a real engineer!
See ya!
