Max: 00:03 Welcome to the tech deep dive podcast where we let our inner nerd come out and have fun getting into the weeds on all things tech. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. Hi. Max Clark, and I’m here with Holland Barry, who’s the senior vice president of strategic alliances for Sextra. Holland, thank you for joining.Holland: 00:26
Max, thanks for having us. Good to be here.
Max: 00:28 So, Holland, we were we were just chatting a little bit offline, but you have an interesting kind of path into Cyxtera, and that started with an acquisition and landed you in the cybersecurity division with Cyxtera, and and now and then on on demand services, now alliances. Can you kinda give me a little bit of, you know, background of how you, you know, you ended up where you are now and what your path has been?
Holland: 00:50 Yeah. Absolutely. So I’ve been in technology for all of my adult life. I started, in my teenage years, actually. I had to start a little IT consulting company with my older brother.
Holland: 01:00 And gosh, 27 years later, I’m dating myself. Here we are. So, yeah, kind of more recently, I was with a little cybersecurity startup. It was called Capper. We made a hypervisor based security appliance that did a whole host of cool stuff.
Holland: 01:13 Won’t drain our time with with that, but, that was one of the initial companies, that was acquired as part of the formation of Cyxtera back in May of 2017. So I started out on the cyber side with the company and, saw some of the cool stuff that we were working on to modernize the data center, make it feel more like a cloud experience, create an SDN fabric. And then we’re gonna talk about that later. And so, as I was exposed more and more of what’s happening with my my friends over on the data center side of the business, I thought, oh gosh. This would be a nice opportunity to go and help out over there.
Holland: 01:45 So, here I am.
Max: 01:48 6Terra is a relatively new company, but it’s a collection of assets from really old companies with a new brand and it’s and a spin out. So so what what is Cyxtera Now, and where did it come from, and and what are these things that pieced it together?
Holland: 02:01 Yeah. Absolutely. So we we started out back in May of 2017. And, you know, at our core, we’re an enterprise colocation and connectivity company, and that was largely based on the acquisition of the CenturyLink Savvis, data center footprint. So, we’ve got 62 hybrid ready facilities spread across 29 markets, got about 3,000,000 square feet of data center space, and in the neighborhood of 2 50 megawatts of power capacity.
Holland: 02:31 We’re the 3rd largest provider of interconnection globally. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 network providers with an average of 14, 15 per facility, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 total crossconnects. So pretty big focus on the interconnection piece of our story. And I should also note, too, that a majority of our data centers are within 3 milliseconds of public cloud providers. So heavily cloud adjacent, when we say hybrid ready, that’s part of that statement is the fact that we know people are going to be spreading workloads between private cloud environments, you know, colocation environments.
Holland: 03:06 And that’s that adjacency and that access to public cloud is important because we know applications or application tiers might live on both ends of that proverbial fence.
Max: 03:16 Xixtera has a service line called CXT, and this is your I mean, it’s it’s a Nutanix based platform, and this is your hybrid cloud bare metal, you know, insert marketing term here. But how would you actually describe CXD and and, you know, and and Zixtera speak?
Holland: 03:34 Yeah. I’ll I’ll try to up level it and then make it as simple as possible. So at its foundation, that modernization effort I talked about at the top about, making our data centers, a little bit more cloud like in terms of how you consume the services. Foundationally, that’s delivered by a software programmable network and SDN fabric, right? And that’s really the foundation of CXD connecting, you know, one point in the data center to another point, and it ended up highly automated software programmable fashion.
Holland: 04:03 Sitting on top of the CXD network fabric, and CXD, by the way, stands for 6Tera Extensible Data Center, is our enterprise bare metal platform. We launched with Nutanix. We’ve added some additional entities on the fabric, which I’ll talk about in a second. But, you know, just think about it as an SDN fabric with infrastructure services and an ecosystem of partners that sit on top. So whether one of your if you’re one of our colocation partners or customers or someone new to Cyxtera, you have this great platform that you can run your applications on effectively.
Max: 04:40 So CXT and the approach behind between CXT and this concept of, you know, enterprise bare metal and hybrid environments, you know, the trend was very much go to the cloud. And now companies are realizing, I think, that maybe go to the cloud isn’t necessarily what they want, and, you know, and and they want something a little bit different. So, I mean, how do you how do you view that something different? And what is Sextra trying to accomplish with CXT?
Holland: 05:01 It’s it’s exactly what inspired us to create the platform. And I I wouldn’t necessarily describe us as an alternative to public cloud, although sometimes we are for people, but I like to think of us as a complement. And look, Cyxtera is a big consumer of public cloud. We had the conversation internally when we first started. It’s like, hey, we’ve got a few acquired companies here with a mix of infrastructure all over the world, right, across multiple platforms.
Holland: 05:26 What makes sense to run where? And we came to the conclusion that there was a set of workloads that were perfectly suited to run up in public cloud, and we still run them there today, even though we could easily run them all. You know, we have these big banks infrastructures and facilities all over the world. But if I need to go do a 10,000 VM, you know, scale test for one of our DevOps groups for a new piece of software that we’re writing, that exercise is much better suited, you know, for the public cloud. But for a steady state, kind of back end IT apps, things that are very demanding on the metal, things that might get you into some cost considerations running up in public Cloud, we wanted to introduce another way to think about it.
Holland: 06:04 And so one of the design goals with CXD and our enterprise per metal platform is to give our customers, you know, all the financial and operational flexibility of Cloud, but combine that with the control performance and security elements of running your local dedicated, you know, on prem or co located infrastructure. And so we’ve kind of created this third category where it’s not something that you’re running in your campus data center in terms of infrastructure, and it’s not something that you’re running up on public cloud. It’s this thing kind of in between. And that that’s, in its essence, what CXT and enterprise bare metal is.
Max: 06:45 So what I’ve noticed is that it’s not necessarily a financial, you see when you say financial or operational, you know, consideration for public cloud versus versus something else. Yeah. In almost every scenario, it seems that moving to a public cloud environment is more expensive for an enterprise to take on. Right? So the decision for most, I wouldn’t say is we’re trying to save money by moving to the cloud.
Max: 07:05 We’re trying to do something else or accomplish something else. And Right. Traditionally, cloud, right, is is, you know, elasticity and and and unpredictable workloads. You say you wanna scale up a a ton of VMs in order to do a DevOps test and then turn them off. You know, you have this this that kind of aspect or it’s it’s a managed platform.
Max: 07:21 You know, you wanna a managed database or you wanna manage, you know, object store, something like that. Right? Yep. But what I’ve noticed and what we’re seeing, I’m curious about what you’re seeing as well, is it it’s really more about the operational management. You know, companies don’t wanna scale operational overhead to support lots of infrastructure globally, and cloud made that really easy for them.
Max: 07:40 Like, oh, we don’t need to figure out how to put somebody, you know, in in Hong Kong or fill in the blank. Right? And so, I mean, so today, when you look at CXD and and enterprises coming to you, I mean, you know, how much of it is financial now, and how much of it is operational, and, you know, what are people actually trying to solve that that they talk to you about?
Holland: 07:57 I think it’s a combination of things. I think cost savings is the topic du jour just because, a lot of people had and still do had a cloud first strategy. And what they interpreted that to mean was go to public cloud. We have a slightly different take, which hopefully we’ll get into in a second. But they got everything up in public cloud.
Holland: 08:17 They did their cost analysis. And all of a sudden, the CFO’s at the door with some questions because the cost predictions and then the actual costs didn’t line up. And so now we’re seeing a trend of repatriation that is squarely on cost. But you’re right, there are some wonderful attributes of public cloud, especially the platform elements. You get a whole suite of capabilities around just, you know, and we’ll take Amazon as an example, the EC2 instance, right?
Holland: 08:46 You’ve got a 100 and hundreds of services that surround that instance to make it really easy to do kind of whatever you want. And I think that element, and that’s one of the reasons that that’s as attractive to us too and why we run certain workloads there as well. But there are elements of what we talked about before, performance. There’s some elements of security, and and we still see that being cited as a reason why people continue to run on dedicated or co located infrastructure. So I wouldn’t say it’s any one thing, but I do think cost is driving a lot of the conversations, at least that we’re participating in.
Max: 09:21 And when you talk about cost driving the conversation, it’s not necessarily the cost of the VM. It’s all these ancillary costs that people aren’t factoring in that come along with the VMs, like bandwidth, you know?
Holland: 09:30 You got that right. Yeah. Or or maybe they selected the wrong disk type to to pair with it or the right or wrong type of storage volume. Maybe they’re blowing through their CPU credits in a way that they didn’t anticipate. So maybe there are additional whatever that service is that were necessary that they didn’t anticipate out of the gate.
Holland: 09:45 So there’s all these, service adjacencies around the actual VM itself that can run up the bill pretty quickly. And when you’re running a private cloud and on dedicated infrastructure, your costs are a bit easier to predict, we would argue.
Max: 10:01 Right. Because you know how many nodes you have, what those nodes cost, if you’re oversubscribing or under subscribing those nodes, what you’re I mean, it’s it’s not variable at the same same degree. Right?
Holland: 10:11 Yeah. That’s right. And and for us, in the way that we offer the service, we’re not metering anything. Right? So you can pin a bare metal compute node at redline, 100% CPU, 100% memory, 20 fourseven, you know, and that’s that’s on you.
Holland: 10:25 Same thing with our network bandwidth. And and those are the things that can get you into trouble if you hadn’t predicted that that steady state of a workload or bandwidth utilization up in a public cloud environment. So we we in particular, the way that we deliver our platform is is highly predictable from a cost perspective.
Max: 10:41 Can you walk me through what the CXD platform components are now and and what, you know, the selection somebody would go through in deciding, you know, I want, you know, option a or option b or option c?
Holland: 10:52 Yeah. Absolutely. So as you mentioned at the top, we launched with Nutanix. We had a heavy slant on our catalog with HCI capable configurations to run the Nutanix software. We’ve broadened things out a little bit, in in the recent quarters.
Holland: 11:09 So we have now options available from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Most of those configurations in our node catalog are also HCI capable. You can just as easily run the Nutanix stack on top of them. You could also run VMware’s vSAN if you wanted to. We have options from Fujitsu as well in our EMEA market, specifically our London market right now.
Holland: 11:31 And those as well have an HCI capable configuration, to run the Nutanix stack as well. We have some upcoming things that we’re gonna be announcing with NVIDIA by the time this publishes. I think those will be public, so I’m comfortable talking about it. We’re doing some really interesting things around GPU as a service and NVIDIA’s DGX platform, to kind of further thicken out the capabilities on the platform. But the core concepts all remain true, right?
Holland: 12:01 We want to give folks, an easy way to consume enterprise grade infrastructure, allow you to consume it and pay for it just like a public Cloud instance, and give you a dedicated single tenant access to it. And when I say dedicated, I mean all the way down to the bias or the IPMI, meaning you could make system level changes that could technically break the box. But we want to give you the experience just as if you had bought it and, you know, wrapped and stacked it in in a cage that you own and operate. And so that’s that’s that’s the high line on on some of the technology options that we’re delivering that are 6 terra branded. And then to complement that, we’ve partnered with a number of companies, and that community continues to grow that also have services that sit on top of the CXD networking fabric.
Holland: 12:48 So we’ve got a great storage partner called Zadara. If you need to go get a petabyte of object storage for a week, they can do that. And you can plumb the network. So maybe you got 5 HPE ProLiant DL 360 servers from 6tera. You can then pair that storage from Zadara, all using that same automated networking plumbing and make that environment look like one logical together stack of infrastructure, just as if you went and built it yourself.
Holland: 13:15 But what we saved you from doing is actually having to not only define and buy a cage space within one of our colocation facilities, but also procure that IT gear, get a shift, rack it, stack it, you know, provision it, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, most of us know we’ll see in 60 to 90 days once you start that process. Our vision is you should be able to stand up a data center environment within a day or 2 and leverage all these on demand services that we’re delivering as part of our platform, as part of our marketplace.
Max: 13:44 And for clarity, when you say HCI, you’re talking about hyperconverged infrastructure where the node has a compute and RAM and storage and everything is in one box. You can build blocks with those boxes together.
Holland: 13:56 You got that right. And sorry for the acronym soup here. I have a tendency to go there. So, yeah, let’s unpack those. Does that imply?
Max: 14:03 You know, you talk about, like, data center. How quickly can you build a data center and stand up a data center, and what is the actual impact to companies. Right? And so data centers are expensive to build. I mean, just the floor space is expensive to build.
Max: 14:14 And if if the enterprises are still maintaining a computer room, I mean, that’s a that’s a lot of investment in order to build those things out. And, of course, they’re sticky and they’re fixed capacity, and you can only have so much power, and the expansion is really hard. So that was the initial push into colocation markets. Right? Like, hey, you know, it’s expensive for you to build your own data center.
Max: 14:31 So come to our our data center. And then that became like, well, it’s it’s complicated or expensive or time consuming to maintain server infrastructure. So go to the cloud, but then the cloud becomes expensive. So now it’s okay. Well, here, you know, kind of come back and and you’re, like, 1 foot in a data center and and 1 foot in the cloud.
Max: 14:47 Right? I mean, that’s basically what we’re talking about.
Holland: 14:49 Yeah. And and look, we’re saying do both, just like we’re doing. We’re we are practicing what we preach. That that’s exactly right. And so to the extent that we can remove some of those complications of having that that dedicated infrastructure while retaining some of those benefits that people have become accustomed to with public cloud.
Holland: 15:07 I think we’re, we’re gonna delight our customers.
Max: 15:11 So I mean I mean, and operationally, you get into all the, like, the fun things of, like, okay, you have to ship you know, how many pallets of gear to a facility in Ashburn, Virginia, and then and then hire somebody locally in that market that can go and unpack those boxes and cable those boxes. And, oh, whoops. You forgot to buy DAC cables, so you have to wait for the for the, you know, those to show up and, you know, over the SFP is incorrect and
Holland: 15:31 or Right.
Max: 15:32 You know, what I think what people see a lot is is just the the the warranty management of equipment, you know, cycling. Like, oh, we’re 2 years into this box and something died on the motherboard, and who’s gonna be there to let a tech in to go replace this motherboard component. So, you know, in this with CXD, you’re taking all of that off of the customer’s plate. And they get resources, but they don’t have to physically manage those resources.
Holland: 15:55 That’s absolutely correct. And there’s one other element that I think is important to point out when you’re talking about that DIY approach of building out a colocation cage versus something like a CXD platform, which is that notion that you sort of have to build to a perceived peak on what the demands of that application are going to be out of the gate and then maybe a few quarters into the future. And with CXD and our enterprise bare metal platform, you can break the bulk of that typical build to peak, IT procurement and design process and just order a note at a time. So maybe you’re standing at the VDI environment. You know, out of the gate, there’s going to be 500 users.
Holland: 16:30 Well, you might only need 8 of our servers to do that out of the gate. And then but you know you know, you’re in growth mode, and you’re hiring a bunch of folks, and you know that environment and that footprint is going to need to expand, up to maybe the equivalent of needing 20 servers, you know, over the course of the year. Well, most people are just going to buy all 20 of those servers, rack them in a cage, and, have some of that infrastructure sitting idle, and that capital kind of sitting idle as well that could have been deployed elsewhere. And our thesis is that if you utilize the way that we built the platform, start with that minimal set of servers. And if you need one tomorrow, cool.
Holland: 17:04 Go to the portal, click a portal, click a few buttons, and you can get one. And then if in a month later, you need 3 more, same exercise. That capital that you would have deployed at that build to peak exercise upfront, and then be hopefully used for more interesting things.
Max: 17:18 So what are the contract cycles with that? I mean, if you’re going and you say, no. I need to add a node. Go click and and add a node. I mean, is this something that’s that’s provisioned as a, you know, month to month basis?
Max: 17:26 I mean, you can get into terms for discounts. You know, how does how does somebody consume this?
Holland: 17:31 Yeah. The the typical term for one of our enterprise bare metal nodes is a year. If you think about the profile of applications that are running on these, these are long standing steady state back end IT, critical production infrastructure. Although we do have some DevOps folks on the platform as well, and it’s perfectly suited for that. We do have some shorter terms, under a year, but, typically, a year is is the the default.
Holland: 17:55 And, you know, the 3 years not being uncommon either. And, obviously, there are discounts as as you commit to longer time periods.
Max: 18:02 Nutanix was a, you know, hyperconverged infrastructure box. Right? This HCI infrastructure. But then they also had this idea of you were gonna bring your own, you know, platform on top of it. You’re gonna run VMware on top of Nutanix or something else or, you know, Kubernetes is really popular.
Max: 18:16 So when somebody’s making that decision of, you know, you know, do I want to run, you know, Nutanix or HPE or Fujitsu? I mean, is that something that they’re selecting or you’re talking to them and saying, okay. You know, what are you running? You wanna run Kubernetes. You should run this because it makes more sense for you.
Holland: 18:31 Yeah. You know, just like we’re we’re the we’re the infrastructure folks. Right? So that that persona of saying, gosh, building a data center is hard, that’s really our expertise. Right?
Holland: 18:40 We’re we’re great at power and and and cooling and air displacement and physical building security and all that stuff. And I think we’re pretty good at the physical infrastructure piece as well, so networking and physical hardware boxes. As we start to move up the stack though, we tend to allow our customers to make that choice. We have opinions. We’ve got great engagement from the OEMs that we work with, HP, Nutanix, Fujitsu, etcetera.
Holland: 19:05 But once it start once we start getting to the hypervisor and the workloads above, we tend to start bringing in the folks that are just simply better at it than we are. So what we do, in our portal or with our complementary set of APIs that we use for provisioning is we’ll allow the user to select a hypervisor. Right now, we offer Nutanix’s Acropolis and VMware. And we will include those images. We’ll image the boxes with those hypervisors.
Holland: 19:37 You can also choose an OS option. And that’s just to kind of get the box bootstrapped and up and running. So especially if you already have an existing environment, co location or existing enterprise bare metal, you can quickly add that resource to the resource pool and start motioning VMs over to it. But we do that more as a courtesy and less as something in an advisory role. So we give you the choice, but it’s really on the customer and then their partners to make that decision on what the best route is.
Holland: 20:05 And, you know, there’s merits to argue all day long about why VMware versus Acropolis and the Nutanix ecosystem. I think Nutanix has done a fabulous job at building up feature parity with what VMware has built. But as you know, a lot of people have written automation around the VMware APIs, and there might be certain features that they just need in one platform versus the other. And, we we definitely leave that to to the customer.
Max: 20:29 I I think that also probably depends a lot on I mean, as you say, it depends on the customer, what the customer’s existing application is, you know, and what they’re what they’re managing. I mean, you get into, like, web scale environments or data science, you know, it’s gonna be running on VMware or Nutanix. You know, that’s not a you know, they wanna do something different. If you’re giving IPMI access, you’re like, okay. Here’s IPMI.
Max: 20:47 You know, go do whatever you want with this box now. Right? I mean, that’s basically what you’re saying.
Holland: 20:50 That’s exactly right. Yeah. And and so for those folks that are running, you know, Kubernetes and and Docker or whatever container flavor they like, you know, they’re gonna be throwing CentOS or Ubuntu or RHEL or something on the box. And then we don’t want to be so prescriptive to say, you must use this environment in this way. And that’s been our philosophy with the platform in general, right?
Holland: 21:08 We don’t want to force you to use our VLAN scheme, right? All of the layer 2 networking segments that the customer gets to the client are encapsulated within a VXLAN so they can bring their own VLANs, bring your own layer 3 space, bring your own IPs public, you know, or private. We support BGP. So really, this is a bit of a blank infrastructure canvas for our customers to build whatever they want on. And we’re trying not to put a ton of guardrails around that so people don’t feel constricted with how we design the platform.
Max: 21:37 Is CXD available now across 6Terra’s entire, you know, environment of your portfolio data centers? Or I mean, are you still in phase of rolling this out?
Holland: 21:46 We’re still in the phases of of rolling it out. We have it available I think we’re in 8 markets now. And when I say a market, that market could be comprised of multiple data centers. As an example, out here in Silicon Valley, we’ve got 7 data centers. Right?
Holland: 21:59 So when we roll out the market, we roll it out to all of the data centers. So we have dark fiber running between all of our facilities and the platforms present. And all of them, we have access to, you know, whether you’re in data center A or data center B, it’s all available. The compute infrastructure is available. The network’s available.
Holland: 22:16 Our partners are available. So I would say over half of our data centers have it right now, and then, almost every single one of them is on the road map to get it.
Max: 22:27 If I was an existing Zixtera data center customer, I mean, it sounds like moving into CXT would be very easy. You know, create a crosscut in the facility, know, plug into the platform. Now I have additional, you know, compute nodes available to me that we can scale up as we needed or scale down, whatever our our profile would look like to our existing infrastructure. If we’re outside of a SIXTA data center and we’re in a a cloud environment or maybe we’re in a different facility, what does that interconnection or that networking side of it look like? I mean, is this driven to public interconnect?
Max: 22:53 Is it driven to, you know, some sort of a cloud interconnect fabric? Or are you talking about bringing in additional layer 2 transport circuits between buildings? What what what happens?
Holland: 23:03 Yeah. So the the easiest way to get connected into the environment and look, we have a multitude of ways to do it just given the footprint of the network providers that we have in every building. But the the easy button, and we want to make sure we have this available out of the gate, is we we made available as part of a core CXE offering, 6Terra branded service called IP Connect. This is a blended, bandwidth service that’s behind the scenes is comprised of 2 top tier providers. You know, so think like Level 3 and CenturyLink and Zayo and the like.
Holland: 23:37 We can tie that in a software defined fashion back to the fabric and pair your dedicated infrastructure to it. And then you can use layer 3 type services to get into those nodes. That could be landing an IPSec tunnel or setting up an open VPN server. That could be, you know, using that and opening up SSH. So, you know, port 22 can come straight over the Internet.
Holland: 23:59 Some security folks might wince at that. But we give you those options. So it’s the combination of the CXD networking fabric, the bare metal sitting on top, and then that IP connect service. All those ingredients mixed together will allow for a non 6Terra customer to come in and get access to that, newly provisioned gear and then pair it with whatever environment they want to in a multitude of ways. But that IP Connect service is the easy button.
Max: 24:25 When we go through data center sizing and costing exercises, right, you get into how much floor space do you need, how many racks do you need. I mean, there’s there’s a lot of moving pieces, server equipment, switches, and you get into some point operational overhead. You know, what what is your you know, human cost of these things? What’s your warranty? What’s your logistics?
Max: 24:41 How many spares do you have? You know, that list kinda keeps going and going and going. But if you look at and you say, okay. You know, in a normal cycle, maybe a company is buying a lot of gear and they’re leasing it for 3 years, but they’re assuming a 4 or 5 year life cycle for that gear. Gear.
Max: 24:55 So at some point, that equipment comes out of a, you know, a cash flow. There’s not a cash flow component to maintaining that equipment for the equipment anymore. I mean, there’s still is for the data center and everything else, but the financials change. I mean, there’s a pretty significant when you look at a 4 or 5 year total cost for a server and a cabinet that that changes. So when we talk about CXT and we look at these things and look at your terms, how do you match those with customers with what they’re used to from a finance perspective?
Max: 25:21 And as equipment ages, are you replacing the equipment? Are they up? Are we talking about refresh cycles? Are they talking about, you know, at some point, they’re they’re they own the gear? Are they the cost changes?
Max: 25:31 I mean, what what are they what can somebody expect?
Holland: 25:34 Yeah. So the the platform, I’ll just wanted to state that it’s it’s relatively new. I think we’re about 18 months into having it in production and actually having the web GUI. So we haven’t have hit that first refresh cycle. But what we’re anticipating is that around that 3 year mark, people are gonna start saying, hey, I I wanna get the new thing.
Holland: 25:52 Right? And so our plan is to refresh our node fleet to have the new thing. And then instead of the traditional IT procurement motion, which is I’m going to go buy the new ones, we’re just going to allow people to trade them in and motion their VMs, or they’re not using VMs, you know, migrate their environment over to the new stuff. And so that saves them from, at year 3, a spike in that capital outlay where they need to go buy the new stuff. We’re just saying we already have it there.
Holland: 26:20 You’re just gonna subscribe to the new stuff, re up on your term, whatever that was, and motion your environment over.
Max: 26:25 I mean, has there been discussion about maybe these people wanna stay on the old hardware and what that would mean in terms of a financial impact for them?
Holland: 26:33 Yeah. I mean, stay on the old hardware that’s sitting on our enterprise bare metal.
Max: 26:38 Yeah. So, like, if it was your your your equipment, right, your your bare metal, and then you have a customer who’s been on that that infrastructure for 3 years, you know, and and what happens, like, year 4? Like, maybe they’d say, hey, this is working fine, and can we get a better, you know, a a a better financial the equipment’s been depreciated. It’s been there for a long time.
Holland: 26:57 Yeah. Absolutely. And we we since we haven’t hit that yet, we haven’t gone through this. But what I anticipate that we’ll do, if someone says, look. I love this gear.
Holland: 27:04 It’s working fine. Can we renegotiate, maybe get a better rate? I think we’re going to be absolutely open to that conversation. And they’ll have the choice. And what we’re certainly not going to do is say, sorry, we’re bringing in all the new stuff.
Holland: 27:14 And your stuff’s out. You got to use the new stuff. Because we know that there might be some functionality, on a certain rev of hardware, that might be critical to running their application. We’re not gonna put them in a bad spot. So I think you hit it on the head that we’ll be having a conversation with these folks who wanna remain on the last generation of gear, and it’s probably gonna be financially beneficial to them if they choose to do so.
Max: 27:40 Hi. I’m Max Clark, and you’re listening to the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At ClarkSays, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. With thousands of negotiated contracts, Clark Sys has helped hundreds of businesses source and implement the right tech at the right price.
Max: 27:55 If you’re looking for a new vendor and wanna have peace of mind knowing you’ve made the right decision, visit us at Clark dotcom to schedule an intro call. So, I mean, network takes some time to establish and figure out, you know, what kind of connectivity we have. Are we are we bringing up, you know, a a layer 3 service or an Internet based product? Or we do we do private connectivity. But, I mean, how long does it actually take to provision, you know, CXD from scratch?
Max: 28:20 Like, I you know, we we we say we’re gonna go. We we’re not a customer yet. We wanna turn it on. Like, what what does that cycle actually look like in real?
Holland: 28:28 Yes. I’m gonna start out an answer with an answer. It’s the start of all great answers, which is it depends.
Max: 28:36 Yeah. Of course.
Holland: 28:37 So I I I would say, one of the longer pieces in that process is it has nothing to do with technology. It’s all about legal contracts and MSAs and, lawyers sending back and forth red lines for contracts and things like that.
Max: 28:52 Oh, come on. Lawyers never take a long time with these processes. I know.
Holland: 28:55 I know. I don’t want to insult any of our lawyer friends in the audience. But, you know, the truth is the larger the organization, the longer that’s just gonna take. Right? Or they’re just gonna find a piece of language that they wanna argue about with us, and that’s fine.
Holland: 29:06 And we’re used to it. But it’s gonna insert massive latency into that, you know, spin up process. So assuming we can get through that that MSA contract negotiation phase, relatively quickly, and, we can kinda get them onboard as a customer, which we can do relatively quickly, you know, we we could stand up somebody in, let’s say, I don’t know. I’m gonna I’m gonna say 10 days or 10 business days, would be a good run. And I’m factoring a few things in.
Holland: 29:34 Right? It’s a new platform. We have to do some training. There’s always some discovery, I’ll say, around connecting someone’s VPN since they’re gonna be coming in externally, right, or just getting that external connectivity going, training them up. So being up and workload ready, assuming that we can shorten that legal process time, you know, maybe down to a handful of days, we could get you workload ready in 10 days from a technology standpoint.
Holland: 29:58 And let me give you the alternate of that. If you’re already a SIXTARA customer and you have one of our CXD ports, which is your gateway out to the fabric, I can get you a piece of infrastructure in under an hour. I can provision an HPE node and get a layer 3, address on on the iLO port and stretch a network from your cage to the to your CXD port. I mean, it’s it’s it’s literally an hour. I can provision one of those IP connect services to get you out to the Internet up to 5 gigs in about 60 seconds.
Holland: 30:27 So it’s it’s not really a technology conversation in terms of time frames. It’s it’s all the other stuff.
Max: 30:34 So IP Connect is interesting because Syxtera at inception was carrier neutral. We talk about carrier density and and providers that are in your facility, but not everybody wants a carrier neutral environment. Right? They wanna I just want you to take care of everything for me. So, I mean, IP Connect, I would assume, came out of that that place of how do we give a customer the ability to not have to think about this stage and rapid provision.
Max: 30:56 And then you said, you know, up to 5 gig. You know, what are, like, the boundaries of IP Connect? And at what point do we do we go back and say, okay, you know, you you need a 100 gig interconnect. Go talk to CenturyLink or go talk to Ozayo or go talk to somebody else.
Holland: 31:09 Yeah. Yeah. You hit the nail on the head with kind of the easy button and just, hey, we we don’t wanna think about this piece, provision it. But I don’t see a lot of our customers using our IP connect circuit as their primary method of delivering their application. Although some might, and look, it’s redundant.
Holland: 31:24 It’s going out to 2 different providers with redundant fiber paths, and everything is redundant even to the CXD or if it’s a dual fiber handoff. So you have redundancy kind of all the way outside of our walls and and through, however the provider has architected their fiber network. That being said, we’re seeing IP Connect used more as a complement to existing connectivity, especially for existing customers. Right? So maybe they’re experiencing a service degradation with their main IP transit provider.
Holland: 31:52 60 seconds, we can get you spun up and you can have another path into your environment or another way to to make your application more available. I see it more as a compliment to the buffet of carriers that we have in our data center and and less of it as an alternative to although some people might be using it, that way. And but at the end of the day, it’s still traversing at least 2 of those existing carriers. So it’s not like they’re cut out of the equation. It’s just the path in which that traffic is taking to to get to those carriers might be a little different.
Max: 32:23 In the past, Nutanix wasn’t necessarily a super flexible hardware platform, and they had a relatively defined spec of what a Nutanix node look like. HPE, little bit more flexible. And when we start talking about a customer application on and a, you know, a spec for hardware. I mean, how flexible can you be in provisioning infrastructure? And then if a customer has a custom build that they want a a very specific thing, you know, I mean, at some size, you did say, hey.
Max: 32:48 We want, you know, a 1,000 physical machines. I’m sure you would do it. But that I would assume also impacts your ability to rapidly provision additional nodes. So, like, how do you balance those 2 and and and what, you know, what’s available for people?
Holland: 33:02 It’s a great question. When we went to market with this to see kind of what people are using, what are maybe some common configs to support the applications running on top, and let’s build a standard node catalog that’s available on demand to match those application profiles. And, you know, we started with one thing, and we got smarter as we engage more customers, and we made some augmentations to the catalog. And that include the introduction of a small handful of non HCI variants. We noticed that some people just needed a utility node.
Holland: 33:35 They didn’t need all the functionality or capabilities with, with a hyperconverged stack. They don’t need, you know, a ton of local disk. They’re not gonna be pairing it with anything else. This is like maybe a low impact, low criticality server. So we’ve introduced those options as well to the catalog.
Holland: 33:50 And so that’s kind of what’s standard right now. We have, I think, somewhere around 15 different configs that hit, I would say, the upper end of all available configs on a compute node. They’re more enterprise grade, and that’s why we call the platform in part enterprise bare metal. These are not low core count, low memory, inexpensive servers. They all say these are these are very much tool for the enterprise.
Holland: 34:15 So, you know, that’s what we stock. That’s what’s available on demand. But we frequently have conversations with customers. We’re saying, hey, this doesn’t hit the mark. We need something else.
Holland: 34:23 And we don’t really have a size threshold if someone wants something custom. They’re going to lose out a little bit on that on demand portion or benefit of the platform. They’re gonna lose out a little bit on if they needed to rapidly expand, say they wanted 6 custom nodes, right, that didn’t conform to the specs of our node catalog, and they need to add 3 more in 3 months. That’s something that we’ll go buy for them and and rack on the on the fabric. It just might take us 30 days to do so.
Holland: 34:48 They they’re not gonna be able to get it in an hour. And that’s totally fine. And and a lot of customers are totally comfortable with that. Some customers say, hey, we’re gonna go custom nodes, and we’ll give you a forecast. And that’s okay too.
Holland: 34:59 So, we certainly don’t need a big dollar figure to go have a custom node conversation with the customer.
Max: 35:06 Something I’ve seen a lot when people start moving out of a cloud environment back into a physical environment is is sizing. You know, not really knowing I mean, none of these public cloud vendors really make it very easy for you to understand what the underlying infrastructure hardware is, you know, that you’re running on. Right? You know, they they mask it in some way, you know, vCPU or some other kind of esoteric terminology. Right?
Max: 35:27 So when we when we go into these physical migrate you know, back to physical migrations, you get into these just dialogues of how many CPU sockets do we need? How many cores do we need? Are we running Intel? Are we running AMD? How much RAM do we need per core?
Max: 35:38 You know, how much disk do we need? Is it SSD? Is it not? Is it NVMe? You know, how much network do we need?
Max: 35:43 You know, is it 10 gig, 25 gig? You know, what’s the actual stack look like? As somebody is going through that that transition, right, that a lot of that becomes a little bit of experimentation. Like, we’re gonna run this application on this this box. You know, how does it work?
Max: 35:56 Oh, we need to tweak these knobs a little bit. How do they go through that cycle with 6Terra?
Holland: 36:01 Yeah. So and luckily, there’s been a a host of, solutions that have popped up to help with this process. Right? So you can size something for, you know, the 3 big public clouds, and then you can also get kind of like the equivalent of what you might need if you’re running on prem. You know, we’ll forget about the hypervisor type, you know, for that part of the conversation.
Holland: 36:22 But in addition to that, and I’ll use Nutanix as an example, they’ve got a great sizer tool. You can go to their website and plug in a bunch of stuff, and they can give you a rough idea, based on a number of inputs, what type of box you should get, you know, factoring in oversubscription and and all the things that you’d expect. So I think today, it’s much easier than it was even a couple of years ago when people are like, gosh, I don’t even know where to start. You know, I’m gonna need to run this thing. So, I I would argue that there’s great tools, out there to to help make an informed decision.
Max: 36:51 And so in in that case, if they came in, they say, okay. We’ve got this this you know, we want box 2 c in your catalog, and they start there. They, you know, run a workload for 30 days, and they say, you know, this is not the right size hardware for us. We wanna switch. Is that something that they can do?
Holland: 37:09 Yeah. And typically, in those situations when they’re not absolutely sure about what they want, we’ll say, hey, let’s let’s just do a 30 day trial. We’ll get you set up. You don’t have to pay us anything, and let’s see how it goes. And if we need change, we’ll change.
Holland: 37:20 So we typically embrace kind of that collaborative spirit on let’s let’s get it right out of the gate and not make it hard for you if we got it wrong for some reason.
Max: 37:29 You know, what size companies are using CXT today? And what is their, you know, what’s an average environment for you now? I mean, we’re talking about, like, you know, a handful of nodes, dozens of nodes, hundreds of nodes. Like, what what are you actually seeing deploying in real life?
Holland: 37:42 It’s it’s definitely on the the lower end of the scale. It’s not 100, although, we do have some opportunities we’re working on that are very much in the 100. But since it’s a newer platform, and since a majority of our current customers, we’ve got about 2,300 customers spread across the planet, tend to be on the larger enterprise side of things. You know, 80%, I think, plus of our customer base is enterprise. And, I think we’ve got like 33% of Fortune 100 sitting with us.
Holland: 38:10 So if you think about their appetite for a new cutting edge technology, it’s typically a little bit later in the adoption cycle. So, you know, we get people saying, hey, we’re gonna we’re gonna take this one environment, and and we’re gonna try it out on CXD. And that could be just a few clusters. Right? That could be all 16 nodes.
Holland: 38:28 But we also have SMBs in our data centers too. And they’re saying, hey. We’ve seen a cluster. We have this one environment. So it’s it’s up for a tech refresh.
Holland: 38:36 We don’t wanna spend the cash. And this this seems like a better model. And for whatever reason, we can’t or don’t wanna run it up in public cloud. So I think we’re starting small as people get used to us. And I anticipate, you know, just given what I see in our pipeline, that that’ll grow, into that higher end.
Holland: 38:51 But I think our our sweet spot is going to be in the dozens if if I were to predict kinda long term.
Max: 38:58 You know, I mean, we’re talking about this from, like, public cloud to, you know, physical migrations. But doing, you know, physical server to virtualized server migrations as well, I mean, it’s really surprising, I think, when you go through that process and you watch an enterprise go through that process, just how efficient modern hardware is when you start virtualizing physical servers onto a platform like VMware and Nutanix and just what that compression actually looks like in terms of physical servers. I mean, 6 servers, you know, 6 cutting edge modern HCI Nutanix nodes. I mean, you’re talking hundreds and hundreds of VMs that can come on the machine.
Holland: 39:31 Absolutely. The consolidation ratios, and obviously, it all comes down to the workload type, but, you know, lightweight VDI instances, I mean, you could Yeah. You go in one box, you could be talking to an 80 to 1 consolidation ratio, 100 to 1 consolidation ratio. So, yeah, it’s beyond impressive. And, you can be extremely efficient with how you do those consolidations.
Holland: 39:52 And with a platform like ours, you know, you’re you don’t have to worry about pinning that infrastructure, either from a compute standpoint or a network standpoint, you know, up in its red zone, because there’s no metering. And another thing I wanted to point out too, in terms of efficiency and kind of cost considerations is, if you are generating a big center of gravity, data gravity on that infrastructure, You don’t have to worry about if one day you wanna take it out from 6Terra and go put it somewhere else. There’s no notion of an egress view with us as is not true with some of the other platforms. So, as you extrapolate your data usage down maybe 3, 5 years, you don’t have to have that worry. And I think that is a consideration that you do need to think about with other platforms.
Max: 40:36 So your partnership with NVIDIA, you know, and talking about GPU compute, I mean, I go to a very specific application list very fast. So Mhmm. I’m curious what’s driving this for you guys and what you saw is, like, this is we need to get into this side of the house.
Holland: 40:50 Yeah. It’s it’s very much where we’re starting. And NVIDIA, their hardware and software platform has a lot of different applications, as you know, across a lot of different verticals. But, the one that we chose to start with was definitely AI and machine learning. We got on this journey with NVIDIA last July, I believe it was, by having a handful of our data centers certified as what they call DGX ready.
Holland: 41:14 It’s one of their programs. And that basically just says that we have the environmentals, the cooling, the power capabilities to support these high performance compute nodes, right? That might consume many more kilowatts than what’s standard per rack. And as we went through that certification process and started engaging our customers, we started to see demand signals saying, gosh, we’re running a lot more, well, let’s call them GPU enabled compute nodes. And they’re like, okay, well, that’s that’s interesting.
Holland: 41:45 What are you doing on them? And inevitably, the conversation led to AI and machine learning. And this has applications everywhere, government, fintech, automotive, oil and gas, you name it. And These are all the folks that are sitting in our data centers anyways. And so then we started to say, okay, what are some of the challenges to adoption today?
Holland: 42:03 You know, what were people kind of running into headwinds? And, you know, as you know, some of these, systems from NVIDIA, especially their DGX systems, can cost 100 of 1,000 of dollars. And so actually said, well, what if that was available, you know, in an on demand offering, delivered in an automated fashion on our SDN fabric, and people could subscribe to them and take advantage of those efficiencies of being able to run it unencumbered in terms of resource monitoring and then the associated billing. You know, what would you think about that, mister customer? And then it was a resounding, yeah, that sounds really interesting.
Holland: 42:38 So we’re, you know, we’re starting out small ish, with the NVIDIA relationship. We’re targeting some very specific verticals, but really, we’re seeing a blossom of AI and ML related use cases and workloads. And that’s that’s the space that we’re hoping to help our customers with out of the gate. There’s a whole other set of conversations that are likely to occur around gaming and just generally GPU enabled workloads, which seem to be taking off in a bunch of different directions. But right now, we’re we’re gonna try to cut our teeth and and get the AI ML piece right, and then we’ll expand from there.
Max: 43:11 I mean, this goes back to, you know, financial conversation from 2, you know, like, two sides. Right? Are you investing in CapEx to buy this? Are you currently running this workload somewhere else? And when we talk about public cloud vendors and we look at, you know, actual cost, true cost in public clouds, you know, data egress is a big factor for a lot of people.
Max: 43:29 I mean, more than they would expect it to be. But, you know, the the data science and machine learning pipelines for companies, I mean, these are massive cost centers and cloud environments. And and I’ve seen a lot of companies carve out just the machine learning data science workloads and shop those around and find different providers and cc, you know, primary platforms in one cloud and machine learning in another cloud. And and I think that’s become a very common kind of expectation of we’re gonna start chunking those things up. And taking that out of cloud entirely and bringing it back into a physical environment that the customer doesn’t have to operate.
Max: 44:03 I mean, that’s that’s a very interesting opportunity, you know, for, you know, for conversation and also a lot of value you’re presenting because people have this problem now of, like, 100 and 100 of 1,000 of dollars a month and spend to maintain these things that that are unpredictable and cost variable and, you know, not CFO friendly. Right? Like, I mean, that’s it seems like a a really good match for you.
Holland: 44:28 It certainly feels like it. And, look, you know, not an acknowledgment to public cloud. Sometimes that’s the right place to start. But then as you start needing more, GPU nodes, need to cluster them together, you start forecasting that data expansion. At some point, there’s a strong argument to be made that maybe at least some of this should reside in a dedicated environment that’s not so metered.
Holland: 44:52 But, yeah, we, you know, we’re trying to cater to, initially, out of the gate, the data scientist community, who at the end of the day, just want to train their models and and get their application off the ground. And they’re more than happy to go take the credit card and and, consume up in public cloud. But at at some point, the CFO shows up and says, what’s going on here? It’s looking pretty expensive. And I think we’re gonna be a really attractive alternative to that, being able to run at a fraction of the cost.
Max: 45:21 Hey. You know, obviously, Sextra is still a very much a data center company. And Mhmm. You offer different flavors of that in different markets. And and CXT is I was very excited when I saw this announcement, and it was something that I think you bring a lot of value to market.
Max: 45:34 And we see now more and more, you know, conversations. You know, multi cloud’s been a conversation for a long time, but it’s really it’s not many people are in multi cloud. Right? And hybrid cloud became a conversation. And now we’re starting to see movement into bare metal.
Max: 45:46 And it feels like you’re in the same boat where you’re seeing conversations and customers that went from colo to public cloud now coming back, but not wanting to be in colo anymore. And and this is, like, where you’ve started from and where you, know, you’re you’re just, like, going full circle back. Right? You know, we were colo, then went public cloud, then we’re back colo, but now it’s kinda like quasi in the middle. You know, it’s it’s funny to think about it in that way.
Holland: 46:06 Yeah. It very much is. Look, everything comes in cycles. We we think we’re well positioned to take advantage of this next cycle, which is very much having a bunch of choices and being able to architect a solution that’s right for your company, right for your workloads. And, we feel like that what we’ve created is something that was missing in the market.
Holland: 46:27 And, yeah. And at the end of the day, we’re just here to give our customers choices.
Max: 46:31 And when you said about, like, your partner ecosystem that are available on CXT, I mean, this was like, you know, storage was your example, the first one that came up. What else kind of, like, you know, categories are available to somebody on on the partner platform?
Holland: 46:43 Yeah. So right now, we’re, I’d say storage, the the compute, obviously. We’ve got a nice ecosystem of connectivity, whether those are network service providers or or SDN providers. We’ve got a great relationship with Megaport, as an example, you know, Packet Fabric, folks of that nature. But in the queue to come and join the CXD party are technology vendors in a number of different categories.
Holland: 47:12 So think security, think networking, right? Anything that can be addressable, you know, via layer 2 or layer 3, that we can plug in Ethernet cable to, has the opportunity to be delivered as a service on our platform. And the end state vision that we’re trying to accomplish is the full ability for you to be able to deploy, say you need to rapidly expand into a new market as a company, or say you need to set up a new availability zone for your X as a service platform, whatever it is. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just go to a portal and start clicking a bunch of buttons and basically design a data center, and then have all of that come to life, all programmed to the API, and be available so you can, you know, move your container images or your VMs over there, and now all of a sudden you’re up and running, taking a 6 month process, maybe down to a couple days. If we do our job right, you’ll be able to do that.
Max: 48:06 So if if I have a a partner, you know, I have an application or a need for one of your partners, is this something that you’re enabling the connectivity to it and I can provision that in the portal? Or is this something we’re actually do I have to go out and establish a a you know, bring the lawyers in and negotiate an MSA and then and then go that way? Or is this, like, I already have an MSA with Exterra for CXD and you’re billing me and I can go click on a button and say, hey, I need this thing and just turn it on and and Exterra bills bills me and I don’t have to deal with that again.
Holland: 48:33 Yeah. Yeah. I’ll go back to my wonderful answer starter again. It depends. So we do have some services that we can, resell a small handfuls that would sit on 6 tera paper to save you from having to go negotiate another contract.
Holland: 48:45 But really, what we’re doing behind the scenes is enabling the connectivity layer 2, specifically connectivity out to this ecosystem of partners. And so we would go into our web based command center portal and say, like, I would I want to connect over to connectivity provider x, storage provider y. And, we will basically send a friend request to them. And there’s, you know, a little bit of back and forth. Pretty simple.
Holland: 49:13 But to establish that relationship, we don’t want people to be able to roguely just attach to each other so we have some safeguards within that process. But at the end of that short process, we effectively stretch, 1 or more layer 2 segments through our CXD fabric, through those VXLANs that are dedicated just to that customer and that partner. And then they can transact and consume that service in whatever way they want. So the magic really is the automated connection from a to b within the facility. And then the commercial relationship that sits on top kind of varies depending on the nature of our relationship with the partner.
Max: 49:46 So infrastructure as a service, so IaaS became a really popular marketing thing. And really what that was was, you know, some sort of private cloud platform, multi tenant environment that then a service provider MSP was managing and providing services for. And and you guys are very different because we’re not talking about you providing any services to the customer outside of this infrastructure is available to you, do whatever you want to with it. So when I think about, you know, enterprises and and where these, you know, other fits, we talk about existing SIXTARA customers, but then we also talk about, you know, if if an enterprise has infrastructure in a data center today that maybe is already VMware. You know, they’re running they’re running VMware or they’re running, you know, Cisco’s platform or they’re running these different things because they want to have off-site in a colo, I mean, and not go through a refresh cycle in the future.
Max: 50:31 I mean, 6Terra would be a a really good interesting option for them because they would still manage it, and they would still maintain it. It would just be they don’t have to support the data center. They don’t have to drive bodies there. They they get all these other ancillary benefits around it on top of your platform. I mean, that’s that’s kind of what I’m hearing you say.
Holland: 50:49 That’s absolutely right. Yeah. And it brings up a good point of distinction that I’ll underscore again, which is, well, we manage the network and we do some management of the hardware because the compute nodes specifically are sitting in a secure cage that only 6 tera folks have access to. You If a drive goes out, a proc goes bad, memory stick goes bad, we’re out doing those break fix things, right? But then we start moving up the stack into the application and the hypervisor layer or whatever for those customers who don’t want to do that type of thing by themselves or with us.
Holland: 51:19 Cause, you know, we’re probably there troubleshooting alongside them because sometimes a hardware issue can manifest as a software issue. So we just don’t know what it is, so we’ll be on the phone with them. But a lot of folks do want to have a managed environment. And in fact, we’ve got a great relationship with a number of MSPs. I’ll call out Sirius Computer Solutions because they were one of our first.
Holland: 51:36 We partner tightly with them. In fact, they’ve built an HCI as a service platform on top of our CXD platform. And so you can go get that full managed experience all the way up to stack and all the adjacencies. Maybe you need a SIEM, maybe you need managed firewall. They do everything.
Holland: 51:51 And, you know, we’re just kind of this partner that’s in the background, silently powering that engagement for the managed partner. But, yeah, those folks are critical to us because we can’t do everything. We’ve chosen not to do everything when it comes to managing these environments. And and that neutrality, I think, has served us well because it doesn’t put us in competition with with our various partners.
Max: 52:13 Give me a ballpark, and I’m gonna answer a lot of the it depends questions here before before I ask you the rest of the questions. Right? So so if you think about it from base infrastructure. Right? You know, you’re talking about a a company that’s doing either wants to go from a physical to virtual or they’re doing a refresh in their existing virtual environment, and they know their nodes.
Max: 52:31 Let’s just call it 3 nodes. Right? They need 3 nodes. It’s an HCI environment. You know, they’re in a relatively vanilla configuration, dual socket, some number of core.
Holland: 52:38 Mhmm.
Max: 52:39 You know, an average amount of RAM, you know, an average amount of, you know, of f SSD or NVMe drives. Like, what would they expect? I mean, what’s that kind of, like, you know, ballpark range of what they would be looking at to come over into, you know, a 6 terra 60?
Holland: 52:54 May I ask for how long they would want that environment?
Max: 52:57 Let’s call it 3 years.
Holland: 52:58 Okay. I mean,
Max: 52:59 it’s enterprise. Right? So so it’s still 3 years. Right?
Holland: 53:02 Yeah. Yeah. I I would say, let’s call it somewhere between I’m I’m gonna give you the a mid range here. 800 to $1,000 a month, something like that.
Max: 53:11 Per node or for the entire kid’s little?
Holland: 53:14 Per per node. But what’s included with that is all of the networking infrastructure, top of rack, core, kind of everything. That’s all of the, I’ll call it, smart hand services, which is us doing all that hardware break fix in the background. That’s all the power, cooling, kind of all those other inputs that we might factor into charging a colocation customer to come be one of the denizens in our buildings. That’s all included.
Holland: 53:37 And I think that’s a that that power input’s a big thing that I think people miss. Because they may say, oh, gosh, for $800 a month, well, I could go lease this, and it would maybe be 6.50 a month if I did straight lease. It’s like, yeah. But what about everything else? What about that top rack switch you gotta buy?
Holland: 53:51 What about the fact that it’s sucking down, you know, the 500 watts or 800 watts of energy? I can translate into that real cost. And so all of a sudden, that cost per node at $800 is looking pretty good. So that’s one of the things that we have to sometimes remind our customers that there’s a lot built into that node cost because you’re not having to think about anything. You’re not having to think about building security.
Holland: 54:10 You’re not having to think about the fact that, you know, we’ve got 3 layers of power redundancy, 14, you know, providers of fiber sitting at the edge of the building. And all these things add up to, I think, a pretty nice value add and certainly hard costs that they had incurred if they had to go and solve it themselves.
Max: 54:26 So you’re saying 800 to a1000 as a as a rough kinda, like, mid tier ballpark. Right? So we say 24100 or $3,000 when you compare that to a data center, you know, after after you have cabinet space and power and cross connects and network services and start factor. I mean, just just that alone, you know, somewhere in that, like, 1800 to $25100 a month target, I mean, you’re already there. You’re not talking about buying equipment.
Max: 54:51 I mean, so that’s I wouldn’t say that’s I mean, I would say that’s incredibly competitive when it comes actually into what is the total cost of supporting a data center environment and not factor in, like, can you have somebody physically local that can drive to the facility and go do, you know, physical maintenance?
Holland: 55:07 Right. And and which we can do as well. But yeah. So for that 3 node, that fictional 3 node cluster at $24100 a month, I think that’s a pretty good deal. And let’s pretend for a second too, and this is a huge differentiator for us compared to almost every other bare metal platform, is that let’s say you had compute node to launch a workload, right?
Holland: 55:30 You might be a Juniper shop or a Palo Alto shop or a Fortinet shop, and you might wanna have their security stack deployed alongside of it. You might have an SD WAN solution. You might have some exotic networking equipment. Maybe you have an old AS 400 that needs to interact with this cluster. Whatever it is, well, we’ve got CXD enabled cages and and environments that we can set up that we can pair with those compute nodes too, And it’ll all work together as if it’s sitting right next to each other on the same, you know, LAN effectively.
Holland: 55:58 Right? But then you still get a lot of the benefits of us being able to do smart hand stuff. We’re happy to come in if you got a red blinking light or you need us to jiggle a cable because something’s not working, but that AS 400 might be collecting dust. It might need a little, you know, get kind of those cans of air at the back or whatever. We can do that kind of stuff too.
Holland: 56:15 So you get a lot of extra possibilities with the platform if you need to pair it, you know, with our services or some gear that you wanna send us and have stand up alongside.
Max: 56:27 You know, those AS 400 are gonna be running until the end of the Internet. I don’t think we’re ever gonna see the end of
Holland: 56:32 the They’re they’re gonna outlast you and me. That’s for sure.
Max: 56:35 Oh, 100%. So well, Holland, thank you so much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed this. It was great.
Holland: 56:42 Likewise, Max. This was fun.
Max: 56:44 I look forward to doing this again, you know, in the future.
Holland: 56:47 I hope so, man. Happy to come back anytime. Appreciate having us on.
Max: 56:52 Thanks for joining the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At ClarkSys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visitus@clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
