 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Welcome to our new podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scato-Cutaya, founder and CEO of JSA. And along with me, my friend, my co-host, top B2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Christel. Hey Evan. Hey, how are you? Good to see you, everyone listening. And welcome to Data Movers, where we sit down with the movers and shakers in today's data telecom and data com world, and really interview a who's who of the industry. And we've had some great guests, and I look forward immensely to our guests today. Yes, me as well. And what a day today is, as we're recording this, the inauguration celebration is in the background. You know, whether you're blue or red, you're a party affiliation, it is something to witness the transfer of power. And the nation, hopefully taking a collective sigh, and really call this call for unity, has me thinking about, you know, how we can even establish that, perhaps in our day to day moving forward. Yeah, at least a wish, not being a social media. Let's take the temperature down on social media. There are already reports that there's less victory all and anger and hate, now that we seem to move post-Trump, and let that be a sign of things to come. Let's look at the positive, the good side of social, that we all love so much, the educational side, the discovery, the science and the connection, and less of the darker side, so here, here. Yeah, and, you know, you think about our previous presidents, I feel like Obama and Trump are both social celebrities, and their own rights had huge Twitter followings before they lost their Twitter account, speaking about Trump, but social influence had really helped them secure the White House during their election. So Biden really comes in not only as the oldest president and a Catholic a second time, we have a Catholic in the White House, but also as not so much as social celebrities, so. Yeah, let's keep it that way, boring is good. Someone said, you know, politics isn't everything, and let's get back to where politics is more sort of background noise than constant agitation. So on that note, I think we have a great guest today, Jamie. Yes, and talking about Unity, I'm so excited with our next guest here, Data Movers. Today we welcome Chin Fang, he's the founder and CEO of Zethar Incorporated. Thanks Chin for joining us. So I've been really reading your bio and your company background with intrigue and interest. So let's start off with the basics. Give us an introduction to Zethar, in particular the really cool science fiction-like name. Okay, Zethar, just by the way, is playing a poem on two words, okay? Zethar is time to the 23rd power, so it's a huge number. And Zethar is at least to computing people, it means tape archive. So it means also getting data together. So the two in combination means a lot of data together. That's what Zethar means. Yeah, and so what do you do at Zethar? I founded the company in 2008 upon seeing the AWS S3 came into sync around that time. It was announced in 2006. I had been in IT industry back then for quite a while. So I knew, well, this thing is gonna proliferate. And indeed, true. Now that you see many, many cloud providers, not just in compute, also cloud storage, okay? Azure, Google, that's the other two big ones. But back then there was only AWS, so-called simple storage service S3. I thought, no, this is not gonna be a stand-alone for sure. So I was looking into a so-called cloud federation, meaning how can you use multiple services in a simple, transparent manner? And now, even though it's still a challenge to a lot of enterprises, so-called multi-cloud is not that simple, okay? But then around 2014, I came to the realization, oh, cloud storage stores a lot of data. And moving a lot of data is actually a more challenging problem. That needs to be solved first. So I switch or what you call pivoted, okay? Into moving data at scale and the speed. That's how it got started. I hope that that answer makes sense to you so far. Yeah, in fact, we call our podcast Data Movers. So you're the penultimate example of our perfect guest. You've been around the block, you've been in many conferences, one of which you talked about the analogy to transporting water as data movement. Hopefully that's not because water's always leaking when you're traveling around. Oh, no, no, no. Help us understand that analogy for our listeners. Okay, I'm living and working in Northern California. So I tend to use a very famous late 19th century, early 20th century engineering fit in the United States as an example. It's the Hachi-Hachi Accaduct Project. It transports water from the Yosemite Hachi-Hachi Valley or reason war to the Bay Area to provide the water supplies. And as you can see crossing various different landscapes like mountains and plants and all that, it's a pretty significant engineering endeavor. So I typically post this question to my audience. For a large water transport project, what are the four major elements to make the project successful? And this question is innocently simple, but it also got people to think and scratch their head for a while. So I will just make the answers available right now. It actually starts off with a reasonable with sufficient water level. I mean, if you don't have a reasonable, how can you transport water? That's obvious, right? The next one actually is also obvious. If I say it, it's like a pipes, large diameter pipes. Why pipes plural? It's because the rates, the volume and the redundancy, what if the pipe is leaking? You just mentioned the leak, right? So what can you do? So you need that, so pipes. How about the third one? Electricity, of course, you need it to power everything. Then finally, what is it? Pumps, again, plural, why? The volume, the water volume, the rates and the redundancy again, okay? What if a pump, single pump fails? You need redundancy. So these four actually are the essential elements. I hope so far I am understandable and you agree with the way I explained it. Absolutely, yeah. Reservoir, pipes, electricity, pumps, building in that redundancy, I love it. Yeah, yeah. To moving data. In fact, moving data requires almost logically the same elements, four elements. And without a fast storage, how can you fill the rest of the path with data? You can't, let's say you have only a slow USB stick. Can you transfer a lot of data long distance? No way, right? So you need a formal, serious, enterprise-grade, fast data storage to begin with. Then you also need fast connections. I mean, if you use your home connection, obviously you cannot go very fast. If you're on a Wi-Fi, especially a low-quality one, oh, come on, even your Zoom session may flip, okay? So, so connection, the bandwidth is important, just like the pipes. Then the third one is, I mean, if you are on a very, very old computing device, say something from like 2000, can you do your job well? Not even running Microsoft Word will be a pleasant experience, right? So computing power. Now, finally, the software. And it has to be highly efficient. Otherwise, just like a pumps, I mean, if the pumps are not well-built, well-designed, how can you pump the water? So, exactly the same four elements. So the water transport analogy is an excellent analogy to make people understand. And people learn best, often from learning from examples. Oh, I love that. So, so Zetar ZX is your platform. Yeah. When you talk about simplicity and scalability and efficiency. Yeah. How long has that platform been in development and underway? Since 2014. And we initially recall what we discussed a while ago. We paid attention to cloud federation. Then we came to the realization, oh, no. I mean, actually federating a cloud or using so-called today, in today's words, it's called multi-cloud. Actually, you need the ability to move data around. I mean, between cloud from your premises, on premise to a cloud and all that may be coming back. So, in 2014, we started pivoting to moving data. And then that's the beginning of it. And if you have any folks related follow-up question, just pump me. Oh, I'm sure we have lots of details to dive into. Oh, sure. But before we do, we love to get a sense of the stories behind the leaders like yourself in our industry. So, let's take a little step back. I see on your bio here, you're originally from Taiwan, you came over to the US. Yeah. You immediately got a master's degree and a Stanford that went on to get a PhD at Stanford. Is that because you were rejected at Harvard and MIT? You were headed there. You know, my folks were living in California even as a really tough guy, okay? I can tell you, he asked the tough questions. So, I have a soft answer about that. Actually, my folks who were living in Los Angeles area, I didn't want to go too far because they were old. So, I applied to East Coast like MIT and all that, but Stanford gave me a mission first, okay? So, I said, oh, I mean, that's only 400 miles, not that much by United States standard, right? So, I just took it and went to Stanford instead. So, it's not because I have something negative to say about MIT or East Coast Ivy League colleges, okay? No, no, no, they are excellent colleges. Yeah, just I like to be close to my family, that's all. That's lovely. And then, how did you go from a PhD to launching a career in IT? That's a, you know, quite a compelling path. And it's actually what you call serendipity. Serendipity, yep. Yeah, my PhD advisor, back then he was the chairman of Stanford's aerospace department. He gave me a PhD topic, dissertation topic that turned out after some sleepless night to be a very, very difficult problem to solve. It's called design a thick composite, but if you translate that into a mathematical formulation, okay, it actually is one class of the most difficult solved mathematical problem called discrete optimization. So, I, because of that, I needed a lot of computing power. And luckily, the Stanford computing center back then IBM donated a bunch of very powerful force workstation called RX-6000, as in Richard, as in Smith, 6,000, that's the number, okay? So I hopped up as many as I could and finally, my activity called the upstairs system managing people, especially the manager's attention. One day he called me up, he said, Chen, would you like to work in my group? Well, the rest is end of the story. I love it, history in the making right there. And I also, because the dissertation is so computational intensive, so naturally I became better and better in software. IT staff in general is special with the mentoring of my manager back then at Stanford computing center. As someone who keeps a very tight pulse on the industry, what do you see as the biggest trends in IT in the next three to five years? Yeah, actually you already, we already see it, it's the adoption of the cloud storage services. And but right now, one big hindrance is that many people still do not have the knowledge, solution or skill about moving data at a scale and the speed. So, and as you know, cloud is a remote resources. And if your enterprise or institution wants to interact with cloud, the data must be moved. Otherwise, without data, you cannot do compute, without data, you cannot have the information available in the cloud anyway. So once this stage is overcame hopefully with our solution and the software, then it will be accelerated. So that will be more and more. So people can do more AI in the cloud, for instance, can do more machine learning in the cloud, for instance, can do more like biomedical research in the cloud, for instance, it will good for everybody. So that trend will be accelerating with the moving data and the scale and speed. And you think the pandemic really fast forwarded our adoption? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a trigger, what I call, at this stage, it's a trigger, it's a motivation, very strong motivation, because as you can see that the revenue of major cloud providers or even a second tier one all went up, have gone up, not just went, have gone up. Yeah, being able to move data at the scale and speed efficiently and simply, transparently, scalably will accelerate this process. And the cloud is a good thing to have for everyone. It's really the foundation of digital transformation, right? Oh yeah, oh yeah. And we've seen the cloud wars emerge with AWS versus Azure versus Google Cloud and Alibaba, this whole landscape. Do you see winners and losers there? Or is it, you think it's just win-win for all the major players? You know, even you always ask me tough questions. So I'd like to give you some answers. My answer is simple, let them fight it out, let the market decide. Yes. Is that a good one? It's good, worked so far. So I don't think it's too after this. Yeah, no, it's a great marketplace, a great time to be in our industry. So let's, let's shift fire, have a little bit of fun. We want to give our listeners a little more insight into you and your personality. So let me ask you a few trivia questions. Let's call them. What's the most used app on your phone? iPhone, Samsung, whatever it might be. What do you use, like daily, hourly? I use Samsung. And you will be surprised that the app I use most often depends on the time of the day. So in daytime, I tend to use text messages. And I also make phone calls. Of course, that's what the phone is for. You're very old school, very traditional here, yeah. No, no, no, not really, not really, not really. I tend to work with both European customers and Middle East customers and customers in the APAC region. With them, I use a WhatsApp. And you don't use it just for text messages and phone calls. And you can use it for many things, even forward pictures and forward shop documents. It's a quite versatile tool. So what, what, what next question? What technology or innovation do you personally look forward to seeing in the years to come? Is it a gadget, a device? Is it a technology? Is it VR, AR? I mean, what are you personally excited about on the tech front? I think the most exciting technology in developing and it's progressing is the persistent memory. The Intel is working on, but I'm very, very sure. So no later, other competitors will come into thing and probably give Intel a hard time, just like AMD and ARM have given Intel a hard time these days. Yeah, I think I know the answer to this, so what's your favorite subject in school when you were young? I'm guessing math, but please correct me. No, when you said, when you were young, I'm really, you need to define that it's a preteen or teenager or in college, okay? York, yeah. So I will give you three, okay? Initially, I think I like history a lot. Nice. Then I like in early teen, I like literature. Then in late teen, I became fascinated with the physics and the gradually math. And in college, sure, math. I did my dissertation with the statistics, Monte Carlo simulation. Nice, nice. So it evolves, it doesn't really always the same. And I'm back to history again, so I don't know. It's like we always go back to what fascinated us as kids. And how do you spend your time when you're not working long hours? How do you like that, how do you compress? That's why California is still a great place, although Bay Area is extremely expensive and it just has such a fantastic outdoor environment. I love outdoors. Yeah, the right place. I mean, San Francisco is a dream and I miss it. I'm based here in Boston and I miss my trips out west. And Jamie, I'm sure you miss your trips out east. Yeah, I agree with you, Chen. There's no better place to survive the pandemic than out here in the beautiful San... Oh, yeah, yeah. Even though we are confined in Santa Clara Valley, we think once you go beyond 150 miles, you come back, you have to quarantine yourself for two weeks. But even within 150 miles, there are lots to see. So I don't really feel that bad. Yeah, I mean, you can at least get some sun on your face and... Oh, yeah, oh yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. Right? Yeah. So congratulations on all the success and we look forward to watching your big data grow story, grow even bigger. So thanks for coming on the show. We just really enjoyed getting to know you, Chen, as a pastry and as a person, you know, your background story was just so fascinating. Thank you so much for being with us here today, Chen. For our listeners, if you enjoyed today's Data Movers podcast, be sure to check us out, jsa.net, slash podcast for upcoming Data Movers episodes. We release them every other week on Wednesday morning. So go ahead and listen in. And additionally, you know, I'm not sure if you're on Twitter, but if you are, follow us at Jay Scotto and Evan Kirstel and you can get back to normal Twitter, let's say our pre-Trump Twitter and take the temperature down. So look forward to chatting more after the show. Yeah, all right. Well, thank you guys again and for everyone out there, happy networking.