The Uncast Show
Owning an Unraid server gives you the ultimate control over your data and reduces your dependence on The Cloud. Join host Ed Rawlings to learn how to get the most out of your Unraid server, stay up to date on relevant news and topics, and get to know members of the Unraid community!
The Uncast Show
The Unraid Story: Lime Technology Co-CEO's Discuss the Past and Future of Unraid OS
On this very special episode of the Uncast Show, we are joined by the Founder and CEO of Lime Technology, Tom Mortensen, and Co-CEO Tiffany Jones to talk about the origins of Unraid OS, the evolution of the product over the past 18+ years, and some upcoming changes to the company to better align the product and user's desires in Unraid 7 and beyond.
Tom and Tiffany share their personal career journeys and take us down memory lane as Unraid incorporated VMs and Docker containerization, GPU passthrough (a decision that dramatically shifted the course of the company with Linus Tech Tips), made key hires to expand the team, and talk about some key projects and initiatives that got the company where it is today.
The conversation shifts gears to the future and goes into the upcoming changes to Unraid's pricing model for new licenses and why this change is crucial and necessary for sustaining the company and improving the product for all in the years to come.
For full details on the upcoming pricing change, please refer to our blog.
Wrapping up the episode, we'll get a first look at Unraid 7 and explore some exciting future OS features and projects such as making the unRAID array optional, integrating and maintaining plugins into the OS, VM Snapshots and cloning, the "Hardware Database," the "My Friends Network," a new Unraid website, a public, open-source Unraid API and much, much more.
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Hi there, guys, welcome to another episode of the Uncast Podcast. I'm your host, Ed. All you may know me as my alias, space Invader 1. And I must say today I'm really excited and I say thumping in the chest, excited for a really exciting episode, because the man whose invention is buzzing through not only my server but friend's servers but probably most of you guys watching, is inventions buzzing through your servers as well. So yes, guys, today on the show we're going to be chatting with the founder CEO of Lime Technology, the brain behind the remarkable Unraid, tom Mortensen, and also the co-CEO, tiffany Jones. So thank you, guys, for taking the time to be with us today. Thanks for having us, ed.
Tom Mortensen:Yeah, thanks Ed.
Ed Rawlings:You know to the viewers and listeners out there, we're going to be diving into some really exciting updates today regarding Unraid and Lime Technology and, trust me, you're going to want to stick around to the end. This is some really exciting and important updates that you're going to want to hear. This is going to be a journey filled with insights, surprises and news that you're going to want to hear first hand. But before we jump into that, I think it'd be fun to kind of lighten things up a little bit. I want to get to know Tom and Tiffany asking them something I call quick fire questions. So, tom, if it's all right, I'm going to start with you. You're going to be in the crosshairs first and I'm going to start asking you some questions. So what I want you to do, please, is I'm going to ask you kind of questions that's pretty much just got an A or B answer. I want you to answer them as quick as you can. No kind of like thinking about it, just fire them off. Are you an early bird or a night owl?
Tom Mortensen:Early bird and night owl. Can it be both?
Ed Rawlings:You're meant to choose one, tom. You're spoiling my form as desktop or laptop.
Tom Mortensen:Desktop, although these days I'm mainly using a laptop.
Ed Rawlings:And I'd say Mac or PC, pc Standing desk or traditional desk.
Tom Mortensen:Used to have a standing desk. Now it's a traditional desk.
Ed Rawlings:And whilst you're working. Do you like silence or do you like a little bit of background music? Silence, not even music and Hard to come by, and coffee or tea?
Tom Mortensen:Oh coffee, Lots of it.
Ed Rawlings:I'm sure if you guys actually drink tea in the States. Are you a cat or a dog person? Cats or dogs?
Tom Mortensen:Dogs We've had. At one time we had seven dogs. We're down to one now.
Ed Rawlings:Wow, that's a lot of dogs. My mum also has a lot of dogs, so you definitely got on with her, I think. So a very important question, Tom. Star Wars or Star Trek you can tell a lot about a person with this answer, so be careful.
Tom Mortensen:Okay, well, star Trek, if I'm forced to choose, if I must pick, it's Star.
Ed Rawlings:Wars Good answer, but I think Star Trek, at least 50% of our audience. Oh, there was a little flip there. There was a flip there. At least 50% of the audience will be happy with that. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no? No way, not on pizza, pineapple just in dessert. Say, a bit of a sort of fun one. Would you rather have Iron Man's suit or Batman's gadgets? If you had to choose one or the other, Iron Man's suit yeah good answer.
Ed Rawlings:I totally agree, but I do like Batman's gadgets too. And if you could travel in time, would you rather go back in the past or to the future?
Tom Mortensen:Well, if I go in the future, it might end up being just a fireball somewhere, so I'm going to pick the past.
Ed Rawlings:Optimist or pessimist. Thanks for that, tom. I won't give you any more, but, tiffany, it's going to be your turn now, please. So, again, no thinking or elaborating, tiffany, please. I promise I won't. I'll take your answers, Got it Right? Android or iOS? Ios, your favorite browser? Chrome, ebook or Realbook? Oof damn it.
Tiffany Jones:The answer is yes, but I'll say ebook.
Ed Rawlings:Right and spontaneity or meticulous planning. Oh, personally, can I answer?
Tom Mortensen:that one for her.
Tiffany Jones:Spontaneity? No, we're not. There's no elaborating here, so I just got to say it. One app you couldn't live without the Reminders app. I live and die by the Reminders app on my phone and if you could choose city life or countryside.
Ed Rawlings:Countryside Just the same as the last one I gave for Tom. Time travel, future or past.
Tiffany Jones:Past, Not because the future is a fireball. Just to clarify.
Ed Rawlings:As with all the best stories, I guess let's start at the beginning. Like, obviously, our audience, they know line technology and unraid, but not everyone knows the story of the person behind it all. So, tom, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit, please, about your early years. Were there any specific incidents or influences in your childhood that hinted that you'd be venturing, possibly, into the world of tech and technology?
Tom Mortensen:Wow, back to the childhood, huh. Well, I grew up in San Jose and I remember when I was in high school I had a good friend and we used to ride our bikes from South San Jose up to Santa Clara University and at that time they had a computer lab, but it just had some, it's just this room. It had like an HP 2000 in it, something like a PDP 11. And we used to sneak in there and have write programs of punch cards, learn how to feed it into the punch card reader, and we got so good at doing this that the actual university students would come in and we'd be helping them. We'd be helping them, you know, reboot the computer, debug their programs, and then we'd split back on our bikes and got out of there. So yeah, that was the first inkling, I guess.
Ed Rawlings:How old would you figure you were back in some day?
Tom Mortensen:That was teenager, I guess I don't know 16, 17, probably 15. It was before a car, so, yeah, 15. Yeah.
Ed Rawlings:Also, tom. I believe before you form line technology, you were at a company called Maxstrat.
Tom Mortensen:Correct.
Ed Rawlings:If I'm correct, it was founded in the. I'm not sure, was it in the early 90s or the mid 80s? It was the mid 80s, yeah, like mid 80s, late 80s, yeah, and it specialized, I believe, in high performance RAID storage systems. Correct, didn't they have their product used by DreamWorks Inc for all the movie Prince of Egypt?
Tom Mortensen:Yeah, so they, when Maxstrat in those days in the late 80s, the market for what they were mainly doing was storing video data from, like the early CAT scan machines. Their initial product was just a video display device that would hook to the CAT scan and the doctor could adjust the contrast and all that. Later they we needed to add storage because of digital data and it was just a simple we'd call it. These days we called it RAID zero. But then in the late 80s this guy I think his name was Patterson, from UC Berkeley, came out with a paper that talked about RAID, the different RAID levels, and I remember one of the founders at Maxstrat came and he's whiteboarding this out. So we created a RAID five and I think that and I don't know this for sure and I'm not trying to brag or anything, but I think it was the first commercial RAID five product, but it was very specialized. Then, yeah, the product was used in Disney.
Tom Mortensen:So I think what you're referring to is was the early some of the early animation. Last year early I saw Little Mermaid and Aladdin. We worked with Disney and they used digital media to, you know, hard drives to store the animation. They would have an army of people in their IT staff. In the morning, well, all during the night they'd be putting data onto these SGI workstations or animators that work on, and then in the evening they'd have to take all the data off and shuffle it onto these disk arrays. But that's what we're doing, one of the things Maxstrat also. We were involved with high performance computing connecting to Cray super computers and so, for that purpose, large disk arrays. We created large disk arrays in order to just increase the bandwidth. I can remember hitting 100 megabytes per second was such a huge deal and with these you know these old, these large like eight inch hard drives. That's why I started really programming on purpose for disk arrays.
Ed Rawlings:And so back then, how big were these disk arrays, how many?
Tom Mortensen:Oh gosh, it's hard.
Ed Rawlings:What kind of size were they?
Tom Mortensen:Okay, they were like, they can be remembered. So I want to say there were, you know, like a couple hundred megabytes Megabytes is all not gigs A couple hundred megabytes per disk and I think we had these huge cabinets trying to remember how many probably 24 hard drives in various configurations.
Ed Rawlings:How do you think your time there actually influenced or shaped your approach towards storage situations and kind of, what did you learn there that maybe kind of like you kind of brought across when you created Unrayed?
Tom Mortensen:Well, for sure is that hard drives are unreliable. You know, if you lose a hard drive, it depends on how diligent you are with backups. But you know, honestly, there's gaps in when you do backups and so if you lose a hard drive, you've you know you've lost a lot, not only the data but also time to recreate from somewhere. So yeah, hard drives, and plus they're expensive. You know, during the 90s and the 2000s, early 2000s, they're, you know, pretty expensive. Still. The first Unrayed prototypes were I was using these, these white label hard drives, and I don't know if they even produce white double hard drives anymore, but they, they would literally put a white label over the manufacturer and all that. So you didn't and they were just sold cheaply. So I don't know where they came from, back of a truck or whatever they were, but they were cheap but also unreliable. So they needed some kind of RAID technology.
Ed Rawlings:The company MaxTrat. Did it get bought by Sun?
Tom Mortensen:Micros yeah, 99. It was bought by Sun Micro. Sun wanted to get into high performance computing storage and and that was at the beginning of technology called Sand Storage Area Networks. That was all the RAID back in those days, yeah.
Ed Rawlings:Yeah Well, one thing I saw you know before the podcast I kind of tried to research a little bit about MaxTrat and okay couldn't find a lot of information, to be honest, but I thought it was kind of a really kind of peculiar, sort of kind of full circle narrative that kind of unfolded is you work for MaxTrat, and then they were acquired by Sun Micros systems who actually developed as probably most of the audience already know, they developed the ZFS file system. So you know, fast forward today and ZFS has woven itself into the RAID storage stack. Now, while there's no direct actual linkage between your time at MaxTrat and ZFS coming into RAID, it's kind of like a cool and intriguing technical tapestry, don't you think? Now I just wondered if you can share your feelings about witnessing these kind of two separate paths kind of converging in an unexpected manner, as they have.
Tom Mortensen:Well, I guess it was inevitable. In my time at Sun I was working for a network storage division and right down the hall were the Solaris guys and it was at the beginning of them developing ZFS. It wasn't an official thing at those days yet, but ZFS has advantages and disadvantages. Right now is, I think, a great time because where it's going to really shine in an RAID server environment is going to be with SSD devices, the solid state NVMe, because it requires, you know, if you use it in a disk array, it requires all your drive spun up all the time.
Tom Mortensen:So if you have large disk arrays, well, a lot of people are very energy conscious, especially over where you are in the EU, you know, in the UK, yeah, it's very expensive and so, yeah, it's not necessarily ideal for a home user or even a small business if you don't have to always have your drive spun up. But if you want to manage large SSD type arrays, it's really good. So that's where I think it's going to really find its niche in. An RAID is in that capacity and you'll use your traditional RAID array with Parity as like a really longer term mass storage of you know, really high density hard drives. But yeah, it is interesting how it's sort of come full circle.
Ed Rawlings:Regarding the solid state storage, like SSDs and NVMe, do you think that you know ZFS has got an advantage over, say, butterfs?
Tom Mortensen:Yeah.
Ed Rawlings:A similar type of file system.
Tom Mortensen:It's certainly more mature and there are a lot more knobs to turn and to improve performance. You know ButterFS has some advantages to it's simpler. You know. I have to say ButterFS, anybody who's used it you know. You know that it's used a certain way and for example, their RAID five and six implementation is kind of stagnated. They never really, you know, made that bulletproof. So in that regard ZFS has big advantages, I think. And by the way, between yourself and a few other people that work for us in the UK and the EU, I'm going to be calling it ZFS pretty soon In Canada.
Ed Rawlings:I think, as I call it ZFS now, I'm so used to saying that.
Tom Mortensen:Oh, yeah, okay, so you're turning over to the dark side then.
Ed Rawlings:So yeah, I've swapped to Z and you Okay.
Tom Mortensen:All right.
Ed Rawlings:Cool. Anyway, I don't really want to talk too much about present day on RAID quite yet, so if we can kind of loop back to the beginning of the company, I've heard snippets before about RAID being kind of born out of you know, something you wanted to create for yourself, for your own personal needs. But I wondered can you share what actually sparked the initial idea and perhaps you know what solutions were you actually using before you created RAID? That just didn't quite hit the mark for you.
Tom Mortensen:So I worked at 7 from 99 to 2001,. Then another startup for a couple of years and then by around 2004 or so, I was mainly just sitting at home. But in those days that was right, when high definition TVs were really starting to come out and a couple of other things happened. So I had a large DVD collection and all of a sudden now there's media server software that can run on a PC and you could copy DVDs to your hard drive and play it from your computer onto your high-devvision TV. And so I started doing that.
Tom Mortensen:And it takes, you know, you spend a lot of hours moving your DVD collection to hard drives and pretty soon you realize, well, okay, yeah, if a hard drive fails, again I was using these white label drives. If a hard drive fails, okay, I got my collection still. But what about all those hours spent ripping, you know? So I got to work. I wanted to create a RAID 5 type system, some kind of parity protection, but I already had these bunch of devices, hard drives, that had data on them. I didn't want to re-stripe them. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to add parity and we'll do block level parity across all the devices, and so each disk itself would still be its own file system. And then I realized there's a lot of advantages of that because also at the same time, gig ethernet was starting to come out, but the hard drives were fast enough to keep up. Okay, so there was really no need to stripe. You could stripe, but there was no point because you couldn't feed it out of your network interface any faster. So it was just fine to store video and pictures and everything else on one hard drive and the rate and the speed of the hard drive was enough to play back flawlessly, right. So that's how RAID was born. So I figured out, I got, I had a little experience with Linux, but not really doing any kind of like driver development. So I got a hold of Linux and it was version 2.4 in those days and there was a driver already called MD which implemented RAID 5 and RAID 1. And so I looked at that and learned how the block layer worked in Linux and I took that as a starting point, that driver, and created an RAID version. So that's where that came from. Okay, so the term RAID hopefully I don't get sued for this, but it came from the old 7up commercials of like the 70s and 80s they called themselves the UnCola right, and so this was a RAID array, but it wasn't really like it wasn't RAID 5, it wasn't RAID 1, but that wasn't really a RAID level for it, so I called it UnRAID. Okay, that's where that came from.
Tom Mortensen:Then, one day, my son he was learning how some of this computer stuff worked and he thought it was pretty cool and he said hey dad, you know, I think you should try to sell this to other people, see, because other people don't want to do this. Okay, and so I decided all right, I need to form an LLC. And it was just what I did, and so to come up with the name is kind of hard. So I was living on Lyme Drive, so that's where that came from. Lyme technology came from Lyme Drive. That's a real creative right, so that's why we've got more different people now doing the creative stuff, like Tiffany over here and you others. So that's where that came from. I was living on Lyme Drive.
Ed Rawlings:That's really interesting. Just kind of going back to you saying about that you had a lot of data already on the hard drive and so you didn't want to actually have to empty the drives and recreate it. So if you think if you didn't have had all of that data on the drives and some had given you a bunch of brand new hard drives maybe we would have not had that type of parity system in unrated? It was just because of you having that data.
Tom Mortensen:I would say it's more unlikely. If I didn't have the data, I probably never would have done this to begin with.
Ed Rawlings:I'm glad you did. Every invention it always begins with some kind of prototype or a first draft. So after you developed the initial unrate, who were the first group of people to actually test it and what was their feedback?
Tom Mortensen:So one of the first users was a fellow named Joe L on the forums. He's no longer active on the forums but he wrote a lot of the early scripts, a lot of early utilities for unrate, and one of them is pre-clear. I think it's still in use today in some form. The initially unrate was just an array of hard drives and each disk disk, one disk, two, again not a real imaginative name, but they showed up as network shares. Then after a while people said well, hey, it'd be nice to have like a unified name called movies, for example, or pictures, and it just showed everything on the array. So got to work creating what's called now the user share file system. It's basically a union file system. That was from feedback of the community. It's something I wanted to. A lot of the features in unrate are there because I wanted to use them.
Tom Mortensen:Then one disadvantage with the unrate organization is that because it's not data's not striped as you write, you always have to modify two devices in parallel your target data disk plus. You have to update parity, and so writes tend to be slower than reads, in fact quite a bit. There may be around 30% and 40% the speed of reads For that reason. As networks got faster, it became desirable to be able to transfer data to the server faster than the hard drives could keep up writing. So that's where we came up with this idea of a cache drive. It's called just a single device to receive the data and then later we would move it to the array at a time when your system was quiet, like at 3 in the morning, for example. So that also was a in response to people with faster networks and wanted to get the data to the array faster.
Tom Mortensen:I'd say virtually every feature in unrate is that genesis was from a user that requested it, or said the users. And hey, this looks like a pretty popular thing to add Even ZFS to present day. There's a lot of people that want to use it. So yeah, let's do it.
Ed Rawlings:Anyway, switching gears a little bit, tom. I'm particularly interested in how your company in the early days you were also building and shipping servers. When did you actually decide to switch away from that? I'm just only focused on developing the OS. When did that?
Tom Mortensen:happen? Yeah, okay, so I looked it up and the first server was shipped in September of 2005. I remember that well. It was the very first product server product was a full tower case. It had wheels and as a whole bunch of IDE hard drives 12 of them and the box. The whole thing weighed in the shipping box something like 95 pounds and anyway, sold several of those and what's the one thing you forgot, though, when you were shipping that first server?
Tom Mortensen:Yeah, the very first server went out. I forgot the power cords, so I had to FedEx the power cords, that again. And then I implemented manufacturing, testing and checklist and all that Unrayed was sold, as I never did sell it just a software product, it was always a server, various forms of server. We had something called Starter Kit, which was just a motherboard, the disc controllers and the flash device and the processor and memory and that was it. And now all I had to do was install that in a case. So that was a pretty popular product for a while. And then we also sold pre-configured flash devices where just get put Unrayed already on it, so you didn't have to mess with that, it just just with boot right there.
Tom Mortensen:So we built servers up until September. The last one went out September of 2015. And over that time was several hundred servers and I built almost all of them myself and 2015 was kind of a pivotal year. I guess we'll get to that, but it was a pivotal year for the company and it was clear. You know we have to decide are we going to build, are we going to be a hardware company building these servers, or are we going to just concentrate on the software and make that easy for people. And so, as you know, we chose the latter path, and that was just so we could focus better, more on the software. I mean, it's building servers, it's time consuming and dealing with not only building them, shipping them, returns, you know, replacements there's a lot to it procuring the parts to begin with.
Ed Rawlings:Reflecting on the remarkable evolution of Unrayed since it starts. Did you ever kind of anticipate during those early foundational stages that you were shaping one of the future leaders and NAS solutions? No way. And also also kind of on the back of that. How did Unrayed manage to adeptly pivot, incorporating kind of functions such as virtualization and Docker containerization? What drove that expansion During that phase? Were there any kind of significant hurdles that were very difficult to get over?
Tom Mortensen:So 2015 was okay. That was a pivotal year. So before that, what I would tell people is I'm doing this mainly for beer money. I mean we're making. You know I wasn't making a huge amount of money shelling servers. You know we tried to be. There was no huge profit margin, margins or anything. I wouldn't say it was a hobby. It wasn't a hobby because it was something I was doing full time. But I wasn't trying to build something that would be sold for millions of dollars or something like that. I wasn't trying to do that. It would have any VC. To this day, there's no outside funding. There's no venture capital or anything like that right now.
Tom Mortensen:In 2015,. However well, actually a little before that, in 2014,. That timeframe got to a point where I needed to make a decision. Are we going to keep going the way it is? There's other competitors coming along, there's other storage solutions. Are we going to try to make this into a growing business? I thought, okay, well, let's try to make it a business. I hired my first employee, who was a marketing gentleman.
Tom Mortensen:In 2015, we incorporated as a corporation, really got to work, looking at what's the future of the product going to be. What do people want? The first thing was people wanted to run apps, a way to run some kind of apps on the server itself. What was happening was server hardware itself motherboards, processors, ram. All that was getting is not only was it staying inexpensive, but it was getting very powerful way more powerful than you need just to have network storage. We decided, all right, how can we make use of this processing power?
Tom Mortensen:The first idea was to implement virtual machines, because Docker wasn't around quite yet. Maybe it was starting, but it wasn't really something big yet. That virtual machines were the first virtual machine implementation, for Unrate was actually Zen. The idea behind that was that you could have individual virtual machines. Each one would be tailored for a specific application. If you wanted to run a media server VM, that would be a VM. If you wanted to run a backup server, that would be another VM. That was the idea that each app what we know as app now would be its own VM. That went along and we worked on that during basically 2015 or so.
Tom Mortensen:It became evident that, as Linux itself was evolving, that KVM was really a better solution Totally switch gears. There's still some vestiges of Zen. The share that we use to store virtual machines is called domains. That's the Zen term. That's where that came from. We just kept that, just maintain compatibility. So, yeah, we shifted gears.
Tom Mortensen:Then, all of a sudden, people in the community started talking about Docker. The KVM implementation was working and we shifted gears and integrated Docker and realized that this is a really good. For lighter weight apps there's VMs. You can do a lot with VM. You can have Windows VM, mac OS VM if you want. Docker looked like a good choice to run individual apps, not only that, to be able to leverage what other people do. If other people have an app they want to run on the server, then Docker is the way to do it. That was also around 2015 or so. 2016 is when we did that. Yeah, that's where that came from. Again, it was the community and myself wanting to see this hardware and you look at the load on it doing even doing parody sinks, and all that in a load is like 5% you think, okay, what else can we do here?
Ed Rawlings:It's a great testament, tom, to how you listen to the community. You're saying that the community was talking about Docker and you implemented it into Unrade. But speaking of VMs and speaking of milestones, 2015 was quite a pivotal year for Unrade. I believe the visibility of Unrade skyrocketed when you got featured on Linus Tech Tips, especially the video two game is one CPU, then later the seven game is one CPU. I was wondering how did that collaboration come about and how did those videos on Linus's channel impact the trajectory of line technology?
Tom Mortensen:I could mention before, I had hired a guy to do some marketing for us and he was sending out emails just to any influencers. He could kind of like cold email saying, hey, here's this product and we want to get, can we feature it on your channel, and that kind of thing. Him and other people that we had on the team finally got a reply from Linus. The other bit of technology that was happening right then, by the way, was something called GPU pass through. That was the ability to take a physical graphics card in your host server and basically pass it completely through to a VM so that that virtual machine had direct access to the hardware of that graphics card. There was some work done by a guy at Red Hat to make that possible.
Tom Mortensen:We integrated that and we were able to do this GPU pass through and that caught the attention of Linus and I'm very grateful this day for Linus. He was instrumental in those days. We put together, with his help, put together a server that did exactly that. I had a couple of graphics cards and one server and he was able to produce that video around it and, yeah, it was amazing the visibility and it changed my mind about how video marketing, how YouTube marketing, how that works it's just phenomenal. That was an awesome time at the end of 2015 and into 2016.
Ed Rawlings:Yeah, Navigating through the rapid growth that obviously came from after those videos coming out and obviously a lot more people being exposed to Unrayed. You've expanded the team and rebranded. Can you touch on any key milestones and hires during this phase?
Tiffany Jones:People may not realize this, but Tom is actually my dad. I've been around this business for a long time as well, though not as involved. Until the last couple of years here In 2018, I was working at a design agency as their producer, and my dad and I talk all the time and I was learning about how much this business was growing and expanding and all the awesome things that were happening, and I said you know, unrayed could really use a logo and Unrayed could really use a brand. That's not clip art. Sliced limes.
Tom Mortensen:Yeah, my brother, and my brother, my brother. When he saw our old Lime Tech logo, he goes Tom, are you in the grocery business? Anyway?
Tiffany Jones:And so I finally convinced my dad hey, come to this agency, I will produce. You know, I will be the producer on the project. Let's get some messaging, let's get some branding, let's get a website, let's get you know, let's make this more official. And so he said, all right. So I think that started early 2018, and kind of the joke was at the time I was pregnant and I was due at the end of August of 2018. And so the joke was we have to get this all launched before the other launch before I launch baby.
Tiffany Jones:So he came in and it was really amazing to be able to kind of usher. That usher Unrayed into that next era and I learned a lot more about the company at that time and I was also working. Another person who was there at the agency with me was a guy named Zach Spear who is now our senior front-end developer on the team, and so he actually built the website and after he ended up leaving that agency, my dad called and said hey, you think I could snag Zach. I think he'd come work for us. I said, yeah, let's do it. So he brought. He brought Zach on a couple of years or maybe a year after that 2019-ish I think it was like January 2019. And then a couple months later, my dad reached out to Spencer, who is our marketing communications manager, and also my husband, and said hey, can you come? He started off as a community manager and be our liaison between the community and us Because, as a result of so much growth, our community was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and that gap between my dad and the community was getting bigger.
Tiffany Jones:We didn't want that to happen. We wanted to have a good line of communication, because it's so important to this company's history and our future, and so Spencer came on in 2019. And that was really a huge moment. So between having a new website, a brand, a logo, a dedicated person leasing with the community, a front-end developer and all these people coming into the mix, things started to really ramp up even more. And then later in 2019, I came on as a consultant to start streamlining operations inside the company, and that has evolved over time to now us really working in partnership, leading this company, where he handles mostly on the tech side and I'm on all the other side operations, marketing people and since that time, we've brought on I think I counted six people between 2019 and now, which is full-time employees. So we have Eli, who came on a little over a year ago to manage all of our cloud services. We brought on Justin. He's our DevOps engineer. He came on about six months ago.
Ed Rawlings:Yeah, I can just stop you for one moment. Yeah, yeah, for people. I'm sure some of the guys watching they don't actually know what a DevOps is. What is DevOps?
Tom Mortensen:He's mainly responsible for actually running our cloud services that we need for the business. For example, we have a server that we call KeyServer. He and Eli work on that. These days is mainly Eli, but other DevOps would be backups, managing where our downloads are stored, getting staging environments set up.
Tom Mortensen:Right and forum updates all those types of projects is what Justin's doing right now? I don't know, maybe you'll ask us, but something to point out is we're a fully remote company and always have been. We were a remote company before it was a thing to be a remote company, before it was in vogue. And so, for example, justin's in Sweden, eli is in Virginia, I'm in San Diego, tiffany Spencer up on the ocean side, zach's in Oregon, larry is in Arizona, ed here is in the UK. We've got other developers in the Netherlands, austria, norway, Portugal, portugal, canada, texas. So that's the other part of DevOps is having things so that we can communicate amongst each other when we need to across time zones. So, yeah, that's been pretty interesting Learning how to deal with all this. There's a lot more tools now available for remote work, but yeah, we already had a lot of that figured out before it was a thing.
Ed Rawlings:If you want to carry on with the. You know what other staff members you took on and what their roles were.
Tiffany Jones:Yeah, yeah, so we brought Larry on. He was before Eli, kind of in the timeline here. But, larry, one of also the unique things to mention about pretty much every single one of our hires is they came from the community. So you guys all out there you probably have interacted with Larry LJM42. That's how we it's funny we have to go between real names and forum handles for people out there. So instead of calling him Andrew, we just we all just call him squid at this point, but anyway. So Larry's been out there for a long time and it's really cool to actually have that, because you can kind of look back on a person's history and go, okay, you know, like they've, they're an amazing community member, they have a good you know they haven't gone off on anybody.
Tom Mortensen:Yeah, there's many swearing.
Tiffany Jones:Maybe in some DMs or something, but so so Larry came on and Larry has really become your right hand man in in producing OS releases and testing and managing the OS development team, and really great person to work with. He came from Cisco, yeah yeah. And then the last person I want to hire or bring up is someone we hired about. They started three days ago. As of this recording. His name is Adam. He actually comes to us from IAIC Systems. I mean, he built up their customer what did he call it? The customer success team there, so he handled all of their operations. He was in their QA department for a while and he was there for about eight years, and so we brought him on to our team.
Tiffany Jones:And the reason why we brought this person on is, you know, you can imagine, as our community is grown and we're selling more and more licenses, you know the support needs have really grown too, and something that I'm really big on is making sure that our customers feel really taken care of and that customer support needs to be, you know, really high level. And so we wanted to bring Adam on to head up that department. Spencer has really kind of been the person spearheading that department, but you know he wears a lot of hats and he's getting spread pretty thin, and so we felt like the timing was really right to bring Adam on, and so we're really excited to see what he's going to do. And, ed, I definitely want to get him on the podcast with you too. He'll love to talk shop with you.
Tom Mortensen:And one thing Adam brings to is a deep knowledge and experience of ZFS. So we feel like, thank you, that's going to be very valuable to help us avoid, maybe, some pitfalls. What's really important to implement ZFS is huge. It's an enterprise level file system and storage management software. There's a lot of things you can do with it, but what is really necessary? I think he's going to be very helpful in helping to sort that out at a faster rate.
Ed Rawlings:So he's a great fit for the company for sure. So when you're expanding your team, what are the key attributes you look for when expanding?
Tom Mortensen:out your team. Well, number one is we look to our community. We look for people who already know of use and rate. Everybody that we've hired is in that category. Basically, from time to time, projects come up and one of the things we want to do in the future more is have a way to officially say, hey, we have this little project we want someone to do and post it on the forum and let people be compensated for their work. So that's something that we want to look towards in the future. And so, yeah, the community is where we go for everything, and I guess they're listening to this right now. So, big thank you to everybody and I'd rate this would definitely not be possible without the community.
Tom Mortensen:And when I say that, the forum discord, now even Reddit, facebook groups, there's other discord servers and right, our primary goal has always been to try to keep our community friendly, keep it very, you know, really help new people out. There's no dumb questions. A lot of times in tech you can get people to say, well, why don't you try a search first in the forum? Well, you know it's not perfect. You know every community is. You know there's always things and things fall through the cracks and I don't always see everything in the forum and but I think for the most part we have a good reputation of having, you know, one of the best communities out there for for this kind of a storage product. So we're very, you know, I'm the most proud of that. You know the software. You know people could, people could replicate it. You know it's not rocket science. You know people could, could replicate it. But our community is really what's most important.
Ed Rawlings:Yeah, I think we've got a really great community. It's a very friendly, friendly forum. You know, so often, like you say, tom, you know new people, can you know post on all sorts of forums and let you say people are just like horrible to say then you know, we all kind of started not knowing anything. You know. So people need to remember that and I think our community is very sensitive.
Tom Mortensen:And our moderators are great. You know there's been mistakes. You know there's been some people that maybe weren't treated the way they thought they should be, but our moderators are awesome.
Tiffany Jones:Yeah, there's, there's zero tolerance for being an A-hole. I don't know if we cuss all this, but there's no tolerance for that and Spencer's really, you know that has been the ethos the whole time. And then Spencer has really, you know, made sure that that has been enforced across the board, even in, you know, private support tickets that come in. You know it's just, it's just not tolerated to be jerks, yeah.
Tom Mortensen:And you know we've been over backwards as much as we can to help anybody. We're not. I hope people don't think we're just these greedy guys and we're not we. We try to do anything we can to help people out, that's all.
Ed Rawlings:When did you guys start kind of putting unread into other languages as well, because that's quite a recent thing as well, isn't it? Like? I believe, like you know, chinese, german is kind of translations of, of the documentation website, that kind of thing, but when did you start?
Tiffany Jones:When was that? That was a Spencer. That was a Spencer initiative.
Tom Mortensen:Spencer and Ronald.
Tiffany Jones:Yeah, I was like 20, probably, you know, 2019, 2020. It was kind of one of his first big projects where it's like you know it'd be really great to localize the product and, you know, worked internally on that. But then you know, almost all the translations not every single one, but almost all of them and ongoing are community supported. You know they're done by the community, just like a lot of things with Unread.
Tom Mortensen:Well, the story that happened there was. The developer of the implementation of multiple languages within our management intervention at Webgui is Ronald, who has done a lot of work for us, and Bonnie, Bonnie and L. Bonnie and L Bonnie and L, yeah, yeah.
Tom Mortensen:And he lives in the Netherlands. This task has been out there. You know, we knew we wanted to do it and we were. I was within I don't know a week or two of publishing sort of the next release. It was a fairly major Unread. I don't remember the exact version number but all of a sudden here's this huge, this massive PR on GitHub Ronald, okay, here's multiple language support. I'm like what? Okay, so I merged it and I go. Well, how hard could it be? So I merged it and you know, it only delayed the release maybe a month, and but we got it in and it was an awesome piece of work. And then, and then Spencer, he went to, went to town sending up different repos, github repos for each of the languages, recruiting people to start doing translation. And to this day, mm-hmm.
Tiffany Jones:And then on the website. So we created a localized version of the website in many languages. It's a little bit pared down but still you can. You can look at the website in your language and same with the docs. So something that we're actively working on right now. If you've gone to docsunreadnet recently you'll notice it has a whole new look and we Larry is working with a consultant and we are going through those, those our documentation, and updating it not only in the content that's there but also in breaking it into smaller chunks and callouts and just making it a better experience, and so that's ongoing as things get updated, those are getting published and then once we kind of get through this big round of updating which should be wrapping up in the next couple of months, so probably by the end of November or so then we will go through and localize all of those as well in the update.
Tom Mortensen:So and so even that fellow, the his worker Larry, he was from the community, yeah, yeah, he was a new on-ride user and he reached out. Hey, you know I'm a technical writer. I got some time.
Tiffany Jones:Yeah.
Tom Mortensen:You guys, your documentation is a little lacking and we said you're hired Pretty much.
Tiffany Jones:Yeah, and that's been going really well.
Ed Rawlings:Shout out to Paul. So you know we're with kind of new highs and stuff and expanding. You know, obviously, that all costs money. So I think it's just kind of maybe quite a good segue to discuss something that is coming up fairly soon. It's always interesting to hear how businesses adapt and evolve. So, looking at the future of Unrayed, I've heard that there is a pricing change coming for people who will be buying new licenses going forward. What prompted this decision? I think it's fairly obvious, but I'm going to ask that question anyway and what can current Unrayed users and future customers expect in terms of this new pricing structure? And what is this new pricing structure? And to look like and sit up like okay.
Tom Mortensen:Well, our pricing structure, the way it is, is, we currently are selling three versions of a license key it's basic, plus and pro, and the only thing different between them is how many devices are supported storage devices and the idea behind that was it was designed to match your hardware investment. So if you just bought, you know, a small, cheap motherboard, then you just have, you know, four or five, six devices. Okay, you don't have much of a hardware investment, so you just get a basic key you move up to maybe you know a tower, a mid tower or maybe a small rack mount, something like that, and you have a more substantial investment. You have, you know, a more powerful motherboard, more RAM, okay, so now you need a plus key, all right. Well, you have a really big system, lots of hard drives, lots of SSDs. You've got you know, several thousand dollars at least in your hardware investment. Okay, pro is what you need, and that that's just unlimited.
Tom Mortensen:I have to worry about the vice limits. So that's how it's always been. We've our pricing has hardly changed at all over the years. It's been tweaks here and there, different sales here and there. The other feature that the pricing has is is it's a one time purchase, right, you, you, you get your key and that's it. You never have to purchase another upgrade or anything. And you, you could upgrade between levels so you can go from basic to plus, basic to pro, et cetera. So that model served us well. It's sort of the one that when I first started with line technology for created, unrated, started selling it. I that's how I wanted it to be, you know. I just again getting back to just, you know, not trying, we're not trying to like extract as much cash as possible from people. You know we just here's this product. You know, if you got it, it'll support to the vice limits Development, and it was fine, all right.
Tom Mortensen:But fast forward now and, as we've just talked about, we've hired some, several people, especially professionals, people, you know, people who are taking it really seriously and that's not a hobby business and any, any in any shape or form. So we've come to to realize that these days, a company really needs some kind of recurring revenue stream. That's really what you need in order to sustain continued growth. So that's what we're doing. We're we're going to introduce new key types and the idea is that you'll make a one time purchase of your key. The difference is is after you've purchased a license key, you can go and update out, get all the updates for unrated OS as long as you want, but after one year no more updates. So beyond that point, if you want to continue getting updates related to the server running that key, then you have an update fee, which is somewhere it's going to be somewhere around 50% the purchase price. So every year you'll have this recurring charge if you want to keep getting unrated OS updates. So one way.
Ed Rawlings:And if and if you didn't want to, even if you didn't want to update, the key continues working. Yeah, How's it Right?
Tom Mortensen:So it's not. It's not like a SaaS product. You don't want to update the key anymore? Okay, it's just stuck on the latest release of unrated OS that will run with that key and we don't do anything. We don't, we won't limit your data, we don't lock you out of your data, nothing like that. It's just merely whether you're eligible to get updates, future updates, and even if you, let's say, you, lapse, so maybe you, you purchase a key and then you, over the course of a year, you maybe update once or twice and you're happy with the release that's running, and your anniversary comes up and you say, okay, I'm not going to get any more updates, it's fine. And so you just keep running. Maybe six months later, here we are. We've created a release that has some feature that you want Okay, or maybe a critical security, something like that and you say, all right, I want to get this, so we're not going to charge you for the time you missed, nothing like that. You're not penalized. You're not penalized, okay, get the renewal fee. All right, now you get another year.
Tom Mortensen:So again, we're, we're trying to. You know, I want it to be the way I want it. If I was a customer, how, how would I want this to be, and and that's the way we look at it. At the same time, there's a lot of things that we want to do. We just don't have the resources and and I'm not going to go out and go buy, go find venture capital, and we're not really interested in doing that. We, you know, we want to be community driven, community supported, so this, having a recurring revenue stream like this will help us grow and create the features that that we want to create down the road and hire more developers.
Tiffany Jones:Basically, I'm going to add a few things too. In terms of what you were just saying about resourcing it's. It's what it really is is that if we continue in the model that we're in right now, which is a one time fee and forever updates and we're forever supporting you in in your you know support, ticketing and all that kind of stuff, our money, the money that we're making as a company, it has to go towards marketing. You know, a huge chunk of our funds have to go towards marketing because we're constantly needing to bring new customers in and that it's. We can do that, but it's kind of a bummer because I personally and I think the team agrees that I would much rather be investing that money back into the company and back into our customers experience and being able to bring new developers on or being able to do the project, do different projects that we're going to get into in a little bit about, you know, what we want to do in the future, what we want to see, and if we keep having to be on this hamster wheel of continually having to bring in new, new, new, new customers all the time, it's just kind of stressful and it's not very fun, and so we want to be able to switch our resource allocation back into the company and into the product and you know this, this decision, this new pricing model we have been working on it literally for years, years and years it's been talked about.
Tiffany Jones:We've known that this had to happen. We have had multiple off-sites discussing this. We have brought in we brought last year we brought in an agency to consult with us and we went through a. We dedicated a significant amount of resources and time and money to go through a months-long process of analyzing the company. Up until then, we did one-on-one interviews with different users, with people in our community.
Tiffany Jones:We put out a customer survey that thank you to everyone who answered that, by the way. It was incredibly helpful to hear everybody's voices and hear what you guys want. I think nearly 5,000 people responded to that survey, which was really cool and I hope to do more of those. And we've really, really done our due diligence. We've gone down so many different paths of you know, looking at different companies and how they've implemented recurring revenue stream, and a lot of things didn't feel right to us. It didn't feel right to limit features. It didn't feel right to just charge in ways that was going to just kind of make it annoying for the customer. We wanted you to fully experience the product.
Tom Mortensen:And a big one. We don't want to have. We don't want it to be a requirement that your server be online on the internet the valedict license keys. So we're still tying the license to your USB device, your boot device. We're still doing that. Someday in the future maybe that'll be augmented, but for the near future here it's still tied to your flash device. There's no phone home. A trial still has a phone home, but it always has had a phone home just to validate your trial period.
Tom Mortensen:We're not again. We're very sensitive to the voices in the community. Also, I'll say this anybody that currently has a key already a basic, plus, pro there I guess what's the term grandfather, grandfathered in. Yeah, yeah, nothing changes All of a sudden. We're not going to say, hey, you guys have to pony up more money. No way, we're not doing that at all. Everything will work exactly the same. We'll provide upgrade paths. If you have a basic, even after we announce these new keys, you can still upgrade your basic key to a plus key or to a pro key. We're still going to do that, still offer that option. I think we'll offer. If you have a basic key, we'll offer a way to upgrade to a new key that has unlimited devices. So again, we're trying to do this. If I am a user, I'm a customer. How would I like to see this proceed? Is what is where we're trying to go.
Tiffany Jones:There's two other big keys that I wanna or big points I wanna, bring up too. One is you guys will all be very happy about this that actually prices are gonna go down, which is exciting for you all out there A little nerve-wracking for us in here, but we feel good about it. And then the and you know my dad mentioned this already but the recurring, the annual fee to receive updates is optional. That is gonna be an optional fee that you do. You can choose not to pay and that's okay, and you still own a perpetual copy of the license.
Tiffany Jones:So we really tried to hold on to the things that we heard from the community were really important to them, bake that into it and also look at it from a business perspective to make sure that we can stay around for a very long time and also make sure that we can be able to recruit great talent, keep great talent that we have on our team right now, pay them a great salary, give great benefits. We are incredibly generous to our employees and we wanted to keep that going. So there were a lot of things we had to consider in this, and doing this podcast episode is part of that. So we wanted to make sure that you guys knew who we were. We wanted to make sure you guys understood why we're doing this, understood that we have taken the utmost care in making all of these decisions and we hope that you guys understand where we're coming from and that you know. If we're not meeting your expectations, let us know and we'll see what we can do about that. Is there anything else you would add to that?
Tom Mortensen:Well, I guess not. I think we've covered it all. It's really not a I don't think it's a huge change operationally.
Tiffany Jones:Oh, I realized one thing I did wanna say. What's that? So if you are listening to this right now, dear listener, and you are in a trial of unraid, it's very important that you understand that this change will be coming and by the time this goes out, we'll have a firm date that'll be in the show notes of this and this podcast will be a part of a blog post and be circulated widely. But if you are in a trial, there is a decision point that is gonna need to be made, whether you purchase now in the quote unquote, you know old or current model or into the new one, and that is something that we also that was a huge point of debate internally is we're gonna make this switch one day and there's gonna be a huge handful of people who are in trials, and we did not.
Tiffany Jones:We're trying to move through this with the utmost integrity and we didn't wanna just pull the rug out from people who had maybe already researched, already knew the pricing, already knew what they were getting themselves into, and then they go to actually buy it whoa, everything's different. So if you're listening to this and you're in a trial and the pricing has not changed yet and you wanna be in the older model. That's totally fine. Please, you know, go ahead and do that. That was one thing that I really wanted to make sure people knew.
Ed Rawlings:Right. Also, it sounds actually really good. You know existing users, all the people listening who have already got their unraided licenses. Nothing's gonna change. That's really cool.
Ed Rawlings:I think it's commendable how you guys are. You know grandfathering in, you know everyone who's already got a license. You know very true to your word when you know people bought it. You know 100%. You know it's 100% true. And the fact as well, like you mentioned, tiffany, that people can actually buy a license for cheaper than what they used to be. So new users are gonna be able to get into the unraided world for, you know, less money. You know everyone likes that and I think as well you know the flexibility of being able to choose if you want an update is really great.
Ed Rawlings:Some people they might, you know, just kind of buy the license at a cheaper price and they're quite happy with just the features they've got. They're not interested in other features. They might just want the server sitting under the stairs. Just you know it's a basic file server and you know they don't want any more updates. So that's gonna be cheaper for them.
Ed Rawlings:But if there is a feature you like, you can think, oh great, okay, I wanna have that.
Ed Rawlings:So you buy the feature and I think because of that, you know it's gonna be quite a user-centric development because obviously the company, I'm sure, is going to want people to want the updates.
Ed Rawlings:So you're gonna have to listen a lot to what the users want if you want people to actually update, and I think that is gonna be a really, really good thing for all of us users, you know, because you know the recurring revenue will depend on if people want the features that are coming. So I think that's really awesome and new users they're gonna have the security knowing that Unray doesn't go anywhere, that it's got its sustainability and it's gonna be there for the lawn hall. And you know, I think the way basically you guys have done this and the structuring, I think it's really awesome. It's very well thought through and I think it's very fair and I think it's very exciting as well, to be honest, to sort of see where Unrayed and Lyme technology can go with a sustainable funding method, that you're not having to just throw money into marketing all the time to constantly be chasing the next person to sign up for a lifetime license.
Tiffany Jones:Exactly, and you know there's been a lot of even work behind the scenes to launch all of this, and so we're all getting very excited to get this out into the wild and be able to shift back into, you know, development mode and not new model mode. So that might actually be a good segue. If you wanna talk a little bit about the other kind of exciting announcement coming out which is Unrayed 7.
Ed Rawlings:Okay, tom, so Unrayed 7,. Hey, can you tease us a bit or give us some sneak peeks into some of the enhancements we might anticipate in 7?
Tom Mortensen:Sure. So what we did right now, as I'm recording the podcast, the current stable release is 6.12 series and we're working on 6.13. Like I mentioned, we're fully remote, so we have a way of passing around releases to all the developers, and so 6.13 right now is in our sort of internal alpha or beta stage, and the main, probably the main chunk of work in the OS itself is the ZFS implementation. So what we decided to do since there's a lot of changes coming the pricing model, there's a website coming where our support system, our customer support, is gonna be totally revamped.
Tom Mortensen:Anyway, it seemed natural to retire Unrayed 6, and so the next release after Unrayed 6.12 series will be Unrayed 7. That will the several key features in there. The primary one is going to be a more complete ZFS implementation, so it will implement so-called hybrid pools natively, so you have a root storage pool and then you can have various sub pools, like an L2 arc pool. There's five of them. Also, the Open ZFS project is going to be itself having some great new features that the ZFS community has wanted a long time, for example, being able to expand Zpool.
Ed Rawlings:That's huge, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, that is so huge.
Tom Mortensen:That'll be huge, and so that's also something that we're working on integrating. It'll come in. We'll see if it gets into Unrayed 7.0, but definitely it'll be 7.1, 7.2, as the evolution of Unrayed OS itself continues, then we'll just keep adding and supporting what the community wants from our ZFS. Implementation is mainly how we're going to approach this. Also, another feature coming in Unrayed 7.0 is what a lot of other people want too is multiple Unrayed arrays. Oh wow, so for people that have really-. That makes me really happy.
Tom Mortensen:Okay. So we're going to do that, and, in terms of implementation, what we're going to end up doing is everything's going to be a pool. So, at the present time, you want to create a new pool, you click a button and you say, okay, how many slots, which is how many devices will be in a pool and then you create it, and then you can create a file system type, et cetera. So one of the types of pools you'll be able to create will be an Unrayed Data Organization style pool, and so we'll be able to have multiple of those, along with multiple ZFS pools, multiple ButterFS pools. Along with that, our mover will be augmented. You'll be able to move from pool to pool. Oh, that's good. Yeah, so good stuff. There We've integrated-.
Ed Rawlings:Can I ask you Sure, I'm sorry to interrupt, tom. Can I ask you a question about the Unrayed arrays? If someone didn't want to actually have any of the original type of Unrayed arrays as pools, could they just have a ZFS or ButterFS pool and no other pools at all?
Tom Mortensen:Yes, that's also slated for Unrayed 7. In fact that'll probably be an Unrayed 7.0 when we release. We'll lift that requirement to have Unrayed array itself.
Ed Rawlings:Yes, One of my servers presently my full kind of ZFS server I used actually Squid told me about it in a podcast with him. He said you can always use a flash drive as the one driver Really, can he. So I think I've got something like a four gig flash drive as my Unrayed array and one of my servers.
Tom Mortensen:So yeah, I think it's great that you know yeah, yeah, so we'll lift that requirement, sure, okay, other features in the OS itself where we've integrated Bonnie and Al's file manager plugin, so a lot of some plugins. What we're sort of over time were some of the plugins were integrating into the OS itself. The implication for that is is that us, lime Tech, as a company, we maintain that software, so we're integrating the file manager plugin. Another person has integrated VM snapshots and VM cloning, another feature that people have asked for, so that's also coming. That's in beta right now.
Tom Mortensen:Our own Squid has integrated a plugin that is called Webgui Search, so you can, if you don't know where a particular setting is at, you can. There's a box you type in, like, you know, auto Trim, and it'll show you. It'll highlight everywhere in the Webgui where that setting is provided and it works. It's CPs. Not only that, it's multilingual too. And, by the way, a few words about Andrew, aka Squid. He lives in Canada, he's the developer for our community apps plugin and curating the feed, and he is he's just a rockstar. I just wanna say that. So, andrew, if you're hearing this, you're a rockstar buddy.
Ed Rawlings:Tom, could I just ask you one question about seven I know-.
Tom Mortensen:Yeah, sure.
Ed Rawlings:That the audience will probably be wondering will we have a kernel that supports Intel Arc GPUs?
Tom Mortensen:Oh yeah, absolutely, we're already. We're using the in beta. We're using the 6.5 kernel. I will say one word about that, about with ZFS. So now that we've integrated OpenZFS in some respects we're kind of tied to them, meaning they're a little bit lagging in kernel support, so we can't upgrade the kernel until all the other subsystems used by NRATOS support that kernel, and predominantly there is OpenZFS. So they just actually released, I guess, 2.1.13 as of this podcast, and that's supports up to 6.5 kernel and that's what we're using right now and I think they plan on going to 6.6 ultimately, which is, I think, the current RC in the Linux development we always wanted.
Tom Mortensen:Traditionally, we try to keep up with the latest kernels Until we get to a long-term release. Then we might linger there for a while, which I think the 6.12, nratos 6.12 is on a long-term kernel. Those tend to get. They're pretty stable. They get security updates to get bug fixes. They don't get any new features, however. So as NRATOS moves along, we try to keep up and I'm always amazed by how fast kernel updates occur. It's pretty amazing.
Ed Rawlings:But yeah, so to answer your question, yes, Are there any other projects or ideas in the NRATOS universe that you're hoping to explore or bring to the future, though?
Tom Mortensen:So a feature that I've wanted to have for a long time I think we're finally gonna get around to implementing and that's okay. I call it the hardware database. Basically, what that is is one of the questions we get a lot in non-informs but in support is will my hardware work at unrate? Because there are for different hardware products, there are quirks and sometimes you have to add a kernel. For example, when you boot you have to add a little kernel option to turn something on or off, to get your hardware to work right, to find out how old it is, et cetera. So what I always thought would be very useful is a database where people voluntarily upload their hardware configuration, what motherboard they're using, the processor, anything you can think about in terms of their server hardware, the storage devices, all that and let people upload that information anonymously and we will build up this database and you'll be able to plug in your configuration and say, okay, a green check, everything's fine, or maybe this will work, but you need to be aware of this, this and this.
Tom Mortensen:I think that would be very useful. Depending on how far we expand it and what kind of things we look for, it'll be very useful even outside unrate community. Down the road, we can include software components. For example, what hardware platforms are best at running certain VMs? Right. We can gather statistics on what's the most popular storage device out there right. Which ones are being replaced the most. So this is, honestly, it's something that I should have done. We should have done as a company a long time ago, but finally, we have resources that we can dedicate to this, and so, right after this website launch and the launch of N-Rate 7.net, something that we really want to devote some resources to getting done so outside, really, n-rate OS itself right, but I think it'd be very useful.
Ed Rawlings:Oh, yeah, and we can.
Ed Rawlings:I can see that being super cool, like if you're planning on buying a new component maybe a new motherboard, new CPU, a new thread-ripper CPU that's not been released yet. You don't have to just post on the forum and hope someone comes across it and reads it and go oh yeah, I've tried that and that was actually fine. To actually have a database and people will be able to do that Gives you a bit more confidence to actually go ahead and purchase something and I know whether it's gonna work or not.
Tom Mortensen:Right, there's some fun things we could do too. We could you know who's got the biggest? Who's got the most terabytes Right? Who's got the most simultaneous VMs running? Who's got the most? Okay, simon, who's been developing the VM clone and snapshot feature. He recently gave us a little demo and he brings up his VM manager page. I mean he's gotta scroll it to see all the VMs he's got and snapshot so he might win that one. But yeah, so there's a lot of fun things you can do with this kind of information.
Ed Rawlings:I think the biggest pool I've ever seen in Unrayed was Jason from Byte my Bits. I think he had 500 terabytes butter FS pool in his Unrayed service. Oh wow, that's impressive. I kind of like it made my little kind of like 60 terabyte array look very bad.
Tom Mortensen:I was pretty jealous. Yeah, that's amazing. So other features you know we've had this sort of a project going in the background that we've called Connect Formerly my Servers, Formerly my Servers. We want to expand that capability. One of the ideas behind that was for you to create something called a my Friends Network, where you have your own servers and maybe you've got some friends who've got servers in their own homes it could be your next door neighbor, or it could be someone you know in the States, right, and or maybe you're a small business same thing. So it would be like a private network where you can make shares available to people within your my Friends Network for purposes of backup, data sharing, that sort of thing. So we want to facilitate that. So that's one of the features we want to work on with Connect moving forward.
Ed Rawlings:Could that be an encrypted data set? So if I stored some data on a friend's server they wouldn't be able to access it, only I would be able to. That's correct, and vice versa. So we can kind of buy an eight terabyte hard drive each. I put one in mine. Yes, he puts one in here. That's awesome, so yeah.
Tom Mortensen:And you can choose not have it encrypted. So you want to post up something that you want them to see.
Tiffany Jones:Yeah, what we're trying to share here is, you know, some of the great things that we're going to be able to do in the future, going forward, now that we kind of have this pricing change behind us, or when it is behind us, it's just going to be really exciting for us. And one of the things that, ed, you brought up on our list here, that you were really excited about, that everybody always gets excited about when I mention it, is this we're calling it the UnCon, so an UnCon friends, basically. And you know, honestly, we haven't sat down and like mapped this out, but you know, the idea is just to get everybody together in person if possible, or maybe people can join virtually too. I don't know what we'll do with the UnCon. I don't know where it's going to be, but we think that it would.
Tiffany Jones:One of the things we really want to try and do is just continue to build on the amazing community that we already have. And so, you know, along with Unrade 7, along with the new pricing model, we're launching a whole new website and there's going to be an awesome section of use cases. We already have a section of use cases on our website, but this is going to go even deeper and success stories so you can go there for inspiration, go there to figure out how people did a certain thing. It's going to be searchable, filterable, and we'll be continuing to add to that, and so that's something we're really excited about. There's going to be just more resources available for people to connect with one another. So the UnCon is kind of the in-person extension of that. I'm hoping it can be, you know, like in the South of Spain or something, but we'll see where it ends.
Tom Mortensen:I was hoping Hawaii, but I think that's kind of isolated to everybody.
Tiffany Jones:Yeah, kind of far, kind of far, yeah. Another request that people have had over the years is just making the web go your responsive, and so that's something that we want to be working on as well.
Tom Mortensen:There's a little project going on internally to start slowly doing that, so actually that could end up being a pretty big feature. In order to do that, we want to come up with something that we just call the Unrate API. So it'll be an API that anybody could use to write a mobile app or new web GUI if they wanted to, and make pretty much the entire server capability available through an API. So that's something else in the works.
Ed Rawlings:That'd be cool for things like Home Assistant as well, correct?
Tiffany Jones:And along those lines of Home Assistant, yeah, the other thing that I want to call out that was launched this year again by Spencer and has been growing and people have really enjoyed, is the ability to book in a paid support session with members from our community, and Ed is one of them. You know that's not done. We facilitate it and we take a very small cut just to cover the costs of, you know, the various software that we need and the infrastructure we need to run it. But you can go on our website right now and you can book a paid support session. At the time of this recording it's $150 US for an hour of someone's time and I think Ed I don't know if it's happened People have joked that they've just booked the time to just, you know, have a beer with you and hang out.
Tiffany Jones:You've been one of our most popular bookings on there, but there's other experts we list on there. You know what each person's sort of background, capabilities and expertise is in, so you can kind of choose. Again, going back to the multilingual aspect, there's a couple of different languages that are available, and that's always that's also expanding. So that's something else that has gotten really great traction and we want to keep going with that Just to get people.
Tiffany Jones:You know, I've read some Reddit threads about this and there's kind of two camps. There's the camp of, oh, I've learned so much just figuring it out and, you know, doing it myself Like I don't. You know I wouldn't, I don't think I would do this, and other people are like I ain't got time for that. I'm totally down to pay someone 150 bucks and tell me exactly what to do here and solve my problem. So if you're in that camp, go check that out. So that's something that we're also excited to continue to be expanding and, like you said earlier, just better customer support, better pipeline between our customers and the product development itself. So, you know, new features or requests or bugs or submitting, you know, to the hardware database in the future. So just really making sure that as we grow and expand, that that pipeline that has really been the foundation of this company, the community, to our developers does not get closed up. You know it's really, really, really important to us.
Tom Mortensen:Something to say along those lines is this that myself and other developers, we only see a fraction of everything that's posted out there in terms of forums support. It's just a large volume, and so we rely on people such as yourself, other forum moderators if there's, you know, a real fire out there and people are going hey, man, you got to fix this problem. Well, I might not see it myself, but those guys they bring it to our attention, then we'll jump on it. But I've noticed just doing the 613, we're fixing some bugs that people brought to my attention, our attention, that I didn't know about. We're going yeah, you know that is pretty bad. How come I didn't know about this before it's posted in the forum? But, like I said, I just don't have the ability to see every single post out there. So we rely on that and try to be responsive as much as possible. When someone a developer or a community member, a moderator, a community developer says hey, you got to fix this. You know, add this, then we'll try to do that.
Ed Rawlings:Well, guys, you know, wow, that's all I can say. It's been an incredibly insightful conversation.
Tom Mortensen:Thank you very much for facilitating this and for putting this together. It's very much appreciated and I'm sorry I haven't been on a podcast sooner. A lot of people in it after me thought I'm gonna get on a podcast when you, but you made it excellent, very easy. It's a lot of fun and so thank you very much.
Tiffany Jones:Yeah, and I also just want to express our gratitude really to you, ed, to others who create videos, guides, content, our community and the forums on YouTube, just everyone out there. I just it is incredible, it's like incredibly inspiring to see how much people not only love the product but love helping other people. It's just like I have to tell Larry all the time I'm like sign off. You know he's like well, this person needs help and you know it's like everybody cares so much and it's really, really fun to be a part of a product that has created such a great community. So you know, we've said it multiple times, but we just really can't express our gratitude enough to all the listeners and all of our users out there. Thank you for being with us on this journey and for championing this change that we're about to go through. I hope it makes sense and that you know we are presenting a plan that is really honoring our users, current and future. So just thank you.
Ed Rawlings:You know, your journey from the early days to the thriving community we've got now and the platform on RAID is today is really nothing short of inspiring. I'm gonna say you know real heartfelt, you know a real heartfelt. Thank you for sharing your time and giving us an enriched understanding and appreciation of what you and the team are actually building and how things are gonna move forward in the future. And to all of our listeners out there, thank you very much, guys for tuning in and spending your time with us. Tom Tiffany, I tell you I'm cheering you and on RAID and the team on as you chart forward through these new territories. Again, thanks to the listeners. You're a vital part of this podcast. Thank you for listening. And to all of you guys, you know, until next time, stay inspired, keep those gears turning and I'll meet you in the next episode.
