Dr Milburn heads 45Drives, a Sydney, Nova Scotia-based company with global reach. 45Drives specialises in big, strong, fast, high-capacity data storage solutions. It has an impressive client list that includes Apple, Google, Amazon, NASA, Intel, FedEx, the US Department of Justice, and more. They have contracts with major tier one players, as well as media and entertainment, education, University researchers, and numerous others. What binds the customers together is a need and demand for performant, robust, reliable storage on a consistent platform. 45Drives has made it its mission to be the partner who provides and supports such mission-critical storage, and what's more, on a purely open platform based on open source.

Open source software is a wonderful thing; we've all benefited in some way from the altruistic offerings of such notable titles like Apache, MySQL, 7-Zip, VLC, WordPress, not to mention the Linux operating system itself. Yet, the question many ask is would you really trust your income-earning to open source products? When something goes wrong, and boy, can things go wrong, you need iron-clad support options - not to simply rely on nebulous online forums where your questions may attract criticism, skepticism, and mocking - if any reply at all. In fact, iTWire finds many a managed service provider (MSP) refuses to use open source software, with a policy any product it implements must have a paid support option.

Well, as the world saw vividly only last July, proprietary software isn't immune from risk. The CrowdStrike outage took down airports, banks, media, and all kinds of businesses around the world. Millions of systems were disrupted and the cost is estimated at billions of dollars. The root was a confluence of misconfiguration coupled with inadequate testing, and unfettered access to Windows servers at the highest level. Maybe it's time to rethink open source. 45Drives president and co-founder Dr Doug Milburn says his business proves open source has what it takes, and what's more, it provides far greater trust and control over your environment than proprietary software can ever dream of doing.

First things first; Milburn has plenty of healthy respect for Microsoft and a lot of what it's done. He's of an age where he grew up side-by-side with the evolution of modern computing. "As an undergrad in electronics and then a grad student, I did a lot of software development on the way," he said. "I go back to the PDP, the VAX, and 6502 CPU, and watched the world evolve."

In those days software developers did their own systems administration and networking out of necessity. Tech grew; operating systems grew. Milburn watched as the major personal computer contenders of the day - Apple and Microsoft - went their own ways. "Apple went with closed hardware and software, while Microsoft went with an open hardware ecosystem. They closed off the software because you've got to make a buck," he said, "and Billy has done successfully."

"Microsoft did quite the job of taming the hardware world. They made it very open around them and reasonably open around the applications world. They pulled it off and did a great job," Milburn said. "They may be shaky tactically, but I've got no big grudge out to get those guys."

By contrast, other companies followed the Apple route of closed systems, to today's enterprise storage and computing world with proprietary platforms that want to own both the hardware and software your data lives on, that your business depends on. There's a lot of lock-in. Though, even then, Milburn is also pragmatic and congratulatory. "The proprietary world has developed and done a lot of good things for people; proprietary has been the backbone of computing for a lot of years," he said.

With these sentiments it's plain to see Milburn isn't your classic stereotypical open source advocate who blindly follows their passion as a religion; instead, he calmly reflects on what's the right tech for the right situation.

Pictured: Dilbert - NOT Dr Doug Milburn who embraces a different view

And it's here, he says, open platforms and open source are the right thing if you don't want your company to collapse in a screaming heap. "CrowdStrike became a nightmare due to a forced update."

"CrowdStrike really enunciates that when you give over control to security software, when we as keepers of IT systems give over something like that, we become vulnerable," he said. "It's convenient, it gives one-stop shopping, and it's one call to fix things - but when things go wrong, it goes really wrong."

45Drives is the opposite; "At 45Drives we're about open source storage and virtualised computing. We run Proxmox, ZFS, Ceph, and other options," he said.

To be clear, Milburn says, this isn't to say an outage like the CrowdStrike one won't happen in an open source world - "if anyone said that they'd be lying" - but you gain greater options; you can mitigate risk.

"The more you go out, the more your life is in other people's hands," he said. Yet, at the same time, "open source can be a lot of work to build. It's not in scope for the vast majority of organisations."

With this tension - proprietary takes away control and transparency; open source requires support and integration - what, realistically, can regular organisations do here?

According to Dr Milburn, the answer is companies like his. "We're just like your legacy options. We will provide the services to people under one purchase order, and with the full service and support organisations need," he said. "But - with the flexibility of open source. And we don't own you. It's an open model, an open hardware platform, and open source software."

"You have a contractual risk with proprietary options," Milburn noted, with one highly visible modern example coming straight to mind - "VMware was a gigantic carpet pull under everybody. The size of Broadcom and VMware is mind-boggling, but when someone owns your future by contract it's a risk," he said, referring to Broadcom's dramatic wide-sweeping changes to VMware agreements. Perpetual licenses changed to subscription models; subscription plans became bundled with other products that may not be needed but at a higher price-tag; partners had their status canceeled; licensing increased in price overall.

It's the same with the traditional enterprise storage and virtualisation world, Milburn said. "It's the old model around since the dawn of time. When ti gets old - like a snowball rolling downhill - they've still got to deliver. When these companies gather too much cost structure they struggle and profitability suffers."

"It's like Mr Burns and Smithers," he said. "It's the same guys who run enterprise computing companies. When they need profit elsewhere they'll yank the carpet under you."

By contrast, open source isn't such a risk. It's not without rugpulls, "Red Hat and IBM cancelled CentOS," he noted as an example. "However, a whole lot of people had a stake in enterprise Linux. So they forked and founded Rocky Linux," he said. "And we're a founding member."

If your in-house infrastructure is based on open source, "a carpet pull can still rattle your world," he said, but at the end of the day, "it's only a little indigestion when it's announced. When all is said, it ends up not being a big deal when you're running your own shop under an open source license. You can go on as long as you like."

Sure, "there's obsolesence at some point, but you can run in-house forever."

"Nobody owns you," he said.

Hence, with a supplier like 45Drives you gain the benefits of both worlds; "we bring open source for enterprise and move with the zeal of the open source world - but have the support of the proprietary world. It's world class. We answer the phone, support the products, sell you systems, service, and support under one purchase order."

45Drives customers have tended to be those who understand the value of open source for enterprise and buy it, but, Milburn said, they're getting increasing interest from those who are sick of the rug pull, and sick of the forced update. "We're talking to MSPs all the time," Milburn said. "They're starting to be open and curious to possibilities."

A common prevailing view of open source is it's all do-it-yourself and you must wade through a massive number of options, evaluate distro upon distro, figure out how to handle updates, how to validate your implementation. "This is the open source caveat," Milburn said. "It powers the majority of servers and applications worldwide and brings immense power. But you can create yourself some true misery if you don't know what you're doing when you set it up."

45Drives can tame this zoo for you. "We're a mass customiser. Our approach to open source - and how you do it really well - is to match hardware and software. You need to get the architecture right, out of the gate."

"We have a wide variety of hardware and open source solutions we utilise, and we develop," he said. "We make these modular and offer mass customisation. The modules and components we put together are finely honed and highly proceduralised. Our people, our service, and our culture is extremely structured."

"Our models snap together like Lego. We create systems that just work, and work straight out of the gate, and our after-sales elements are the same way."

It was a fascinating talk with Dr Milburn, and clearly, he's doing things right with a model that's proving popular and successful. "We're successful in the enterprise world, and now blown to the MSP world," Milburn said.

The company is seeing 30% year-on-year growth all over the world. It has a team of 400 people, and more than 8,000 enterprise customers.

One public example is Oregon City, who recognised the need for 45Drives after suffering critical data loss through ransomware encryption with their previous platform. As well as 45Drives-supplied hardware and its platform, the Oregon City solution includes Snapshield, a security system developed by 45Drives that brings firewalls and endpoint scanning and smart analytics to protect and lock down data from malware.

Snapshield is constantly monitored, identifying ransomware patterns within a few tens of files. “On top of that, it has a complete logging of any file that is touched in there and it’s snapshotting," Milburn said, "thus you can role any file back to any state that you want."

Contrast this with having your systems shut down, and being helpless to do anything about it, simply because your key provider made a configuration issue and failed to perform basic testing - and the update was forced upon you. Imagine being an IT Manager or business owner who has to face the reality they're simply an end user on their own systems? That's what the proprietary world forces upon you.

There's a better way, Milburn wants you to know. And you can do it yourself; open source is, after all, free for anybody to use and execute.

Or, you can bring in an expert - such as Dr Milburn and 45Drives - to make it all run like a finely-oiled machine, providing the support guarantees and SLAs your business demands, while ensuring you still own your platform, own your data, and won't have the rug pulled out from under you.

Perhaps it's time for you to re-evaluate the critical enterprise systems in your business and give demicrosoftification a serious go.