W. Curtis Preston

EXPERIENCE

W. Curtis Preston started his career in backups as “the backup guy” for MBNA, at that time the second-largest credit card company.  He managed the backups as they grew from 15 to 250 servers, and from 2 operating systems to 5 operating systems, running Informix, Oracle, Sybase & other applications.  Windows was just beginning to grow in the data center.  Believe it or not, a $35B company in those days had a total of 300 GB in the entire data center.

He left MBNA to join Collective Technologies in 1996, which was a large consulting company that made a lot of money in the .com days.  In February of 2001 he started his first company called The Storage Group, and they specialized in backup & recovery system design, implementation, and management. The Storage Group was acquired by GlassHouse Technologies, where Preston was the VP of Data Protection for five years.  At the time they were the largest independent provider of professional services in the infrastructure space.

He then started another company called Truth in IT, Inc and ran that company for five years before selling it to Ekovox.  He then worked as an analyst at Storage Switzerland for two years, publishing many blogs, articles, and webinars.

He was the Chief Technical Evangelist for Druva, a Data Protection as a service (DPaaS) company from 2017 to 2023.