#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

Chris Evans AWS, Cloud, CloudFlare, Garbage Collection, Object Storage, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcement from CloudFlare of R2, a new object storage solution. With such a widely dispersed CDN network, could CloudFlare become a real competitor for S3, considering that the R2 platform will have no egress fees? This episode digs into the details, to look at what additional features object storage vendors need in their arsenal and whether there’s any other vendor likely to come close to competing with AWS. At the outset of the podcast, Chris mentions Dark Star, which did indeed have a tiny budget of only $60,000. …

#210 – Building SANs in the Cloud

#210 – Building SANs in the Cloud

Chris Evans Cloud, Software-Defined Storage, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the merits of building virtual SANs in the public cloud. Vendors including Silk and Pure Storage now offer virtual storage “appliances” built from virtual instances and cloud storage. Why are these solutions necessary, when the public cloud providers have plenty of high-performance block and file storage offerings? The discussion looks at the why and how of these types of solutions as well as the implications and the lock-in they could represent. Elapsed Time: 00:33:53 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:04:00 – Silk and Pure Storage are two examples of cloud …

#207 – AWS Gets a SAN Upgrade

#207 – AWS Gets a SAN Upgrade

Chris Evans Cloud, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week the team is back after a short break and ready to talk all things cloud – or at least about Elastic Block Store. AWS recently announced io2 and io2 Block Express, the first new EBS block storage offerings for eight years. With such a long gap since io1 was first released, what has AWS been up to and what’s new? In this discussion, Martin and Chris question whether AWS is aiming to meet the requirements of enterprise customers that simply want to lift and shift their infrastructure into the cloud. Alternatively, the effort …

#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure

#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure

Chris Evans Cloud, Guest Speakers, Liqid, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Sumit Puri, CEO of Liqid Inc. Liqid has developed a composable infrastructure platform they call CDI or Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure. CDI enables IT organisations to take the building blocks of compute – storage, networking, CPUs, memory and GPUs then combine them dynamically in ways that address the processing needs of the enterprise. Customers use the technology to enable greater efficiency in the use of hardware and to truly deliver the software-defined data centre. Sumit explains how the Liqid technology works across multiple fabrics that could be PCIe, Ethernet …

#200 – Virtualisation, Containers, Serverless and Data

#200 – Virtualisation, Containers, Serverless and Data

Chris Evans Cloud, Data Management, Databases, Guest Speakers, Serverless

This week, Martin and Chris are joined by Jim Walker, VP of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs. In a slight departure from a purely storage-based recording, this discussion follows the evolution of application packaging and deployment, from virtualisation to containers and serverless. The logical conclusion of any computing environment is to execute code and gradually, we are abstracting from the specifics of infrastructure and allowing the code to do the work. How will serverless technologies standardise and implement non-functional requirements such as security and credentials management, data access and most important – portability? Will de-facto …

#196 – Creating a Multi-Cloud Data Strategy

#196 – Creating a Multi-Cloud Data Strategy

Chris Evans Cloud, Data Management, Garbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the issues of building a multi-cloud data storage strategy. The range of options for private, public and hosted data services is huge, with each offering a different set of services and implemented in subtly unique ways. How can an enterprise take advantage of these services, while maintaining data protection, cost control and service availability all front and centre? This conversation is incredibly wide-ranging, touching on data centre build and usage, Finops for cloud, global name spaces, operating system envy and finding that killer app for the public cloud that …

#182 – FaunaDB – Client Serverless Computing

#182 – FaunaDB – Client Serverless Computing

Chris Evans Cloud, Databases, Fauna, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Evan Weaver, CTO and co-founder at Fauna. The company has developed a database as a service, available simply through a globally available API. Fauna calls the platform “client serverless”. How can a database be made globally available and still guarantee performance, resiliency and most important, data consistency? Of course, you will need to listen to find out. As we learn in this podcast, a database accessible via API provides the ability to write applications that talk directly to the platform, with application use cases for mobile and IoT. …

#179 – The Myth of Cheap Cloud Storage

#179 – The Myth of Cheap Cloud Storage

Chris Evans Cloud

Everyone thinks cloud storage is cheaper than on-premises, but is that really true? When cloud storage like AWS S3 was first introduced, vendors dropped their $/GB prices on a frequent basis. However, AWS hasn’t reduced the base price of S3 in five years, instead preferring to offer cheaper tiers of storage. In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin debate the reasons for the lack of reductions, especially in light of continuing growth in HDD capacities and reducing costs. Elapsed Time: 00:30:58 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:02:00 – Is cloud storage cheaper than on-premises? 00:05:05 – …

#156 – Introduction to Hammerspace (sponsored)

#156 – Introduction to Hammerspace (sponsored)

Chris Evans Cloud, Data Management, Guest Speakers, Software-Defined Storage, Sponsored

In this episode, returning guest Douglas Fallstrom from Hammerspace takes Chris and Martin through the details of the Hammerspace global file system platform. The solution is software-defined, running either on virtual machines or in the public cloud. Customers can choose to leave data on existing hardware platforms and simply abstract the data into the Hammerspace platform, or use block storage to build out a distributed file system. The ability to abstract the physical placement of data from metadata allows customers to choose exactly how to manage their content. Traditional storage platforms have implemented data protection …

#155 – Introduction to Clumio with Chadd Kenney

#155 – Introduction to Clumio with Chadd Kenney

Chris Evans Cloud, Data Protection, Guest Speakers

In this edition of the podcast, Chris chats to Chadd Kenney, VP and Chief Technologist at Clumio. Clumio is a SaaS data protection company that has recently expanded to support Office 365 environments. This discussion covers background on Clumio, how data protection for cloud should work and some specifics of the Clumio implementation. Looking deeper at the way in which the Clumio platform works, data from protected environments (such as VMware vSphere) lands directly on S3. This allows the solution to scale up to support thousands of concurrent backups, without needing to know that customers …