#179 – The Myth of Cheap Cloud Storage

#179 – The Myth of Cheap Cloud Storage

Chris EvansCloud

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 EvansCloud, Data Management, Guest Speakers, Software-Defined Storage, Sponsored, Storage Unpacked Podcast

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 EvansCloud, 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 …

#151 – Introduction to StorageOS V2.0 (Sponsored)

#151 – Introduction to StorageOS V2.0 (Sponsored)

Chris EvansCloud, Containers, Software-Defined Storage, Sponsored

In this episode, Martin and Chris are joined in conversation by Alex Chircop, CEO at StorageOS. The company has announced StorageOS V2.0, a significant evolution in their storage platform, built for containers using containers. As this episode explains, the version 2.0 release of StorageOS enhances scalability and resiliency, with a strong focus on features needed for enterprise adoption. Each volume presented to a container now has a “mini-brain” to implement much more distributed application awareness. Availability is increased through the use of Delta Sync, a new technology to ensure data volumes are recovered to a …

#145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise

#145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise

Chris EvansCloud, Containers, Garbage Collection

This week Chris and Martin discuss the announcement of Google Cloud partners offering Anthos Ready Storage. Anthos is Google’s on-premises cloud infrastructure running Kubernetes-based containers. Platform users can now deploy locally in their data centre, on local hardware, while using the GCP management plane. What is the benefit of having storage certified for Anthos? The discussion looks initially at why containers need persistent storage, moving on to examine the profile of the first ARS certified storage companies. Is this a move simply to gain more access to enterprise customers? There’s lots questions in this discussion, …

#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

Chris EvansCloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris chats with Andy Watson, CTO at WekaIO in another episode recorded live at Flash Memory Summit 2019. With the recent acquisition of E8 Storage and Elastifile by hyper-scale cloud companies, is this move an attempt to plug the gap in existing cloud storage offerings? Andy provides his opinion on the two acquisitions and how they might fit into the existing ecosystem. Even 1GB/s may not be enough throughput as we see more focus on ML/AI applications and using cloud-based GPUs and TPUs. Some applications expect data in both NFS and SMB format. …

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

Chris EvansCloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week we talk to Mark Carlson, co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, about the storage needs of hyperscalers.  Mark defines hyperscalers as those companies opening multiple data centres a year, most notably Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google and Facebook in the US and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China.  These vendors are deploying petabytes of storage a year, with specific requirements on storage media.  The hyperscaler applications have issues with HDD and SSD performance characteristics, such as tail latency and the effects of garbage collection.  As a result, drive manufacturers are building in new features …