#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

Chris Evans Cloud, 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 Evans Cloud, 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 …