#163 – Inflection Points in Storage Deployment Strategies

#163 – Inflection Points in Storage Deployment Strategies

Chris Evans Data Management, Guest Speakers, Storage Management, Storage Unpacked Podcast

Technology refreshes are a constant part of the IT landscape. Businesses need to frequently update and modernise their infrastructure. Typically, the inertia to move between vendors is strong, but inflection points do occur, when the cost and risk of change is outweighed by the benefits. How do you identify inflection points in your environment and then take advantage of the opportunity? In this podcast, Chris chats with three guests (Matt Watts from NetApp, Lee Nolan from MTI and Kam Panesar from Atradius) to get views from a vendor, solutions provider and end user perspective. The …

#160 – Updates on Hitachi Ops Center with Stan Stevens (sponsored)

#160 – Updates on Hitachi Ops Center with Stan Stevens (sponsored)

Chris Evans Data Management, Hitachi Vantara, Storage Management

In this week’s episode, Chris catches up with Stan Stevens, Director of Software Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara to talk about updates to Hitachi Ops Center. Ops Center is the storage management platform for administering Hitachi VSP storage products. Stan discusses new features (including Ops Center Protector and support for VSP E990), and provides a view on what to expect in the future. Ops Center is divided into four main components – Administrator for provisioning and systems management; Analyser for AIOps functionality, including problem resolution; Automator for workflow automation and Protector for data protection and …

#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 …

#152 – Global File System Concepts

#152 – Global File System Concepts

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

This week, Chris and Martin are joined by Douglas Fallstrom, SVP Product & Operations at Hammerspace, as the conversation on global file systems continues. Hammerspace has developed a global file system platform that caters for geographic data dispersion and sits above traditional storage. In this podcast episode, Douglas explains some of the challenges of stretching data over distance – typically latency and getting effective throughput. When metadata and data are abstracted in a file system, these issues can be mitigated – global data sharing doesn’t imply a need for global locking. This separation of the …

#150 – Myriad File Systems

#150 – Myriad File Systems

Chris Evans Data Management, Garbage Collection

File systems provide structure and a way to store data on computer systems. From the early days of FAT and NTFS, we now see a proliferation of file systems in the enterprise. Why do we have so many and what benefits do they offer? In this episode, Chris and Martin look at the evolution of the file system and why solutions have been developed to meet specific application requirements. Much of file system development has been driven from the improvement of hardware technology. Larger HDDs meant supporting more file system metadata and so the evolution …

#147 – Introduction to Key Value Stores and Redis

#147 – Introduction to Key Value Stores and Redis

Chris Evans Data Management, Databases, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin look at Key-Value stores and in particular, Redis, with Kyle Davis, Head of Developer Advocacy at Redis Labs. Key Value stores are at first glance a lightweight way to store structured data. As it turns out, the implementation of Redis includes significantly more features and functionality as well as multiple complex data types. Redis runs in-memory and is typically used accelerate traditional databases or store state for web-based applications. The ability to store and retrieve data from memory enables fast response times for features like shopping carts or tracking gaming …

#144 – Introduction to Storage as a Service

#144 – Introduction to Storage as a Service

Chris Evans Data Management, Data Protection, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Gary Breder (Director of Cloud and Services Product Marketing) and Diane Clay (Sr Manager of Cloud and Services Product Marketing) from Hitachi Vantara about storage as a service. While we’ve had different consumption models in the past, does StaaS offer anything different? Perhaps the key takeaway from this conversation is the use of service-based offerings as a way to financially engineer more attractive cost structures to businesses. The vendor shoulders the risk with the customer by putting resources on the floor with an expectation of usage at some …

#143 – Storage Adoption Myths & Realities

#143 – Storage Adoption Myths & Realities

Chris Evans Data Management, Guest Speakers

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Paul Stringfellow, CTO at Gardner Systems, about the realities of technology adoption. We hear lots of talk about Kubernetes, HCI, all-flash and even SCM technologies. But are all organisations deploying these technologies from day one? In reality, businesses deploy technology in a timeline that matches a normal distribution curve. As detailed in “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, there’s a gap between early adopters and the mainstream IT organisations. What causes this inertia? Some of the challenges relate people and process, however there’s also a desire to implement …

#142 – Storage, Automation and DevOps

#142 – Storage, Automation and DevOps

Chris Evans Data Management, Garbage Collection, Storage Management

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the automation of storage. In a follow-on from the Dell EMC presentation at Storage Field Day 19, this conversation looks at the challenges of opening storage provisioning and management to the wider developer community. In the past, SRM tools have focused on providing the “record of truth” for storage and well as the interface to provision resources to hosts. Dell EMC tried to create a separate data and management plane with ViPR, but the industry didn’t adopt this approach – potentially because Dell/EMC continued to own the technology. Today, …

#141 – Building Storage Systems of the Future

#141 – Building Storage Systems of the Future

Chris Evans Data Management, Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week Chris and Martin are joined by Erik Kaulberg, Vice President at Infinidat. Erik has appeared on the podcast before and this time is here to talk about how we build storage systems of the future. You can tell from the introductions that we recorded this episode towards the end of 2019 – we haven’t been transported into the future! With many choices in new media, system builders have a wide choice of persistent storage from which to build new architectures. There’s NAND flash, traditional hard drives and a range of technologies such as …