Garbage Collection Archives - Page 2 of 5

#186 – End of the Year Show 2020 – Part One

Chris Evans 11 December 2020Garbage Collection, Guest Speakers

This week, Martin and the two Chris’s look back at 2020 for the highlights and lowlights of the storage industry. What’s been hyped and what’s been a success? Will we be travelling in 2021 and what impact has the lockdown had on 2020 sales? This episode is the first of a two parter over the next couple of weeks before we close down for the Christmas period. Elapsed Time: 00:43:10 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:00:56 – Chris has not been to China 00:01:55 – Chris M is on a health kick! 00:02:48 – Gartner analysts …

#181 – Is There a Future for Storage Infrastructure Companies?

Chris Evans 6 November 2020Garbage Collection, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin debate the future of on-premises storage infrastructure companies in light of announcements and events from IBM, Dell and NetApp. IBM is splitting in two, while Dell and NetApp have recently held virtual versions of their annual conferences. Is the on-premises infrastructure business shrinking and becoming too low-margin to be worthwhile? Martin mentions Lou Gerstner’s book – linked here – Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? The Simpson’s episode where Mr Burns runs for Governor is “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” – without a doubt a …

#176 – Opinionated Storage Opinions with Chris Mellor

Chris Evans 2 October 2020Garbage Collection, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Martin and Chris catch up with Chris Mellor in his “pandemic infused isolation”. Without a particular theme, this episode looks at the unchanging landscape of tape and media, Dell EMC building another new storage platform and Nutanix still not making a profit. In the future zone, we speculate on AMD and Micron getting together to build an Optane challenger, the chances of Kubernetes storage being successful and whether Nebulon has a new architecture with cloud-defined storage. Naturally the conversation is interspersed with many tangents and diversions, but hey, it wouldn’t be opinion without …

#170 – The End of Pure Play Storage Companies

Chris Evans 21 August 2020Garbage Collection, Midrange, Object Storage, Software-Defined Storage, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin debate whether we have seen the end of new “pure play” storage companies that go the distance to full independence. Where there used to be many businesses like EMC, Pure Storage and NetApp, the number of public storage-only companies is dwindling. Is this market too challenging to get into or is there simply no money to be made? If we look back 30 years, storage hardware was all the rage. Storage solutions were complex with custom hardware. These days, anyone can build a software-based solution and open source for everyone …

#168 – Storage Unicorns

Chris Evans 24 July 2020Garbage Collection, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin review the idea of storage unicorns, companies that have a valuation of one billion dollars or more. What exactly is the basis or justification for a billion dollar price tag? Is this something invented by the VC industry or is there a real degree of science behind the assumptions? The list in question comes from a Blocks & Files article written by Chris Mellor, which in turn references the list produced by an analyst firm. While valuation based on some multiple of money invested does give some indication of value, …

#153 – Post Pandemic Storage Efficiencies

Chris Evans 17 April 2020Garbage Collection, Storage Management, Storage Unpacked Podcast

As we head towards week 4 of lockdown in the UK, Chris and Martin reflect on the personal changes in their daily routines, as well as the implications on businesses. This has been a time for dusting off old skills (like DNS/DHCP configurations) and finding new uses for Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. Working from home has placed significant focus on Zoom, where the attack vector for “zoombombing” has resulted in some organisations (like schools) temporarily moving away from the platform. We’re seeing the inevitability of short-term scaling, for Zoom and Microsoft with Teams. Are cloud …

#149 – Coronavirus 2.0

Chris Evans 20 March 2020Garbage Collection, General

This week, Chris and Martin review their thoughts from the previous discussion on COVID-19 and what we have learned since then. In what is an incredibly fast-moving situation, the way in which we viewed the impacts of the global epidemic were perhaps a little naive. We take another look at how vendors will need to market and sell to their clients and how even virtual events may be impossible to implement with so many staff dispersed to their homes. The ultimate outcome is that for the foreseeable future, our way of working, selling and messaging …

#146 – Coronavirus and Impacts on the Technology Industry

Chris Evans 3 March 2020Events, Garbage Collection, General

In this episode we take a look at the impact of COVID-19, commonly known as the Coronavirus. Since the outbreak in China towards the end of 2019, tens of thousands have been infected, thousands of people have died. As the spread of the disease moves outside China, we look at the effect on business, conferences and the positive benefits that may occur with reduced travel. During the podcast we make some specific references. Here’s a link to the report on supply chain impacts. Here’s a link to the article on the reduction in emissions over …

#145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise

Chris Evans 28 February 2020Cloud, 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, …

#142 – Storage, Automation and DevOps

Chris Evans 7 February 2020Data 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, …