#40 – Garbage Collection: Death of the Storage Admin

#40 – Garbage Collection: Death of the Storage Admin

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

This week’s podcast was recorded a few months ago, so apologies for the sound quality.  The team discuss the role of the storage administrator and whether we will see the eventual demise of storage admins or simply a transition to another role.  The conversation tracks the responsibilities of storage administrators over the last 30 years, from the era of the mainframe to today’s software-defined offerings. Early on, Martin invents a new word (abomnerbation)!  The discussions finally agree that the age of the LUN monkey is over. Elapsed Time: 00:26:57 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intro 00:01:00 – …

#39 – Garbage Collection: Storage Mythbusters Part I

#39 – Garbage Collection: Storage Mythbusters Part I

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

In this week’s podcast, the guys talk about some of the myths in the storage industry.  The focus is mainly on traditional storage arrays and some of the features that end users might not need.  The conversation takes a marketing turn, with questions on how five 9’s availability is marketed and the use of dedupe/compression as a tool to reduce costs. What do you think? Are there any myths you believe exist within the industry?  Drop us a line and give us your thoughts or areas we should be discussing. Elapsed Time: 00:31:05 Timeline 00:00:00 …

Garbage Collection #008 – Chris’ Travels – Commvault, NetApp & SFD14

Garbage Collection #008 – Chris' Travels – Commvault, NetApp & SFD14

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

In this podcast, recorded on 21 November 2017, Chris, Gavin and Martin talk about thoughts from Chris’ recent trips to CommVault GO, Storage Field Day 14 and NetApp Insight.  The CommVault and SFD14 events were held in the US, with NetApp Insight talking place in Berlin, Germany.  At Storage Field Day, Dell EMC, E8 Storage, Scality and Congruity 360 presented.  This podcast talks about the Dell EMC presentations. E8 Storage has been a recent podcast guest. Feelings on the events and content were mixed.  Some good and some bad.  What do you think?  Leave us …

Garbage Collection #006 – LTO-8 and the Future of Tape

Garbage Collection #006 – LTO-8 and the Future of Tape

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

This week LTO-8 was announced, with raw cartridge capacities of up to 12.8TB.  In this podcast, recorded on 23rd October 2017, Chris and Martin discuss the evolution of LTO from a lowly 100GB to todays media with 120x the capacity. Tape is changing and becoming more of an archive medium, as backup has increasingly moved to disk.  This begs the question, should standard formats like LTFS be more common?  How should media be recycled and what other ways are there for getting data onto tape media? For a bit of nostalgia, there’s mention of the …

Garbage Collection #005 – Disaggregated Storage

Garbage Collection #005 – Disaggregated Storage

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

In this podcast, recorded on 6th September 2017, Chris, Martin and Gavin discuss the subject of disaggregated storage.  With the move to NVMe, traditional dual controller architectures are hamstrung by the need for all data to go via the processor(s).  Disaggregation takes the component parts and makes them scalable, while removing the controller bottleneck.  The guys discuss why these solutions are needed, who the players are in the market and what we can expect to see as this section of the storage industry develops. Elapsed time: 00:21:02 Timeline 00:00:00 – Introductions – What do we …

Garbage Collection #004 – Dell EMC World Preview, DockerCon 2017 and The Return of Violin Memory

Garbage Collection #004 – Dell EMC World Preview, DockerCon 2017 and The Return of Violin Memory

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

In this podcast, recorded on 27 April 2017, ChrisE, Martin and Gavin discuss what is likely to be announced at Dell-EMC World in May.  The team talk about DockerCon 2017, held in Austin and muse about the possible return of Violin Memory, resurrected after their buyout.   Image courtesy 0f Sven Storbeck – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=289284 Elapsed Time: 00:27:05 Timeline 00:00:00 – Introductions 00:00:42 – Dell-EMC World! 00:00:57 – RIP DSSD 00:03:00 – Whatever happened to Atmos? 00:04:30 – Remember folks it’s all about storing data 00:05:40 – EMC Unity or Nexsan Unity? …

Garbage Collection #3 – Storage Predictions for 2017

Garbage Collection #3 – Storage Predictions for 2017

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

In this podcast, recorded in February, but finally being published in March, Chris, Martin and new host Gavin talk about what happened in 2016 and what’s coming up in 2017.  Of course some of these predictions may seem prescient, being some 4 weeks after the recording!  However this is a fast changing industry as we all know. Timeline 00:00:00 – Introduction and Gavin 00:01:20 – Recording in Feb, releasing in March – sorry! 00:02:00 – 2016 – Dell & EMC combine 00:03:30 – 2016 – The demise of Violin Memory 00:05:00 – 2016 – IBM …

Garbage Collection – Implementing a Multi-Vendor Storage Strategy

Garbage Collection – Implementing a Multi-Vendor Storage Strategy

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

  In this podcast, Chris and Martin discuss the issues in designing and implementing a multi-vendor storage strategy.  The discussion covers whether any one vendor can provide all of today’s storage products and who multiple vendors can be used to deliver a single requirement. Elapsed Time: 00:36:26 SFW: Yes 00:00:00 – Introduction 00:00:45 – A look at the market – product categories 00:01:30 – Vendor Roundup 00:03:20 – The product overlap problem 00:05:30 – Is storage unique in the data centre? 00:06:30 – Data Gravity 00:07:00 – Why do people change vendors? 00:07:50 – tension …

Garbage Collection – All-flash Market Consolidation

Garbage Collection – All-flash Market Consolidation

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

In this opinion piece, recorded on 31 October 2016, Martin Glassborow, Chris Mellor and Chris Evans discuss the state of the all-flash market and what we can expect to happen to the remaining all-flash startup vendors.  We discuss Violin’s delisting, talk about the range of vendors and size of the market.  Mr Mellor presents his interpretation on the “Supernatural Quadrangle” of all-flash vendors and products.  We then speculate on the Chinese and the similarity of IBM’s storage portfolio to, well you’ll just have to listen…. One other thing – we promise to get ChrisM a headset …