#159 – Introduction to MRAM with Joe O’Hare from Everspin

#159 – Introduction to MRAM with Joe O'Hare from Everspin

Chris EvansEverspin Technologies, Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin dig deeper into storage media and look at magneto-resistive RAM, commonly known as MRAM in this conversation with Joe O’Hare, Director of Distribution and Product Marketing at Everspin Technologies. MRAM is a persistent memory technology that uses resistance to determine the state of data. Everspin, the leading provider of MRAM technologies offers two product types – Toggle and Spin Transfer Torque. These two solutions provide different characteristics of endurance and scaling, but both offer low latency reads and writes at around 35 nanoseconds. MRAM is already finding uses in embedded …

#157 – Introduction to Dell PowerStore (sponsored)

#157 – Introduction to Dell PowerStore (sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, NVMe, Sponsored, Storage Hardware

In this sponsored episode, Chris and Martin look at the newly announced midrange storage platform from Dell Technologies. PowerStore is a new all-flash midrange storage solution that offers both scale-up and scale-out capabilities. As we find out in the discussion with Dan Cummins and Devon Reed, this is only one aspect of the new technology. Through a feature called AppsOn, customers can run their own applications on a native ESXi hypervisor. In building a new storage platform, how did Dell Technologies leverage the assets already in the portfolio? We find out that XtremIO, SC Series …

#156 – Introduction to Hammerspace (sponsored)

#156 – Introduction to Hammerspace (sponsored)

Chris EvansCloud, 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 …

#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 …

#154 – Hitachi Vantara VSP E990 NVMe Midrange Appliance with Colin Gallagher (Sponsored)

#154 – Hitachi Vantara VSP E990 NVMe Midrange Appliance with Colin Gallagher (Sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Hardware

Today, Hitachi Vantara announced the VSP E990, a midrange all-NVMe storage appliance. The new solution, available immediately, offers up to 5.8 million IOPS, I/O latency as low as 64µs with up to 64PB effective capacity. In this episode, Chris Evans chats remotely to Colin Gallagher about the new platform. VSP E990 extends the existing solutions in the VSP family, from the F350 up to the 5000 series enterprise-class solutions. The “E” denotes NVMe – other platform models have “F” (flash) and “G” (general) designations. The quoted 64µs latency figure is lower than the VSP 5000 …

#152 – Global File System Concepts

#152 – Global File System Concepts

Chris EvansData 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 …

#147 – Introduction to Key Value Stores and Redis

#147 – Introduction to Key Value Stores and Redis

Chris EvansData 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 (formerly 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 …

#144 – Introduction to Storage as a Service

#144 – Introduction to Storage as a Service

Chris EvansData 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 EvansData 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 …

#141 – Building Storage Systems of the Future

#141 – Building Storage Systems of the Future

Chris EvansData 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 …