#90 – Dell EMC’s Enterprise NVMe Strategy with Vince Westin (Sponsored)

#90 – Dell EMC's Enterprise NVMe Strategy with Vince Westin (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Sponsored

This week, Chris talks to Vince Westin, Technical Evangelist within the PowerMax Group at Dell EMC.  PowerMax is the latest in a storage product line with lineage back to the original Symmetrix systems of the early 1990s.  PowerMax is an all-NVMe storage array, reflecting an industry move towards faster, low latency media.  Vince takes us through the rationale for moving to NVMe across the Dell portfolio and PowerMax in particular. Some of the more interesting aspects of the transition include the ability to simplify code paths with NVMe compared to back-end SAS.  NVMe introduces a …

#89 – Choices in NVMe Architectures

#89 – Choices in NVMe Architectures

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This episode was recorded while Chris was in Silicon Valley for Storage Field Day 18.  Although not part of the event, Chris took time to catch up with Pavilion Data. in particular Jeff Sosa, VP Product Management and Walt Hinton, Head of Corporate and Product Marketing.  Both Jeff and Walt have a long history in the storage industry, including companies like Virident, Western Digital, Fusion-io, Brocade, NetApp and Data Domain – to name but a few!  It’s great to get opinions on the future of storage technology from industry experts, in this case on the …

#88 – Nigel Tozer returns to talk about Ransomware

#88 – Nigel Tozer returns to talk about Ransomware

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers

This week Chris and Martin talk to Nigel Tozer, Solutions Marketing Director for EMEA at Commvault.  Nigel was a guest about 12 months ago and on that episode he talked about GDPR.  This time the discussion is about ransomware and what businesses can do about it. The challenges of protecting data from theft or extortion are greater than ever.  So, can we identify a common attack model?  Are specific operating systems more vulnerable?  Most important, how do you develop a plan that protects your data and systems?  The process is more than just patching primary …

#87 – The Risks of Storage Media Reuse versus Recycling

#87 – The Risks of Storage Media Reuse versus Recycling

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris and Martin talk to Simon Zola from Avtel Data Destruction.  This is a follow-up episode to #85 (Storage for Home and Homelabs) where Martin and Chris questioned the ease of recovering data from pre-owned storage media.  As we find out, the process was pretty easy.  Martin was able to recover significant amounts of personal data with little effort and using standard tools. Media destruction is one route to safely dispose of drives and guarantees that data is destroyed.  But what are the consequences?  Simply disabling a drive and throwing it into …

#86 – Eran Brown Discusses Storage, Security & Multi-Cloud

#86 – Eran Brown Discusses Storage, Security & Multi-Cloud

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Eran Brown, CTO in EMEA for INFINIDAT.  As we move to a more distributed world, implementing data security becomes ever more challenging.  Eran explains the issues and how his customers are looking to solve the problem. One of the initial choices is to decide exactly where to encrypt.  We’re familiar with drive-level encryption, even host-level.  Eran sees hypervisor and application encryption being equally if not more important. What are the implications on technology?  Encryption reduces savings from de-duplication and compression, changing the cost model.  Encryption and data security …

#84 – Discussing New NVMe Form Factors with Jonathan Hinkle

#84 – Discussing New NVMe Form Factors with Jonathan Hinkle

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Jonathan Hinkle, Principal Researcher – System Architecture and Master Inventor at Lenovo.  As solid-state storage and NVMe become more prevalent, the legacy 2.5″ HDD format is increasingly impractical for getting the best density, power and cooling in servers.  Jonathan explains how his work led to the founding of the Enterprise and Data Centre Small Form Factor working group and new device formats being introduced into the industry. EDSFF is responsible for managing device standards like Intel Ruler (see a previous blog episode covering this technology).  How did the …

#83 – Introduction to NetApp MAX Data

#83 – Introduction to NetApp MAX Data

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers

On this week’s podcast, recorded live at NetApp Insight 2018, Chris talks to Greg Knieriemen and Rob McDonald about the introduction of Memory Accelerated Data, commonly called MAX Data.  The MAX Data solution is a software product that implements a local file system on a server using local persistent memory such as Intel Optane.  Of course, this is what DAS (Direct Attached Storage) used to offer 20 years ago and this is definitely not what MAX Data provides.  Protection against loss within a server is achieved with a feature called MAX Recovery that synchronously replicates …

#80 – Discussing NetApp’s AI Strategy with Santosh Rao

#80 – Discussing NetApp's AI Strategy with Santosh Rao

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

In this podcast recorded at NetApp Insight 2018, Chris talks to Santosh Rao, Senior Technical Director at NetApp.  Santosh leads NetApp’s AI and Data Engineering efforts and has a 10-year history at the company, working on initiatives including Clustered ONTAP. This conversation covers how NetApp is developing an Edge-to-Core-to-Cloud strategy that includes collecting and processing data at the edge, storing it in the core and exploiting the AI tools of public cloud. End users want to make the most of CPU and GPU solutions, while minimising data movement.  Edge Solutions, including ONTAP Select provide the …

#79 – Learning More About QLC Storage with Steve Hanna

#79 – Learning More About QLC Storage with Steve Hanna

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers

This week Chris and Martin talk to Steve Hanna, Senior Product Manager for Enterprise SSDs at Micron.  Steve looks after the 5210 ION QLC SSD product line, which was introduced earlier this year.  As an evolution of existing flash technology, QLC offers greater capacities at lower cost.  But what are the issues? The conversation covers how QLC has reduced the price to 1/100th of that seen in early enterprise SSDs.  Although endurance is lower than previous flash generations, in reality for many use cases the ability to write up to 1 DWPD is enough.  However, …

#78 – Thoughts on NetApp with Greg Knieriemen

#78 – Thoughts on NetApp with Greg Knieriemen

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

Last week Chris attended NetApp Insight in Barcelona and had a chance to chat to Greg Knieriemen, Chief Technologist in the Storage Systems & Software business at NetApp.  Greg was formerly at Hitachi Vantara where he held a similar role.  This conversation touches on Greg’s reasons for choosing NetApp and exactly what he will be focusing on within the company. Elapsed Time: 00:17:07 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:01:30 – Why move to NetApp? 00:04:00 – Three BUs, Storage/Systems, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Services 00:07:00 – The Data Fabric is much more real today than two years …