#61 – Introduction to NVM Express with Amber Huffman

#61 – Introduction to NVM Express with Amber Huffman

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Standards, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This is the second of a series of podcasts recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2018 in Santa Clara.  In this episode, Chris talks to Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow and President and founder of NVM Express Inc.  NVM Express is the standards body that governs the development of the NVMe base standard, NVMe-MI (Management Interface) and NVMe over Fabrics.  Amber explains how standards’ bodies are initially established, including the ongoing ownership of intellectual property.  The discussion continues, looking at how NVM Express standards are developed by committee, how the body is funded and how the process …

#60 – New Data Economy with Derek Dicker

#60 – New Data Economy with Derek Dicker

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This week Chris is attending the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara.  This is the first of three podcast recordings from the event and is a conversation with Derek Dicker CVP and GM of the Storage Business Unit at Micron. Derek participated in a keynote session at the event and talked about the challenges of managing new data types.  This includes processing data coming from a range of new sources, as well as providing capabilities to do new processing like analytics at the core and edge.  The interesting part of the discussion is how ML/AI …

#59 – Ethernet vs Fibre Channel

#59 – Ethernet vs Fibre Channel

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This week’s podcast looks at storage networking and in particular the choice of using Ethernet vs Fibre Channel as the network protocol.  Traditionally, enterprise storage platforms have been Fibre Channel connected, with only a small amount of iSCSI usage.  However, the world isn’t just block storage and in fact, as guest Marty Lans (General Manager, Storage Connectivity Engineering & Global Interoperability Business Unit at HPE) tells us, 80% of storage is Ethernet connected.  This is because of the growth in unstructured data stored on NAS and object stores. Ethernet storage now includes lossless Ethernet (DCB) …

#57 – Storage on the Edge with Scott Shadley

#57 – Storage on the Edge with Scott Shadley

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

What is computational storage and how do we manage storage on the edge of the network?  This week’s conversation is a discussion on how storage and data is managed within IoT devices and partially covers the new segment of computational storage.  Martin and Chris talk to Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing for NGD Systems. Edge storage means more than simply managing the data on a Raspberry Pi or other small form-factor device.  During the podcast, Scott uses the example of aircraft analytics, which generate terabytes of content per flight.  How do these implementations work?  How …

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

Chris EvansCloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week we talk to Mark Carlson, co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, about the storage needs of hyperscalers.  Mark defines hyperscalers as those companies opening multiple data centres a year, most notably Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google and Facebook in the US and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China.  These vendors are deploying petabytes of storage a year, with specific requirements on storage media.  The hyperscaler applications have issues with HDD and SSD performance characteristics, such as tail latency and the effects of garbage collection.  As a result, drive manufacturers are building in new features …

#53 – Persistent Storage and Kubernetes with Evan Powell

#53 – Persistent Storage and Kubernetes with Evan Powell

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This week Chris and Martin talk to Evan Powell, CEO of OpenEBS and formerly the founding CEO of Nexenta.  The conversation covers the use of persistent storage with container orchestration tool, Kubernetes.  Despite what the industry might think, persistent storage that can be mapped to a container (or in this case pod) is still an important problem to solve. Evan sets the scene for us with some background on pods, stateful sets, claims and storage classes.  As the conversation proceeds, the team discusses the way in which developers expect to consume cloud-native storage and in …

#52 – An Introduction to WekaIO Matrix with Liran Zvibel (Sponsored)

#52 – An Introduction to WekaIO Matrix with Liran Zvibel (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Sponsored

This week’s guest episode was recorded live in Silicon Valley at the offices of WekaIO.  The company has developed a scale-out parallel file system called Matrix that was specifically designed to exploit NVMe storage and new fast networking.  Chris is onsite to talk with CEO and co-founder, Liran Zivbel.  Martin is dialled in remotely from the bowels of the Storage Unpacked offices. The conversation covers how Matrix was developed to work with new media and at the same time address some of the issues seen in the use of parallel file systems such as managing …

#50 – Introduction to Quantum Computing

#50 – Introduction to Quantum Computing

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

How does quantum computing relate to storage?  This week’s episode is a bit of a diversion from our normal podcasting topics.  In episode #47 (Enterprise Storage is not Boring), we mused as to how quantum computers use data.  With no real knowledge between us, we asked for listeners to help us out.  As a result, we’re joined in this episode by Scott Crowder, Vice President & CTO, Quantum Computing, Technical Strategy & Transformation, IBM Systems.  That’s a long job title, Scott! During the show we try and get to the bottom of what quantum computing really …

#49 – Reputation in Technology Marketing

#49 – Reputation in Technology Marketing

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This week Chris and Martin talk to Gina Minks, who works on product marketing at VMware within the Cloud BU.  The discussion evolved from a post Gina published on www.24x7itconnection.com talking about how vendors shouldn’t go negative when promoting their own technology.  We’ve seen hyperbole from many vendors in the past – you know who you are! During the conversation, the topics cover the original Twitpisses that used to take place regularly on social media.  This leads on to the independence of bloggers who have been acquired by big corporations yet still use their own …

#48 – Introduction to Datrium DVX (Sponsored)

#48 – Introduction to Datrium DVX (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Sponsored

This week’s podcast was recorded on the road a few weeks ago in Silicon Valley.  Chris dropped into the Datrium offices in Sunnyvale to talk about DVX, Datrium’s open converged platform.  Taking part in the podcast is Sazzala Reddy, CTO and co-founder and Tushar Agrawal, Director of Products. Datrium DVX is an extension of HCI that scales performance and capacity separately.  Persistent storage is deployed on a shared array, with each compute host using local cache in the form of flash storage.  You can find out more on a recent blog post covering DVX. The …