#205 – 25 Years of Commvault & the Power of And (Sponsored)

#205 – 25 Years of Commvault & the Power of And (Sponsored)

Chris EvansCommvault, Data Management, Data Protection, Guest Speakers, Sponsored, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin have a great conversation with David Ngo, CTO for Metallic at Commvault, and Ranga Rajagopalan, VP Product Management for Commvault and Metallic. Commvault is celebrating 25 years in data protection, while Metallic, a SaaS data protection solution from Commvault has been available for nearly two years. In this discussion, David and Ranga explain the background to Metallic and how customers have quickly adopted the SaaS model. With 25 years of product development, Commvault has a suite of solutions to call upon, including traditional data protection software, appliances and …

#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure

#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure

Chris EvansCloud, Guest Speakers, Liqid, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Sumit Puri, CEO of Liqid Inc. Liqid has developed a composable infrastructure platform they call CDI or Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure. CDI enables IT organisations to take the building blocks of compute – storage, networking, CPUs, memory and GPUs then combine them dynamically in ways that address the processing needs of the enterprise. Customers use the technology to enable greater efficiency in the use of hardware and to truly deliver the software-defined data centre. Sumit explains how the Liqid technology works across multiple fabrics that could be PCIe, Ethernet …

#203 – Storage and Chia Cryptocurrency Farming

#203 – Storage and Chia Cryptocurrency Farming

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week, Martin and Chris delve into cryptocurrency mining in a lengthy discussion on Chia with Robert Novak. Chia is a new cryptocurrency technology that differs from previous online currencies in that the basis for earning rewards (or coins) is based on the volume of data stored on disk, rather than raw compute performed. Rob takes the team through a discussion of the difference between the processes that earn currency, explaining how Proof of Work and Proof of Stake has evolved to Proof of Space and Time with Chia. Rob goes on to explain how …

#202 – Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat (Sponsored)

#202 – Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Infinidat, Storage Hardware

In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris and Martin talk to Phil Bullinger, newly appointed CEO at Infinidat. The company has reached their ten-year anniversary, shipping over seven exabytes of capacity in that time. With successful growth in every quarter during 2020, we discuss how Infinidat is helping drive the consolidation story for large enterprises and MSPs looking to optimise their storage systems. The ability to deploy entire storage arrays into customer data centres is both an operational benefit and financial tool for Infinidat. Enterprises love the set-and-forget approach, while MSPs like to pay as their …

#201 – Introducing Scality ARTESCA (Sponsored)

#201 – Introducing Scality ARTESCA (Sponsored)

Chris EvansContainers, Guest Speakers, HPE, Object Storage, Scality, Sponsored

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin talk to Paul Speciale (Chief Product Officer at Scality) and Chris Tinker (Distinguished Technologist with HPE) about the launch of ARTESCA, a new lightweight, cloud-native object storage solution. HPE and Scality have announced the product jointly, delivering the solution on HPE hardware with an exclusive distribution agreement for 6 months. We get the detail on why ARTESCA is different to RING and the types of workload Scality is aiming to support. Since the launch of Scality and RING a decade ago, a lot has changed in technology and …

#200 – Virtualisation, Containers, Serverless and Data

#200 – Virtualisation, Containers, Serverless and Data

Chris EvansCloud, Data Management, Databases, Guest Speakers, Serverless

This week, Martin and Chris are joined by Jim Walker, VP of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs. In a slight departure from a purely storage-based recording, this discussion follows the evolution of application packaging and deployment, from virtualisation to containers and serverless. The logical conclusion of any computing environment is to execute code and gradually, we are abstracting from the specifics of infrastructure and allowing the code to do the work. How will serverless technologies standardise and implement non-functional requirements such as security and credentials management, data access and most important – portability? Will de-facto …

#195 – Fungible Data Processing Units

#195 – Fungible Data Processing Units

Chris EvansFungible, Guest Speakers, SmartNICs, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week’s podcast episode continues the discussion on SmartNICs and DPUs with Fungible, a company that claims to have originally coined the term DPU. Chris and Martin talk with Pradeep Sindhu (CEO and co-founder) and Jai Menon (Chief Scientist) about Fungible’s storage cluster and host-based DPU. The Fungible architecture aims to solve the challenges of disaggregation, a topic we first looked at back in September 2017. This discussion highlights some interesting challenges that new technology such as NVMe-oF is introducing into the data centre. As we move to a model of highly parallelised workloads, the …

#193 – HYCU Protégé Office 365 Backup as a Service

#193 – HYCU Protégé Office 365 Backup as a Service

Chris EvansData Protection, Guest Speakers, HYCU Inc

This week, Chris and Martin are talking to a podcast repeat offender, Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU. HYCU has recently announced the availability of Protégé for Microsoft Office 365, delivered as SaaS or Backup as a Service (BaaS). This continues an expansion of the HYCU and Protégé backup offerings that started with Nutanix data protection and has expanded past on-premises virtualisation to encompass the public cloud and now SaaS. The conversation covers a wide range of topics relating SaaS and data protection, including the way in which services are implemented via APIs provided …

#192 – Storage & Kubernetes with Nigel Poulton

#192 – Storage & Kubernetes with Nigel Poulton

Chris EvansContainers, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to long-time friend and Kubernetes legend, Nigel Poulton. Nigel is well-known in the industry for producing training courses and books on Kubernetes, although was once a storage person in a previous life. The aim of this podcast episode is to examine how storage and Kubernetes come together. However, we start by asking Nigel to explain his pivot to containers and now the Kubernetes ecosystem. This discussion touches on some interesting aspects of how persistent storage and Kubernetes should be managed together, which today is via the CSI (Container Storage …

#191 – CIO Pandemic Priorities

#191 – CIO Pandemic Priorities

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pure Storage, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin are in discussion with Cathy Southwick, CIO at Pure Storage. The topic of conversation is the results of a CIO survey undertaken by Pure to look back at the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and how customers have changed their IT strategies. The discussion covers how Pure Storage has adapted to the lack of in-person site visits and adapting to remote installation and operations. Digital transformation projects have continued, while customers have adapted their priorities and goals to align with the challenges presented by COVID-19. Public cloud has been an …