#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 …

#190 – NVIDIA BlueField SmartNICs & DPUs

#190 – NVIDIA BlueField SmartNICs & DPUs

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVIDIA, SmartNICs, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Kevin Deierling, SVP of Marketing for Networking Products at NVIDIA. SmartNICs and DPUs (Data Processing Units) are starting to become mainstream as application use-cases such as AI and analytics drive a need for greater data throughput and performance. Kevin explains the design and thinking behind BlueField, NVIDIA’s family of DPU products that combine offloaded network, storage and security functionality. Elapsed Time: 00:47:36 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:01:30 – We’re not a networking podcast! 00:02:15 – Why will we need DPUs and SmartNICs? 00:04:30 – Von Neumann is diverging …

#186 – End of the Year Show 2020 – Part One

#186 – End of the Year Show 2020 – Part One

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, Guest Speakers

This week, Martin and the two Chris’s look back at 2020 for the highlights and lowlights of the storage industry. What’s been hyped and what’s been a success? Will we be travelling in 2021 and what impact has the lockdown had on 2020 sales? This episode is the first of a two parter over the next couple of weeks before we close down for the Christmas period. Elapsed Time: 00:43:10 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:00:56 – Chris has not been to China 00:01:55 – Chris M is on a health kick! 00:02:48 – Gartner analysts …

#185 – Pure-as-a-Service 2.0 (Sponsored)

#185 – Pure-as-a-Service 2.0 (Sponsored)

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

This week Chris and Martin talk to Rob Walters, GM for Pure-as-a-Service at Pure Storage. The company has recently announced upgrades and expansion of the “as-a-service” model, formerly known as Evergreen storage. The name change and the widening of the portfolio represents an opportunity for customers to see transparent pricing and a greater depth of service offerings. In this sponsored episode, we review the origins of the service and look at how that has evolved into the capability for customers to consume Pure block and file products as true services. We discuss the challenges in …

#184 – MCAS – Memory Centric Active Storage

#184 – MCAS – Memory Centric Active Storage

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, In-Memory Computing, Persistent Memory

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Daniel Waddington, Principal Research Staff Member in the Global Storage Research Group at IBM Research. Daniel is developing MCAS – Memory Centric Active Storage – a high-performance key-value store designed for persistent memory. The aim is to create a platform that can be used to bring storage and compute closer together. Persistent memory has been a regular topic on Storage Unpacked (see related podcasts below) and we’re always interested to understand exactly how it can be fully exploited in the enterprise. PMEM offers byte-level addressing and is particularly …

#180 – SmartNICs – Pliops Storage Processor

#180 – SmartNICs – Pliops Storage Processor

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pliops, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin chat to Steve Fingerhut, CMO at Pliops. Pliops has developed a “Storage Processor” in the form factor of an AIC (add-in card) that offloads storage functions from application software. This discussion looks at why the technology is needed and how Pliops has implemented the solution to drop into an existing server. The Pliops Storage Processor acts as a high-speed key-value store, implementing in the first instance features such as data compression. As a hardware accelerator, the technology reduces CPU core overhead, saves on storage and can reduce application licensing costs. …

#178 – Monetising the Value of Data

#178 – Monetising the Value of Data

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers, Hitachi Vantara, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris has a great conversation with Bill Schmarzo, Chief Innovation Officer at Hitachi Vantara. Bill maintains a consultancy practice within Hitachi that helps customers build processes and identify data that can be used to create business value within an organisation. In this discussion, Bill outlines the process for identifying opportunities, capturing the data and building governance around translating data into income. Aside from the insights in how businesses can generate new revenue streams from the data in their organisation, this podcast highlights the challenges of determining which data to keep and discard, while …

#175 – IBM FlashSystem Deep Dive (Sponsored)

#175 – IBM FlashSystem Deep Dive (Sponsored)

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

This week Chris catches up with Ralf Colbus from IBM to talk about the evolution of FlashSystem. The FlashSystem platform is an enterprise-class block-based storage solution that scales from SMB/SME offerings to high-end all-NVMe and SCM capable devices. At the heart of the design is the software behind Spectrum Virtualise, the SAN Volume Controller or SVC. FlashSystem now offers a standardised portfolio based on SVC. This starts with the 5010 and 5030, both SAS-based solutions that can be all-flash or hybrid flash & HDD. The 5100 upwards (including 7200 and 9200) introduces NVMe and IBM’s …