#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 …

#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 …

#194 – ScaleFlux & Computational Storage Devices

#194 – ScaleFlux & Computational Storage Devices

Chris EvansSmartNICs, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s episode, Martin and Chris discuss Computational Storage with Tong Zhang, Chief Scientist and co-founder at ScaleFlux. Computational Storage devices add value to traditional NAND by offloading data processes directly onto the storage media. ScaleFlux offers two families of CSDs, including the CSD 2000 series, which implements inline data compression to improve endurance and logical device capacity. In this conversation, Tong covers the benefits of using CSDs as well as some of the challenges of implementation. It’s likely we will se CSDs being used for AI/Analytics pre-processing, especially in the public cloud. More …

#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 …

#189 – The Quiet Success of Software-Defined Storage

#189 – The Quiet Success of Software-Defined Storage

Chris EvansSoftware-Defined Storage, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin debate the success of software-defined storage or SDS. Over the past 10-15 years, storage systems have evolved into a wide range of software solutions, appliances and cloud-based products. What has driven this move to focus entirely on software and what will the next stage of evolution be? Are we in a position where everything is based on software, in some form? This discussion also touches on consumption models. Has SDS provided the catalyst for vendors to offer better subscription licences and consumption models? Is the writing on the wall for …

#183 – Magnetic Tape AMA (Ask Matt Anything)

#183 – Magnetic Tape AMA (Ask Matt Anything)

Chris EvansData Protection, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin take the opportunity to grill (not broil) Matt Starr from Spectralogic to learn everything about magnetic tape. This episode came out of a discussion with Chris Mellor (episode #176) in which we asked the question why tape media doesn’t wear out. The answer is obviously within the podcast so you’ll need to listen to find out! In this conversation, the team look back at the evolution of tape but more importantly what we can expect in the future. Magnetic tape is more of an archive offering these days (although ransomware …

#182 – FaunaDB – Client Serverless Computing

#182 – FaunaDB – Client Serverless Computing

Chris EvansCloud, Databases, Fauna, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Evan Weaver, CTO and co-founder at Fauna. The company has developed a database as a service, available simply through a globally available API. Fauna calls the platform “client serverless”. How can a database be made globally available and still guarantee performance, resiliency and most important, data consistency? Of course, you will need to listen to find out. As we learn in this podcast, a database accessible via API provides the ability to write applications that talk directly to the platform, with application use cases for mobile and IoT. …