#181 – Is There a Future for Storage Infrastructure Companies?

#181 – Is There a Future for Storage Infrastructure Companies?

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin debate the future of on-premises storage infrastructure companies in light of announcements and events from IBM, Dell and NetApp. IBM is splitting in two, while Dell and NetApp have recently held virtual versions of their annual conferences. Is the on-premises infrastructure business shrinking and becoming too low-margin to be worthwhile? Martin mentions Lou Gerstner’s book – linked here – Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? The Simpson’s episode where Mr Burns runs for Governor is “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” – without a doubt a …

#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 …

#177 – SmartNICs and Project Monterey

#177 – SmartNICs and Project Monterey

Chris EvansStorage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast, VMware

This week Chris and Martin look at SmartNIC technology and the announcement of Project Monterey. SmartNICs are offload devices that provide networking, storage and security functions with additional benefits such as centralised management. VMware has announced Project Monterey, a preview solution that takes SmartNICs and offloads storage and networking tasks from the ESXi hypervisor. It’s clear from the discussion that SmartNIC technology needs to provide a “10x” benefit to the data centre. The technology is already in use by hyperscalers to deliver Public Cloud. With Monterey and ESXi 7, the private data centre can use …

#176 – Opinionated Storage Opinions with Chris Mellor

#176 – Opinionated Storage Opinions with Chris Mellor

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Martin and Chris catch up with Chris Mellor in his “pandemic infused isolation”. Without a particular theme, this episode looks at the unchanging landscape of tape and media, Dell EMC building another new storage platform and Nutanix still not making a profit. In the future zone, we speculate on AMD and Micron getting together to build an Optane challenger, the chances of Kubernetes storage being successful and whether Nebulon has a new architecture with cloud-defined storage. Naturally the conversation is interspersed with many tangents and diversions, but hey, it wouldn’t be opinion without …

#174 – Introduction to Zoned Storage with Phil Bullinger

#174 – Introduction to Zoned Storage with Phil Bullinger

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast, Western Digital

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Phil Bullinger, Senior VP and General Manager for the Data Centre Business Unit at Western Digital. As storage media capacities increase, recording methods are introducing challenges to maintaining resiliency and performance. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) are two techniques that have developed to address the scaling issues in modern media devices. SMR is a technique for hard drives that overlays the recording area of tracks on storage media to gain increased areal density. This results in a requirement to re-write entire blocks or zones of …

#170 – The End of Pure Play Storage Companies

#170 – The End of Pure Play Storage Companies

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, Midrange, Object Storage, Software-Defined Storage, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin debate whether we have seen the end of new “pure play” storage companies that go the distance to full independence. Where there used to be many businesses like EMC, Pure Storage and NetApp, the number of public storage-only companies is dwindling. Is this market too challenging to get into or is there simply no money to be made? If we look back 30 years, storage hardware was all the rage. Storage solutions were complex with custom hardware. These days, anyone can build a software-based solution and open source for everyone …

S02E03 – Hybrid Cloud Storage Choices – Rent or Buy?

S02E03 – Hybrid Cloud Storage Choices – Rent or Buy?

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Hybrid Cloud Podcast

On the face of it, public cloud seems like a great place for long-term retention of unstructured data. However, as volumes of data stored rise, the cost of exiting the cloud cloud become prohibitively expensive. What’s the right strategy to follow? In this discussion, Chris chats to Matt Starr from Spectralogic on how to build out a model of public/private cloud storage and the pitfalls to avoid in the process.

#168 – Storage Unicorns

#168 – Storage Unicorns

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin review the idea of storage unicorns, companies that have a valuation of one billion dollars or more. What exactly is the basis or justification for a billion dollar price tag? Is this something invented by the VC industry or is there a real degree of science behind the assumptions? The list in question comes from a Blocks & Files article written by Chris Mellor, which in turn references the list produced by an analyst firm. While valuation based on some multiple of money invested does give some indication of value, …