#143 – Storage Adoption Myths & Realities

#143 – Storage Adoption Myths & Realities

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Paul Stringfellow, CTO at Gardner Systems, about the realities of technology adoption. We hear lots of talk about Kubernetes, HCI, all-flash and even SCM technologies. But are all organisations deploying these technologies from day one? In reality, businesses deploy technology in a timeline that matches a normal distribution curve. As detailed in “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, there’s a gap between early adopters and the mainstream IT organisations. What causes this inertia? Some of the challenges relate people and process, however there’s also a desire to implement …

#140 – Introduction to Document-Orientated Databases

#140 – Introduction to Document-Orientated Databases

Chris EvansDatabases, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin speak to David Koppe, Director of Information Strategy at MongoDB. The discussion covers document-orientated databases, or simply document databases, and their appeal to the enterprise. Document databases differ from traditional relational databases in that the data is stored within each “document” as a series of key-value pairs. In this instance a document is not to be confused with a Word or PDF file. Unlike relational databases, document records don’t have to be “symmetrical” and aren’t required to contain every field (or a null value for empty fields). This makes the …

#135 – Introducing Datrium DRaaS Connect with Simon Long

#135 – Introducing Datrium DRaaS Connect with Simon Long

Chris EvansData Management, Data Protection, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This episode was recorded live at the Datrium offices in Silicon Valley. Chris chats to fellow Brit Simon Long about the announcement of DRaaS Connect and Instant RTO. Both are new features/products in the data mobility and DR space and complement Datrium’s existing storage and virtualisation offerings. Enterprises traditionally implement DR failover for virtual environments using techniques like storage replication and SRM. Datrium has offered DVX, Cloud DVX and Automatrix as tools to abstract and deliver DR capabilities to virtual machines. For customers that can’t immediately move to DVX, DRaaS Connect provides the capability to …

#121 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part II with J Metz

#121 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part II with J Metz

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This podcast episode continues the discussion with Dr J Metz and focuses on the detail of NVMe 1.4 and NVMe over Fabrics 1.1. Both standards are complete and have been published in the last few months. The conversation today digs deeper into what the new standards offer and specifically how NVMe/TCP becomes “officially” part of the NVMe standard. The conversation on NVMe/TCP is particularly interesting as it highlights how the protocol will offer significant benefits over iSCSI. The details in the podcast are quite technical and so it’s worth checking out some of the additional …

#120 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part I with J Metz

#120 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part I with J Metz

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin talk to J Metz, R&D Engineer in Cisco Systems’ Advanced Storage division. This is a two-parter – the second episode will be published on Monday 30th September 2019. The NVMe 1.4 specification has recently been published and is in the final 45-day ratification process. This discussion provides some background on NVMe then dives pretty deep into the NVMe standards and how design decisions are refactoring the NVMe protocol for version 2.0. NVMe for consumer devices will be different to the feature set used within enterprise storage (although the protocol is …

#119 – Storage Hardware is Back!

#119 – Storage Hardware is Back!

Chris EvansStorage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin catch up with some of the storage hardware on show at Flash Memory Summit 2019. FMS is essentially a trade show and so there are lots of technologies on display that haven’t quite made it to the enterprise. Technology vendors are selling to other vendors and this year there were some interesting hardware solutions to see. Flash has been on the agenda for the last decade and continues to push the boundaries of capacity and performance. Chris and Martin discuss 96+ layer products and the promise of 500 layers in …

#118 – Pure Accelerate 2019 with Patrick Smith

#118 – Pure Accelerate 2019 with Patrick Smith

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Pure Storage, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris is in Austin, Texas at Pure Accelerate 2019. Prior to the event, Chris catches up with Patrick Smith, Field CTO for EMEA for Pure. Patrick moved to Pure after being a customer. The initial discussion covers why flash as a platform offers better reliability and consistency than traditional disk based storage. At Accelerate 2019, Pure announced FlashArray//C, DirectMemory modules and the GA of Cloud Block Store. Patrick previews these changes and what benefits customers can expect to see from these new products. Elapsed Time: 00:30:07 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:03:00 – What …

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week’s episode is the final recording from Flash Memory Summit 2019. Chris is joined by the team from NGD Systems for a discussion on Computational Storage. On this podcast are Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing, Nader Salessi, CEO and Ashok Savdharia who has the lovely title of “technologist”. Computational storage uses the processing power of modern SSD controllers to run application workloads directly on the SSD itself. Imagine each drive being a mini blade server, with compute, memory and storage. In the case of NGD Systems, this means a range of devices and form …

#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

Chris EvansCloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris chats with Andy Watson, CTO at WekaIO in another episode recorded live at Flash Memory Summit 2019. With the recent acquisition of E8 Storage and Elastifile by hyper-scale cloud companies, is this move an attempt to plug the gap in existing cloud storage offerings? Andy provides his opinion on the two acquisitions and how they might fit into the existing ecosystem. Even 1GB/s may not be enough throughput as we see more focus on ML/AI applications and using cloud-based GPUs and TPUs. Some applications expect data in both NFS and SMB format. …