#216 – The Data Explosion with VAST Data CEO Renen Hallak

Chris Evans All-Flash, Data Management, Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast, VAST Data

This week, Chris chats to VAST Data CEO, Renen Hallak about the explosion in data and the challenges of analysing and managing huge quantities of unstructured content. VAST Data has built a scale-out unstructured object store that customers are now using to store petabytes of complex data. But what does complex mean, and how is that data being used? Renen explains how many of VAST customers are now at the exabyte level, more than might have been expected only a few years ago. What will customers do with this data? AI and analytics are the …

#215 – Stateless Compute Machines

#215 – Stateless Compute Machines

Chris Evans Garbage Collection, NVMe, SmartNICs, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin discuss network booting and the ability to create completely stateless servers. The idea of SAN booting has been around for two decades, enabling both the operating system disk and data disks to be delivered from SAN storage. NVMe/TCP and other NVMe-oF protocols promise the ability to implement the same capability for modern systems. Can this be done today? Why are more servers not booted from SAN? Is this a technical issue or one of practicality and comfort? With large-scale computing platforms, perhaps network booting will make (or already …

#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

Chris Evans AWS, Cloud, CloudFlare, Garbage Collection, Object Storage, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcement from CloudFlare of R2, a new object storage solution. With such a widely dispersed CDN network, could CloudFlare become a real competitor for S3, considering that the R2 platform will have no egress fees? This episode digs into the details, to look at what additional features object storage vendors need in their arsenal and whether there’s any other vendor likely to come close to competing with AWS. At the outset of the podcast, Chris mentions Dark Star, which did indeed have a tiny budget of only $60,000. …