Storage Unpacked Podcast Archives - Page 8 of 9

#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

Chris Evans 6 September 2019 Cloud, 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. …

#114 – CIO Storage & Data Challenges with Clay Ryder

Chris Evans 23 August 2019 Data Management, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris catches up with Clay Ryder from the DCS (Data Centre Systems) group at Western Digital. The discussion focuses on the challenges for today’s CIO, with an emphasis on storage and data. The division of responsibility between CTO and CIO isn’t always obvious. As we learn in this discussion, there’s a lot of overlap and a lot of interaction between the two. CIOs are focused on data and more specifically information, whereas the CTO has to deliver the right platform to meet application needs. The conversation covers challenges around technical debt, determining what …

#96 – Discussing SmartNICs and Storage with Rob Davis from Mellanox

Chris Evans 3 May 2019 Guest Speakers, SmartNICs, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this podcast, recorded live at Dell Technologies World 2019, Chris talks to Rob Davis, VP of Storage Technology at Mellanox, about the development of SmartNIC technology and storage. SmartNICs offload tasks such as encryption, compression and protocol traffic from core CPUs. This allows system vendors to create more efficient and cheaper products. It can also provide a backward compatibility for legacy applications and operating systems. Rob takes us through the implementation of SmartNICs on both the initiator (host) and target (array) side of the storage network. We discuss vendors using the technology and what …

#87 – The Risks of Storage Media Reuse versus Recycling

Chris Evans 15 February 2019 Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris and Martin talk to Simon Zola from Avtel Data Destruction. This is a follow-up episode to #85 (Storage for Home and Homelabs) where Martin and Chris questioned the ease of recovering data from pre-owned storage media. As we find out, the process was pretty easy. Martin was able to recover significant amounts of personal data with little effort and using standard tools. Media destruction is one route to safely dispose of drives and guarantees that data is destroyed. But what are the consequences? Simply disabling a drive and throwing it into …

#84 – Discussing New NVMe Form Factors with Jonathan Hinkle

Chris Evans 25 January 2019 Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Jonathan Hinkle, Principal Researcher – System Architecture and Master Inventor at Lenovo. As solid-state storage and NVMe become more prevalent, the legacy 2.5″ HDD format is increasingly impractical for getting the best density, power and cooling in servers. Jonathan explains how his work led to the founding of the Enterprise and Data Centre Small Form Factor working group and new device formats being introduced into the industry. EDSFF is responsible for managing device standards like Intel Ruler (see a previous blog episode covering this technology). How did the …

#61 – Introduction to NVM Express with Amber Huffman

Chris Evans 14 August 2018 Guest Speakers, NVMe, Standards, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This is the second of a series of podcasts recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2018 in Santa Clara. In this episode, Chris talks to Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow and President and founder of NVM Express Inc. NVM Express is the standards body that governs the development of the NVMe base standard, NVMe-MI (Management Interface) and NVMe over Fabrics. Amber explains how standards’ bodies are initially established, including the ongoing ownership of intellectual property. The discussion continues, looking at how NVM Express standards are developed by committee, how the body is funded and how the process …

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

Chris Evans 29 June 2018 Cloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week we talk to Mark Carlson, co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, about the storage needs of hyperscalers. Mark defines hyperscalers as those companies opening multiple data centres a year, most notably Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google and Facebook in the US and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China. These vendors are deploying petabytes of storage a year, with specific requirements on storage media. The hyperscaler applications have issues with HDD and SSD performance characteristics, such as tail latency and the effects of garbage collection. As a result, drive manufacturers are building in new features …

#43 – All-flash Market Review 2018 with Chris Mellor

Chris Evans 23 March 2018 Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin review the all-flash market with Chris Mellor. We looked at this sector around 12 months ago, so we’re ready for an update. Lots of things have happened over the past 12 months. Vendors have gone away and come back (Violin). Existing vendors have seen a resurgence in their sales (IBM and NetApp), while others have struggled. Pure Storage is now an incumbent alongside the likes of Dell EMC, IBM, NetApp and HPE. The conversation moves on to discuss some interesting start-ups like WekaIO and both Excelero and E8 Storage (previous …

Storage Unpacked 25 – Private Cloud Storage and The Tintri Platform with Kieran Harty

Chris Evans 20 October 2017 Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this podcast, recorded on 9 October 2017, Chris and Martin chat to Kieran Harty, CTO and co-founder at Tintri. The discussion covers the requirements for private cloud and in particular how storage should be deployed in private cloud environments. Kieran highlights how Tintri has adapted their all-flash and hybrid arrays to meet the needs of organisations looking to transform to private cloud operations. During the podcast Kieran mentions Tintri Scale-out. Details can be found here. Chris mentions the HPE 3PAR paper on private cloud storage, which can be found here. Elapsed Time: 00:32:15 Timeline …

Soundbytes #008: FlashBlade 2.0 With Rob Lee at Pure Accelerate

Chris Evans 14 June 2017 All-Flash, Pure Storage, Pure//Accelerate, Soundbytes, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this podcast, recorded on 14th June 2017 at Pure Accelerate in San Francisco, Chris talks to Rob Lee, Chief Architect of the FlashBlade product line. FlashBlade 2.0 sees greater scalability for the product, but more interesting is the way in which companies have taken the platform and used it creatively to achieve things that weren’t possible with traditional NAS products. Elapsed Time: 00:20:22 Timeline You can view more details on FlashBlade on the Tech Field Day website, specifically covering the event with dedicated FlashBlade sessions. Disclaimer: Chris was invited to the Pure Accelerate event, …