In this episode, Martin and Chris are joined in conversation by Alex Chircop, CEO at StorageOS. The company has announced StorageOS V2.0, a significant evolution in their storage platform, built for containers using containers. As this episode explains, the version 2.0 release of StorageOS enhances scalability and resiliency, with a strong focus on features needed for enterprise adoption. Each volume presented to a container now has a “mini-brain” to implement much more distributed application awareness. Availability is increased through the use of Delta Sync, a new technology to ensure data volumes are recovered to a …
#134 – Introduction to Datera with Hal Woods (Sponsored)
This week Martin and Chris catch up again with Hal Woods, CTO at Datera. In this sponsored episode, we look in detail at the Datera Data Services Platform and how it differs from traditional storage. DSP is a software-defined solution, which is purchased either as a software licence or in conjunction with partners. Software-defined storage has been around for some time, but hasn’t really offered the disaggregation from hardware performance that applications need in the enterprise. DSP enables administrators to set performance and availability policies that are then implemented by DSP, based on the hardware …
#132 – Accelerating Ransomware Recovery with Eran Brown (Sponsored)
This week Chris and Martin talk to Eran Brown, EMEA CTO at Infinidat about the challenges of ransomware and expediting fast recovery. Ransomware is a big challenge for IT organisations as hackers attempt to extort money from a range of businesses that include everything from large enterprises to healthcare organisations. However, is the traditional route of “restore from backup” actually practical or do IT organisations need a more comprehensive set of data protection and recovery techniques? Eran sets the scene by describing the impacts of ransomware attacks on businesses. Companies with customer-facing websites risk lost …
#108 – Druva Cloud-Native Data Protection with Curtis Preston (Sponsored)
In this week’s episode, Chris talks to W. Curtis Preston. Curtis is a long-time and well-known industry expert in the backup area and now Chief Technologist at Druva. Data protection in a multi-cloud world introduces new challenges compared to traditional on-premises backup. As a result, Druva has developed a cloud-native platform that protects on-premises, cloud, endpoint and SaaS applications. What does cloud-native actually mean? Chris and Curtis discuss the benefits of using native AWS public cloud services like S3, DynamoDB, RDS and EC2 instances. Compared to on-premises backup, where hardware is procured to meet high …
#106 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part II) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)
In this second episode on VAST Data, Chris and Martin continue the discussion with Howard Marks. You can find the previous episode at #105 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part I). This time, the conversation continues where the discussion left off, with Howard finishing the explanation of wide striping. To explain exactly how data is accessed on the platform, Howard introduces the concept of v-trees. These are like b-trees but flatter and wider. The v-tree is used to hold both metadata and data. One interesting aspect of the discussion is in understanding exactly how Optane …
#105 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part I) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)
This week, Chris and Martin talk to Howard Marks, Chief Storyteller at VAST Data. You may know Howard as an independent analyst and author for a range of online publications. Howard recently joined VAST to help explain and promote understanding of their data platform architecture. The VAST Data platform uses three main technologies that have only recently emerged onto the market. QLC NAND flash provides long-term, cheap and fast permanent storage. 3D-XPoint (branded as Intel Optane) is used to store metadata and new data before it is committed to flash. NVMe over Fabrics provides the …
#101 – Datrium Automatrix with Brian Biles and Tim Page (Sponsored)
In this podcast episode, Chris talks to Brian Biles (Chief Product Officer and co-founder) and Tim Page (CEO) from Datrium about the announcement of Automatrix. The Datrium Automatrix platform implements five important components needed to deliver a consistent approach to application mobility. These are primary storage, backup, disaster recovery, encryption and data mobility. Automatrix brings together existing products that include DVX and Cloud DVX with the general availability of ControlShift (previously Project CloudShift). ControlShift provides full automation of the disaster recovery failover and failback process, currently between on-premises DVX instances and by the end of …
#92 – Introduction to Elastifile with Jerome McFarland (Sponsored)
This week, Chris talks to Jerome McFarland, VP of Marketing with Elastifile, Inc. Elastifile has developed a scale-out distributed file system called ECFS – the Elastifile Cloud File System. ECFS runs either on-premises, in the public cloud as a marketplace offering or, most recently as a full native storage service in GCP. In addition to the base file system, Elastifile provides the capability to move any on-premises NAS data into the public cloud with CloudConnect. ClearTier provides the facility to use the public cloud for tiering of cool or inactive data. Jerome explains the reasons …
#90 – Dell EMC's Enterprise NVMe Strategy with Vince Westin (Sponsored)
This week, Chris talks to Vince Westin, Technical Evangelist within the PowerMax Group at Dell EMC. PowerMax is the latest in a storage product line with lineage back to the original Symmetrix systems of the early 1990s. PowerMax is an all-NVMe storage array, reflecting an industry move towards faster, low latency media. Vince takes us through the rationale for moving to NVMe across the Dell portfolio and PowerMax in particular. Some of the more interesting aspects of the transition include the ability to simplify code paths with NVMe compared to back-end SAS. NVMe introduces a …
#73 – HYCU – Data Protection for Hyper-converged Infrastructure (Sponsored)
This week, Chris and Martin talk to Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU, Inc. HYCU is both the name of the company and the data protection product sold by HYCU Inc. The market already has many data protection solutions, so the unique differentiator for HYCU is focusing on the HCI market, specifically offering backup for Nutanix (both ESXi and AHV). Of course, HCI platforms already have backup support, but as the discussion explains, having deeper integration into the HCI APIs, specifically those around changed file tracking, provide HYCU with an advantage over products backing …