#234 – Introducing Pure Storage FlashBlade//S and Evergreen//Flex with CTO Rob Lee (Sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Object Storage, Pure Accelerate techfest22, Pure Storage, Sponsored, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris talks to Rob Lee, CTO at Pure Storage about today’s announcement covering FlashBlade//S and Evergreen//Flex. FlashBlade//S is a new hardware platform that evolves the solution into a disaggregated architecture. The design enables compute and storage resources to be scaled independently, while incorporating existing DFMs (DirectFlash Modules) that are currently used in the FlashArray family. To exploit the benefits of FlashBlade//S, Pure has also announced a realignment of the Evergreen programme, including the new Evergreen//Flex option. //Flex customers can retain hardware ownership while benefiting from “component” mobility. The hardware changes in FlashBlade//S …

#233 – Introduction to the VAST Data Ceres Hardware Platform with Jeff Denworth (Sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast, VAST Data

In this episode, Chris is in conversation with VAST Data CMO, Jeff Denworth. The topic covers the recent announcement of Ceres, a new hardware platform combining ruler form-factor flash and BlueField DPUs. The new solution, which will eventually replace the current “Mavericks” D-boxes is a 1U system with flash, storage-class memory and network connectivity through DPU SmartNICs. The design can be vastly simplified compared to other storage solutions as the hardware component simply presents storage as drives over NVMe-oF. A single 1U system supports up to 22 ruler drives, with a capacity of 675TB. Jeff …

#231 – Introducing Infinidat InfiniBox SSA II (Sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Infinidat, Sponsored, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris talks to Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat about the announcement of SSA II, the second generation all-flash InfiniBox platform. The first generation SSA (solid state array) was developed to address a customer requirement that all long-tail latency I/Os must be delivered at all-flash levels of performance. The InfiniBox architecture is capable of delivering up to 95% of I/O from DRAM, but for some customers, that figure simply wasn’t high enough. With SSA II, Infinidat has moved to the Intel Cascade Lake architecture, adding a further 48 cores of processing. In addition, …

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

Chris EvansAll-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 EvansGarbage 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 …

#209 – Discovering Unified Fast File and Object with Pure Storage (Sponsored)

#209 – Discovering Unified Fast File and Object with Pure Storage (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pure Storage, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin meet with Brian Carpenter, Senior Director of Unstructured Technology Strategy at Pure Storage, to talk about UFFO – Unified Fast File and Object. UFFO is a technology bringing together the two main types of unstructured data into a single platform – FlashBlade. The discussion centres on the benefits of using a single platform that offers high performance throughput for both file and object at the same time. Brian walks the team through use cases and how customers are using UFFO in their environments today. You can find out …

#203 – Storage and Chia Cryptocurrency Farming

#203 – Storage and Chia Cryptocurrency Farming

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week, Martin and Chris delve into cryptocurrency mining in a lengthy discussion on Chia with Robert Novak. Chia is a new cryptocurrency technology that differs from previous online currencies in that the basis for earning rewards (or coins) is based on the volume of data stored on disk, rather than raw compute performed. Rob takes the team through a discussion of the difference between the processes that earn currency, explaining how Proof of Work and Proof of Stake has evolved to Proof of Space and Time with Chia. Rob goes on to explain how …

#202 – Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat (Sponsored)

#202 – Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Infinidat, Storage Hardware

In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris and Martin talk to Phil Bullinger, newly appointed CEO at Infinidat. The company has reached their ten-year anniversary, shipping over seven exabytes of capacity in that time. With successful growth in every quarter during 2020, we discuss how Infinidat is helping drive the consolidation story for large enterprises and MSPs looking to optimise their storage systems. The ability to deploy entire storage arrays into customer data centres is both an operational benefit and financial tool for Infinidat. Enterprises love the set-and-forget approach, while MSPs like to pay as their …