#175 – IBM FlashSystem Deep Dive (Sponsored)

#175 – IBM FlashSystem Deep Dive (Sponsored)

Chris Evans All-Flash, Guest Speakers, IBM, Sponsored, Storage Hardware

This week Chris catches up with Ralf Colbus from IBM to talk about the evolution of FlashSystem. The FlashSystem platform is an enterprise-class block-based storage solution that scales from SMB/SME offerings to high-end all-NVMe and SCM capable devices. At the heart of the design is the software behind Spectrum Virtualise, the SAN Volume Controller or SVC. FlashSystem now offers a standardised portfolio based on SVC. This starts with the 5010 and 5030, both SAS-based solutions that can be all-flash or hybrid flash & HDD. The 5100 upwards (including 7200 and 9200) introduces NVMe and IBM’s …

#174 – Introduction to Zoned Storage with Phil Bullinger

#174 – Introduction to Zoned Storage with Phil Bullinger

Chris Evans Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast, Western Digital

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Phil Bullinger, Senior VP and General Manager for the Data Centre Business Unit at Western Digital. As storage media capacities increase, recording methods are introducing challenges to maintaining resiliency and performance. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) are two techniques that have developed to address the scaling issues in modern media devices. SMR is a technique for hard drives that overlays the recording area of tracks on storage media to gain increased areal density. This results in a requirement to re-write entire blocks or zones of …

#170 – The End of Pure Play Storage Companies

#170 – The End of Pure Play Storage Companies

Chris Evans Garbage Collection, Midrange, Object Storage, Software-Defined Storage, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin debate whether we have seen the end of new “pure play” storage companies that go the distance to full independence. Where there used to be many businesses like EMC, Pure Storage and NetApp, the number of public storage-only companies is dwindling. Is this market too challenging to get into or is there simply no money to be made? If we look back 30 years, storage hardware was all the rage. Storage solutions were complex with custom hardware. These days, anyone can build a software-based solution and open source for everyone …

#166 – Infinidat Elastic Storage Pricing with Eran Brown (Sponsored)

#166 – Infinidat Elastic Storage Pricing with Eran Brown (Sponsored)

Chris Evans Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week, Chris and Martin are joined by Chris Mellor from Blocks & Files and Eran Brown from Infinidat to discuss flexible pricing strategies in light of current business disruptions. Infinidat has introduced an elastic pricing model for both capex and opex purchases. How is this implemented and what platform features enable Infinidat to deliver this capability? As businesses are disrupted through the coronavirus pandemic, uncertain times means uncertain demands and budgets. Companies may defer spending or want flexible purchasing models for technology deployments. Public cloud is one choice, but this comes with challenges around …

#164 – Introduction to StorONE S1: All-Flash Array.next with George Crump (Sponsored)

#164 – Introduction to StorONE S1: All-Flash Array.next with George Crump (Sponsored)

Chris Evans All-Flash, Guest Speakers, Software-Defined Storage, Sponsored, Storage Hardware, StorONE

Storage startup StorONE has introduced the S1: All-Flash Array.next (also known as S1:AFAn) which accelerates performance using Intel Optane technology. In this podcast, Chris and Martin discuss the benefits of Optane within the S1 platform in a conversation with George Crump, CMO at StorONE and formerly the founder of Storage Switzerland. S1 is a software-defined storage solution that optimises the use of hardware resources to deliver an efficient and low-cost multi-protocol shared storage platform. The architecture of S1 enables Intel Optane to be used as a tier of storage that acts as the primary target …

#161 – Seagate MACH.2 Dual Actuator Drive Deep Dive

#161 – Seagate MACH.2 Dual Actuator Drive Deep Dive

Chris Evans Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin look at the dual actuator drive technology developed by Seagate, also known as MACH.2. This conversation with Colin Presly and Tim Walker digs down into the detail of the hardware implementation and the operational aspects of deploying a hard drive that acts as two physically independent units. Dual actuator technology was developed to overcome the performance limitations of traditional hard drives. Over the years, drive capacities have increased almost exponentially, while performance has followed a linear track. MACH.2 divides the read/write heads of a traditional drive into two separate components, …

#159 – Introduction to MRAM with Joe O’Hare from Everspin

#159 – Introduction to MRAM with Joe O'Hare from Everspin

Chris Evans Everspin Technologies, Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin dig deeper into storage media and look at magneto-resistive RAM, commonly known as MRAM in this conversation with Joe O’Hare, Director of Distribution and Product Marketing at Everspin Technologies. MRAM is a persistent memory technology that uses resistance to determine the state of data. Everspin, the leading provider of MRAM technologies offers two product types – Toggle and Spin Transfer Torque. These two solutions provide different characteristics of endurance and scaling, but both offer low latency reads and writes at around 35 nanoseconds. MRAM is already finding uses in embedded …

#157 – Introduction to Dell PowerStore (sponsored)

#157 – Introduction to Dell PowerStore (sponsored)

Chris Evans All-Flash, Guest Speakers, NVMe, Sponsored, Storage Hardware

In this sponsored episode, Chris and Martin look at the newly announced midrange storage platform from Dell Technologies. PowerStore is a new all-flash midrange storage solution that offers both scale-up and scale-out capabilities. As we find out in the discussion with Dan Cummins and Devon Reed, this is only one aspect of the new technology. Through a feature called AppsOn, customers can run their own applications on a native ESXi hypervisor. In building a new storage platform, how did Dell Technologies leverage the assets already in the portfolio? We find out that XtremIO, SC Series …

#154 – Hitachi Vantara VSP E990 NVMe Midrange Appliance with Colin Gallagher (Sponsored)

#154 – Hitachi Vantara VSP E990 NVMe Midrange Appliance with Colin Gallagher (Sponsored)

Chris Evans All-Flash, Guest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Hardware

Today, Hitachi Vantara announced the VSP E990, a midrange all-NVMe storage appliance. The new solution, available immediately, offers up to 5.8 million IOPS, I/O latency as low as 64µs with up to 64PB effective capacity. In this episode, Chris Evans chats remotely to Colin Gallagher about the new platform. VSP E990 extends the existing solutions in the VSP family, from the F350 up to the 5000 series enterprise-class solutions. The “E” denotes NVMe – other platform models have “F” (flash) and “G” (general) designations. The quoted 64µs latency figure is lower than the VSP 5000 …