#130 – Making Money in the Storage Business

#130 – Making Money in the Storage Business

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Garbage Collection, NVMe, Storage Hardware

This week, Chris and Martin reflect on changes in the storage industry and the ways in which vendors can make money from storage hardware and software. It’s been a tough time for storage vendors of late and the discussion starts by looking at the challenges of making money in a market where components are commodity and decline in price each month. How should vendors adapt to these challenges? There are alternative strategies than simply piling it high and selling it cheap (although that is one model). All-flash systems offered the ability to charge higher margins, …

#123 – Hitachi Next 2019: VSP 5000

#123 – Hitachi Next 2019: VSP 5000

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Hardware

This is the first of a series of podcast episodes recorded at Hitachi NEXT 2019 in Las Vegas. Hitachi announced the next generation of VSP storage arrays, the VSP 5000 at the show. The new platform provides greater performance and capacity than previous systems at lower latency. Chris meets with Colin Gallagher (VP Product Marketing for the Infrastructure Portfolio) and Dan McConnell (SVP of Infrastructure Product Management) to discuss the details. VSP 5000 offers up to 21 million IOPS at 70µs and up to 69PB of internal capacity. This level of performance can be delivered …

#119 – Storage Hardware is Back!

#119 – Storage Hardware is Back!

Chris EvansStorage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin catch up with some of the storage hardware on show at Flash Memory Summit 2019. FMS is essentially a trade show and so there are lots of technologies on display that haven’t quite made it to the enterprise. Technology vendors are selling to other vendors and this year there were some interesting hardware solutions to see. Flash has been on the agenda for the last decade and continues to push the boundaries of capacity and performance. Chris and Martin discuss 96+ layer products and the promise of 500 layers in …

#118 – Pure Accelerate 2019 with Patrick Smith

#118 – Pure Accelerate 2019 with Patrick Smith

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Pure Storage, Storage Hardware

This week, Chris is in Austin, Texas at Pure Accelerate 2019. Prior to the event, Chris catches up with Patrick Smith, Field CTO for EMEA for Pure. Patrick moved to Pure after being a customer. The initial discussion covers why flash as a platform offers better reliability and consistency than traditional disk based storage. At Accelerate 2019, Pure announced FlashArray//C, DirectMemory modules and the GA of Cloud Block Store. Patrick previews these changes and what benefits customers can expect to see from these new products. Elapsed Time: 00:30:07 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:03:00 – What …

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week’s episode is the final recording from Flash Memory Summit 2019. Chris is joined by the team from NGD Systems for a discussion on Computational Storage. On this podcast are Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing, Nader Salessi, CEO and Ashok Savdharia who has the lovely title of “technologist”. Computational storage uses the processing power of modern SSD controllers to run application workloads directly on the SSD itself. Imagine each drive being a mini blade server, with compute, memory and storage. In the case of NGD Systems, this means a range of devices and form …

#115 – The Transition to NVMe-oF Storage Solutions with Praveen Asthana

#115 – The Transition to NVMe-oF Storage Solutions with Praveen Asthana

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week, Chris catches up with Praveen Asthana from Exten Technologies in an episode recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2019. With NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics set to become the dominant technologies for public cloud and the enterprise, exactly how will the transition from current solutions occur? Praveen discusses the continuing need for centralised storage that can fully exploit the benefits of NVMe. This will need another transition in technologies in the same way flash created a whole new market of storage solutions some ten years ago. An interesting aspect of NVMe adoption is the …

Multiple media types

#113 – The Expanding Storage Hierarchy with Erik Kaulberg

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week’s episode is the first in a series from Flash Memory Summit 2019. Chris catches up with Erik Kaulberg from INFINIDAT to discuss how the expanding hierarchy of solid-state storage media will drive new products and solutions in the future. The topics of conversation cover how media has diversified, with new solutions like MRAM and 3D-XPoint. At the same time, we hear that 5-level NAND could be a reality. How are vendors combining these products with traditional storage? Will the ability to learn from the field with the deployment of traditional storage designs, provide …

#105 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part I) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)

#105 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part I) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)

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

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 …

#87 – The Risks of Storage Media Reuse versus Recycling

#87 – The Risks of Storage Media Reuse versus Recycling

Chris EvansGuest 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 …

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

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

Chris EvansAll-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, …