In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Jeb Horton, SVP Global Services at Hitachi Vantara, discussing the capabilities of Hitachi Vantara’s Global Services offerings, which deliver infrastructure management and infrastructure as a service to its customers. In addition to EverFlex, Hitachi Vantara has a long history of managed services capabilities that span more than just outsourced storage. As Jeb explains, the company also manages storage infrastructure from other vendors, in addition to non-storage systems. The interesting aspect of this discussion is the complex nature of the interaction between customers and Hitachi. Solutions offerings aren’t …
Storage Unpacked 261 – Pure Storage Platform Announcements at Accelerate 2024 (Sponsored)
In this podcast episode, Chris discusses the platform update announcements from Pure Accelerate 2024 with Prakash Darji, VP and GM of the Digital Experience BU at Pure Storage.
Storage Unpacked 257 – The Future of Data Storage in the Enterprise (Sponsored)
In this sponsored episode, Chris talks to Fred Lherault and Larry Touchette from Pure Storage on the evolution of storage in the enterprise and the impacts on storage administration.
Storage Unpacked 251 – Modernising Storage as a Service with Prakash Darji from Pure Storage (Sponsored)
In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Prakash Darji, VP and GM at Pure Storage. The company has just announced a new Paid Power & Rack Space offering, new SLAs for service delivery and Pure Protect //DRaaS a new disaster recovery solution delivered as a service.
#163 – Inflection Points in Storage Deployment Strategies
Technology refreshes are a constant part of the IT landscape. Businesses need to frequently update and modernise their infrastructure. Typically, the inertia to move between vendors is strong, but inflection points do occur, when the cost and risk of change is outweighed by the benefits. How do you identify inflection points in your environment and then take advantage of the opportunity? In this podcast, Chris chats with three guests (Matt Watts from NetApp, Lee Nolan from MTI and Kam Panesar from Atradius) to get views from a vendor, solutions provider and end user perspective. The …
#162 – The Evolving Role of Storage Administration
The role of the storage administrator has changed over the years and is in many ways influenced by the three “V”s typically used to describe AI. Admins have to deal with increased data Volumes, with the Velocity of delivering resources and with a wide Variety of application profiles. This week, Chris talks to Clay Ryder (Senior Director of Enterprise Marketing) and Frank Shepherd (Principal Systems Engineer) from Tintri to gain their insights on how technology and process is changing storage administration to meet the Three Vs challenge. Exponential data growth has always been an issue …
#160 – Updates on Hitachi Ops Center with Stan Stevens (sponsored)
In this week’s episode, Chris catches up with Stan Stevens, Director of Software Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara to talk about updates to Hitachi Ops Center. Ops Center is the storage management platform for administering Hitachi VSP storage products. Stan discusses new features (including Ops Center Protector and support for VSP E990), and provides a view on what to expect in the future. Ops Center is divided into four main components – Administrator for provisioning and systems management; Analyser for AIOps functionality, including problem resolution; Automator for workflow automation and Protector for data protection and …
#153 – Post Pandemic Storage Efficiencies
As we head towards week 4 of lockdown in the UK, Chris and Martin reflect on the personal changes in their daily routines, as well as the implications on businesses. This has been a time for dusting off old skills (like DNS/DHCP configurations) and finding new uses for Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. Working from home has placed significant focus on Zoom, where the attack vector for “zoombombing” has resulted in some organisations (like schools) temporarily moving away from the platform. We’re seeing the inevitability of short-term scaling, for Zoom and Microsoft with Teams. Are cloud …
#142 – Storage, Automation and DevOps
This week, Chris and Martin discuss the automation of storage. In a follow-on from the Dell EMC presentation at Storage Field Day 19, this conversation looks at the challenges of opening storage provisioning and management to the wider developer community. In the past, SRM tools have focused on providing the “record of truth” for storage and well as the interface to provision resources to hosts. Dell EMC tried to create a separate data and management plane with ViPR, but the industry didn’t adopt this approach – potentially because Dell/EMC continued to own the technology. Today, …
#125 – Hitachi Next 2019: Ops Center
This is the second recording from the Hitachi NEXT 2019 conference held in Las Vegas in October 2019. In a previous episode we looked at the new VSP 5000 platform. In this discussion, Chris talks to Stan Stevens, Director of Infrastructure Software Product Marketing, about Ops Center, the new platform for Hitachi storage management. Ops Center has four main components; Analyzer provides insights into systems through the use of telemetry collated across the storage footprint. Automator provides workflow orchestration and integrates with common automation tools. Administrator provides the tools to provision storage. Instance Director implements …