This week, Chris is in conversation with Don Foster, Global Head of Sales Engineering at Commvault, looking at real-world customer challenges.
#216 – The Data Explosion with VAST Data CEO Renen Hallak
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 …
#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?
This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcement from CloudFlare of R2, a new object storage solution. With such a widely dispersed CDN network, could CloudFlare become a real competitor for S3, considering that the R2 platform will have no egress fees? This episode digs into the details, to look at what additional features object storage vendors need in their arsenal and whether there’s any other vendor likely to come close to competing with AWS. At the outset of the podcast, Chris mentions Dark Star, which did indeed have a tiny budget of only $60,000. …
#211 – Pure//Launch – Announcing Fusion and Portworx Data Services (Sponsored)
In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris chats to Alex McMullan, CTO International at Pure Storage. The discussion covers Pure//Launch and today’s announcements of two SaaS solutions – Fusion and Portworx Data Services. Fusion is a new SaaS management plane for administering and optimising Pure Storage hardware and software products, including FlashArray, FlashBlade and Cloud Block Store. Portworx Data Services enables customers to deploy and operate managed databases using the PX-Enterprise platform. Together, these two solutions provide an insight into the next stage of evolution and growth for Pure Storage. There’s a lot to unpack in …
#209 – Discovering Unified Fast File and Object with Pure Storage (Sponsored)
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 …
#208 – NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage – More Than a Good Marketing Message?
In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin look at NVIDIA’s GPUDirect Storage (GDS), a technology for moving data directly from persistent storage to GPUs, bypassing the CPU. The aim of the technology is to provide greater throughput to keep GPUs active, and looking at some of the thoughts from our podcast with Liqid (#204), it’s clear that this feature is needed. However, with such quick adoption by many storage vendors, is the announcement of GDS more of a marketing exercise? We dig into the details and what the announcement of GDS could mean for the …
#205 – 25 Years of Commvault & the Power of And (Sponsored)
In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin have a great conversation with David Ngo, CTO for Metallic at Commvault, and Ranga Rajagopalan, VP Product Management for Commvault and Metallic. Commvault is celebrating 25 years in data protection, while Metallic, a SaaS data protection solution from Commvault has been available for nearly two years. In this discussion, David and Ranga explain the background to Metallic and how customers have quickly adopted the SaaS model. With 25 years of product development, Commvault has a suite of solutions to call upon, including traditional data protection software, appliances and …
#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure
This week, Chris and Martin talk to Sumit Puri, CEO of Liqid Inc. Liqid has developed a composable infrastructure platform they call CDI or Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure. CDI enables IT organisations to take the building blocks of compute – storage, networking, CPUs, memory and GPUs then combine them dynamically in ways that address the processing needs of the enterprise. Customers use the technology to enable greater efficiency in the use of hardware and to truly deliver the software-defined data centre. Sumit explains how the Liqid technology works across multiple fabrics that could be PCIe, Ethernet …
#202 – Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat (Sponsored)
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 …
#201 – Introducing Scality ARTESCA (Sponsored)
In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin talk to Paul Speciale (Chief Product Officer at Scality) and Chris Tinker (Distinguished Technologist with HPE) about the launch of ARTESCA, a new lightweight, cloud-native object storage solution. HPE and Scality have announced the product jointly, delivering the solution on HPE hardware with an exclusive distribution agreement for 6 months. We get the detail on why ARTESCA is different to RING and the types of workload Scality is aiming to support. Since the launch of Scality and RING a decade ago, a lot has changed in technology and …