#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

Chris EvansAWS, Cloud, CloudFlare, Garbage Collection, Object Storage, Storage Unpacked Podcast

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)

#211 – Pure//Launch – Announcing Fusion and Portworx Data Services (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pure Storage, Pure//Launch, Sponsored, Storage Unpacked Podcast

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)

#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 …

#208 – NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage – More Than a Good Marketing Message?

#208 – NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage – More Than a Good Marketing Message?

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, NVIDIA, Storage Unpacked Podcast

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)

#205 – 25 Years of Commvault & the Power of And (Sponsored)

Chris EvansCommvault, Data Management, Data Protection, Guest Speakers, Sponsored, Storage Unpacked Podcast

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

#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure

Chris EvansCloud, Guest Speakers, Liqid, Storage Unpacked Podcast

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)

#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 …

#201 – Introducing Scality ARTESCA (Sponsored)

#201 – Introducing Scality ARTESCA (Sponsored)

Chris EvansContainers, Guest Speakers, HPE, Object Storage, Scality, 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 …

#195 – Fungible Data Processing Units

#195 – Fungible Data Processing Units

Chris EvansFungible, Guest Speakers, SmartNICs, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week’s podcast episode continues the discussion on SmartNICs and DPUs with Fungible, a company that claims to have originally coined the term DPU. Chris and Martin talk with Pradeep Sindhu (CEO and co-founder) and Jai Menon (Chief Scientist) about Fungible’s storage cluster and host-based DPU. The Fungible architecture aims to solve the challenges of disaggregation, a topic we first looked at back in September 2017. This discussion highlights some interesting challenges that new technology such as NVMe-oF is introducing into the data centre. As we move to a model of highly parallelised workloads, the …

#193 – HYCU Protégé Office 365 Backup as a Service

#193 – HYCU Protégé Office 365 Backup as a Service

Chris EvansData Protection, Guest Speakers, HYCU Inc

This week, Chris and Martin are talking to a podcast repeat offender, Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU. HYCU has recently announced the availability of Protégé for Microsoft Office 365, delivered as SaaS or Backup as a Service (BaaS). This continues an expansion of the HYCU and Protégé backup offerings that started with Nutanix data protection and has expanded past on-premises virtualisation to encompass the public cloud and now SaaS. The conversation covers a wide range of topics relating SaaS and data protection, including the way in which services are implemented via APIs provided …