#188 – Is Intel Optane Ready for Primetime?

#188 – Is Intel Optane Ready for Primetime?

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Garbage Collection, Intel, NVMe, Persistent Memory

This week, Chris and Martin dig deeper into the adoption of Intel Optane technology in both the consumer and enterprise markets. Optane is a new persistent memory technology that offers greater performance and lower latency compared to NAND flash, but currently is more expensive and offers smaller capacity devices. As Optane becomes more prevalent in both markets, how is it being adopted and what needs to change to increase adoption levels? Note: Since recording, Chris has tried out the Intel H10 device and the results were disappointing. Read more here. Elapsed Time: 00:31:49 Timeline 00:00:00 …

#185 – Pure-as-a-Service 2.0 (Sponsored)

#185 – Pure-as-a-Service 2.0 (Sponsored)

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

This week Chris and Martin talk to Rob Walters, GM for Pure-as-a-Service at Pure Storage. The company has recently announced upgrades and expansion of the “as-a-service” model, formerly known as Evergreen storage. The name change and the widening of the portfolio represents an opportunity for customers to see transparent pricing and a greater depth of service offerings. In this sponsored episode, we review the origins of the service and look at how that has evolved into the capability for customers to consume Pure block and file products as true services. We discuss the challenges in …

#182 – FaunaDB – Client Serverless Computing

#182 – FaunaDB – Client Serverless Computing

Chris EvansCloud, Databases, Fauna, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Evan Weaver, CTO and co-founder at Fauna. The company has developed a database as a service, available simply through a globally available API. Fauna calls the platform “client serverless”. How can a database be made globally available and still guarantee performance, resiliency and most important, data consistency? Of course, you will need to listen to find out. As we learn in this podcast, a database accessible via API provides the ability to write applications that talk directly to the platform, with application use cases for mobile and IoT. …

#180 – SmartNICs – Pliops Storage Processor

#180 – SmartNICs – Pliops Storage Processor

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pliops, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin chat to Steve Fingerhut, CMO at Pliops. Pliops has developed a “Storage Processor” in the form factor of an AIC (add-in card) that offloads storage functions from application software. This discussion looks at why the technology is needed and how Pliops has implemented the solution to drop into an existing server. The Pliops Storage Processor acts as a high-speed key-value store, implementing in the first instance features such as data compression. As a hardware accelerator, the technology reduces CPU core overhead, saves on storage and can reduce application licensing costs. …

#178 – Monetising the Value of Data

#178 – Monetising the Value of Data

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers, Hitachi Vantara, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris has a great conversation with Bill Schmarzo, Chief Innovation Officer at Hitachi Vantara. Bill maintains a consultancy practice within Hitachi that helps customers build processes and identify data that can be used to create business value within an organisation. In this discussion, Bill outlines the process for identifying opportunities, capturing the data and building governance around translating data into income. Aside from the insights in how businesses can generate new revenue streams from the data in their organisation, this podcast highlights the challenges of determining which data to keep and discard, while …

#177 – SmartNICs and Project Monterey

#177 – SmartNICs and Project Monterey

Chris EvansStorage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast, VMware

This week Chris and Martin look at SmartNIC technology and the announcement of Project Monterey. SmartNICs are offload devices that provide networking, storage and security functions with additional benefits such as centralised management. VMware has announced Project Monterey, a preview solution that takes SmartNICs and offloads storage and networking tasks from the ESXi hypervisor. It’s clear from the discussion that SmartNIC technology needs to provide a “10x” benefit to the data centre. The technology is already in use by hyperscalers to deliver Public Cloud. With Monterey and ESXi 7, the private data centre can use …

#175 – IBM FlashSystem Deep Dive (Sponsored)

#175 – IBM FlashSystem Deep Dive (Sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-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 EvansGuest 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 …

#173 – Transparent Enterprise Storage Pricing

#173 – Transparent Enterprise Storage Pricing

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Vendors

Enterprise storage pricing has all the simplicity of a mobile phone tariff. Vendors love to obfuscate the costs, whereas prospective purchasers just like a good, honest price. Why does enterprise storage pricing have to be so complicated and can’t we just have pricing online? Chris and Martin chat to George Crump from StorONE about strategies for pricing from both the customer and vendor perspective. Vendors mentioned in this podcast: StorONE, IBM, NetApp, Microsoft Azure, Pure Storage, Dell EMC. Find more about StorONE at https://www.storone.com. Elapsed Time: 00:35:05 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:02:00 – Enterprise storage …

#172 – Tintri SQL Integrated Storage

#172 – Tintri SQL Integrated Storage

Chris EvansData Management, Databases, Guest Speakers, Tintri

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Shawn Meyers, Field CTO at Tintri about SQL Integrated Storage. The Tintri VMstore platform originally provided the ability to apply policy-based management to virtual machines on shared storage. This capability has now been extended to databases, in particular Microsoft SQL Server. SQL Integrated Storage (or SIS) works by exposing an SMB share from the VMstore platform onto which database files are stored. VMstore is provided awareness of the SQL database structure and can therefore manage the QoS and data management requirements of individual files that comprise a single …