#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, Dell EMC is focusing on automation through tools like Ansible and Python. How will enterprises continue to reduce over-provisioning and protect production systems? How should billing work? What about documentation? These questions and more, answered in this week’s podcast.

Elapsed Time: 00:31:17

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:00:46 – Dell EMC & DevOps at TFD
00:01:45 – The Storage Admin is a gatekeeper
00:03:00 – SRM software has been universally terrible
00:04:43 – Dell acquires iWave to create ViPR
00:06:35 – Should we use wrappers or simply script?
00:08:49 – Storage platforms must have multi-tenancy
00:09:50 – How is storage billing achieved in the public cloud?
00:11:00 – Shout out to DFHSM!
00:13:02 – How efficient are storage system APIs?
00:15:57 – How are RBAC and credentials managed?
00:18:10 – What happens to documentation with automation?
00:20:52 – Storage desired state and actual state
00:23:27 – Which vendors are delivering best practice automation?
00:24:09 – Do we simply need better (software-based) storage products?
00:27:27 – Should Dell be doing ViPR or just simple automation?
00:28:00 – Could standards’ bodies do more?
00:30:50 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

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