#35 – The Spectre of Meltdown with Alex Chircop

#35 – The Spectre of Meltdown with Alex Chircop

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

In this week’s podcast, the team talk to Alex Chircop, CTO at StorageOS about the implications on storage of the recent Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities.  Much has been made of the potential impact to I/O performance and by definition storage platforms and products.  The guys talk about what the vulnerabilities actually mean for end users and what to expect from storage vendors.  Finally, the podcast concludes with some suggestions from Martin, as the token end user in the discussion.

Two references were made in the podcast.  The first is to a Techspot article comparing NVMe and SSD performance.  You can find that here.  The second was the reference to an inpromptu Slack group, set up to work on patches.  You can find that here.

Elapsed Time: 00:25:17

Timeline

  • 00:00:00 – Intro
  • 00:01:00 – Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities defined
  • 00:05:30 – How are patches affecting the workload of applications?
  • 00:09:30 – How successful have existing patches been?
  • 00:10:30 – Was the awareness of the issue handled correctly?
  • 00:12:00 – Has the industry overreacted to the problems?
  • 00:13:00 – How are storage products affected?
  • 00:17:30 – What should end users and storage vendor customers do?
  • 00:21:00 – NVMe and all-flash may suffer more than spinning media systems.
  • 00:24:00 – Wrap Up

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