#160 – Updates on Hitachi Ops Center with Stan Stevens (sponsored)

#160 – Updates on Hitachi Ops Center with Stan Stevens (sponsored)

Chris EvansData Management, Hitachi Vantara, Storage Management

In this week’s episode, Chris catches up with Stan Stevens, Director of Software Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara to talk about updates to Hitachi Ops Center. Ops Center is the storage management platform for administering Hitachi VSP storage products. Stan discusses new features (including Ops Center Protector and support for VSP E990), and provides a view on what to expect in the future. Ops Center is divided into four main components – Administrator for provisioning and systems management; Analyser for AIOps functionality, including problem resolution; Automator for workflow automation and Protector for data protection and …

#159 – Introduction to MRAM with Joe O’Hare from Everspin

#159 – Introduction to MRAM with Joe O'Hare from Everspin

Chris EvansEverspin Technologies, Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin dig deeper into storage media and look at magneto-resistive RAM, commonly known as MRAM in this conversation with Joe O’Hare, Director of Distribution and Product Marketing at Everspin Technologies. MRAM is a persistent memory technology that uses resistance to determine the state of data. Everspin, the leading provider of MRAM technologies offers two product types – Toggle and Spin Transfer Torque. These two solutions provide different characteristics of endurance and scaling, but both offer low latency reads and writes at around 35 nanoseconds. MRAM is already finding uses in embedded …

#158 – Midrange Teardown with Chris Mellor

#158 – Midrange Teardown with Chris Mellor

Chris EvansMidrange

This week we continue with the discussion on midrange storage platforms with a more in-depth look at PowerStore and other recent announcements. PowerStore is the new Dell midrange platform that’s expected to replace XtremIO, SC Series and Unity. We learned more on the platform from Dell earlier in the week (see the links in related episodes). This episode looks to unpack some of the detail with reference to the wider storage market. Will AppsON be a success? What does it mean to have an integrated hypervisor? Could PowerStore run in the public cloud? All questions …

#157 – Introduction to Dell PowerStore (sponsored)

#157 – Introduction to Dell PowerStore (sponsored)

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

In this sponsored episode, Chris and Martin look at the newly announced midrange storage platform from Dell Technologies. PowerStore is a new all-flash midrange storage solution that offers both scale-up and scale-out capabilities. As we find out in the discussion with Dan Cummins and Devon Reed, this is only one aspect of the new technology. Through a feature called AppsOn, customers can run their own applications on a native ESXi hypervisor. In building a new storage platform, how did Dell Technologies leverage the assets already in the portfolio? We find out that XtremIO, SC Series …

#156 – Introduction to Hammerspace (sponsored)

#156 – Introduction to Hammerspace (sponsored)

Chris EvansCloud, Data Management, Guest Speakers, Software-Defined Storage, Sponsored, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, returning guest Douglas Fallstrom from Hammerspace takes Chris and Martin through the details of the Hammerspace global file system platform. The solution is software-defined, running either on virtual machines or in the public cloud. Customers can choose to leave data on existing hardware platforms and simply abstract the data into the Hammerspace platform, or use block storage to build out a distributed file system. The ability to abstract the physical placement of data from metadata allows customers to choose exactly how to manage their content. Traditional storage platforms have implemented data protection …

#155 – Introduction to Clumio with Chadd Kenney

#155 – Introduction to Clumio with Chadd Kenney

Chris EvansCloud, Data Protection, Guest Speakers

In this edition of the podcast, Chris chats to Chadd Kenney, VP and Chief Technologist at Clumio. Clumio is a SaaS data protection company that has recently expanded to support Office 365 environments. This discussion covers background on Clumio, how data protection for cloud should work and some specifics of the Clumio implementation. Looking deeper at the way in which the Clumio platform works, data from protected environments (such as VMware vSphere) lands directly on S3. This allows the solution to scale up to support thousands of concurrent backups, without needing to know that customers …

S02E01 – Codefresh and CI/CD Pipeline Management

S02E01 – Codefresh and CI/CD Pipeline Management

Chris EvansHybrid Cloud Podcast

As developers move to a model of continuous integration and delivery, it’s easy for sprawl to occur and vulnerabilities introduced through poor management of CI/CD infrastructure. Codefresh offers a solution for efficient CI/CD pipeline management using containers. Chris talks to Dan Garfield, Chief Technology Evangelist at Codefresh to learn more about how the company helps organisations streamline and manage their CI/CD deployments. Timeline 00:00 – Intros 02:00 – How has software deployment changed over time? 05:05 – COBOL is seeing a resurgence! 07:00 – Environment sprawl is a big problem 08:40 – How is CodeFresh …

#154 – Hitachi Vantara VSP E990 NVMe Midrange Appliance with Colin Gallagher (Sponsored)

#154 – Hitachi Vantara VSP E990 NVMe Midrange Appliance with Colin Gallagher (Sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Hardware

Today, Hitachi Vantara announced the VSP E990, a midrange all-NVMe storage appliance. The new solution, available immediately, offers up to 5.8 million IOPS, I/O latency as low as 64µs with up to 64PB effective capacity. In this episode, Chris Evans chats remotely to Colin Gallagher about the new platform. VSP E990 extends the existing solutions in the VSP family, from the F350 up to the 5000 series enterprise-class solutions. The “E” denotes NVMe – other platform models have “F” (flash) and “G” (general) designations. The quoted 64µs latency figure is lower than the VSP 5000 …

#153 – Post Pandemic Storage Efficiencies

#153 – Post Pandemic Storage Efficiencies

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, Storage Management, Storage Unpacked Podcast

As we head towards week 4 of lockdown in the UK, Chris and Martin reflect on the personal changes in their daily routines, as well as the implications on businesses. This has been a time for dusting off old skills (like DNS/DHCP configurations) and finding new uses for Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. Working from home has placed significant focus on Zoom, where the attack vector for “zoombombing” has resulted in some organisations (like schools) temporarily moving away from the platform. We’re seeing the inevitability of short-term scaling, for Zoom and Microsoft with Teams. Are cloud …

#152 – Global File System Concepts

#152 – Global File System Concepts

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers, Software-Defined Storage

This week, Chris and Martin are joined by Douglas Fallstrom, SVP Product & Operations at Hammerspace, as the conversation on global file systems continues. Hammerspace has developed a global file system platform that caters for geographic data dispersion and sits above traditional storage. In this podcast episode, Douglas explains some of the challenges of stretching data over distance – typically latency and getting effective throughput. When metadata and data are abstracted in a file system, these issues can be mitigated – global data sharing doesn’t imply a need for global locking. This separation of the …