#130 – Making Money in the Storage Business

#130 – Making Money in the Storage Business

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Garbage Collection, NVMe, Storage Hardware

This week, Chris and Martin reflect on changes in the storage industry and the ways in which vendors can make money from storage hardware and software. It’s been a tough time for storage vendors of late and the discussion starts by looking at the challenges of making money in a market where components are commodity and decline in price each month. How should vendors adapt to these challenges? There are alternative strategies than simply piling it high and selling it cheap (although that is one model). All-flash systems offered the ability to charge higher margins, …

#129 – Choices for Persistent Container Storage with Niraj Tolia

#129 – Choices for Persistent Container Storage with Niraj Tolia

Chris EvansContainers, Data Management, Data Protection, Software-Defined Storage

This week Chris records a live podcast episode with Niraj Tolia, co-founder and CEO at Kasten Inc. As a follow-up to online discussions that dive into how container storage should be presented to Kubernetes (and other container) environments, this episode reviews some of Chris’ thoughts and Niraj’s opinions on the market as to how persistent storage should evolve. The discussion starts by reviewing the idea of either block or file storage for container environments and moves on to discuss whether application-based replication could simply replace the need to have a persistent storage back-end. The Container …

#128 – Reflections on Commvault GO with Glenn Dekhayser

#128 – Reflections on Commvault GO with Glenn Dekhayser

Chris EvansCommvault, Data Management, Data Protection, Guest Speakers

This episode was recorded live (as you can tell from the background noise) at Commvault GO, held in October 2019. Chris talks to Glenn Dekhayser, Field CTO at Red8 about his reflections on the announcements from the event. The biggest news from the show was arguably the release of Metallic, a SaaS data protection offering for midrange customers. You can learn more about the specifics from the links at the end of this post. Glenn walks us through his opinion on how Commvault is adapting to change and releasing new products like Metallic to an …

S01E03 – Sumo Logic and PAF

S01E03 – Sumo Logic and PAF

Chris EvansHybrid Cloud Podcast

Sumo Logic provides log management solutions based in the public cloud. PAF is a Finnish gaming company that uses Sumo Logic technology for log analysis. In this episode, Chris talks to Clive McDonald from Sumo Logic and Lars-Göran Hakamo from PAF about the choice to move to a cloud-based model for log management services. Timeline 00:00 – Intros 01:36 – Who are PAF? 02:10 – Why Sumo Logic? 04:25 – What is log analysis? 06:40 – Why use the cloud for log analysis? 09:20 – How does a 53 year old company move to the …

#127 – Hitachi Next 2019: CI & HCI Solutions Update

#127 – Hitachi Next 2019: CI & HCI Solutions Update

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This is the third in a series of podcasts recorded earlier this year at Hitachi NEXT 2019 in Las Vegas. This episode is a discussion on updates to the Hitachi Vantara UCP CI & HCI solutions portfolio with Chris Gugger (Director, Infrastructure Marketing) and Ed Reidenbach (Senior Director, Product Management). Hitachi produces two updates a year, covering spring and autumn (fall). The fall update 2019 introduces support for Cascade Lake processor architectures, VSP 5000 storage and Arista switches. Hitachi has updated UCP Advisor to cover multi-VMware and bare metal environments. The interesting aspect of UCP …

#126 – Software-Defined Storage in Review with Hal Woods

#126 – Software-Defined Storage in Review with Hal Woods

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Software-Defined Storage

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Datera CTO, Hal Woods about the state of the software-defined storage (SDS) market. SDS emerged around ten years ago as a solution to overcome the expense of buying storage appliances. With cheap hardware, IT organisations could simply buy software or use one of many open-source solutions. Has SDS been successful and how has it evolved? Early modes of deployment simply ran existing storage software on commodity hardware. As the category developed, software defined storage has been built specifically to address a new set of requirements. These are typically …

#125 – Hitachi Next 2019: Ops Center

#125 – Hitachi Next 2019: Ops Center

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Management

This is the second recording from the Hitachi NEXT 2019 conference held in Las Vegas in October 2019. In a previous episode we looked at the new VSP 5000 platform. In this discussion, Chris talks to Stan Stevens, Director of Infrastructure Software Product Marketing, about Ops Center, the new platform for Hitachi storage management. Ops Center has four main components; Analyzer provides insights into systems through the use of telemetry collated across the storage footprint. Automator provides workflow orchestration and integrates with common automation tools. Administrator provides the tools to provision storage. Instance Director implements …

#124 – Initial Thoughts on Commvault Metallic with Chris Mellor

#124 – Initial Thoughts on Commvault Metallic with Chris Mellor

Chris EvansData Management, Data Protection, Guest Speakers

This episode was recorded “live” at Commvault GO in Aurora, Colorado, close to Denver airport. Chris Evans and Chris Mellor discuss the announcement of Metallic, a new SaaS data protection solution from Commvault targeted at mid-market customers. Metallic has been advertised as a Commvault “venture”, establishing a separate brand and website for the platform. Initially, Metallic will support Office 365, endpoint, file and on-premises virtual machine data protection. Prospective customers can choose to keep data for on-premises backups onsite as well as creating a copy in the public cloud. Chris & Chris talk through what …

#123 – Hitachi Next 2019: VSP 5000

#123 – Hitachi Next 2019: VSP 5000

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

This is the first of a series of podcast episodes recorded at Hitachi NEXT 2019 in Las Vegas. Hitachi announced the next generation of VSP storage arrays, the VSP 5000 at the show. The new platform provides greater performance and capacity than previous systems at lower latency. Chris meets with Colin Gallagher (VP Product Marketing for the Infrastructure Portfolio) and Dan McConnell (SVP of Infrastructure Product Management) to discuss the details. VSP 5000 offers up to 21 million IOPS at 70µs and up to 69PB of internal capacity. This level of performance can be delivered …