#121 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part II with J Metz

#121 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part II with J Metz

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This podcast episode continues the discussion with Dr J Metz and focuses on the detail of NVMe 1.4 and NVMe over Fabrics 1.1. Both standards are complete and have been published in the last few months. The conversation today digs deeper into what the new standards offer and specifically how NVMe/TCP becomes “officially” part of the NVMe standard. The conversation on NVMe/TCP is particularly interesting as it highlights how the protocol will offer significant benefits over iSCSI. The details in the podcast are quite technical and so it’s worth checking out some of the additional …

#120 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part I with J Metz

#120 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part I with J Metz

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin talk to J Metz, R&D Engineer in Cisco Systems’ Advanced Storage division. This is a two-parter – the second episode will be published on Monday 30th September 2019. The NVMe 1.4 specification has recently been published and is in the final 45-day ratification process. This discussion provides some background on NVMe then dives pretty deep into the NVMe standards and how design decisions are refactoring the NVMe protocol for version 2.0. NVMe for consumer devices will be different to the feature set used within enterprise storage (although the protocol is …

#119 – Storage Hardware is Back!

#119 – Storage Hardware is Back!

Chris EvansStorage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin catch up with some of the storage hardware on show at Flash Memory Summit 2019. FMS is essentially a trade show and so there are lots of technologies on display that haven’t quite made it to the enterprise. Technology vendors are selling to other vendors and this year there were some interesting hardware solutions to see. Flash has been on the agenda for the last decade and continues to push the boundaries of capacity and performance. Chris and Martin discuss 96+ layer products and the promise of 500 layers in …

#118 – Pure Accelerate 2019 with Patrick Smith

#118 – Pure Accelerate 2019 with Patrick Smith

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

This week, Chris is in Austin, Texas at Pure Accelerate 2019. Prior to the event, Chris catches up with Patrick Smith, Field CTO for EMEA for Pure. Patrick moved to Pure after being a customer. The initial discussion covers why flash as a platform offers better reliability and consistency than traditional disk based storage. At Accelerate 2019, Pure announced FlashArray//C, DirectMemory modules and the GA of Cloud Block Store. Patrick previews these changes and what benefits customers can expect to see from these new products. Elapsed Time: 00:30:07 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:03:00 – What …

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week’s episode is the final recording from Flash Memory Summit 2019. Chris is joined by the team from NGD Systems for a discussion on Computational Storage. On this podcast are Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing, Nader Salessi, CEO and Ashok Savdharia who has the lovely title of “technologist”. Computational storage uses the processing power of modern SSD controllers to run application workloads directly on the SSD itself. Imagine each drive being a mini blade server, with compute, memory and storage. In the case of NGD Systems, this means a range of devices and form …

#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

#116 – Fixing Gaps in Cloud Storage with Andy Watson

Chris EvansCloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris chats with Andy Watson, CTO at WekaIO in another episode recorded live at Flash Memory Summit 2019. With the recent acquisition of E8 Storage and Elastifile by hyper-scale cloud companies, is this move an attempt to plug the gap in existing cloud storage offerings? Andy provides his opinion on the two acquisitions and how they might fit into the existing ecosystem. Even 1GB/s may not be enough throughput as we see more focus on ML/AI applications and using cloud-based GPUs and TPUs. Some applications expect data in both NFS and SMB format. …

#115 – The Transition to NVMe-oF Storage Solutions with Praveen Asthana

#115 – The Transition to NVMe-oF Storage Solutions with Praveen Asthana

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week, Chris catches up with Praveen Asthana from Exten Technologies in an episode recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2019. With NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics set to become the dominant technologies for public cloud and the enterprise, exactly how will the transition from current solutions occur? Praveen discusses the continuing need for centralised storage that can fully exploit the benefits of NVMe. This will need another transition in technologies in the same way flash created a whole new market of storage solutions some ten years ago. An interesting aspect of NVMe adoption is the …

#114 – CIO Storage & Data Challenges with Clay Ryder

#114 – CIO Storage & Data Challenges with Clay Ryder

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris catches up with Clay Ryder from the DCS (Data Centre Systems) group at Western Digital. The discussion focuses on the challenges for today’s CIO, with an emphasis on storage and data. The division of responsibility between CTO and CIO isn’t always obvious. As we learn in this discussion, there’s a lot of overlap and a lot of interaction between the two. CIOs are focused on data and more specifically information, whereas the CTO has to deliver the right platform to meet application needs. The conversation covers challenges around technical debt, determining what …

Multiple media types

#113 – The Expanding Storage Hierarchy with Erik Kaulberg

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week’s episode is the first in a series from Flash Memory Summit 2019. Chris catches up with Erik Kaulberg from INFINIDAT to discuss how the expanding hierarchy of solid-state storage media will drive new products and solutions in the future. The topics of conversation cover how media has diversified, with new solutions like MRAM and 3D-XPoint. At the same time, we hear that 5-level NAND could be a reality. How are vendors combining these products with traditional storage? Will the ability to learn from the field with the deployment of traditional storage designs, provide …

#112 – Introduction to NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS)

#112 – Introduction to NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS)

Chris EvansData Protection, Guest Speakers

NetApp has developed a new backup service called NDAS or NetApp Data Availability Services. NDAS is based in the public cloud and provides the ability to run analytics against secondary data in AWS S3, without having re-hydrate through a backup platform. Chris met with Charlotte Brooks (Technical Marketing Engineer) and Joel Kaufman (Director of Technical Marketing) to discuss how NDAS works and what customers are doing with their cloud-based data. NDAS provides some interesting features that make the product slightly different from existing backup software. The solution runs in AWS using the customer’s account. This …