#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 …

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#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 …

#111 – The Cohesity Marketplace with Rawlinson Rivera

#111 – The Cohesity Marketplace with Rawlinson Rivera

Chris EvansData Management, Data Protection, Guest Speakers

This week Chris is in Silicon Valley and catches up with Rawlinson Rivera, Field CTO at Cohesity. The company recently released a new feature called Marketplace that enables customers to run data-focused applications directly on the Cohesity platform. The idea of running applications on data protection hardware has some benefits and potential disadvantages. Naturally, the focus is to provide a single point of truth for secondary data, reducing the risk of having many teams and departments storing their own data copy. But is DataPlatform capable of delivering the performance requirements of AI and ML? Rawlinson …

#110 – Storage Vendor Consolidations & Acquisitions

#110 – Storage Vendor Consolidations & Acquisitions

Chris EvansGeneral

We’ve started to see the consolidation of storage vendors as some startups and long-term players in the market get acquired. Is the reason for this buying spree one of positive growth, or a defensive position to maintain survival? Chris and Martin discuss the issues and the vendors doing the buying. Who’s been buying? Violin Systems acquired part of X-IO (specifically the ICE) products as that company changed focus to their edge device (Axellio). DDN acquired Tintri and Nexenta. StorCentric, founded from Drobo and Nexsan has acquired Retrospect and Vexata. Are we seeing a move to …

#109 – An Overview of ObjectEngine with Brian Schwarz

#109 – An Overview of ObjectEngine with Brian Schwarz

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pure Storage

In this episode, Chris talks to Brian Schwarz, VP of Product Management for FlashBlade and ObjectEngine at Pure Storage.  ObjectEngine is a scale-out de-duplication engine that efficiently writes data to either FlashBlade or public cloud object stores.  The solution developed from the acquisition of StorReduce in 2018. ObjectEngine was conceived when Pure Storage observed customers using FlashBlade for backup data.  The FlashBlade platform was originally developed for high-performance file-based applications like analytics.  De-duplication wasn’t integrated natively as an initial design decision.  Combining ObjectEngine with FlashBlade enables space saving ratios of around 8:1 or greater. You …

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#108 – Druva Cloud-Native Data Protection with Curtis Preston (Sponsored)

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers, Sponsored

In this week’s episode, Chris talks to W. Curtis Preston.  Curtis is a long-time and well-known industry expert in the backup area and now Chief Technologist at Druva.  Data protection in a multi-cloud world introduces new challenges compared to traditional on-premises backup.  As a result, Druva has developed a cloud-native platform that protects on-premises, cloud, endpoint and SaaS applications. What does cloud-native actually mean?  Chris and Curtis discuss the benefits of using native AWS public cloud services like S3, DynamoDB, RDS and EC2 instances.  Compared to on-premises backup, where hardware is procured to meet high …

#107 – Should IBM Quit the Storage Hardware Business?

#107 – Should IBM Quit the Storage Hardware Business?

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

IDC recently released their latest quarterly storage sales figures.  The data shows, yet again, that IBM sales continue to decline.  In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin discuss the state of IBM’s storage business.  Is it time for IBM to quit? IBM has an embarrassment of riches in storage software and hardware (or a nice portfolio as Martin puts it).  Many of these solutions have evolved from other technology, like SVC and XIV.  With the acquisition of Red Hat, IBM customers will have even more storage choice.  Does this mean more flexibility or confusion? Re-using …

#106 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part II) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)

#106 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part II) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Sponsored, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this second episode on VAST Data, Chris and Martin continue the discussion with Howard Marks.  You can find the previous episode at #105 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part I).  This time, the conversation continues where the discussion left off, with Howard finishing the explanation of wide striping. To explain exactly how data is accessed on the platform, Howard introduces the concept of v-trees.  These are like b-trees but flatter and wider.  The v-tree is used to hold both metadata and data.  One interesting aspect of the discussion is in understanding exactly how Optane …