#105 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part I) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)

#105 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part I) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)

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

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Howard Marks, Chief Storyteller at VAST Data.  You may know Howard as an independent analyst and author for a range of online publications.  Howard recently joined VAST to help explain and promote understanding of their data platform architecture. The VAST Data platform uses three main technologies that have only recently emerged onto the market.  QLC NAND flash provides long-term, cheap and fast permanent storage.  3D-XPoint (branded as Intel Optane) is used to store metadata and new data before it is committed to flash.  NVMe over Fabrics provides the …

#104 – Creating a Data Management Strategy with Paul Stringfellow

#104 – Creating a Data Management Strategy with Paul Stringfellow

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers

This week, Chris talks to Paul Stringfellow, Technical Director at Gardner Systems, about the process of creating a data management strategy.  As we adopt additional, sometimes disparate services from SaaS and IaaS vendors, increasingly businesses are seeing their data being dispersed across multiple platforms.  With such a valuable asset at their fingertips, how do businesses go about building a strategy for storing, managing and securing their information? The conversation starts with a look at three layers – physical infrastructure, smart storage management and data management.  Storage platforms are pretty fully functional these days, so features …

#103 – Data Management and DataOps with Hitachi Vantara (Sponsored)

#103 – Data Management and DataOps with Hitachi Vantara (Sponsored)

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers

This week Chris speaks to Jonathan Martin (CMO) and John Magee (VP, Portfolio Marketing) at Hitachi Vantara.  This episode was recorded live onsite at the new Hitachi Vantara offices in Santa Clara. As data becomes ever more valuable to organisations, the process of building data pipelines will continue to be a time and resource intensive task.  In order to keep up with demand, Hitachi Vantara believes that businesses will need to implement automated processes that deal with the analytics pipeline – a concept called DataOps. DataOps is a methodology rather than any specific product.  It …

#102 – May Midrange Madness with Chris Mellor

#102 – May Midrange Madness with Chris Mellor

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Garbage Collection

This week Martin, Chris Evans and Chris Mellor discuss Dell EMC’s plans for merging the three current midrange storage platforms marketed by the company.  This is a follow-up to the article Chris recently posted on https://blockandfiles.com that discusses Project Trident. There are a lot of moving parts to consider when merging storage platforms.  Customers have spent time and effort developing processes and scripting to automate common processes.  How will these be supported?  Will the new platform appear to take on the persona of the previous three?  Should customers (as Martin believes) be forced to make …

S01E01 – Solving Workload Automation with Morpheus Data

S01E01 – Solving Workload Automation with Morpheus Data

Chris EvansHybrid Cloud Podcast

This episode was recorded at Dell Technologies World in April 2019, held in Las Vegas, USA. Chris talks with Brad Parks, VP Marketing and Business Development at Morpheus Data. Morpheus has created an automation and application deployment framework that allows customers to reduce the time and effort needed in managing Hybrid Cloud deployments. Rather than having processes that differ for each platform, Morpheus brings together a single standard for rolling out virtual machines across private and public infrastructure that includes VMware, Microsoft, AWS and more. The benefits here are clearly defined in three areas: Discovery …

#101 – Datrium Automatrix with Brian Biles and Tim Page (Sponsored)

#101 – Datrium Automatrix with Brian Biles and Tim Page (Sponsored)

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers, Sponsored

In this podcast episode, Chris talks to Brian Biles (Chief Product Officer and co-founder) and Tim Page (CEO) from Datrium about the announcement of Automatrix.  The Datrium Automatrix platform implements five important components needed to deliver a consistent approach to application mobility.  These are primary storage, backup, disaster recovery, encryption and data mobility. Automatrix brings together existing products that include DVX and Cloud DVX with the general availability of ControlShift (previously Project CloudShift).  ControlShift provides full automation of the disaster recovery failover and failback process, currently between on-premises DVX instances and by the end of …

#100 – Optimising Unstructured Data with Krishna Subramanian

#100 – Optimising Unstructured Data with Krishna Subramanian

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers

This week, Martin and Chris talk to Krishna Subramanian, President and COO at Komprise.  We mentioned the Komprise technology back on episode #75 (It’s ILM All Over Again) as part of a discussion on managing the movement of files to and from archive storage.  Krishna joins this discussion to fill in some background on the challenges of managing unstructured data, including how to implement solutions with as little lock-in as possible. Why do we need to manage data in the first place?  With around 75% of all data having no access in over 12 months, …

#99 – Dell Technologies World 2019 in Review

#99 – Dell Technologies World 2019 in Review

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcements from Dell Technologies World 2019, held in April/May 2019 at the Sands Convention Centre in Las Vegas.  Chris attended as a guest of Dell Technologies, who covered flights and accommodation. Dell Technologies made a range of announcements, including improved capabilities on the Unity XT and Isilon storage platforms.  A new data protection platform called PowerProtect was introduced and PowerMax gained dual-ported Optane drives that allow a new tier of persistent media storage. One of the most interesting areas was the announcement of more SaaS and cloud-based offerings, …

#98 – Shared Storage for Scale-out Databases with Walt Hinton from Pavilion Data

#98 – Shared Storage for Scale-out Databases with Walt Hinton from Pavilion Data

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this third recording from Dell Technologies World 2019, Chris talks with Walt Hinton, Head of Corporate and Product Marketing at Pavilion Data Systems.  The topic of conversation is the alignment of shared storage with scale-out NoSQL databases that typically place storage components on separate local disks. As rack-scale computing becomes more widely adopted, local storage will migrate back into bottom-of-rack shared storage infrastructure.  In this instance, does it make sense to put shards of databases back on the same hardware?  Walt thinks it is the next logical step in optimising scale-out applications and introducing …

#97 – Building Storage Using NVMe/TCP with Kam Eshghi from Lightbits Labs

#97 – Building Storage Using NVMe/TCP with Kam Eshghi from Lightbits Labs

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This episode was recorded live at Dell Technologies World 2019.  Chris talks to Kam Eshghi, VP of Strategy & Business Development at Lightbits Labs.  Lightbits has pioneered the development of NVMe/TCP, which allows standard Ethernet NICs to be used for NVMe-over-Fabrics storage traffic. The ability to implement NVMe-oF without custom NICs (like RDMA) offers the potential to deploy NVMe fabrics in hyper-scaler and enterprise data centres with lower cost and complexity compared to existing solutions, but what are the drawbacks?  Kam explains how NVMe/TCP can be implemented on high-speed networks that even include multiple switch …