#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

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 …

#96 – Discussing SmartNICs and Storage with Rob Davis from Mellanox

#96 – Discussing SmartNICs and Storage with Rob Davis from Mellanox

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, SmartNICs, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this podcast, recorded live at Dell Technologies World 2019, Chris talks to Rob Davis, VP of Storage Technology at Mellanox, about the development of SmartNIC technology and storage.  SmartNICs offload tasks such as encryption, compression and protocol traffic from core CPUs.  This allows system vendors to create more efficient and cheaper products.  It can also provide a backward compatibility for legacy applications and operating systems. Rob takes us through the implementation of SmartNICs on both the initiator (host) and target (array) side of the storage network.  We discuss vendors using the technology and what …

#95 – Quantifying Storage Vendor Guarantees with Chris Mellor and Eran Brown

#95 – Quantifying Storage Vendor Guarantees with Chris Mellor and Eran Brown

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This week, Chris E is joined by Chris Mellor and returning guest Eran Brown.  The team discuss the usefulness of storage vendor guarantees like de-dupe ratios and uptime.  Do vendors use these metrics as a marketing tactic to attract new customers or is there any value in them? The idea of a sales/marketing guarantee sounds appealing.  Storage vendors have been using them for years to entice customers and offer some sort of incentive to buy.  Most recently we’ve seen de-dupe and compression ratios being a battleground for optimising the cost of all-flash arrays.  Digging down, …

#94 – Backblaze HDD Reliability Stats with Andy Klein

#94 – Backblaze HDD Reliability Stats with Andy Klein

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

In this episode, Martin and Chris talk to Andy Klein from Backblaze.  Since 2014, Backblaze has been collecting and publishing hard drive reliability information for their storage pods.  The pods are custom-built and used to hold backup data from customers and to support the B2 cloud storage offering.  Rather than buy an expensive storage platform or use the public cloud, Backblaze initially decided to build their own solution at a fraction of the cost of other options.  Once at scale, it seemed logical to use the platform for B2. Over the years, the Backblaze team …