The Unpacked Network

Unpacking Technology Through The Medium of Podcasting

#62 – The Future of Data Infrastructure with Scott Hamilton

Chris Evans 17 August 2018Guest Speakers

This is the third of a series of three podcasts recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2018. In this conversation, Chris talks to Scott Hamilton, Senior Director of Product Management, DCS group at Western Digital Corporation. WDC are working on a new architecture that will deliver a composable data infrastructure for the enterprise. This podcast discussed why composable is needed and exactly what scale of customers will benefit from the disaggregation of compute and storage. WDC are not looking to move into the general infrastructure market with this solution, but rather are developing an open standard …

#61 – Introduction to NVM Express with Amber Huffman

Chris Evans 14 August 2018Guest Speakers, NVMe, Standards, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This is the second of a series of podcasts recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2018 in Santa Clara. In this episode, Chris talks to Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow and President and founder of NVM Express Inc. NVM Express is the standards body that governs the development of the NVMe base standard, NVMe-MI (Management Interface) and NVMe over Fabrics. Amber explains how standards’ bodies are initially established, including the ongoing ownership of intellectual property. The discussion continues, looking at how NVM Express standards are developed by committee, how the body is funded and how the process …

#60 – New Data Economy with Derek Dicker

Chris Evans 10 August 2018Guest Speakers

This week Chris is attending the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. This is the first of three podcast recordings from the event and is a conversation with Derek Dicker CVP and GM of the Storage Business Unit at Micron. Derek participated in a keynote session at the event and talked about the challenges of managing new data types. This includes processing data coming from a range of new sources, as well as providing capabilities to do new processing like analytics at the core and edge. The interesting part of the discussion is how ML/AI …

#59 – Ethernet vs Fibre Channel

Chris Evans 27 July 2018Guest Speakers

This week’s podcast looks at storage networking and in particular the choice of using Ethernet vs Fibre Channel as the network protocol. Traditionally, enterprise storage platforms have been Fibre Channel connected, with only a small amount of iSCSI usage. However, the world isn’t just block storage and in fact, as guest Marty Lans (General Manager, Storage Connectivity Engineering & Global Interoperability Business Unit at HPE) tells us, 80% of storage is Ethernet connected. This is because of the growth in unstructured data stored on NAS and object stores. Ethernet storage now includes lossless Ethernet (DCB) …

#58 – Storage Vendor Hero Numbers

Chris Evans 20 July 2018Garbage Collection

This week, Chris Mellor is back and the team take a dive into the subject of storage vendor hero numbers. What are hero numbers? We’ve all seen them, they’re the huge performance figures quoted by all-flash storage vendors aimed at putting their products forward in the best light possible. Are hero numbers believable or should we be looking at certified vendor benchmark testing as a guide to capability? Do users even look at benchmark or hero numbers in the first place? Could the whole exercise be a waste of time? The conversation moves to talk …

#57 – Storage on the Edge with Scott Shadley

Chris Evans 13 July 2018Guest Speakers

What is computational storage and how do we manage storage on the edge of the network? This week’s conversation is a discussion on how storage and data is managed within IoT devices and partially covers the new segment of computational storage. Martin and Chris talk to Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing for NGD Systems. Edge storage means more than simply managing the data on a Raspberry Pi or other small form-factor device. During the podcast, Scott uses the example of aircraft analytics, which generate terabytes of content per flight. How do these implementations work? How …

#56 – Defining Scale-out Storage

Chris Evans 6 July 2018Garbage Collection

This week’s podcast is a conversation between Martin and Chris, talking about how we define scale-up and scale-out storage. A recent discussion on Twitter about Pure1 and the idea of federated scale-out generated some interesting feedback, so we thought it might be good to get some definitions in place. The opening discussion talks about how scale-up and scale-out should be defined and what definitions of scale-out exist. Volume managers used to be the old-school way of implementing federation, as was storage virtualisation. So perhaps federation is a genuine use case. Martin and Chris move to …

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

Chris Evans 29 June 2018Cloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week we talk to Mark Carlson, co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, about the storage needs of hyperscalers. Mark defines hyperscalers as those companies opening multiple data centres a year, most notably Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google and Facebook in the US and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China. These vendors are deploying petabytes of storage a year, with specific requirements on storage media. The hyperscaler applications have issues with HDD and SSD performance characteristics, such as tail latency and the effects of garbage collection. As a result, drive manufacturers are building in new features …

#54 – Are we at All-flash and HDD Array Price Parity?

Chris Evans 22 June 2018Garbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the subject of price parity between all-flash and hybrid or HDD-based storage arrays. From Martin’s perspective, he is starting to see vendor pricing getting close to parity and it making more sense to buy all-flash than a spinning media device. However, what are the issues? TCO is one – it’s not all about array pricing. Also, flash offers more opportunity to be Opex focused, as it’s easier to increment flash in an array than adding many disks to maintain performance. So what about hybrid? Does it have a position, …

#53 – Persistent Storage and Kubernetes with Evan Powell

Chris Evans 15 June 2018Guest Speakers

This week Chris and Martin talk to Evan Powell, CEO of OpenEBS and formerly the founding CEO of Nexenta. The conversation covers the use of persistent storage with container orchestration tool, Kubernetes. Despite what the industry might think, persistent storage that can be mapped to a container (or in this case pod) is still an important problem to solve. Evan sets the scene for us with some background on pods, stateful sets, claims and storage classes. As the conversation proceeds, the team discusses the way in which developers expect to consume cloud-native storage and in …

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