#56 – Defining Scale-out Storage

#56 – Defining Scale-out Storage

Chris EvansGarbage 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

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

Chris EvansCloud, 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?

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

Chris EvansGarbage 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

#53 – Persistent Storage and Kubernetes with Evan Powell

Chris EvansGuest 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 …

#52 – An Introduction to WekaIO Matrix with Liran Zvibel (Sponsored)

#52 – An Introduction to WekaIO Matrix with Liran Zvibel (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Sponsored

This week’s guest episode was recorded live in Silicon Valley at the offices of WekaIO.  The company has developed a scale-out parallel file system called Matrix that was specifically designed to exploit NVMe storage and new fast networking.  Chris is onsite to talk with CEO and co-founder, Liran Zivbel.  Martin is dialled in remotely from the bowels of the Storage Unpacked offices. The conversation covers how Matrix was developed to work with new media and at the same time address some of the issues seen in the use of parallel file systems such as managing …

#51 – Pure Accelerate Pregame

#51 – Pure Accelerate Pregame

Chris EvansSoundbytes

This episode was recorded at Pure Accelerate in San Francisco on Tuesday 22nd May 2018 just before the event started.  Chris talks to Matt Leib and eventually Ray Lucchesi, initially about the role of the reseller, then eventually moving towards NVMe over Fabrics.  As with all live recorded podcasts, there’s a little background noise, including the weekly noon siren test.  The group speculates on what we can expect to be announced by Pure, the benefits of the Evergreen program, then whether we’re headed back to a hardware future for storage. In the recording Ray talks …

#50 – Introduction to Quantum Computing

#50 – Introduction to Quantum Computing

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

How does quantum computing relate to storage?  This week’s episode is a bit of a diversion from our normal podcasting topics.  In episode #47 (Enterprise Storage is not Boring), we mused as to how quantum computers use data.  With no real knowledge between us, we asked for listeners to help us out.  As a result, we’re joined in this episode by Scott Crowder, Vice President & CTO, Quantum Computing, Technical Strategy & Transformation, IBM Systems.  That’s a long job title, Scott! During the show we try and get to the bottom of what quantum computing really …

#49 – Reputation in Technology Marketing

#49 – Reputation in Technology Marketing

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This week Chris and Martin talk to Gina Minks, who works on product marketing at VMware within the Cloud BU.  The discussion evolved from a post Gina published on www.24x7itconnection.com talking about how vendors shouldn’t go negative when promoting their own technology.  We’ve seen hyperbole from many vendors in the past – you know who you are! During the conversation, the topics cover the original Twitpisses that used to take place regularly on social media.  This leads on to the independence of bloggers who have been acquired by big corporations yet still use their own …

#48 – Introduction to Datrium DVX (Sponsored)

#48 – Introduction to Datrium DVX (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Sponsored

This week’s podcast was recorded on the road a few weeks ago in Silicon Valley.  Chris dropped into the Datrium offices in Sunnyvale to talk about DVX, Datrium’s open converged platform.  Taking part in the podcast is Sazzala Reddy, CTO and co-founder and Tushar Agrawal, Director of Products. Datrium DVX is an extension of HCI that scales performance and capacity separately.  Persistent storage is deployed on a shared array, with each compute host using local cache in the form of flash storage.  You can find out more on a recent blog post covering DVX. The …

#47 – Enterprise Storage is Not Boring

#47 – Enterprise Storage is Not Boring

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This week Martin and Chris talk to Stephen Foskett, chief organiser at Tech Field Day.  The team refute the concept that enterprise storage is boring, as posited by good friend Keith Townsend, also known as The CTO Advisor.  To be fair, Keith was putting a positive spin on storage, however we thought it would be good to expand the conversation and look at why storage is so innovative.  It’s clear that products are driven by a need to constantly improve the status quo, whether that be reducing costs, increasing capacity or performance. The discussion touches …