Unpacked Network

#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 …

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

Chris Evans 5 June 2018Guest 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

Chris Evans 30 May 2018Soundbytes

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

Chris Evans 18 May 2018Guest 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

Chris Evans 4 May 2018Guest 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)

Chris Evans 27 April 2018Guest 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

Chris Evans 20 April 2018Guest 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 …

#46 – Another View on Open Source Storage with Neil Levine

Chris Evans 13 April 2018Guest Speakers

A few weeks ago we discussed Open Source storage and whether it had any place in the enterprise. There was a lot of feedback, so we thought it would be good to follow up with another discussion, so we invited Neil Levine, Director of Product Management at Red Hat to give us his view. Martin, Chris and Neil discuss the difference in buying approach and whether bringing storage in under the radar is a good strategy. The conversation moves on to talk about the Facebook strategy of “move fast and break things”, the situation with …

#45 – Modern Software Defined Storage With Avinash Lakshman

Chris Evans 6 April 2018Guest Speakers

This week Chris is in the Bay area and was able to catch up for a chat with Hedvig CEO Avinash Lakshman. Hedvig is a start-up developing a scale-out software-defined storage platform, which makes Avinash the perfect guest to explain just where SDS has reached. Avinash also has serious SDS credentials, having co-developed Amazon Dynamo and developed Cassandra for Facebook. The conversation starts with a review of where SDS has reached compared to just five years ago. Chris and Avinash discuss whether the enterprise has really bought into SDS as a concept and whether public cloud …

#44 – Ultra High Capacity Flash Drives

Chris Evans 30 March 2018Garbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the availability of super-high capacity or ultra-capacity flash drives. The conversation comes out of an announcement from Nimbus Data that has produced a 100TB SATA SSD. This follows up from last year’s 50TB drives that were OEMed to Viking and Smart Modular. You can find some more background at Architecting IT here. With so much capacity in a single 3.5″ form factor that could cost upwards of $50,000, is this product practical? How do the drives survive failure? Can they be repaired and who would build systems from them? …