#35 – The Spectre of Meltdown with Alex Chircop

#35 – The Spectre of Meltdown with Alex Chircop

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

In this week’s podcast, the team talk to Alex Chircop, CTO at StorageOS about the implications on storage of the recent Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities.  Much has been made of the potential impact to I/O performance and by definition storage platforms and products.  The guys talk about what the vulnerabilities actually mean for end users and what to expect from storage vendors.  Finally, the podcast concludes with some suggestions from Martin, as the token end user in the discussion. Two references were made in the podcast.  The first is to a Techspot article comparing NVMe and SSD …

#34 – NAND Shortage? What NAND Shortage!  with Jim Handy

#34 – NAND Shortage? What NAND Shortage! with Jim Handy

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

In this week’s podcast, the team chat again with Jim Handy from Objective Analysis.  Jim is an analyst covering the semiconductor industry and provides some great insight into where pricing is headed in the NAND flash market.  The conversation covers some of the technical challenges the industry faces, as well as the impact from China entering the market.  Finally, the guys discuss the impact on Enterprise storage pricing. There are some interesting observations in this conversation, such as the capability for NAND to be used in multiple densities and how the ability for the Enterprise …

Introduction to GDPR with Nigel Tozer from Commvault

Introduction to GDPR with Nigel Tozer from Commvault

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

In this podcast, recorded in December 2017, Chris talks to Nigel Tozer, Solutions Marketing Director, EMEA at Commvault.  Today the subject is GDPR, otherwise known as the General Data Protection Regulation.  GDPR is an update to existing data protection legislation that is meant to reflect the needs of EU citizens in protecting their personal data in a digital age. Chris and Nigel talk through the issues, some of the steps end users can take and how Commvault offers solutions to bring businesses in line with GDPR. Elapsed Time: 00:27:52 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intro 00:01:40 – …

Garbage Collection #008 – Chris’ Travels – Commvault, NetApp & SFD14

Garbage Collection #008 – Chris' Travels – Commvault, NetApp & SFD14

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

In this podcast, recorded on 21 November 2017, Chris, Gavin and Martin talk about thoughts from Chris’ recent trips to CommVault GO, Storage Field Day 14 and NetApp Insight.  The CommVault and SFD14 events were held in the US, with NetApp Insight talking place in Berlin, Germany.  At Storage Field Day, Dell EMC, E8 Storage, Scality and Congruity 360 presented.  This podcast talks about the Dell EMC presentations. E8 Storage has been a recent podcast guest. Feelings on the events and content were mixed.  Some good and some bad.  What do you think?  Leave us …

Soundbytes #015: NetApp HCI with Martin Cooper

Soundbytes #015: NetApp HCI with Martin Cooper

Chris EvansSoundbytes

In this podcast, recorded at NetApp Insight in Berlin, November 2017, Chris talks to Martin Cooper, Senior Director of Field Engineering, Next Generation Data Centre.  The conversation introduces HCI, NetApp’s hyper-converged offering, which recently went GA.  NetApp HCI uses SolidFire storage and scales differently to traditional HCI solutions in that the processor cores aren’t shared by storage and compute.  Instead each is delivered as a separate server, more like CI. Martin and Chris discuss the reasons for this architectural choice and how it fits a different market space than traditional hyper-converged solutions. Elapsed Time: 00:11:54 …

Soundbytes #014: A Conversation with NetApp Founder Dave Hitz

Soundbytes #014: A Conversation with NetApp Founder Dave Hitz

Chris EvansSoundbytes

This podcast was recorded at NetApp Insight in Berlin on 15 November 2017.  Chris talks to Dave Hitz, founder of NetApp Inc.  The conversation is fairly free flowing, covering a general discussion on data management, NetApp’s positioning with Azure NFS and how we can expect to see hybrid cloud work in the future.  You’ll notice there’s no discussion on any hardware products at all and little product discussion of any kind. This conversation could have continued for hours (and in fact we did continue off-air), but we kept it to 20 minutes. Elapsed Time: 00:19:05 …

Disaggregated Storage Part III with Josh Goldenhar from Excelero

Disaggregated Storage Part III with Josh Goldenhar from Excelero

Chris EvansAll-Flash

Continuing on our theme of disaggregated storage, Gavin and Martin talk to Josh Goldenhar, VP Products at Excelero.  In this podcast, recorded on 6th November 2017, the guys talk about NVMesh, the Excelero technology that transforms servers and NVMe drives into a distributed storage mesh.  As we’re starting to see, there are some common themes developing here, with Linux-based support, some client and (in this case) host software. Elapsed Time: 00:43:21 Timeline 00:00:00 – Introductions, Martin, Gavin – no Chris 00:01:51 – Who are Excelero? 00:03:50 – Excelero – software only (with partners) 00:05:30 – …

Soundbytes #013: Hitachi Vantara with Greg Knieriemen

Soundbytes #013: Hitachi Vantara with Greg Knieriemen

Chris EvansSoundbytes

In this quick podcast, recorded live at Commvault GO 2017, Chris talks to Greg Knieriemen, Technology Evangelist with Hitachi Vantara.  Hitachi recently merged the HDS (Hitachi Data Systems), Pentaho and Hitachi Insight Group brands together into a single entity, Hitachi Vantara. The new company will focus more on data and IoT, as Greg explains.  Unfortunately the recording terminated early, so we lost about a minute of wrap up and some of the conversation with Max Mortillaro, who joined us at the beginning of the recording. Elapsed Time: 00:14:36 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intro 00:01:17 – Oops …

Disaggregated Storage Part II with Zivan Ori from E8 Storage

Disaggregated Storage Part II with Zivan Ori from E8 Storage

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

In this podcast, originally recorded on 30 October 2017, Chris and Gavin follow up on the subject of disaggregated storage with Zivan Ori, CEO at E8 Storage.  E8 is a start-up that markets and sells a storage array that uses a disaggregated architecture. The conversation covers what disaggregation really means and how E8 focuses on splitting the data and control paths of traditional I/O commands.  With NVMe and RDMA, the E8 architecture allows direct access to metadata on dual controllers within the E8 hardware.  This piece was actually a revelation during the conversation as it …

Garbage Collection #006 – LTO-8 and the Future of Tape

Garbage Collection #006 – LTO-8 and the Future of Tape

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

This week LTO-8 was announced, with raw cartridge capacities of up to 12.8TB.  In this podcast, recorded on 23rd October 2017, Chris and Martin discuss the evolution of LTO from a lowly 100GB to todays media with 120x the capacity. Tape is changing and becoming more of an archive medium, as backup has increasingly moved to disk.  This begs the question, should standard formats like LTFS be more common?  How should media be recycled and what other ways are there for getting data onto tape media? For a bit of nostalgia, there’s mention of the …