#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

Chris EvansAWS, Cloud, CloudFlare, Garbage Collection, Object Storage, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcement from CloudFlare of R2, a new object storage solution. With such a widely dispersed CDN network, could CloudFlare become a real competitor for S3, considering that the R2 platform will have no egress fees? This episode digs into the details, to look at what additional features object storage vendors need in their arsenal and whether there’s any other vendor likely to come close to competing with AWS. At the outset of the podcast, Chris mentions Dark Star, which did indeed have a tiny budget of only $60,000. …

#213 – Kubernetes-Native Data Protection

#213 – Kubernetes-Native Data Protection

Chris EvansData Management, Data Protection, Garbage Collection, Storage Unpacked Podcast

With KubeCon North America 2021 looming, Chris and Martin spend this week looking at data protection for Kubernetes-native environments. Vendors have started to introduce backup solutions, some working within the container environment itself, some outside as part of existing products. Exactly what should be backed up and how should these products work? Are we right to continue using snapshots or is there a better way? Do these solutions capture and retain enough metadata to provide for efficient data recovery? Lots of questions to ask and be answered in this show. Elapsed Time: 00:39:00 Timeline Related …

#212 – File Not Found

#212 – File Not Found

Chris EvansData Management, Garbage Collection, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin get together to discuss the curious case of missing files. In this instance, the files weren’t actually missing, but according to an article in The Verge, students running a software simulation didn’t know how to determine their location. In a world where the current generation have grown up on iPhones and iPads (or similar devices) that present no inherent file and directory structure, is it any surprise that these concepts seem alien? What benefit is there to retaining strict and rigid file system structures and can we move …

#211 – Pure//Launch – Announcing Fusion and Portworx Data Services (Sponsored)

#211 – Pure//Launch – Announcing Fusion and Portworx Data Services (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pure Storage, Pure//Launch, Sponsored, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris chats to Alex McMullan, CTO International at Pure Storage. The discussion covers Pure//Launch and today’s announcements of two SaaS solutions – Fusion and Portworx Data Services. Fusion is a new SaaS management plane for administering and optimising Pure Storage hardware and software products, including FlashArray, FlashBlade and Cloud Block Store. Portworx Data Services enables customers to deploy and operate managed databases using the PX-Enterprise platform. Together, these two solutions provide an insight into the next stage of evolution and growth for Pure Storage. There’s a lot to unpack in …

#210 – Building SANs in the Cloud

#210 – Building SANs in the Cloud

Chris EvansCloud, Software-Defined Storage, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the merits of building virtual SANs in the public cloud. Vendors including Silk and Pure Storage now offer virtual storage “appliances” built from virtual instances and cloud storage. Why are these solutions necessary, when the public cloud providers have plenty of high-performance block and file storage offerings? The discussion looks at the why and how of these types of solutions as well as the implications and the lock-in they could represent. Elapsed Time: 00:33:53 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:04:00 – Silk and Pure Storage are two examples of cloud …

#209 – Discovering Unified Fast File and Object with Pure Storage (Sponsored)

#209 – Discovering Unified Fast File and Object with Pure Storage (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pure Storage, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin meet with Brian Carpenter, Senior Director of Unstructured Technology Strategy at Pure Storage, to talk about UFFO – Unified Fast File and Object. UFFO is a technology bringing together the two main types of unstructured data into a single platform – FlashBlade. The discussion centres on the benefits of using a single platform that offers high performance throughput for both file and object at the same time. Brian walks the team through use cases and how customers are using UFFO in their environments today. You can find out …

#208 – NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage – More Than a Good Marketing Message?

#208 – NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage – More Than a Good Marketing Message?

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, NVIDIA, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin look at NVIDIA’s GPUDirect Storage (GDS), a technology for moving data directly from persistent storage to GPUs, bypassing the CPU. The aim of the technology is to provide greater throughput to keep GPUs active, and looking at some of the thoughts from our podcast with Liqid (#204), it’s clear that this feature is needed. However, with such quick adoption by many storage vendors, is the announcement of GDS more of a marketing exercise? We dig into the details and what the announcement of GDS could mean for the …

#207 – AWS Gets a SAN Upgrade

#207 – AWS Gets a SAN Upgrade

Chris EvansCloud, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week the team is back after a short break and ready to talk all things cloud – or at least about Elastic Block Store. AWS recently announced io2 and io2 Block Express, the first new EBS block storage offerings for eight years. With such a long gap since io1 was first released, what has AWS been up to and what’s new? In this discussion, Martin and Chris question whether AWS is aiming to meet the requirements of enterprise customers that simply want to lift and shift their infrastructure into the cloud. Alternatively, the effort …

#206 – An Update on NVMe 2.0 with Amber Huffman

#206 – An Update on NVMe 2.0 with Amber Huffman

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow and President of NVM Express about the updates in NVMe 2.0. NVM Express (generally abbreviated to NVMe) is a storage protocol that was developed to overcome some of the shortcomings of traditional protocols when working with new high performance media such as NAND SSDs and Optane. The 2.0 release of the NVMe standard refactors the protocol design and also introduces new features, including Namespace Types, Zoned Namespaces, Key-Value data types, endurance group management and HDD support. Amber explains the rationale behind the restructuring and …

#205 – 25 Years of Commvault & the Power of And (Sponsored)

#205 – 25 Years of Commvault & the Power of And (Sponsored)

Chris EvansCommvault, Data Management, Data Protection, Guest Speakers, Sponsored, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin have a great conversation with David Ngo, CTO for Metallic at Commvault, and Ranga Rajagopalan, VP Product Management for Commvault and Metallic. Commvault is celebrating 25 years in data protection, while Metallic, a SaaS data protection solution from Commvault has been available for nearly two years. In this discussion, David and Ranga explain the background to Metallic and how customers have quickly adopted the SaaS model. With 25 years of product development, Commvault has a suite of solutions to call upon, including traditional data protection software, appliances and …