#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 …

#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure

#204 – Liqid Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure

Chris EvansCloud, Guest Speakers, Liqid, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Sumit Puri, CEO of Liqid Inc. Liqid has developed a composable infrastructure platform they call CDI or Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure. CDI enables IT organisations to take the building blocks of compute – storage, networking, CPUs, memory and GPUs then combine them dynamically in ways that address the processing needs of the enterprise. Customers use the technology to enable greater efficiency in the use of hardware and to truly deliver the software-defined data centre. Sumit explains how the Liqid technology works across multiple fabrics that could be PCIe, Ethernet …

#203 – Storage and Chia Cryptocurrency Farming

#203 – Storage and Chia Cryptocurrency Farming

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week, Martin and Chris delve into cryptocurrency mining in a lengthy discussion on Chia with Robert Novak. Chia is a new cryptocurrency technology that differs from previous online currencies in that the basis for earning rewards (or coins) is based on the volume of data stored on disk, rather than raw compute performed. Rob takes the team through a discussion of the difference between the processes that earn currency, explaining how Proof of Work and Proof of Stake has evolved to Proof of Space and Time with Chia. Rob goes on to explain how …

#202 – Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat (Sponsored)

#202 – Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat (Sponsored)

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Infinidat, Storage Hardware

In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris and Martin talk to Phil Bullinger, newly appointed CEO at Infinidat. The company has reached their ten-year anniversary, shipping over seven exabytes of capacity in that time. With successful growth in every quarter during 2020, we discuss how Infinidat is helping drive the consolidation story for large enterprises and MSPs looking to optimise their storage systems. The ability to deploy entire storage arrays into customer data centres is both an operational benefit and financial tool for Infinidat. Enterprises love the set-and-forget approach, while MSPs like to pay as their …

#201 – Introducing Scality ARTESCA (Sponsored)

#201 – Introducing Scality ARTESCA (Sponsored)

Chris EvansContainers, Guest Speakers, HPE, Object Storage, Scality, Sponsored

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin talk to Paul Speciale (Chief Product Officer at Scality) and Chris Tinker (Distinguished Technologist with HPE) about the launch of ARTESCA, a new lightweight, cloud-native object storage solution. HPE and Scality have announced the product jointly, delivering the solution on HPE hardware with an exclusive distribution agreement for 6 months. We get the detail on why ARTESCA is different to RING and the types of workload Scality is aiming to support. Since the launch of Scality and RING a decade ago, a lot has changed in technology and …

#200 – Virtualisation, Containers, Serverless and Data

#200 – Virtualisation, Containers, Serverless and Data

Chris EvansCloud, Data Management, Databases, Guest Speakers, Serverless

This week, Martin and Chris are joined by Jim Walker, VP of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs. In a slight departure from a purely storage-based recording, this discussion follows the evolution of application packaging and deployment, from virtualisation to containers and serverless. The logical conclusion of any computing environment is to execute code and gradually, we are abstracting from the specifics of infrastructure and allowing the code to do the work. How will serverless technologies standardise and implement non-functional requirements such as security and credentials management, data access and most important – portability? Will de-facto …

#199 – Quantifying Data Storage Innovation

#199 – Quantifying Data Storage Innovation

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the level of innovation seen in the data storage industry over the last decade. This topic is one that comes up repeatedly as we review the market, startups and incumbents. In reality, of course there’s been innovation, whether the “micro-innovations” that move the storage media industry along, or the more significant changes like NVMe and persistent memory. What happens when you look at innovation by market spending or VC investments? Is there an alignment of innovation with the development of patentable technology? Finally, the discussion concludes with areas where …