In this episode, Chris chats with Abel Gordon, Chief System Architect at Lightbits Labs, discussing the challenges and benefits of building a virtual storage area network (SAN) on public cloud infrastructure.
Storage Unpacked 250 – Infinidat announces SSA Express and higher capacity SSA II (Sponsored)
In this episode Chris gets an update on new announcements from Infinidat, including SSA Express and higher-capacity SSA II systems. SSA Express is a new feature of the InfiniBox “classic” platform that allows customers to implement what looks like a virtual SSA (all-flash array) within a hybrid InfiniBox. The solution effectively pins volumes in SSD rather than allowing the data to cascade to the HDD layer, with the benefit of SSA performance for no additional cost on 95% of hardware in the field. Infinidat has also introduced a new SSA II, the F4316T with up …
Storage Unpacked 249 – Introduction to Nyriad and the UltraIO Storage Platform
In this episode, Chris talks to Derek Dicker, CEO at Nyriad about the UltraIO storage array. Nyriad has developed a new storage architecture using GPUs that accelerate the calculations needed to store data using erasure coding. This enables UltraIO to implement system-wide data protection using erasure coding at the block level. In contrast to most storage vendors in the market today, the UltraIO platform uses hard disk drives, with a GPU to process data ingested by the system, while data is presented back through the CPU route. This dual processor architecture enables Nyriad to deliver …
#140 – Introduction to Document-Orientated Databases
This week, Chris and Martin speak to David Koppe, Director of Information Strategy at MongoDB. The discussion covers document-orientated databases, or simply document databases, and their appeal to the enterprise. Document databases differ from traditional relational databases in that the data is stored within each “document” as a series of key-value pairs. In this instance a document is not to be confused with a Word or PDF file. Unlike relational databases, document records don’t have to be “symmetrical” and aren’t required to contain every field (or a null value for empty fields). This makes the …
#66 – Amazon RDS – Coming to a vSphere Cluster Near You
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware recently announced that RDS, the Relational Database Service was in tech preview as an on-premises deployment on vSphere. Running a service outside of Amazon’s data centre represents a big change for the company. The only non-core offering to date has been Snowball, the edge data appliance. In this week’s recording, Martin and Chris discuss the implications of running a service on-premises, what’s in it for the customer, for VMware and for AWS. The database market is a lucrative business. It’s reasonable to expect that end users will look to …
#65 – Challenges in Managing Unstructured Data with Shirish Phatak
In this week’s podcast we focus on the issues of managing unstructured data in a distributed world. Chris and Martin are joined by Shirish Phatak, CEO at Talon Storage. It’s interesting that “unstructured” proves to have a moveable definition, depending on what you want to include. While we traditionally think of files and objects as unstructured, these so-called binary pieces of content typically do have structure within them. In contrast, databases can be made up of unstructured data – e.g. files, that together take a structured form. Getting past the definition, we find that data …
#62 – The Future of Data Infrastructure with Scott Hamilton
This is the third of a series of three podcasts recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2018. In this conversation, Chris talks to Scott Hamilton, Senior Director of Product Management, DCS group at Western Digital Corporation. WDC are working on a new architecture that will deliver a composable data infrastructure for the enterprise. This podcast discussed why composable is needed and exactly what scale of customers will benefit from the disaggregation of compute and storage. WDC are not looking to move into the general infrastructure market with this solution, but rather are developing an open standard …
#58 – Storage Vendor Hero Numbers
This week, Chris Mellor is back and the team take a dive into the subject of storage vendor hero numbers. What are hero numbers? We’ve all seen them, they’re the huge performance figures quoted by all-flash storage vendors aimed at putting their products forward in the best light possible. Are hero numbers believable or should we be looking at certified vendor benchmark testing as a guide to capability? Do users even look at benchmark or hero numbers in the first place? Could the whole exercise be a waste of time? The conversation moves to talk …
#52 – An Introduction to WekaIO Matrix with Liran Zvibel (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
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 …