Dell EMC Archives - Unpacked Network

#173 – Transparent Enterprise Storage Pricing

Chris Evans 11 September 2020Guest Speakers, Vendors

Enterprise storage pricing has all the simplicity of a mobile phone tariff. Vendors love to obfuscate the costs, whereas prospective purchasers just like a good, honest price. Why does enterprise storage pricing have to be so complicated and can’t we just have pricing online? Chris and Martin chat to George Crump from StorONE about strategies for pricing from both the customer and vendor perspective. Vendors mentioned in this podcast: StorONE, IBM, NetApp, Microsoft Azure, Pure Storage, Dell EMC. Find more about StorONE at https://www.storone.com. Elapsed Time: 00:35:05 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:02:00 – Enterprise storage …

#145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise

Chris Evans 28 February 2020Cloud, Containers, Garbage Collection

This week Chris and Martin discuss the announcement of Google Cloud partners offering Anthos Ready Storage. Anthos is Google’s on-premises cloud infrastructure running Kubernetes-based containers. Platform users can now deploy locally in their data centre, on local hardware, while using the GCP management plane. What is the benefit of having storage certified for Anthos? The discussion looks initially at why containers need persistent storage, moving on to examine the profile of the first ARS certified storage companies. Is this a move simply to gain more access to enterprise customers? There’s lots questions in this discussion, …

#102 – May Midrange Madness with Chris Mellor

Chris Evans 31 May 2019All-Flash, Garbage Collection

This week Martin, Chris Evans and Chris Mellor discuss Dell EMC’s plans for merging the three current midrange storage platforms marketed by the company. This is a follow-up to the article Chris recently posted on https://blockandfiles.com that discusses Project Trident. There are a lot of moving parts to consider when merging storage platforms. Customers have spent time and effort developing processes and scripting to automate common processes. How will these be supported? Will the new platform appear to take on the persona of the previous three? Should customers (as Martin believes) be forced to make …

#90 – Dell EMC's Enterprise NVMe Strategy with Vince Westin (Sponsored)

Chris Evans 8 March 2019Guest Speakers, Sponsored

This week, Chris talks to Vince Westin, Technical Evangelist within the PowerMax Group at Dell EMC. PowerMax is the latest in a storage product line with lineage back to the original Symmetrix systems of the early 1990s. PowerMax is an all-NVMe storage array, reflecting an industry move towards faster, low latency media. Vince takes us through the rationale for moving to NVMe across the Dell portfolio and PowerMax in particular. Some of the more interesting aspects of the transition include the ability to simplify code paths with NVMe compared to back-end SAS. NVMe introduces a …

#64 – Success & Failure in Storage Startup Land

Chris Evans 31 August 2018Garbage Collection

This week’s conversation follows up on Chris’ recent visit to Flash Memory Summit in the US. Chris and Martin discuss the storage startup landscape and the range of companies appearing at the event. What makes a company successful? Is IPO or acquisition the right route? The discussion starts with a simple, yet tricky question – why does storage continue to be such a diverse market place, with so many solutions to problems? We see a storage “pendulum” effect, with vendors moving between hardware and software. At the moment, there seems to be more focus on …

#58 – Storage Vendor Hero Numbers

Chris Evans 20 July 2018Garbage Collection

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 …

#56 – Defining Scale-out Storage

Chris Evans 6 July 2018Garbage Collection

This week’s podcast is a conversation between Martin and Chris, talking about how we define scale-up and scale-out storage. A recent discussion on Twitter about Pure1 and the idea of federated scale-out generated some interesting feedback, so we thought it might be good to get some definitions in place. The opening discussion talks about how scale-up and scale-out should be defined and what definitions of scale-out exist. Volume managers used to be the old-school way of implementing federation, as was storage virtualisation. So perhaps federation is a genuine use case. Martin and Chris move to …

#41 – Does Open Source Have a Place in Storage?

Chris Evans 9 March 2018Garbage Collection

This week, Martin, Chris and Gavin reflect on the decision by EMC to disband the {code} team and discuss whether open source has a place in storage. {code} was a project started by EMC before the Dell acquisition. The team focused on open source advocacy and developing tools such as storage plugins for Docker. Looking wider, companies like Red Hat have built their business on open source, but how are the storage platforms working out? Can vendors make money from open source and do we need a benevolent dictator like we have in Linux? Elapsed …

#37 – State of the Storage Union with Chris Mellor

Chris Evans 9 February 2018Guest Speakers

This week Chris and Gavin catch up with Chris Mellor, Storage Editor for The Register. With so much happening in storage, it’s difficult to know where to start, so the guys focus on the rumour of Dell EMC reversing into VMware. Could this really happen and why is Dell EMC even thinking about this? The conversation flows on to IBM and their super-mega-hyper-uber announcement on NVMe. Is IBM getting its storage mojo back? Finally, the discussion turns to IoT and how storage and compute move to “The Edge” – no, not Dave Evans, but IoT. …