This week Chris and Martin debate the future of on-premises storage infrastructure companies in light of announcements and events from IBM, Dell and NetApp. IBM is splitting in two, while Dell and NetApp have recently held virtual versions of their annual conferences. Is the on-premises infrastructure business shrinking and becoming too low-margin to be worthwhile? Martin mentions Lou Gerstner’s book – linked here – Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? The Simpson’s episode where Mr Burns runs for Governor is “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” – without a doubt a …
#168 – Storage Unicorns
This week Chris and Martin review the idea of storage unicorns, companies that have a valuation of one billion dollars or more. What exactly is the basis or justification for a billion dollar price tag? Is this something invented by the VC industry or is there a real degree of science behind the assumptions? The list in question comes from a Blocks & Files article written by Chris Mellor, which in turn references the list produced by an analyst firm. While valuation based on some multiple of money invested does give some indication of value, …
#108 – Druva Cloud-Native Data Protection with Curtis Preston (Sponsored)
In this week’s episode, Chris talks to W. Curtis Preston. Curtis is a long-time and well-known industry expert in the backup area and now Chief Technologist at Druva. Data protection in a multi-cloud world introduces new challenges compared to traditional on-premises backup. As a result, Druva has developed a cloud-native platform that protects on-premises, cloud, endpoint and SaaS applications. What does cloud-native actually mean? Chris and Curtis discuss the benefits of using native AWS public cloud services like S3, DynamoDB, RDS and EC2 instances. Compared to on-premises backup, where hardware is procured to meet high …