#99 – Dell Technologies World 2019 in Review

#99 – Dell Technologies World 2019 in Review

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcements from Dell Technologies World 2019, held in April/May 2019 at the Sands Convention Centre in Las Vegas.  Chris attended as a guest of Dell Technologies, who covered flights and accommodation. Dell Technologies made a range of announcements, including improved capabilities on the Unity XT and Isilon storage platforms.  A new data protection platform called PowerProtect was introduced and PowerMax gained dual-ported Optane drives that allow a new tier of persistent media storage. One of the most interesting areas was the announcement of more SaaS and cloud-based offerings, …

#97 – Building Storage Using NVMe/TCP with Kam Eshghi from Lightbits Labs

#97 – Building Storage Using NVMe/TCP with Kam Eshghi from Lightbits Labs

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This episode was recorded live at Dell Technologies World 2019.  Chris talks to Kam Eshghi, VP of Strategy & Business Development at Lightbits Labs.  Lightbits has pioneered the development of NVMe/TCP, which allows standard Ethernet NICs to be used for NVMe-over-Fabrics storage traffic. The ability to implement NVMe-oF without custom NICs (like RDMA) offers the potential to deploy NVMe fabrics in hyper-scaler and enterprise data centres with lower cost and complexity compared to existing solutions, but what are the drawbacks?  Kam explains how NVMe/TCP can be implemented on high-speed networks that even include multiple switch …

#96 – Discussing SmartNICs and Storage with Rob Davis from Mellanox

#96 – Discussing SmartNICs and Storage with Rob Davis from Mellanox

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, SmartNICs, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this podcast, recorded live at Dell Technologies World 2019, Chris talks to Rob Davis, VP of Storage Technology at Mellanox, about the development of SmartNIC technology and storage.  SmartNICs offload tasks such as encryption, compression and protocol traffic from core CPUs.  This allows system vendors to create more efficient and cheaper products.  It can also provide a backward compatibility for legacy applications and operating systems. Rob takes us through the implementation of SmartNICs on both the initiator (host) and target (array) side of the storage network.  We discuss vendors using the technology and what …