#181 – Is There a Future for Storage Infrastructure Companies?

#181 – Is There a Future for Storage Infrastructure Companies?

Chris EvansGarbage Collection, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

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 …

#173 – Transparent Enterprise Storage Pricing

#173 – Transparent Enterprise Storage Pricing

Chris EvansGuest 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 …

#163 – Inflection Points in Storage Deployment Strategies

#163 – Inflection Points in Storage Deployment Strategies

Chris EvansData Management, Guest Speakers, Storage Management, Storage Unpacked Podcast

Technology refreshes are a constant part of the IT landscape. Businesses need to frequently update and modernise their infrastructure. Typically, the inertia to move between vendors is strong, but inflection points do occur, when the cost and risk of change is outweighed by the benefits. How do you identify inflection points in your environment and then take advantage of the opportunity? In this podcast, Chris chats with three guests (Matt Watts from NetApp, Lee Nolan from MTI and Kam Panesar from Atradius) to get views from a vendor, solutions provider and end user perspective. The …

#145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise

#145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise

Chris EvansCloud, 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, …

#130 – Making Money in the Storage Business

#130 – Making Money in the Storage Business

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Garbage Collection, NVMe, Storage Hardware

This week, Chris and Martin reflect on changes in the storage industry and the ways in which vendors can make money from storage hardware and software. It’s been a tough time for storage vendors of late and the discussion starts by looking at the challenges of making money in a market where components are commodity and decline in price each month. How should vendors adapt to these challenges? There are alternative strategies than simply piling it high and selling it cheap (although that is one model). All-flash systems offered the ability to charge higher margins, …

#112 – Introduction to NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS)

#112 – Introduction to NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS)

Chris EvansData Protection, Guest Speakers

NetApp has developed a new backup service called NDAS or NetApp Data Availability Services. NDAS is based in the public cloud and provides the ability to run analytics against secondary data in AWS S3, without having re-hydrate through a backup platform. Chris met with Charlotte Brooks (Technical Marketing Engineer) and Joel Kaufman (Director of Technical Marketing) to discuss how NDAS works and what customers are doing with their cloud-based data. NDAS provides some interesting features that make the product slightly different from existing backup software. The solution runs in AWS using the customer’s account. This …

#102 – May Midrange Madness with Chris Mellor

#102 – May Midrange Madness with Chris Mellor

Chris EvansAll-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 …

#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review

#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

This week, Martin leads the conversation as Chris discusses the vendors presenting at the recent Storage Field Day 18 event.  SFD18 is part of the Tech Field Day series delivered by Stephen Foskett and GestaltIT.  We last spoke with Stephen in April 2018 – an episode on why storage isn’t boring. Although there’s no official theme for SFD events, the companies presenting were nicely delineated into scale-out primary storage and data protection.  WekaIO demonstrated their scale-out file system.  VAST Data came out of stealth and also presented a scale-out file system and object store.  Storpool …

#80 – Discussing NetApp’s AI Strategy with Santosh Rao

#80 – Discussing NetApp's AI Strategy with Santosh Rao

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

In this podcast recorded at NetApp Insight 2018, Chris talks to Santosh Rao, Senior Technical Director at NetApp.  Santosh leads NetApp’s AI and Data Engineering efforts and has a 10-year history at the company, working on initiatives including Clustered ONTAP. This conversation covers how NetApp is developing an Edge-to-Core-to-Cloud strategy that includes collecting and processing data at the edge, storing it in the core and exploiting the AI tools of public cloud. End users want to make the most of CPU and GPU solutions, while minimising data movement.  Edge Solutions, including ONTAP Select provide the …

#78 – Thoughts on NetApp with Greg Knieriemen

#78 – Thoughts on NetApp with Greg Knieriemen

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

Last week Chris attended NetApp Insight in Barcelona and had a chance to chat to Greg Knieriemen, Chief Technologist in the Storage Systems & Software business at NetApp.  Greg was formerly at Hitachi Vantara where he held a similar role.  This conversation touches on Greg’s reasons for choosing NetApp and exactly what he will be focusing on within the company. Elapsed Time: 00:17:07 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:01:30 – Why move to NetApp? 00:04:00 – Three BUs, Storage/Systems, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Services 00:07:00 – The Data Fabric is much more real today than two years …