#206 – An Update on NVMe 2.0 with Amber Huffman

#206 – An Update on NVMe 2.0 with Amber Huffman

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow and President of NVM Express about the updates in NVMe 2.0. NVM Express (generally abbreviated to NVMe) is a storage protocol that was developed to overcome some of the shortcomings of traditional protocols when working with new high performance media such as NAND SSDs and Optane. The 2.0 release of the NVMe standard refactors the protocol design and also introduces new features, including Namespace Types, Zoned Namespaces, Key-Value data types, endurance group management and HDD support. Amber explains the rationale behind the restructuring and …

#157 – Introduction to Dell PowerStore (sponsored)

#157 – Introduction to Dell PowerStore (sponsored)

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, NVMe, Sponsored, Storage Hardware

In this sponsored episode, Chris and Martin look at the newly announced midrange storage platform from Dell Technologies. PowerStore is a new all-flash midrange storage solution that offers both scale-up and scale-out capabilities. As we find out in the discussion with Dan Cummins and Devon Reed, this is only one aspect of the new technology. Through a feature called AppsOn, customers can run their own applications on a native ESXi hypervisor. In building a new storage platform, how did Dell Technologies leverage the assets already in the portfolio? We find out that XtremIO, SC Series …

#123 – Hitachi Next 2019: VSP 5000

#123 – Hitachi Next 2019: VSP 5000

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Hardware

This is the first of a series of podcast episodes recorded at Hitachi NEXT 2019 in Las Vegas. Hitachi announced the next generation of VSP storage arrays, the VSP 5000 at the show. The new platform provides greater performance and capacity than previous systems at lower latency. Chris meets with Colin Gallagher (VP Product Marketing for the Infrastructure Portfolio) and Dan McConnell (SVP of Infrastructure Product Management) to discuss the details. VSP 5000 offers up to 21 million IOPS at 70µs and up to 69PB of internal capacity. This level of performance can be delivered …

#121 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part II with J Metz

#121 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part II with J Metz

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This podcast episode continues the discussion with Dr J Metz and focuses on the detail of NVMe 1.4 and NVMe over Fabrics 1.1. Both standards are complete and have been published in the last few months. The conversation today digs deeper into what the new standards offer and specifically how NVMe/TCP becomes “officially” part of the NVMe standard. The conversation on NVMe/TCP is particularly interesting as it highlights how the protocol will offer significant benefits over iSCSI. The details in the podcast are quite technical and so it’s worth checking out some of the additional …

#120 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part I with J Metz

#120 – NVMe 1.4 Deep Dive Part I with J Metz

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, NVMe, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin talk to J Metz, R&D Engineer in Cisco Systems’ Advanced Storage division. This is a two-parter – the second episode will be published on Monday 30th September 2019. The NVMe 1.4 specification has recently been published and is in the final 45-day ratification process. This discussion provides some background on NVMe then dives pretty deep into the NVMe standards and how design decisions are refactoring the NVMe protocol for version 2.0. NVMe for consumer devices will be different to the feature set used within enterprise storage (although the protocol is …

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week’s episode is the final recording from Flash Memory Summit 2019. Chris is joined by the team from NGD Systems for a discussion on Computational Storage. On this podcast are Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing, Nader Salessi, CEO and Ashok Savdharia who has the lovely title of “technologist”. Computational storage uses the processing power of modern SSD controllers to run application workloads directly on the SSD itself. Imagine each drive being a mini blade server, with compute, memory and storage. In the case of NGD Systems, this means a range of devices and form …

#115 – The Transition to NVMe-oF Storage Solutions with Praveen Asthana

#115 – The Transition to NVMe-oF Storage Solutions with Praveen Asthana

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Storage Hardware

This week, Chris catches up with Praveen Asthana from Exten Technologies in an episode recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2019. With NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics set to become the dominant technologies for public cloud and the enterprise, exactly how will the transition from current solutions occur? Praveen discusses the continuing need for centralised storage that can fully exploit the benefits of NVMe. This will need another transition in technologies in the same way flash created a whole new market of storage solutions some ten years ago. An interesting aspect of NVMe adoption is the …

#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 …

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

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

Chris EvansGuest 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 …

#89 – Choices in NVMe Architectures

#89 – Choices in NVMe Architectures

Chris EvansGuest Speakers

This episode was recorded while Chris was in Silicon Valley for Storage Field Day 18.  Although not part of the event, Chris took time to catch up with Pavilion Data. in particular Jeff Sosa, VP Product Management and Walt Hinton, Head of Corporate and Product Marketing.  Both Jeff and Walt have a long history in the storage industry, including companies like Virident, Western Digital, Fusion-io, Brocade, NetApp and Data Domain – to name but a few!  It’s great to get opinions on the future of storage technology from industry experts, in this case on the …