#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 …

#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, …

#133 – FlashArray//C Deeper Dive with Pete Kirkpatrick

#133 – FlashArray//C Deeper Dive with Pete Kirkpatrick

Chris EvansAll-Flash, Guest Speakers, Pure Storage

This episode was recorded live at Pure Storage offices in Silicon Valley. Chris talks to Pete Kirkpatrick, Chief Hardware Architect at Pure Storage about the FlashArray//C platform. FlashArray//C is a new solution announced at Pure Accelerate 2019 that offers a lower-cost all-flash solution for less latency-sensitive workloads. FlashArray//C uses QLC technology, a cheaper, but slower flash alternative to SLC, MLC or even TLC that is being used in all-flash arrays today. Developing a solution using QLC requires more flash management, however using DirectFlash compared to standard SSDs offers Pure Storage cost and management advantages. How …

#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, …

#109 – An Overview of ObjectEngine with Brian Schwarz

#109 – An Overview of ObjectEngine with Brian Schwarz

Chris EvansGuest Speakers, Pure Storage

In this episode, Chris talks to Brian Schwarz, VP of Product Management for FlashBlade and ObjectEngine at Pure Storage.  ObjectEngine is a scale-out de-duplication engine that efficiently writes data to either FlashBlade or public cloud object stores.  The solution developed from the acquisition of StorReduce in 2018. ObjectEngine was conceived when Pure Storage observed customers using FlashBlade for backup data.  The FlashBlade platform was originally developed for high-performance file-based applications like analytics.  De-duplication wasn’t integrated natively as an initial design decision.  Combining ObjectEngine with FlashBlade enables space saving ratios of around 8:1 or greater. You …

#82 – Storage Predictions for 2019

#82 – Storage Predictions for 2019

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

The idea of this episode was to put some structure around a set of enterprise storage predictions for 2019.  As you will hear from the dialog, that’s not quite what we achieved!  However, Chris Evans, Chris Mellor and Martin Glassborow do raise some interesting points on the direction of the industry in 2019.  The conversation starts with a look at media.  QLC flash is likely to be a hot topic, but what about storage class memory?  Have hard drives had their day or is the technology moving into a state of equilibrium? The conversation moves …

#64 – Success & Failure in Storage Startup Land

#64 – Success & Failure in Storage Startup Land

Chris EvansGarbage 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

#58 – Storage Vendor Hero Numbers

Chris EvansGarbage 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

#56 – Defining Scale-out Storage

Chris EvansGarbage 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 …