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 … [Read more...]
#98 – Shared Storage for Scale-out Databases with Walt Hinton from Pavilion Data
In this third recording from Dell Technologies World 2019, Chris talks with Walt Hinton, Head of Corporate and Product Marketing at Pavilion Data Systems. The topic of conversation is the alignment of shared storage with scale-out NoSQL databases that typically place storage components on separate local disks. As rack-scale computing becomes more widely adopted, local … [Read more...]
#97 – Building Storage Using NVMe/TCP with Kam Eshghi from Lightbits Labs
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 … [Read more...]
#96 – Discussing SmartNICs and Storage with Rob Davis from Mellanox
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 … [Read more...]
#95 – Quantifying Storage Vendor Guarantees with Chris Mellor and Eran Brown
This week, Chris E is joined by Chris Mellor and returning guest Eran Brown. The team discuss the usefulness of storage vendor guarantees like de-dupe ratios and uptime. Do vendors use these metrics as a marketing tactic to attract new customers or is there any value in them? The idea of a sales/marketing guarantee sounds appealing. Storage vendors have been using them … [Read more...]
#94 – Backblaze HDD Reliability Stats with Andy Klein
In this episode, Martin and Chris talk to Andy Klein from Backblaze. Since 2014, Backblaze has been collecting and publishing hard drive reliability information for their storage pods. The pods are custom-built and used to hold backup data from customers and to support the B2 cloud storage offering. Rather than buy an expensive storage platform or use the public cloud, … [Read more...]
#93 – Myspace Loses 12 Years’ of Music
This week, Chris and Martin discuss the issues at Myspace, which recently disclosed that 12 years' worth of user content had been lost during a (failed) server migration. The once-mighty Myspace was the largest social networking site from 2005 to 2009 (according to Wikipedia) and had estimated revenues of $109 million in 2011. So, how could a company with such as large … [Read more...]
#92 – Introduction to Elastifile with Jerome McFarland (Sponsored)
This week, Chris talks to Jerome McFarland, VP of Marketing with Elastifile, Inc. Elastifile has developed a scale-out distributed file system called ECFS - the Elastifile Cloud File System. ECFS runs either on-premises, in the public cloud as a marketplace offering or, most recently as a full native storage service in GCP. In addition to the base file system, Elastifile … [Read more...]
#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review
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 … [Read more...]
#90 – Dell EMC’s Enterprise NVMe Strategy with Vince Westin (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 … [Read more...]