This week, Chris and Martin chat to Phil Bullinger, Senior VP and General Manager for the Data Centre Business Unit at Western Digital. As storage media capacities increase, recording methods are introducing challenges to maintaining resiliency and performance. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) are two techniques that have developed to address the … [Read more...]
#173 – Transparent Enterprise Storage Pricing
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 … [Read more...]
#172 – Tintri SQL Integrated Storage
This week, Chris and Martin talk to Shawn Meyers, Field CTO at Tintri about SQL Integrated Storage. The Tintri VMstore platform originally provided the ability to apply policy-based management to virtual machines on shared storage. This capability has now been extended to databases, in particular Microsoft SQL Server. SQL Integrated Storage (or SIS) works by exposing an … [Read more...]
#171 – Exploiting Persistent Memory with MemVerge
This week the team double down on the topics of in-memory computing and persistent memory. Chris and Martin talk to Charles Fan, CEO at MemVerge about Big Memory and using persistent memory technology (specifically Optane) to supplement system DRAM. DRAM is expensive and as capacities scale linearly, the price of memory increases exponentially. Systems are limited by … [Read more...]
#170 – The End of Pure Play Storage Companies
This week, Chris and Martin debate whether we have seen the end of new "pure play" storage companies that go the distance to full independence. Where there used to be many businesses like EMC, Pure Storage and NetApp, the number of public storage-only companies is dwindling. Is this market too challenging to get into or is there simply no money to be made? If we look back … [Read more...]
#169 – In-Memory Computing and Apache Ignite
This week Chris and Martin talk to Nikita Ivanov CTO and founder of GridGain Systems. The topic is in-memory computing and specifically Apache Ignite, an open-source key-value store that also supports SQL99 and POSIX-compliant file interfaces. The idea of running applications purely from memory isn't a new one. DRAM is the fastest "storage" component but isn't designed … [Read more...]
#168 – Storage Unicorns
This week Chris and Martin review the idea of storage unicorns, companies that have a valuation of one billion dollars or more. What exactly is the basis or justification for a billion dollar price tag? Is this something invented by the VC industry or is there a real degree of science behind the assumptions? The list in question comes from a Blocks & Files article … [Read more...]
#167 – Adapting Open Source Storage for the Enterprise
This week Chris and Martin catch up with Phil Straw, CEO at Softiron for a discussion on packaging Open Source storage solutions for adoption by the enterprise. Softiron sells a software appliance based on Ceph which has been tuned to deliver high performance with high efficiency. So, exactly how do vendors go about making Open Source more consumable without breaking the … [Read more...]
#166 – Infinidat Elastic Storage Pricing with Eran Brown (Sponsored)
This week, Chris and Martin are joined by Chris Mellor from Blocks & Files and Eran Brown from Infinidat to discuss flexible pricing strategies in light of current business disruptions. Infinidat has introduced an elastic pricing model for both capex and opex purchases. How is this implemented and what platform features enable Infinidat to deliver this capability? As … [Read more...]
#165 – Homogeneous Data Protection with HYCU (Sponsored)
As we move to a hybrid and multi-cloud world, IT organisations need standardisation in operational processes. This is particularly true for data protection, where consistent policies and compliance are essential. This week, Chris chats to Subbiah Sundaram from HYCU about data protection in public clouds and the ability to bring a consistent reporting model with HYCU … [Read more...]