This week Chris and Martin chat to Steve Fingerhut, CMO at Pliops. Pliops has developed a "Storage Processor" in the form factor of an AIC (add-in card) that offloads storage functions from application software. This discussion looks at why the technology is needed and how Pliops has implemented the solution to drop into an existing server. The Pliops Storage Processor … [Read more...]
#179 – The Myth of Cheap Cloud Storage
Everyone thinks cloud storage is cheaper than on-premises, but is that really true? When cloud storage like AWS S3 was first introduced, vendors dropped their $/GB prices on a frequent basis. However, AWS hasn't reduced the base price of S3 in five years, instead preferring to offer cheaper tiers of storage. In this week's episode, Chris and Martin debate the reasons for the … [Read more...]
#178 – Monetising the Value of Data
This week, Chris has a great conversation with Bill Schmarzo, Chief Innovation Officer at Hitachi Vantara. Bill maintains a consultancy practice within Hitachi that helps customers build processes and identify data that can be used to create business value within an organisation. In this discussion, Bill outlines the process for identifying opportunities, capturing the data … [Read more...]
#177 – SmartNICs and Project Monterey
This week Chris and Martin look at SmartNIC technology and the announcement of Project Monterey. SmartNICs are offload devices that provide networking, storage and security functions with additional benefits such as centralised management. VMware has announced Project Monterey, a preview solution that takes SmartNICs and offloads storage and networking tasks from the ESXi … [Read more...]
#176 – Opinionated Storage Opinions with Chris Mellor
This week, Martin and Chris catch up with Chris Mellor in his "pandemic infused isolation". Without a particular theme, this episode looks at the unchanging landscape of tape and media, Dell EMC building another new storage platform and Nutanix still not making a profit. In the future zone, we speculate on AMD and Micron getting together to build an Optane challenger, the … [Read more...]
#175 – IBM FlashSystem Deep Dive (Sponsored)
This week Chris catches up with Ralf Colbus from IBM to talk about the evolution of FlashSystem. The FlashSystem platform is an enterprise-class block-based storage solution that scales from SMB/SME offerings to high-end all-NVMe and SCM capable devices. At the heart of the design is the software behind Spectrum Virtualise, the SAN Volume Controller or SVC. FlashSystem now … [Read more...]
#174 – Introduction to Zoned Storage with Phil Bullinger
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...]