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...]
#89 – Choices in NVMe Architectures
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 … [Read more...]
#88 – Nigel Tozer returns to talk about Ransomware
This week Chris and Martin talk to Nigel Tozer, Solutions Marketing Director for EMEA at Commvault. Nigel was a guest about 12 months ago and on that episode he talked about GDPR. This time the discussion is about ransomware and what businesses can do about it. The challenges of protecting data from theft or extortion are greater than ever. So, can we identify a common … [Read more...]
#87 – The Risks of Storage Media Reuse versus Recycling
In this episode, Chris and Martin talk to Simon Zola from Avtel Data Destruction. This is a follow-up episode to #85 (Storage for Home and Homelabs) where Martin and Chris questioned the ease of recovering data from pre-owned storage media. As we find out, the process was pretty easy. Martin was able to recover significant amounts of personal data with little effort and … [Read more...]
#86 – Eran Brown Discusses Storage, Security & Multi-Cloud
This week, Chris and Martin talk to Eran Brown, CTO in EMEA for INFINIDAT. As we move to a more distributed world, implementing data security becomes ever more challenging. Eran explains the issues and how his customers are looking to solve the problem. One of the initial choices is to decide exactly where to encrypt. We're familiar with drive-level encryption, even … [Read more...]