IDC recently released their latest quarterly storage sales figures. The data shows, yet again, that IBM sales continue to decline. In this week's podcast, Chris and Martin discuss the state of IBM's storage business. Is it time for IBM to quit? IBM has an embarrassment of riches in storage software and hardware (or a nice portfolio as Martin puts it). Many of these … [Read more...]
#102 – May Midrange Madness with Chris Mellor
This week Martin, Chris Evans and Chris Mellor discuss Dell EMC's plans for merging the three current midrange storage platforms marketed by the company. This is a follow-up to the article Chris recently posted on https://blockandfiles.com that discusses Project Trident. There are a lot of moving parts to consider when merging storage platforms. Customers have spent time … [Read more...]
#99 – Dell Technologies World 2019 in Review
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...]
#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...]
#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...]
#85 – Storage for Home and Homelabs
This week Chris and Martin discuss the subject of storage for home and homelabs. With so much content being personally generated these days, is it better to store data on local hardware or use the public cloud? It turns out that many of the home storage devices we're familiar with are pushing more to SMB and enterprise-class features. Alternatively, if you're like Martin, … [Read more...]
#82 – Storage Predictions for 2019
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 … [Read more...]
#81 – Storage or Data Asset Management?
This week Chris and Martin talk about the evolution from storage management to data management. This follows from recent vendor events where data management featured highly, but still seemed to focus on infrastructure products. Is there a definition that can bridge the gap - something like Data Asset Management? The team start by trying to get a handle on what storage and … [Read more...]
#75 – It’s ILM All Over Again with Chris Mellor
Data volumes have always increased over time as we store more information with the hope that one day some of it will be useful. Even 30 years ago on the mainframe, Information Lifecycle Management or ILM was a thing with tools like DFHSM used to move content around between disk and tape. This week Martin, Chris Evans and Chris Mellor talk about the new range of data … [Read more...]
#66 – Amazon RDS – Coming to a vSphere Cluster Near You
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware recently announced that RDS, the Relational Database Service was in tech preview as an on-premises deployment on vSphere. Running a service outside of Amazon's data centre represents a big change for the company. The only non-core offering to date has been Snowball, the edge data appliance. In this week's recording, Martin and Chris … [Read more...]