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...]
#64 – Success & Failure in Storage Startup Land
This week's conversation follows up on Chris' recent visit to Flash Memory Summit in the US. Chris and Martin discuss the storage startup landscape and the range of companies appearing at the event. What makes a company successful? Is IPO or acquisition the right route? The discussion starts with a simple, yet tricky question - why does storage continue to be such a … [Read more...]
#58 – Storage Vendor Hero Numbers
This week, Chris Mellor is back and the team take a dive into the subject of storage vendor hero numbers. What are hero numbers? We've all seen them, they're the huge performance figures quoted by all-flash storage vendors aimed at putting their products forward in the best light possible. Are hero numbers believable or should we be looking at certified vendor benchmark … [Read more...]
#56 – Defining Scale-out Storage
This week's podcast is a conversation between Martin and Chris, talking about how we define scale-up and scale-out storage. A recent discussion on Twitter about Pure1 and the idea of federated scale-out generated some interesting feedback, so we thought it might be good to get some definitions in place. The opening discussion talks about how scale-up and scale-out should be … [Read more...]
#54 – Are we at All-flash and HDD Array Price Parity?
This week, Chris and Martin discuss the subject of price parity between all-flash and hybrid or HDD-based storage arrays. From Martin's perspective, he is starting to see vendor pricing getting close to parity and it making more sense to buy all-flash than a spinning media device. However, what are the issues? TCO is one - it's not all about array pricing. Also, flash … [Read more...]
#44 – Ultra High Capacity Flash Drives
This week, Chris and Martin discuss the availability of super-high capacity or ultra-capacity flash drives. The conversation comes out of an announcement from Nimbus Data that has produced a 100TB SATA SSD. This follows up from last year's 50TB drives that were OEMed to Viking and Smart Modular. You can find some more background at Architecting IT here. With so much … [Read more...]