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...]
#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...]
#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...]
#153 – Post Pandemic Storage Efficiencies
As we head towards week 4 of lockdown in the UK, Chris and Martin reflect on the personal changes in their daily routines, as well as the implications on businesses. This has been a time for dusting off old skills (like DNS/DHCP configurations) and finding new uses for Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. Working from home has placed significant focus on Zoom, where the attack … [Read more...]
#150 – Myriad File Systems
File systems provide structure and a way to store data on computer systems. From the early days of FAT and NTFS, we now see a proliferation of file systems in the enterprise. Why do we have so many and what benefits do they offer? In this episode, Chris and Martin look at the evolution of the file system and why solutions have been developed to meet specific application … [Read more...]
#149 – Coronavirus 2.0
This week, Chris and Martin review their thoughts from the previous discussion on COVID-19 and what we have learned since then. In what is an incredibly fast-moving situation, the way in which we viewed the impacts of the global epidemic were perhaps a little naive. We take another look at how vendors will need to market and sell to their clients and how even virtual events … [Read more...]
#146 – Coronavirus and Impacts on the Technology Industry
In this episode we take a look at the impact of COVID-19, commonly known as the Coronavirus. Since the outbreak in China towards the end of 2019, tens of thousands have been infected, thousands of people have died. As the spread of the disease moves outside China, we look at the effect on business, conferences and the positive benefits that may occur with reduced … [Read more...]
#145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise
This week Chris and Martin discuss the announcement of Google Cloud partners offering Anthos Ready Storage. Anthos is Google's on-premises cloud infrastructure running Kubernetes-based containers. Platform users can now deploy locally in their data centre, on local hardware, while using the GCP management plane. What is the benefit of having storage certified for Anthos? … [Read more...]
#142 – Storage, Automation and DevOps
This week, Chris and Martin discuss the automation of storage. In a follow-on from the Dell EMC presentation at Storage Field Day 19, this conversation looks at the challenges of opening storage provisioning and management to the wider developer community. In the past, SRM tools have focused on providing the "record of truth" for storage and well as the interface to … [Read more...]