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...]
#41 – Does Open Source Have a Place in Storage?
This week, Martin, Chris and Gavin reflect on the decision by EMC to disband the {code} team and discuss whether open source has a place in storage. {code} was a project started by EMC before the Dell acquisition. The team focused on open source advocacy and developing tools such as storage plugins for Docker. Looking wider, companies like Red Hat have built their business on … [Read more...]
#40 – Garbage Collection: Death of the Storage Admin
This week's podcast was recorded a few months ago, so apologies for the sound quality. The team discuss the role of the storage administrator and whether we will see the eventual demise of storage admins or simply a transition to another role. The conversation tracks the responsibilities of storage administrators over the last 30 years, from the era of the mainframe to … [Read more...]
#39 – Garbage Collection: Storage Mythbusters Part I
In this week's podcast, the guys talk about some of the myths in the storage industry. The focus is mainly on traditional storage arrays and some of the features that end users might not need. The conversation takes a marketing turn, with questions on how five 9's availability is marketed and the use of dedupe/compression as a tool to reduce costs. What do you think? Are … [Read more...]