This week, Chris and Martin chat to long-time friend and Kubernetes legend, Nigel Poulton. Nigel is well-known in the industry for producing training courses and books on Kubernetes, although was once a storage person in a previous life. The aim of this podcast episode is to examine how storage and Kubernetes come together. However, we start by asking Nigel to explain his … [Read more...]
#191 – CIO Pandemic Priorities
This week, Chris and Martin are in discussion with Cathy Southwick, CIO at Pure Storage. The topic of conversation is the results of a CIO survey undertaken by Pure to look back at the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and how customers have changed their IT strategies. The discussion covers how Pure Storage has adapted to the lack of in-person site visits and adapting … [Read more...]
#190 – NVIDIA BlueField SmartNICs & DPUs
This week, Chris and Martin chat to Kevin Deierling, SVP of Marketing for Networking Products at NVIDIA. SmartNICs and DPUs (Data Processing Units) are starting to become mainstream as application use-cases such as AI and analytics drive a need for greater data throughput and performance. Kevin explains the design and thinking behind BlueField, NVIDIA's family of DPU products … [Read more...]
#186 – End of the Year Show 2020 – Part One
This week, Martin and the two Chris's look back at 2020 for the highlights and lowlights of the storage industry. What's been hyped and what's been a success? Will we be travelling in 2021 and what impact has the lockdown had on 2020 sales? This episode is the first of a two parter over the next couple of weeks before we close down for the Christmas period. Elapsed … [Read more...]
#185 – Pure-as-a-Service 2.0 (Sponsored)
This week Chris and Martin talk to Rob Walters, GM for Pure-as-a-Service at Pure Storage. The company has recently announced upgrades and expansion of the "as-a-service" model, formerly known as Evergreen storage. The name change and the widening of the portfolio represents an opportunity for customers to see transparent pricing and a greater depth of service offerings. … [Read more...]
#184 – MCAS – Memory Centric Active Storage
This week, Chris and Martin talk to Daniel Waddington, Principal Research Staff Member in the Global Storage Research Group at IBM Research. Daniel is developing MCAS - Memory Centric Active Storage - a high-performance key-value store designed for persistent memory. The aim is to create a platform that can be used to bring storage and compute closer together. Persistent … [Read more...]
#180 – SmartNICs – Pliops Storage Processor
This week Chris and Martin chat to Steve Fingerhut, CMO at Pliops. Pliops has developed a "Storage Processor" in the form factor of an AIC (add-in card) that offloads storage functions from application software. This discussion looks at why the technology is needed and how Pliops has implemented the solution to drop into an existing server. The Pliops Storage Processor … [Read more...]
#178 – Monetising the Value of Data
This week, Chris has a great conversation with Bill Schmarzo, Chief Innovation Officer at Hitachi Vantara. Bill maintains a consultancy practice within Hitachi that helps customers build processes and identify data that can be used to create business value within an organisation. In this discussion, Bill outlines the process for identifying opportunities, capturing the data … [Read more...]
#175 – IBM FlashSystem Deep Dive (Sponsored)
This week Chris catches up with Ralf Colbus from IBM to talk about the evolution of FlashSystem. The FlashSystem platform is an enterprise-class block-based storage solution that scales from SMB/SME offerings to high-end all-NVMe and SCM capable devices. At the heart of the design is the software behind Spectrum Virtualise, the SAN Volume Controller or SVC. FlashSystem now … [Read more...]
#174 – Introduction to Zoned Storage with Phil Bullinger
This week, Chris and Martin chat to Phil Bullinger, Senior VP and General Manager for the Data Centre Business Unit at Western Digital. As storage media capacities increase, recording methods are introducing challenges to maintaining resiliency and performance. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) are two techniques that have developed to address the … [Read more...]