This week, Martin and Chris delve into cryptocurrency mining in a lengthy discussion on Chia with Robert Novak. Chia is a new cryptocurrency technology that differs from previous online currencies in that the basis for earning rewards (or coins) is based on the volume of data stored on disk, rather than raw compute performed. Rob takes the team through a discussion of the … [Read more...]
#202 – Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat (Sponsored)
In this week's sponsored episode, Chris and Martin talk to Phil Bullinger, newly appointed CEO at Infinidat. The company has reached their ten-year anniversary, shipping over seven exabytes of capacity in that time. With successful growth in every quarter during 2020, we discuss how Infinidat is helping drive the consolidation story for large enterprises and MSPs looking to … [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...]
#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...]
#183 – Magnetic Tape AMA (Ask Matt Anything)
This week Chris and Martin take the opportunity to grill (not broil) Matt Starr from Spectralogic to learn everything about magnetic tape. This episode came out of a discussion with Chris Mellor (episode #176) in which we asked the question why tape media doesn't wear out. The answer is obviously within the podcast so you'll need to listen to find out! In this … [Read more...]
#181 – Is There a Future for Storage Infrastructure Companies?
This week Chris and Martin debate the future of on-premises storage infrastructure companies in light of announcements and events from IBM, Dell and NetApp. IBM is splitting in two, while Dell and NetApp have recently held virtual versions of their annual conferences. Is the on-premises infrastructure business shrinking and becoming too low-margin to be worthwhile? Martin … [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...]
#177 – SmartNICs and Project Monterey
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...]
#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...]