Storage Unpacked

A weekly podcast on deploying and managing enterprise storage and data

#219 – Anatomy of a Ransomware Attack

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This week Chris chats to Tony Mendoza, Senior Director of IT at Spectra Logic. The conversation covers the ransomware attack experienced by Spectra in May 2020 and the subsequent response to deal with the problem. On 7th May 2020, the company detected a ransomware exploit was encrypting files across application servers. In their place was a plain text file, demanding money … [Read more...] about #219 – Anatomy of a Ransomware Attack

#218 – Real World Customer Data Protection Experiences with Don Foster (Sponsored)

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This week, Chris is in conversation with Don Foster, Global Head of Sales Engineering for Commvault. The discussion covers the experiences of customers as IT continues to evolve into public, hybrid and multi-clouds. Don runs the global Sales Engineering teams, tasked with helping customers protect their data in a world that now includes on-premises deployments, the public … [Read more...] about #218 – Real World Customer Data Protection Experiences with Don Foster (Sponsored)

#217 – Introduction to CXL with Jim Pappas

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This week, Chris and Martin discuss the emerging CXL technology with CXL Consortium Chair, Jim Pappas. CXL or Compute Express Link, is a new solution that will provide improved connectivity between processors and accelerator devices connected through the PCIe 5.0 bus. With CXL, central processors, GPUs and other co-processors can share memory and operate closer together with … [Read more...] about #217 – Introduction to CXL with Jim Pappas

#216 – The Data Explosion with VAST Data CEO Renen Hallak

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This week, Chris chats to VAST Data CEO, Renen Hallak about the explosion in data and the challenges of analysing and managing huge quantities of unstructured content. VAST Data has built a scale-out unstructured object store that customers are now using to store petabytes of complex data. But what does complex mean, and how is that data being used? Renen explains how many … [Read more...] about #216 – The Data Explosion with VAST Data CEO Renen Hallak

#215 – Stateless Compute Machines

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In this week's episode, Chris and Martin discuss network booting and the ability to create completely stateless servers. The idea of SAN booting has been around for two decades, enabling both the operating system disk and data disks to be delivered from SAN storage. NVMe/TCP and other NVMe-oF protocols promise the ability to implement the same capability for modern systems. … [Read more...] about #215 – Stateless Compute Machines

#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

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This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcement from CloudFlare of R2, a new object storage solution. With such a widely dispersed CDN network, could CloudFlare become a real competitor for S3, considering that the R2 platform will have no egress fees? This episode digs into the details, to look at what additional features object storage vendors need in their arsenal and … [Read more...] about #214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?

#213 – Kubernetes-Native Data Protection

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With KubeCon North America 2021 looming, Chris and Martin spend this week looking at data protection for Kubernetes-native environments. Vendors have started to introduce backup solutions, some working within the container environment itself, some outside as part of existing products. Exactly what should be backed up and how should these products work? Are we right to … [Read more...] about #213 – Kubernetes-Native Data Protection

#212 – File Not Found

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In this week's podcast, Chris and Martin get together to discuss the curious case of missing files. In this instance, the files weren't actually missing, but according to an article in The Verge, students running a software simulation didn't know how to determine their location. In a world where the current generation have grown up on iPhones and iPads (or similar devices) … [Read more...] about #212 – File Not Found

#211 – Pure//Launch – Announcing Fusion and Portworx Data Services (Sponsored)

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In this week's sponsored episode, Chris chats to Alex McMullan, CTO International at Pure Storage. The discussion covers Pure//Launch and today's announcements of two SaaS solutions - Fusion and Portworx Data Services. Fusion is a new SaaS management plane for administering and optimising Pure Storage hardware and software products, including FlashArray, FlashBlade and Cloud … [Read more...] about #211 – Pure//Launch – Announcing Fusion and Portworx Data Services (Sponsored)

#210 – Building SANs in the Cloud

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This week, Chris and Martin discuss the merits of building virtual SANs in the public cloud. Vendors including Silk and Pure Storage now offer virtual storage "appliances" built from virtual instances and cloud storage. Why are these solutions necessary, when the public cloud providers have plenty of high-performance block and file storage offerings? The discussion looks at … [Read more...] about #210 – Building SANs in the Cloud