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...]
#173 – Transparent Enterprise Storage Pricing
Enterprise storage pricing has all the simplicity of a mobile phone tariff. Vendors love to obfuscate the costs, whereas prospective purchasers just like a good, honest price. Why does enterprise storage pricing have to be so complicated and can't we just have pricing online? Chris and Martin chat to George Crump from StorONE about strategies for pricing from both the … [Read more...]
#107 – Should IBM Quit the Storage Hardware Business?
IDC recently released their latest quarterly storage sales figures. The data shows, yet again, that IBM sales continue to decline. In this week's podcast, Chris and Martin discuss the state of IBM's storage business. Is it time for IBM to quit? IBM has an embarrassment of riches in storage software and hardware (or a nice portfolio as Martin puts it). … [Read more...]
#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review
This week, Martin leads the conversation as Chris discusses the vendors presenting at the recent Storage Field Day 18 event. SFD18 is part of the Tech Field Day series delivered by Stephen Foskett and GestaltIT. We last spoke with Stephen in April 2018 - an episode on why storage isn't boring. Although there's no official theme for SFD events, the companies presenting were … [Read more...]
#82 – Storage Predictions for 2019
The idea of this episode was to put some structure around a set of enterprise storage predictions for 2019. As you will hear from the dialog, that's not quite what we achieved! However, Chris Evans, Chris Mellor and Martin Glassborow do raise some interesting points on the direction of the industry in 2019. The conversation starts with a look at media. QLC flash is likely … [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 diverse … [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...]
#37 – State of the Storage Union with Chris Mellor
This week Chris and Gavin catch up with Chris Mellor, Storage Editor for The Register. With so much happening in storage, it's difficult to know where to start, so the guys focus on the rumour of Dell EMC reversing into VMware. Could this really happen and why is Dell EMC even thinking about this? The conversation flows on to IBM and their super-mega-hyper-uber announcement … [Read more...]
Garbage Collection #006 – LTO-8 and the Future of Tape
This week LTO-8 was announced, with raw cartridge capacities of up to 12.8TB. In this podcast, recorded on 23rd October 2017, Chris and Martin discuss the evolution of LTO from a lowly 100GB to todays media with 120x the capacity. Tape is changing and becoming more of an archive medium, as backup has increasingly moved to disk. This begs the question, should standard formats … [Read more...]
Garbage Collection – Implementing a Multi-Vendor Storage Strategy
In this podcast, Chris and Martin discuss the issues in designing and implementing a multi-vendor storage strategy. The discussion covers whether any one vendor can provide all of today's storage products and who multiple vendors can be used to deliver a single requirement. Elapsed Time: 00:36:26 SFW: Yes 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:45 - A look at the market - product … [Read more...]