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...]
#163 – Inflection Points in Storage Deployment Strategies
Technology refreshes are a constant part of the IT landscape. Businesses need to frequently update and modernise their infrastructure. Typically, the inertia to move between vendors is strong, but inflection points do occur, when the cost and risk of change is outweighed by the benefits. How do you identify inflection points in your environment and then take advantage of the … [Read more...]
#145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise
This week Chris and Martin discuss the announcement of Google Cloud partners offering Anthos Ready Storage. Anthos is Google's on-premises cloud infrastructure running Kubernetes-based containers. Platform users can now deploy locally in their data centre, on local hardware, while using the GCP management plane. What is the benefit of having storage certified for Anthos? … [Read more...]
#130 – Making Money in the Storage Business
This week, Chris and Martin reflect on changes in the storage industry and the ways in which vendors can make money from storage hardware and software. It's been a tough time for storage vendors of late and the discussion starts by looking at the challenges of making money in a market where components are commodity and decline in price each month. How should vendors adapt … [Read more...]
#112 – Introduction to NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS)
NetApp has developed a new backup service called NDAS or NetApp Data Availability Services. NDAS is based in the public cloud and provides the ability to run analytics against secondary data in AWS S3, without having re-hydrate through a backup platform. Chris met with Charlotte Brooks (Technical Marketing Engineer) and Joel Kaufman (Director of Technical Marketing) to … [Read more...]
#102 – May Midrange Madness with Chris Mellor
This week Martin, Chris Evans and Chris Mellor discuss Dell EMC's plans for merging the three current midrange storage platforms marketed by the company. This is a follow-up to the article Chris recently posted on https://blockandfiles.com that discusses Project Trident. There are a lot of moving parts to consider when merging storage platforms. Customers have spent time and … [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...]
#80 – Discussing NetApp’s AI Strategy with Santosh Rao
In this podcast recorded at NetApp Insight 2018, Chris talks to Santosh Rao, Senior Technical Director at NetApp. Santosh leads NetApp's AI and Data Engineering efforts and has a 10-year history at the company, working on initiatives including Clustered ONTAP. This conversation covers how NetApp is developing an Edge-to-Core-to-Cloud strategy that includes collecting and … [Read more...]
#78 – Thoughts on NetApp with Greg Knieriemen
Last week Chris attended NetApp Insight in Barcelona and had a chance to chat to Greg Knieriemen, Chief Technologist in the Storage Systems & Software business at NetApp. Greg was formerly at Hitachi Vantara where he held a similar role. This conversation touches on Greg's reasons for choosing NetApp and exactly what he will be focusing on within the company. Elapsed … [Read more...]