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...]
#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...]
#133 – FlashArray//C Deeper Dive with Pete Kirkpatrick
This episode was recorded live at Pure Storage offices in Silicon Valley. Chris talks to Pete Kirkpatrick, Chief Hardware Architect at Pure Storage about the FlashArray//C platform. FlashArray//C is a new solution announced at Pure Accelerate 2019 that offers a lower-cost all-flash solution for less latency-sensitive workloads. FlashArray//C uses QLC technology, a cheaper, … [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...]
#109 – An Overview of ObjectEngine with Brian Schwarz
In this episode, Chris talks to Brian Schwarz, VP of Product Management for FlashBlade and ObjectEngine at Pure Storage. ObjectEngine is a scale-out de-duplication engine that efficiently writes data to either FlashBlade or public cloud object stores. The solution developed from the acquisition of StorReduce in 2018. ObjectEngine was conceived when Pure Storage observed … [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...]
#58 – Storage Vendor Hero Numbers
This week, Chris Mellor is back and the team take a dive into the subject of storage vendor hero numbers. What are hero numbers? We've all seen them, they're the huge performance figures quoted by all-flash storage vendors aimed at putting their products forward in the best light possible. Are hero numbers believable or should we be looking at certified vendor benchmark … [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...]
#51 – Pure Accelerate Pregame
This episode was recorded at Pure Accelerate in San Francisco on Tuesday 22nd May 2018 just before the event started. Chris talks to Matt Leib and eventually Ray Lucchesi, initially about the role of the reseller, then eventually moving towards NVMe over Fabrics. As with all live recorded podcasts, there's a little background noise, including the weekly noon siren test. The … [Read more...]