Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris is joined by IBM Storage CMO Scott Baker. The discussion takes place at Flash Memory Summit 2022 (FMS), being held in person in Santa Clara, USA. FlashCore Modules are IBM’s custom flash drives, developed from IP acquired with the acquisition of Texas Memory Systems. Scott is presenting at FMS, discussing how FlashCore could …

In this episode, Chris talks to Rob Lee, CTO at Pure Storage about today’s announcement covering FlashBlade//S and Evergreen//Flex. FlashBlade//S is a new hardware platform that evolves the solution into a disaggregated architecture. The design enables compute and storage resources to be scaled independently, while incorporating existing DFMs (Dire…

In this episode, Chris is in conversation with VAST Data CMO, Jeff Denworth. The topic covers the recent announcement of Ceres, a new hardware platform combining ruler form-factor flash and BlueField DPUs. The new solution, which will eventually replace the current “Mavericks” D-boxes is a 1U system with flash, storage-class memory and network conn…

In this episode, Chris talks to Justin Emerson from Pure Storage about modern design considerations for power-efficient storage. The cost of powering data centres has increased massively over the last 12 months, driven by the global economy and recovery from COVID-19. At a component level, servers are increasing their power usage, with faster proce…

In this episode, Chris talks to Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat about the announcement of SSA II, the second generation all-flash InfiniBox platform. The first generation SSA (solid state array) was developed to address a customer requirement that all long-tail latency I/Os must be delivered at all-flash levels of performance. The InfiniBox architect…

In this episode, Chris and Martin discuss NVMe hard drives with Tim Walker and Mohamad El-Batal from Seagate Research. The concept behind the NVMe HDD is simple – provide a native NVMe interface to traditional enterprise nearline hard drives. Does this approach make sense and what can be gained, other than standardising on an interface? With SMR, m…

In this episode, Chris and Martin explore the recently announced PCIe 6.0 specification with Al Yanes, President and chair of the PCI Sig. PCIe (PCI Express) has been a backbone of server and mobile technologies for almost two decades, providing high-speed interconnect for add-in cards and other peripherals. As one example of the benefit of PCIe, t…

In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Portworx co-founder and VP, GM of the Cloud Native Business Unit at Pure Storage, Murli Thirumale. Rather than covering specific technologies, this discussion looks at data as the third wave of IT agility. Wave One was the efficient use of infrastructure. Wave Two provided application mobility and agil…

Infinidat recently announced some significant enhancements to the InfiniGuard platform. InfiniGuard is a backup target appliance solution that includes deduplicating technology to optimise the storage and retrieval of backup data. In this podcast, Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat, talks about the new features and how they form part of a cyber resilien…

In this episode, Chris and Martin discuss data protection on a “vast” scale, with VAST Data VP of Data Protection, George Axberg. VAST has just announced a partnership with Commvault that will integrate Universal Storage with Commvault’s data management solutions. Further data protection vendor partnerships are expected in due course. While the ide…

In this episode, Chris and Martin discuss storage engine efficiency and performance with Speedb CEO, Adi Gelvan. Storage engines form the core of all databases, providing the translation between the structured form of data the application sees, and the way in which data is written onto physical media like disks or SSDs. The performance and resilien…

In this episode, Chris and Martin are in conversation with Aran Khanna, CEO and co-founder of Archera. The topic is cloud optimisation, also known as FinOps or Financial Operations. The public cloud introduces a transformation from capital to operational expenditure that, when combined with the frictionless ability to spin up any workload in minute…

In this episode, Chris talks to Danny Abukalam about implementations for Software-Defined Storage (SDS), in particular the Task Specific model. Danny works in Product Engineering at SoftIron, a company that develops hardware platforms for Open Source software. In the storage market, SoftIron offers solutions that combine task-specific designed hard…

In this episode, Chris, Martin and Chris are joined by Infinidat CMO, Eric Herzog. The aim of this continuing discussion is to review the storage news and events from 2021. As usual though, the agenda gets trashed and the conversation goes down a series of rabbit holes. However, the team do manage to discuss the changing world of storage management…

This week, the team take a review of 2021, looking at the events in storage and a lot more. In fact, this episode goes way off-piste in the conversation, so be prepared for public cloud, China, service models and storage unicorns. This is part 1 of a two-part “double header”, the next episode of which will be published in a couple of weeks. In the …

This week, Chris and Martin review the announcements coming out of AWS Reinvent, specifically those covering file systems. AWS announced FSx for OpenZFS and recently added FSx for NetApp ONTAP to the existing offerings. With FSx for Windows Server and FSx for Lustre (plus EFS), AWS now has five different file system solutions. Why has AWS decided t…

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 t…

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…

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 o…

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…