Storage Unpacked Podcast

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 vendo…

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 w…

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 i…

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 Flash…

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 offering…

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin meet with Brian Carpenter, Senior Director of Unstructured Technology Strategy at Pure Storage, to talk about UFFO – Unified Fast File and Object. UFFO is a technology bringing together the two main types of unstructured data into a single platform – FlashBlade. The discussion centres on the benefits of usin…

In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin look at NVIDIA’s GPUDirect Storage (GDS), a technology for moving data directly from persistent storage to GPUs, bypassing the CPU. The aim of the technology is to provide greater throughput to keep GPUs active, and looking at some of the thoughts from our podcast with Liqid (#204), it’s clear that this feat…

This week the team is back after a short break and ready to talk all things cloud – or at least about Elastic Block Store. AWS recently announced io2 and io2 Block Express, the first new EBS block storage offerings for eight years. With such a long gap since io1 was first released, what has AWS been up to and what’s new? In this discussion, Martin …

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow and President of NVM Express about the updates in NVMe 2.0. NVM Express (generally abbreviated to NVMe) is a storage protocol that was developed to overcome some of the shortcomings of traditional protocols when working with new high performance media such as NAND SSDs and Optane. The …

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin have a great conversation with David Ngo, CTO for Metallic at Commvault, and Ranga Rajagopalan, VP Product Management for Commvault and Metallic. Commvault is celebrating 25 years in data protection, while Metallic, a SaaS data protection solution from Commvault has been available for nearly two years. In th…

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Sumit Puri, CEO of Liqid Inc. Liqid has developed a composable infrastructure platform they call CDI or Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure. CDI enables IT organisations to take the building blocks of compute – storage, networking, CPUs, memory and GPUs then combine them dynamically in ways that address the p…

This week, Martin and Chris delve into cryptocurrency mining in a lengthy discussion on Chia with Robert Novak. Chia is a new cryptocurrency technology that differs from previous online currencies in that the basis for earning rewards (or coins) is based on the volume of data stored on disk, rather than raw compute performed. Rob […] The post #203 …

In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris and Martin talk to Phil Bullinger, newly appointed CEO at Infinidat. The company has reached their ten-year anniversary, shipping over seven exabytes of capacity in that time. With successful growth in every quarter during 2020, we discuss how Infinidat is helping drive the consolidation story for large enter…

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin talk to Paul Speciale (Chief Product Officer at Scality) and Chris Tinker (Distinguished Technologist with HPE) about the launch of ARTESCA, a new lightweight, cloud-native object storage solution. HPE and Scality have announced the product jointly, delivering the solution on HPE hardware with an exclusive d…

This week, Martin and Chris are joined by Jim Walker, VP of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs. In a slight departure from a purely storage-based recording, this discussion follows the evolution of application packaging and deployment, from virtualisation to containers and serverless. The logical conclusion of any computing environment is to execu…

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the level of innovation seen in the data storage industry over the last decade. This topic is one that comes up repeatedly as we review the market, startups and incumbents. In reality, of course there’s been innovation, whether the “micro-innovations” that move the storage media industry along, or the […] The pos…

With the news that VAST Data is moving to a software-only model, this week Chris and Martin debate the merits of the move, for both the vendor and customers. Does this transition for VAST represent a new move in the industry, or can we point to other companies that have already made the jump? What […] The post #198 – Software-Only Storage Vendors a…

The ongoing saga at OVH highlights the need to have solid disaster recovery plans that reflect the risk and impact of systems failure on the business. In this episode, Chris and Martin dig into the issues at OVH and how they represent a wake-up call for businesses in general. High profile failures have been apparent […] The post #197 – Prioritising…

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the issues of building a multi-cloud data storage strategy. The range of options for private, public and hosted data services is huge, with each offering a different set of services and implemented in subtly unique ways. How can an enterprise take advantage of these services, while maintaining data protection, [……

This week’s podcast episode continues the discussion on SmartNICs and DPUs with Fungible, a company that claims to have originally coined the term DPU. Chris and Martin talk with Pradeep Sindhu (CEO and co-founder) and Jai Menon (Chief Scientist) about Fungible’s storage cluster and host-based DPU. The Fungible architecture aims to solve the challe…

In this week’s episode, Martin and Chris discuss Computational Storage with Tong Zhang, Chief Scientist and co-founder at ScaleFlux. Computational Storage devices add value to traditional NAND by offloading data processes directly onto the storage media. ScaleFlux offers two families of CSDs, including the CSD 2000 series, which implements inline d…

This week, Chris and Martin are talking to a podcast repeat offender, Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU. HYCU has recently announced the availability of Protégé for Microsoft Office 365, delivered as SaaS or Backup as a Service (BaaS). This continues an expansion of the HYCU and Protégé backup offerings that started with Nutanix […] The post…

This week, Chris and Martin chat to long-time friend and Kubernetes legend, Nigel Poulton. Nigel is well-known in the industry for producing training courses and books on Kubernetes, although was once a storage person in a previous life. The aim of this podcast episode is to examine how storage and Kubernetes come together. However, we […] The post…

This week, Chris and Martin are in discussion with Cathy Southwick, CIO at Pure Storage. The topic of conversation is the results of a CIO survey undertaken by Pure to look back at the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and how customers have changed their IT strategies. The discussion covers how Pure Storage has adapted […] The post #191 – CIO…

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Kevin Deierling, SVP of Marketing for Networking Products at NVIDIA. SmartNICs and DPUs (Data Processing Units) are starting to become mainstream as application use-cases such as AI and analytics drive a need for greater data throughput and performance. Kevin explains the design and thinking behind BlueField, NVI…