This week, Chris chats with Andy Watson, CTO at WekaIO in another episode recorded live at Flash Memory Summit 2019.

With the recent acquisition of E8 Storage and Elastifile by hyper-scale cloud companies, is this move an attempt to plug the gap in existing cloud storage offerings?

Andy provides his opinion on the two acquisitions and how they might fit into the existing ecosystem. Even 1GB/s may not be enough throughput as we see more focus on ML/AI applications and using cloud-based GPUs and TPUs. Some applications expect data in both NFS and SMB format. That could be a challenge for some solutions.

These purchases could be opportunistic and we may need to keep watching to see how cloud providers will move to the next level of storage performance.

You can find out more about WekaIO at and follow Andy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/the_andywatson.

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:01:00 – Quick overview of WekaIO* 00:05:00 – E8 Storage & Elastifile acquisitions by public cloud providers* 00:07:10 – Object storage isn’t good for performance, block is not scalable* 00:08:20 – AWS SMB support was implemented via a separate feature* 00:10:39 – Some applications are inherently multi-protocol* 00:12:20 – 1GB/s isn’t enough performance to keep a GPU busy* 00:15:30 – Could latest purchases be opportunistic?* 00:18:00 – The public cloud will have greater file demands in the future* 00:21:55 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #52 – An Introduction to WekaIO Matrix with Liran Zvibel* Can the WekaIO Matrix file system be faster than DAS?* WekaIO Presents at Storage Field Day 18* #92 – Introduction to Elastifile with Jerome McFarland* Disaggregated Storage Part II with Zivan Ori from E8 Storage

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