This week, Chris and Martin discuss the automation of storage. In a follow-on from the Dell EMC presentation at Storage Field Day 19, this conversation looks at the challenges of opening storage provisioning and management to the wider developer community.

In the past, SRM tools have focused on providing the “record of truth” for storage and well as the interface to provision resources to hosts. Dell EMC tried to create a separate data and management plane with ViPR, but the industry didn’t adopt this approach – potentially because Dell/EMC continued to own the technology.

Today, Dell EMC is focusing on automation through tools like Ansible and Python. How will enterprises continue to reduce over-provisioning and protect production systems? How should billing work? What about documentation? These questions and more, answered in this week’s podcast.

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:00:46 – Dell EMC & DevOps at TFD* 00:01:45 – The Storage Admin is a gatekeeper* 00:03:00 – SRM software has been universally terrible* 00:04:43 – Dell acquires iWave to create ViPR* 00:06:35 – Should we use wrappers or simply script?* 00:08:49 – Storage platforms must have multi-tenancy* 00:09:50 – How is storage billing achieved in the public cloud?* 00:11:00 – Shout out to DFHSM!* 00:13:02 – How efficient are storage system APIs?* 00:15:57 – How are RBAC and credentials managed?* 00:18:10 – What happens to documentation with automation?* 00:20:52 – Storage desired state and actual state* 00:23:27 – Which vendors are delivering best practice automation?* 00:24:09 – Do we simply need better (software-based) storage products? * 00:27:27 – Should Dell be doing ViPR or just simple automation? * 00:28:00 – Could standards’ bodies do more?  * 00:30:50 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* Storage Management and DevOps* #129 – Choices for Persistent Container Storage with Niraj Tolia* The Need for APIs in Storage and Data Protection* Dell EMC Presents DevOps at Storage Field Day 19

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