DataCentric

The events of the past year have taught us a valuable lesson: unexpected change is going to happen, and that change requires IT organizations to quickly respond. Data centers built on a solid foundation of fast, flexible, secure, and resilient infrastructure are the ones poised to adapt and keep the business moving forward.

In this episode, Moor Insights & Strategy technology analyst Steve McDowell is joined by a group of storage infrastructure experts to talk about the fundamentals of a flexible cyber-resilient infrastructure.

AJ Casamento and Brian Larsen join from Broadcom, while Brian Sherman comes to us from IBM's Storage division.

The group talks about cyber-resilient architectures, autonomous infrastructure, and building a fast and flexible storage architecture to support it all.

Fibre Channel Gen 7, NVMe-over-FC, Intelligent Storage Systems, tiered storage, disaster recovery... it seems like the group hit on most of the topics that an IT practitioner needs to be aware of as we all look forward to a disruptive future.

This episode is sponsored by Broadcom.

Special Guests: AJ Casamento, Brian Larsen, and Brian Sherman.

Links:

• IBM Storage Solutions

Cloud-native techniques provide a natural way for deliver functionality to the edge and IoT, delivering IT agility where it's needed the most. Arm's Project Cassini brings the IoT industry together with open, collaborative, standards-based initiative to deliver a cloud-native software experience across a secure Arm edge ecosystem.

Arm's Vice President of Marketing for IoT, Mohamed Awad, joins hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell to talk about the power of standardized software at the IoT-enabled edge.

Special Guest: Mohamed Awad.

It's all about cloud-native and containers as IBM announces a slew of new features and offerings at its annual IBM Tech U event. The announcements included:

IBM also announced a longer-term vision for container-native data management.

There's a lot to digest, and IBM's Eric Herzog and Sam Werner join host Steve McDowell to talk through what was announced, and how IBM sees the challenges in today's hybrid-multicloud world.

Special Guests: Eric Herzog and Sam Werner.

Containers have been embraced by IT organizations across the board. No longer strictly limited to dev ops and non-production environments, we're starting to see production enterprise applications being deployed into Kubernetes-managed containers. These deployments quickly expose the limitations of the technology.

Joining hosts Matt Kimball & Steve McDowell (both analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy) is Diamanti's vice present of product, Brian Walden. Diamanti delivers innovative solutions that help bring both performance and simplicity to Kubernetes-managed workloads, whether on-prem, in the cloud, or spanning the two.

This informative conversation delves into some of the challenges of allowing containers to leverage the full power of the underlying hardware. The conversation quickly focuses in on how to overcome these limitations with the use of innovative I/O acceleration technologies, coupled with enhancements to the control & data planes for storage and networking. Combining these technologies and enhancements can help bring the full power of both on-prem and cloud-based resources to a Kubernetes environment.

Special Guest: Brian Waldon.

The hyper-scale market is often a leading indicator of broader enterprise data center trends. This is true of software to manage scalability, autonomous management, security, disaggregated storage, and AI/ML.

Jay Shenoy, vice president of technology for Hyve, joins hosts Matt Kimball & Steve McDowell (each a senior technology analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy) to talk about what he's seeing in this space.

This wide-ranging conversation touches on seemingly everything: an overview of the hyperscale market; the software-defined data center; autonomous infrastructure; disaggregated storage and the increasing adoption of NVMe-over-fabric; the rise of ARM and accelerators; and even the impact of AI/ML in both training and inferernence use cases.

It's another great conversation on the rapid evolution of the enterprise data center.

Special Guest: Jayarama (Jay) Shenoy.

Our old friend Jonathan Seckler, Dell Technologies Director of Server Marketing, joins hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell (both senior analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy) to talk about the current state of the server market.

Jonathan brings us up to speed on the most recent server announcments from Dell, including the the massive storage-centric PowerEdge XE7100 and updates to Dell's OpenManage software.

Beyond hardware, the discussion very quickly evolves into the what's driving the future of enterprise infrastructure (hint: it's digital transformation). Jonathan takes us through the customer conversations and research that Dell Technologies has commissioned to better understand how IT infrastructure is changing.

It's a great conversation that will help clarify how IT organizations think about enterprise infrastructure, and also how the voice of IT practitioners influence the products that are brought to market.

Special Guest: Jonathan Seckler.

Securing the supply chain for enterprise infrastructure is a key element to any comprehensive cyber-security strategy.

John Grosso, who leads the HPE's Global Operations Engineering organization, joins hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell to talk through cyber-security, the criticality of securing the supply chain, and how HPE is stepping up its secure server program with a new "county of origin" program, where servers are assembled and validated in the United States.

This one is a fascinating exploration of an area most of us don't think about on a daily basis. Listen in.

Special Guest: John Grosso.

Links:

• Matt's Forbes column on HPE's new programs

What is it about HCI that enterprise IT likes so much? On this episode David Wang, HPE's director of storage marketing, drops in to talk to hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell about why HCI is compelling, and how the different flavors of HCI address a range of needs in the enterprise, whether on the edge or in the core.

HPE is in an interesting place with HCI. The company has two in-house HCI solutions, dHCI and SimpliVity, and is a major mover of both Nutanix and Vmware VSAN software. How does HPE position them? And what's the right answer for your IT shop?

Join us in a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation about HCI's place in the enterprise, and where HPE's dHCI and other solutions fit.

A special thank you to Sonal Dave' for helping out with the logistics and, of course, David Wang for joining us!

Special Guest: David Wang.

Links:

• HPE's Vmworld 2020 Sessions

Supercomputing has left the lab and is fast becoming a mainstream enterprise IT capability, whether we're talking about a dedicated compute cluster, or HPC-as-a-service. These capabilities are driving everything from COVID-19 modelling to video-analytics at the retail edge to deliver "frictionless retail".

There's nobody better to talk to us about this market than Penguin Computing.

Penguin's SVP of Strategic Solutions Kevin Tubbs joins DataCentric hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell to talk about what matters when thinking about technical computing in the enterprise.

Special Guest: Kevin Tubbs.

It's been a big couple of weeks of earnings from all of the major enterprise infrastructure market players, including NetApp, Pure Storage, Dell Technologies, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. IBM, Cisco, Lenovo and others all disclosed earlier last month.

On the software-defined side, there's Vmware, Nutanix, and a whole lot of Bain Capital.

High-end kit is up, mid-range everything (servers & storage) are soft, while as-a-service & software-defined all seem to be solid. Is the IT world shifting? What's it all mean?

Technology analysts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell (from Moor Insights & StrategY) delve into it all, on this edition of DataCentric.

00:00 - 18:00 The enterprise infrastructure market.

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