Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this podcast episode, Chris discusses the platform update announcements from Pure Accelerate 2024 with Prakash Darji, VP and GM of the Digital Experience BU at Pure Storage. The new features focus on usability and operational enhancements, including AI-based features and support for AI workloads. Highlighted in this discussion are:

As the list shows, there are lots of new updates to make the management and operation of a Pure Storage fleet more efficient and easy. As Prakash explains the reasoning behind the features, it is clear that AI is being used to deliver simplicity, while the platform will provide support for customers wanting to build AI-focused workloads.

To learn more, follow the news from Pure Accelerate 2024 here (link). Prakash mentions two blog posts, which can be found here – Ransomware is a Darwinian Problem That Will Never Be Solved and Editorial: Why Centralised Storage Refuses to Go Away.

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In this podcast episode, Chris catches up with Dan McConnell, Senior VP for Product Management at Hitachi Vantara. The company recently announced VSP One Block, a new mid-range appliance for block storage. This follows on from two product announcements in April, which we covered in this Research Note, and the restructuring of Hitachi Vantara announced towards the end of last year (see this Research Note).

Dan discusses VSP One Block, an appliance that targets mid-range storage requirements. He also covers VSP One SDS, a software-defined solution which runs in AWS and on-premises. The third product announcement covers file, with VSP One File, the latest iteration of the technology that came from the BlueArc acquisition over a decade ago.

You can find out more about the Block Storage Appliance here (link and here). Details on the VSP One SDS announcement can be found here (link), which includes details on VSP One File.

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Copyright (c) 2016-2024 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #4dcx

In this episode, Chris discusses the topic of building sustainable storage solutions with Shawn Rosemarin, Global VP of Customer Engineering at Pure Storage. AI and specifically Generative AI (GenAI) has become a hot topic over the past 12 months. Businesses are looking at projects to use AI internally for productivity gains, but also to drive additional business.

However, AI is still relatively expensive and requires huge volumes of training data. Training is an ongoing process that must react to changes in the data landscape, such as rights and permissions, and government regulation. With AI hardware being so expensive, it’s important to get the storage piece right, and that means having a scalable and cost effective solution. Shawn details how Pure Storage has focused on two aspects. First, the hardware, where DFMs (direct flash modules) have reached 75TB, with commitments to deliver 150TB and 300TB drives in the next few years. Second, the software management capability delivered through Purity, the operating system of Pure Storage hardware.

It’s clear that building cost and power-efficient flash devices will be a challenge for the wider industry, where the focus lies with consumer devices. Pure Storage believes it is well positioned to help customers and potentially hyper-scalers in their goals to deliver efficient storage for AI.

As Shawn highlights, this topic and more will be discussed at Pure Accelerate, to be held in Las Vegas from 18-21 June 2024. Check out the website where you can learn more.

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Copyright (c) 2016-2024 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #xs2w

In this episode, Chris talks to Infinidat CMO, Eric Herzog. Infinidat has announced one of the biggest upgrades in eight years, with the release of InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA G4, the fourth generation of enterprise-class storage. Accompanying the new hardware is an upgrade to InfuzeOS, the Infinidat storage operating system, and a new feature for InfiniSafe – Automated Cyber Protection, or ACP.

Infinidat has upgraded both the InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA platforms with a generation 4 release that includes a switch to AMD processors. Using the EPYC 9554P enables Infinidat to use a single-socket design, while gaining from the move to DDR5 system memory and PCIe 5.0 I/O. The savings to the customer are space, power and cooling. The AMD move also enables Infinidat to release new hardware configurations, including a 14U rack-mount solution for edge data centres, rather than just the custom rack used to ship existing products.

InfuzeOS gains an upgrade to version 8, with support for InfuzeOS in the public cloud on Microsoft Azure (AWS was announced last year). The new hardware and software improvements result in a 2x performance gain for customers. One final announcement covers InfiniSafe and the ability to automate snapshots through the integration of cyber-detection technology with InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA. Customers can now automate the creation of immutable snapshots if their SIEM or SOAR platform detects malicious activity. This capability reduces the size of the threat window and the potential volume of data needing recovery, should a breach occur.

There’s a lot more detail in the podcast, so go ahead and listen! For more information on any of the announcements in this podcast episode, visit https://www.infinidat.com/.

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Copyright (c) 2016-2024 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #xs2w

In this sponsored episode, Chris talks to Fred Lherault and Larry Touchette from Pure Storage on the evolution of storage in the enterprise and the impacts on storage administration. The conversation is divided into three areas focusing on the customer, the administrator and the business.

From the customer’s perspective, the requirements of on-premises data centre storage have changed significantly. Users expect resources to be deployed on demand, using APIs, CLIs or a GUI, without the intervention of a storage administrator. The self-service aspect is also aligned with 100% availability, an expectation that has evolved from the public cloud. End users have less interest in the hardware itself, but instead focus on metrics (IOPS, latency, throughput) and see storage as an endpoint to be consumed.

The role of the storage administrator has evolved to be one similar to that of a product manager. The administration role is much more focused on ensuring storage is available and operating efficiently, rather than on the mundane task of provisioning resources. This means keeping close control on capacity growth, upgrades and patching.

For the business, costs and efficient consumption models are key. With 30-40% annual growth in consumed terabytes, year-on-year costs need to decline, while systems must become more power, space and cooling efficient. Pure Storage has introduced Pure1 and Fusion, tools for the business and administrators to ensure that the storage infrastructure operates efficiently and meets the SLAs expected by internal customers.

During the discussion, we highlight Pure Storage’s annual user conference, Accelerate, which will take place in Las Vegas between June 18th and 21st. Here is a list of some useful related content that discusses the evolution of storage in the data centre.

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In this episode, Chris chats to Rick Kutcipal, “At-Large Director” with the SCSI Trade Association. The topic of conversation is the adoption of SAS media (both HDDs and SSDs) by hyper-scale customers that include public cloud vendors and companies such as Meta. Market perception implies that NVMe-based drives are taking over the world, but that’s far from the truth. As Rick explains, some 90% of exabytes shipped on SSDs and HDDs are still using the SAS interface. SAS scales much better (in terms of drives in systems) than NVMe, while offering a competitive price point when looking at “slot cost”.

There’s a lot of detail to digest in this discussion. It touches on some novel features of HDDs, for example, including Depop and Command Duration Limits. What is clear from the conversation is the longevity of SAS into the future, even as the transition to flash-based media continues.

To learn more about the SCSI Trade Association, check out their website at https://www.snia.org/groups/sta-forum. You can also find them on Linkedin – here.

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In this live episode, recorded at Hitachi Exchange in Paris, Chris chats to Gary Lyng, VP of Products and Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. The company recently announced the VSP One platform, plus some organisational changes that will take Hitachi Vantara back to a focus on core infrastructure. This recording dives into the strategy behind VSP One, before new products and services follow in 2024.

We covered the VSP One announcement and reorganisation details in a blog post, available here – https://www.architecting.it/blog/hitachi-vsp-one/

More information on Hitachi Vantara is available through our X-Ray eBook (subscription required).

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In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Ryan Farris (VP Product and Product Marketing) and Brandon Whitelaw (VP Cloud and Strategic Partnerships) at Qumulo. As the IT world becomes ever more focused on a hybrid cloud model, file storage becomes increasingly important, due to the legacy of applications and data already written to work with file servers.

However, file storage in the public cloud doesn’t have the same features and flexibility as native object or block storage solutions. Most solutions operate and feel like on-premises infrastructure, lifted and shifted to the public cloud. So, what should file storage look like in a hybrid cloud world? Listen to find out!

As we were recording this podcast, Qumulo was planning a big product announcement of the “Scale Anywhere” platform. New features include native support on Microsoft Azure and distributed file system capabilities. Check out the details here – https://qumulo.com/a-new-era-for-cloud-file-storage/

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In this episode, Chris chats with Abel Gordon, Chief System Architect at Lightbits Labs, discussing the challenges and benefits of building a virtual storage area network (SAN) on public cloud infrastructure. Lightbits originally developed the NVMe/TCP protocol and uses this feature to build virtual SANs using public cloud instances. This is a topic we first looked at in episode #210, so it’s good to get a practitioner’s experience.

Modern public cloud now features fast networking, low-latency NVMe and high-performance virtual and physical instances. Unfortunately, NVMe devices are ephemeral and any provisioned storage in the cloud is charged at full capacity. For users of on-premises SANs, the lack of thin provisioning may be an unwelcome surprise.

Why build a virtual SAN, other than to save storage costs? There’s a lot more involved, including delivering resiliency, scalability, targeted performance and capacity. Abel discusses the benefits, then goes on to enumerate the challenges involved when building on vendor-owned infrastructure. Finally, the discussion moves on to how Lightbits’ software is deployed and operated, including the managed application capability in Microsoft Azure.

For more information on Lightbits Labs, visit the company website at https://www.lightbitslabs.com/

As Abel, suggests you can contact him on LinkedIn or email him directly at [email protected].

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Copyright (c) 2016-2023 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #cv54.

In this episode, Chris meets with Pure Storage co-founder John Colgrove (aka Coz) to discuss where the future of data storage lies in the enterprise. This recording was made at the October 2023 Pure//Accelerate event in London and has a little bit of microphone noise at the beginning (apologies!). However, keep listening for some great insights.

In this conversation, Coz explains how Pure Storage has put efficiency at the core of design and product evolution. However, this doesn’t just mean an increase in media capacity, but a vastly improved density and power consumption story. Gains are also being made in software, with continuous improvements in erasure coding overhead and data reduction techniques like compression.

Where will the future lie? NAND flash has many years to go yet, replacing the HDD entirely in the enterprise, if Pure Storage is to be believed. In the meantime, materials science improvements will continue to drive costs down and capacities up. Exactly how far those trends will continue remains to be seen, but we can guarantee that vendors like Pure Storage will be focused on continuous delivery of value to customers.

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