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On this week's podcast, Brian talks with Erick Oliveros, Marketing Manager, and Dhaval Panara, Product Manager, of QNAP Systems, Inc. QNAP Systems was spun off into its own company 16 years ago and has been a friend of StorageReview, sharing its equipment for us to review for several year. Today we talk about several topics including the company’s push to get more 2.5GbE out there and in its NAS devices and switches. We were able to move on beyond hardware too, though we still wonder how they release roughly a NAS per week.

Intel started showing off persistent memory in 2018, before launching formally in April of 2019. PMem was initially targeted toward high-performance database use cases. Here the massive expansion of memory within a server was beneficial for those workloads, but the persistence was icing on the cake, removing the need to rehydrate a large RAM footprint after a system reboot. PMem has come a long way in a short time, Intel recently launched the second iteration of PMem, the 200 Series. On this podcast, Kristie Mann (Queen of PMem) talks about where PMem has come from and what the future holds.

On this week's podcast Brian talks in person with Dave Demlow. Dave is the VP of Product Strategy for Scale Computing, which is code for getting to do the fun visionary work. Scale has been in the HCI business for about as long as HCI has been a thing. Historically Scale has sold HCI like everyone else, usually in a rack but sometimes in a tower form factor. They even recently announced NVMe nodes for customers that need more performance. But in this podcast, we talk more in detail about the announcement they made at the end of last year around micro HCI at the edge.

This week on the podcast Brian sits down with Rob Hunsaker, from Dell Technologies. Rob talks about the Dell EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance, which may be one of the least known components available to Unity/Unity XT storage arrays. In fact, CTA goes way back, some VNX arrays out in the wild are still using the CTA. What's really interesting though is that most who are leveraging it are moving a lot of data and they're opting for Dell EMC ECS more often than the public cloud.

In this week's podcast Brian chats with Preetham Mukhatira, Director of Product Management at Dell EMC. On the podcast Preetham dives into the overall Dell EMC HCI portfolio, with an emphasis on the Azure-based offerings. While most know of vSAN Ready Nodes, VxRail and the larger converged solutions, Dell Technologies has been pioneering Azure-based solutions since day 1. With this week's launch of new AX nodes,  Dell EMC has perhaps the most complete HCI portfolio in the industry.

In this week's podcast Brian talks with Shawn Meyers, Field CTO at Tintri. The podcast starts off with Field of Dreams talk and winning an Eric Davis autographed baseball. Shawn talks about his years as a customer, and reminisces about Fusion-io edge cards.  Eventually the topic of Tintri comes up, which has been around about a decade at this point. What started out as storage for VMs has gown up some. The platform now owned by DDN, which claims to be the largest privately owned storage company...that happens to be profitable.

In this week's podcast, Brian sits down live, in person, with Richard Kennedy, an SE with Qumulo. We recently posted a review of the Qumulo software and before we tear down the cluster, wanted to create a few more pieces of content. Richard and Brian did a live stream on YouTube, with Q&A, for those wanting a deeper dive on the Qumulo interface and capabilities. In this podcast we cover off on some of that, along with talking about what it means to be an SE and why the Pittsburgh Steelers are complete trash. #WhoDey

In this week's podcast Brian and Patrick Kennedy from STH go to war, as two enemy tech websites collide in the squared circle. Actually not quite, we're friends and spend ten minutes talking smoking meats. From there we get into tech; Patrick talks Intel and AMD server CPUs (of course, massive nerd alert). The guys break down PCIe Gen4, Patrick's favorite server from 2020 and eventually, the nonsense surrounding SMR drives.

In this week's podcast Brian interviews Lee Caswell, aka The vSAN guy. Lee covers a lot of ground, starting with a conversation about the momentum of VCF. Of those customers, 80% are net new to vSAN. On the vSAN front, adoption remains strong as VMware is adding 100 customers a week on vSAN. This is reflected in VMware's #1 spot in HCI, which was reaffirmed this week by IDC. The podcast also covers off on Kubernetes, files on vSAN, disaggregated HCI via VVOLs, Bitfusion and the virtualization of GPUs and so much more.

In this week's podcast Brian talks with Tom Butler from Lenovo. Tom starts out by giving an update on Lenovo's latest ThinkPads and talks about the evolution of end user computing in the modern era. The guys then turn to the importance of a good display then dive into tower workstations and the value that still exists for power users for systems like the P920 that just came in for review with a build sheet nearing $25k. No Lenovo podcast is complete without talking about the SE350, then Brian finally gets to the hot Nano talk, getting the lowdown from Tom on how those units came to be and how Lenovo views micro system design.