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The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is part of the UK's Natural Environment Research Council, which itself is part of United Kingdom Research & Innovation (UKRI). They deliver "National Capability" to the UK which includes 5 Antarctic Bases, 5 aircraft, the current research vessel, RRS James Clark Ross which is being replaced by the RRS Sir David Attenborough over the next year; and they manage the UK's Arctic Research Station in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. By its nature, the BAS has defined what it means to collect data and operate data centers at the extreme edge.

Cloudian launched in 2011 as one of the first storage vendors to fully support S3. At the time the concept of a private cloud was an emerging category, but much has changed since then. In the old days, object storage was primarily used as a backup target.  While backup is a key use case,  Cloudian added file support a few years back and has fully embraced Kubernetes to meet emerging workloads with a storage solution that was born in the cloud. New workloads are causing Cloudian to evolve again, this time by supporting all-flash and hybrid cluster configurations.

The HPC world is always one that's a little amorphous to me. The workloads and analysis the scientists and researchers use are dramatically different than the garden variety applications we see in the enterprise. As such, these large Supercomputer sites operate differently in a number of ways.

Ducks Unlimited Canada is all about the preservation of wetlands and the wildlife that rely on them. Maybe with the exception of beavers, who have their own plans when it comes to routing waterways. Okay, that's not true, Ducks Unlimited doesn't hate beavers. All of this preservation work requires a surprising amount of data. This includes what you'd expect, like aerial photography. But it also includes a vast array of extremely remote edge computing nodes with a bevy of sensors for measuring things like water levels, temperatures, and other environmental aspects. Every so often, they send a small payload of data back to the data center. When we think about IoT at the edge, there are few devices more edge than these.

According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), who would know such things, 84% of organizations were running containers in production in 2019, up 15% from a year before. In fact, some would argue that the best technology is coming packaged in containers and if organizations don't adapt, they will be left behind. Yet many organizations are still intimidated by the concept of containers. While containers are commonplace for businesses "born in the cloud" or "cloud-native" applications, more traditional virtualization-first organizations may not be adapting fast enough.

Roblox is one of the most popular game development platforms in the world. They enable developers to create games or experiences that are often easily approachable, making Roblox games perfect for families. In fact, any household with kids likely either knows the Roblox name or has been asked by a kid to re-up their Robux stash. Like many gaming platforms, Roblox saw a surge in traffic as lockdown hit across the globe. Before COVID their most popular day was Saturday. After COVID, every day was Saturday. In fact, they've seen record numbers of participation, including 5.2 million concurrent users and over 3 billion hours of engagement a month on the platform.

Almost two years ago exactly, Lenovo and NetApp signed a collaboration agreement that had two core components. One was to form a joint venture specifically to sell into China. The other was for Lenovo to be able to offer its own line of storage systems. We've been working with the DM Series, which runs ONTAP, but is sold and serviced by Lenovo's enterprise teams. For those that think of Lenovo as the ThinkPad company, there's much more going on. In fact, they've got some of the best servers around, several have earned Editor's Choice awards from us, two this year. The storage arrays are pretty strong too.

HP has been in the remote office game since the Mars rover program in 2004. While today's remote work needs are a little more domestic by comparison, there is a new set of challenges. We all know about VDI which has been most effective for managing large groups of task workers. COVID has caused new problems though for creative pros and other high-end workloads that have shifted out of the office and into the home. Thus we're now dealing with HDI, hosted desktop infrastructure.

This week two Brians collide in a storage podcast showdown! Brian Carpenter, the self-described bridge between customers and engineers at Pure Storage, joins me on the podcast this week. After some hot Brian name spelling talk and ratting on my son for skipping school to ride zip lines in Texas, we get down to business and talk Pure's FlashBlade offering. FlashBlade is a unified file and object storage array with a very unique hardware design. Each 4U chassis can hold up to 15 blades that contain storage, networking and compute within each sled. 150 of these blades can be in a single namespace, which physically fits into a single 42U rack.

On this week's podcast, Brian sits down with Bill Andrews, the CEO of ExaGrid. ExaGrid provides hardware solutions for the enterprise backup and recovery market. ExaGrid has 2700 customers and is growing quickly, largely by displacing legacy backup target providers. On the podcast Bill pulls no punches, providing his take on the backup landscape, breaking down his vision for winners and losers. Bill views Veeam as a big winner while some of his losers may surprise you.