Technology:Unpacked

This week’s episode is a bit of a diversion from our normal podcasting topics.  In episode #47 (Enterprise Storage is not Boring), we mused as to how quantum computers use data.  With no real knowledge between us, we asked for listeners to help us out.  As a result, we’re joined in this episode by Scott […]

This week Chris and Martin talk to Gina Minks, who works on product marketing at VMware within the Cloud BU.  The discussion evolved from a post Gina published on www.24x7itconnection.com talking about how vendors shouldn’t go negative when promoting their own technology.  We’ve seen hyperbole from many vendors in the past – you know who you are!

During the conversation, the topics cover the original Twitpisses that used to take place regularly on social media.  This leads on to the independence of bloggers who have been acquired by big corporations yet still use their own blogging domains.

From there the discussion talks about the use of influencers in marketing and how credibility and authenticity can help in the promotion of products and services.  Finally we wrap up with a discussion on whether companies need to “go big” in order to get themselves heard above the increasing noise of social media and blogging.  Apologies for the mid-podcast clicking – that’s Gina fiddling with her beads!

Remember you can find Gina on twitter at https://twitter.com/gminks, at www.24x7itconnection.com and Wide World of Tech.

Elapsed Time: 00:29:36

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:02:00 – Gina’s blog post on marketing reputation

* 00:06:30 – Remember the epic Twitpiss conversations?

* 00:07:30 – “Independent” bloggers that actually work for a corporation.

* 00:08:40 – Who’s Chad?

* 00:13:30 – How much do influencers affect the marketing of vendors?

* 00:15:30 – Bacon rolls again, Martin

* 00:18:00 – Marketing seems related to credibility

* 00:20:00 – How does authenticity and knowing the person, drive better marketing?

* 00:22:10 – How can reputation be managed?

* 00:24:30 – Do companies need to “go big” with their marketing to get the story across?

* 00:27:00 – Wrap Up

Copyright (c) 2016-2018 Storage Unpacked.  No reproduction or re-use without permission.

This week Chris and Martin talk to Gina Minks, who works on product marketing at VMware within the Cloud BU.  The discussion evolved from a post Gina published on www.24x7itconnection.com talking about how vendors shouldn’t go negative when promoting their own technology.  We’ve seen hyperbole from many vendors in the past – you know who […]

This week’s podcast was recorded on the road a few weeks ago in Silicon Valley.  Chris dropped into the Datrium offices in Sunnyvale to talk about DVX, Datrium’s open converged platform.  Taking part in the podcast is Sazzala Reddy, CTO and co-founder and Tushar Agrawal, Director of Products.

Datrium DVX is an extension of HCI that scales performance and capacity separately.  Persistent storage is deployed on a shared array, with each compute host using local cache in the form of flash storage.  You can find out more on a recent blog post covering DVX.

The conversation covers an explanation on why traditional HCI has issues scaling and how Datrium has solved some of these challenges.  This leads on to a discussion on the features of DVX releases, including DVX 4.0, which offers backup to public cloud.

During the podcast Sazzala mentions Little’s Law (details here).  He also discusses Log Structured File Systems and VMware founder Mendel Rosenblum.  A copy of his paper can be found here.  Also, here’s the original Google MapReduce paper.

Elapsed Time: 00:32:30

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:00 – The challenges of the data centre

* 00:02:00 – The heritage of knowledge on data deduplication

* 00:03:00 – Understanding the Datrium architecture

* 00:06:00 – What are the issues with traditional HCI?

* 00:08:00 – Splitting storage performance and capacity

* 00:10:00 – What improvements are customers seeing?

* 00:12:00 – Log Structured File System implementation

* 00:14:00 – How does failover/recovery work?

* 00:15:00 – How does the solution address some of the backup issues?

* 00:19:00 – Deep Dive – Global Deduplication, compression, data integrity

* 00:24:30 – Deployment models

* 00:27:00 – DVX Version 4.0 and a recap of the previous releases

* 00:30:30 – What is Cloud DVX?

* 00:31:30 – Wrap Up

Copyright (c) 2016-2018 Storage Unpacked.  No reproduction or re-use without permission.

This week’s podcast was recorded on the road a few weeks ago in Silicon Valley.  Chris dropped into the Datrium offices in Sunnyvale to talk about DVX, Datrium’s open converged platform.  Taking part in the podcast is Sazzala Reddy, CTO and co-founder and Tushar Agrawal, Director of Products. Datrium DVX is an extension of HCI […]

This week Martin and Chris talk to Stephen Foskett, chief organiser at Tech Field Day.  The team refute the concept that enterprise storage is boring, as posited by good friend Keith Townsend, also known as The CTO Advisor.  To be fair, Keith was putting a positive spin on storage, however we thought it would be good to expand the conversation and look at why storage is so innovative.  It’s clear that products are driven by a need to constantly improve the status quo, whether that be reducing costs, increasing capacity or performance.

The discussion touches on hardware, software and the quality of management products in the market today.  At the end of the conversation we ask how data is handled in Quantum Computing.  If you can help answer this, drop us a line and you could be on the show!

Elapsed Time: 00:31:54

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:30 – Keith claims Enterprise Storage is boring

* 00:02:00 – Why is there so much happening in the storage industry?

* 00:04:00 – $7 for 32GB thumbnail-size storage

* 00:05:15 – Do storage innovations reach us in waves?

* 00:06:20 – Trade-offs – do they introduce diversification?

* 00:07:00 – What observations can we see from Storage Field Day companies?

* 00:08:30 – Storage gestation period – Storage Developer Conference

* 00:10:10 – Storage has an important job to do!

* 00:12:00 – What did Dell use Ocarina for?

* 00:12:30 – People, that recycling and improvement of ideas

* 00:15:30 – Hardware still drives software

* 00:17:00 – Mass Storage Subsystem!

* 00:19:00 – SRM software is rubbish! (says Martin)

* 00:22:30 – What storage product hasn’t been successful and never made it?

* 00:26:30 – Has Stephen become any better at detecting good companies?

* 00:29:04 – Talk about interesting, how is data managed in Quantum Computing?

* 00:30:50 – Wrap Up

Copyright (c) 2016-2018 Storage Unpacked.  No reproduction or re-use without permission.

This week Martin and Chris talk to Stephen Foskett, chief organiser at Tech Field Day.  The team refute the concept that enterprise storage is boring, as posited by good friend Keith Townsend, also known as The CTO Advisor.  To be fair, Keith was putting a positive spin on storage, however we thought it would be […]

A few weeks ago we discussed Open Source storage and whether it had any place in the enterprise.  There was a lot of feedback, so we thought it would be good to follow up with another discussion, so we invited Neil Levine, Director of Product Management at Red Hat to give us his view.  Martin, Chris and Neil discuss the difference in buying approach and whether bringing storage in under the radar is a good strategy.

The conversation moves on to talk about the Facebook strategy of “move fast and break things”, the situation with Dell EMC ScaleIO and whether Open Source storage still has lock-in.  Finally, we wrap up discussing super architects.

Elapsed Time: 00:32:26

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:30 – How does the buying strategy differ with Open Source?

* 00:04:30 – Storage is being included as part of a wider platform strategy.

* 00:06:30 – How loose are evaluation processes for storage?

* 00:10:00 – Move fast and break things – is that appropriate for storage?

* 00:13:00 – With such long POC’s, is there a trust problem for legacy vendors?

* 00:16:30 – ScaleIO – not entirely dedicated to Dell hardware.

* 00:20:00 – Is there still lock-in with Open Source?

* 00:21:00 – Do we need super architects to design solutions that use cloud?

* 00:23:30 – How are new platforms driving Open Source storage?

* 00:30:49 – Wrap up

Copyright (c) 2016-2018 Storage Unpacked.  No reproduction or re-use without permission.

A few weeks ago we discussed Open Source storage and whether it had any place in the enterprise.  There was a lot of feedback, so we thought it would be good to follow up with another discussion, so we invited Neil Levine, Director of Product Management at Red Hat to give us his view.  Martin, […]

This week Chris is in the Bay area and was able to catch up for a chat with Hedvig CEO Avinash Lakshman.  Hedvig is a start-up developing a scale-out software-defined storage platform, which makes Avinash the perfect guest to explain just where SDS has reached.  Avinash also has serious SDS credentials, having co-developed Amazon Dynamo and developed Cassandra for Facebook.

The conversation starts with a review of where SDS has reached compared to just five years ago.  Chris and Avinash discuss whether the enterprise has really bought into SDS as a concept and whether public cloud is driving the use of SDS in a multi-cloud configuration.  Finally, the conversation finishes on how DevOps and the developer movement wants to consume storage resources.

Hedvig can be found at https://www.hedvig.io (new website) and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/hedviginc.

Elapsed Time: 00:24:06

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:50 – How has SDS matured compared to 5 years ago?

* 00:03:20 – Has the enterprise bought into SDS?

* 00:05:00 – What are the most important features of SDS?

* 00:07:24 – Is HCI delivered by SDS, what is the dependency?

* 00:08:20 – How has public cloud affected the adoption of SDS?

* 00:10:00 – Does the enterprise really want to move multi-cloud?

* 00:12:00 – How much is data mobility a factor of SDS solutions?

* 00:14:30 – What agility is multi-cloud providing for end users?

* 00:16:00 – New storage services sit on top of public cloud and add value

* 00:17:00 – What impact is SDS having on DevOps

* 00;18:30 – APIs – essential to delivering efficient SDS

* 00:20:00 – What is the future of SDS?

* 00:23:23 – Wrap Up

Copyright (c) 2016-2018 Storage Unpacked.  No reproduction or re-use without permission.