Technology:Unpacked

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 […]

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the availability of super-high capacity or ultra-capacity flash drives.  The conversation comes out of an announcement from Nimbus Data that has produced a 100TB SATA SSD.  This follows up from last year’s 50TB drives that were OEMed to Viking and Smart Modular.  You can find some more background at Architecting IT here.  With so much capacity in a single 3.5″ form factor that could cost upwards of $50,000, is this product practical?  How do the drives survive failure?  Can they be repaired and who would build systems from them?  One of the most important questions to answer is the risk factor of putting so much content into a single device and the impact of theft to the end user.  All fun topics!  As Chris and Martin say, if you want your 30+TB drive reviewed, just send a few over…

Elapsed Time: 00:22:31

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:00 – 100TB SATA SSD from Nimbus

* 00:01:30 – What are the practicalities – failure domain?

* 00:03:30 – Can SSDs be repaired?

* 00:05:50 – How many enterprises have 100TB of active data?

* 00:06:35 – What size array could you build, minimum drive count?

* 00:08:08 – RAID rebuilt and throughput times, does this represent a risk?

* 00:11:00 – Do the economics of keeping spare $50,000 drives make sense?

* 00:12:30 – What is the target market?  Hyper-scalers? IoT?

* 00:13:30 – Remember memory chips being stolen from servers?

* 00:15:00 – Could this technology be used for smaller, compact drives?

* 00:15:30 – What about Ruler and NGSFF devices?

* 00:18:45 – When will we have 200TB drives?

* 00:20:30 – Another use case – content delivery.

* 00:21:20 – Wrap Up

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

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the availability of super-high capacity or ultra-capacity flash drives.  The conversation comes out of an announcement from Nimbus Data that has produced a 100TB SATA SSD.  This follows up from last year’s 50TB drives that were OEMed to Viking and Smart Modular.  You can find some more background at […]

This week, Chris and Martin review the all-flash market with Chris Mellor.  We looked at this sector around 12 months ago, so we’re ready for an update.  Lots of things have happened over the past 12 months.  Vendors have gone away and come back (Violin).  Existing vendors have seen a resurgence in their sales (IBM and NetApp), while others have struggled.  Pure Storage is now an incumbent alongside the likes of Dell EMC, IBM, NetApp and HPE.

The conversation moves on to discuss some interesting start-ups like WekaIO and both Excelero and E8 Storage (previous guests).  NVMeoF comes back as a recurring theme.  The podcast wraps up with a discussion of the Chinese influence and whether things are afoot with Western Digital and Cisco.  Could 2018 be the year Cisco acquires NetApp?

Elapsed Time: 00:32:57

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:15 – A quick review of some changes in the market

* 00:01:20 – Violin goes and comes back, IBM, NetApp emboldened.

* 00:02:00 – IDC 4Q2017 all-flash figures, any surprises?

* 00:03:50 – Where has Hitachi gone?

* 00:04:40 – NVMe & NVMeoF – everybody’s doing it.

* 00:06:00 – Are there really any options for new “traditional” flash arrays?

* 00:08:00 – Pure Storage – what was their market strategy?

* 00:09:00 – Back to NVMeoF!

* 00:11:20 – What about all-flash distributed file systems?

* 00:11:40 – Whoops – you mean Exelero, not E8, Chris!

* 00:13:40 – WekaIO and SPECSFS2014 results

* 00:16:38 – Toshiba – who knew? (Chris apparently)

* 00:18:00 – are M.2 drives really “enterprise”?

* 00:20:00 – What about the Chinese companies like Huawei?

* 00:22:30 – Is there really a dedicated all-flash market any more?

* 00:24:00 – Could we see an HCI 2.0 emerge, like the Datrium architecture?

* 00:25:00 – How much demand will there be from ML/AI?

* 00:28:30 – Is something going to happen with Western Digital & Tegile?

* 00:29:00 – Cisco to acquire Pure? (or NetApp)

* 00:32:00 – Wrap up!

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

This week, Chris and Martin review the all-flash market with Chris Mellor.  We looked at this sector around 12 months ago, so we’re ready for an update.  Lots of things have happened over the past 12 months.  Vendors have gone away and come back (Violin).  Existing vendors have seen a resurgence in their sales (IBM […]

In this week’s episode, Martin and Chris talk to Fred Monsone, founder of A3 Communications, a boutique storage PR and communications company.  It’s clear that modern day PR isn’t the right term any more and communications describes the work much more accurately.  Fred describes the reasons why start-ups and seasoned companies want to find the right way to engage with the press & journalists, bloggers and other influencers.  Dealing with people is a challenge, especially the divas (like Martin), who expect bacon rolls at events!  In case you’re wondering, we mentioned A3 Technology Live, an event that Fred runs and Martin & Chris have attended in the past.  Finally the conversation wraps up with a few horror stories and a problem with steamy windows!

Elapsed Time: 00:38:23

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:00 – Is it PR or Communications – what’s the difference?

* 00:02:20 – Who do comms companies talk to?

* 00:04:00 – First hand experience counts in being an influencer

* 00:05:00 – Who are the clients – startups? Incumbents?

* 08:50:00 – Why choose storage as a specialist PR company?

* 00:11:00 – How has the storage market grown over the last 15 years?

* 00:13:00 – Are there any EMEA storage bloggers left?

* 00:15:30 – I’m selling a new storage product – how does PR work?

* 00:18:45 – How do the American and European markets differ?

* 00:22:00 – Are you a “leading” provider?

* 00:23:00 – How can you measure coverage and success of PR?

* 00:28:00 – Being selective about reading interesting influencers.

* 00:31:30 – Quirky people, dealing with the divas! (including bacon rolls)

* 00:33:00 – Vendor horror stories, spill the beans!

* 00:35:00 – Steamy windows!

* 00:37:00 – Wrap Up

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

In this week’s episode, Martin and Chris talk to Fred Monsone, founder of A3 Communications, a boutique storage PR and communications company.  It’s clear that modern day PR isn’t the right term any more and communications describes the work much more accurately.  Fred describes the reasons why start-ups and seasoned companies want to find the […]

This week, Martin, Chris and Gavin reflect on the decision by EMC to disband the {code} team and discuss whether open source has a place in storage.  {code} was a project started by EMC before the Dell acquisition. The team focused on open source advocacy and developing tools such as storage plugins for Docker.  Looking wider, companies like Red Hat have built their business on open source, but how are the storage platforms working out?  Can vendors make money from open source and do we need a benevolent dictator like we have in Linux?

Elapsed Time: 00:23:18

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:00:30 – The demise of EMC {code}

* 00:03:00 – Does open source have a place in storage?

* 00:06:00 – Open source storage hasn’t come from existing companies

* 00:07:30 – Is open source (storage) simply a loss leader for other business?

* 00:08:00 – What about SAMBA?  The biggest open source storage platform?

* 00:08:30 – ViPR, iWave and open sourcing the control plane.

* 00:11:00 – Is open source storage good for storing data we can afford to lose?

* 00:13:30 – Paid storage lets customers play the blame game

* 00:15:35 – So how can vendors make money from open source storage?

* 00:18:00 – ScaleIO – interesting usage model (although this has changed)

* 00:20:00 – Did storage need a benevolent dictator like Linus?

* 00:21:33 – Wrap Up

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

This week, Martin, Chris and Gavin reflect on the decision by EMC to disband the {code} team and discuss whether open source has a place in storage.  {code} was a project started by EMC before the Dell acquisition. The team focused on open source advocacy and developing tools such as storage plugins for Docker.  Looking […]

This week’s podcast was recorded a few months ago, so apologies for the sound quality.  The team discuss the role of the storage administrator and whether we will see the eventual demise of storage admins or simply a transition to another role.  The conversation tracks the responsibilities of storage administrators over the last 30 years, from the era of the mainframe to today’s software-defined offerings. Early on, Martin invents a new word (abomnerbation)!  The discussions finally agree that the age of the LUN monkey is over.

Elapsed Time: 00:26:57

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intro

* 00:01:00 – Storage on the mainframe – including punched cards, 300GB under management.

* 00:03:00 – Storage Admin in the 1990s – VSS and ESS

* 00:04:00 – Centralised storage (EMC) introduced to fix the mess of Windows

* 00:04:33 – StorageTek Iceberg, or RAMAC Virtual Array

* 00:05:20 – EMC horror stories, Gavin – spill the beans!

* 00:07:00 – Storage was very “hands on” – Bus & Tag!

* 00:08:30 – 2000’s introduced the move towards simplicity and awful SRM products

* 00:10:00 – Bring on the APIs!

* 00:12:00 – Reliability – one of today’s big improvements

* 00:13:00 – How reliable were those old mainframe disks?

* 00:14:00 – Who made things easier – XIV and 3PAR.

* 00:15:30 – Storage is now highly automated for performance.

* 00:16:30 – Hardware costs have declined, why pay for an expensive human resource?

* 00:17:30 – Using policy to determine how storage should be managed

* 00:19:00 – The storage role is changing to architectural and design – with less understanding?

* 00:22:00 – Who will do low level support in the future, the vendor?

* 00:24:00 – Start to understand the value of the data you are managing.

* 00:26:00 – The LUN Monkey is dead!!

* 00:26:08 – Wrap Up

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