Technology:Unpacked

This week, Martin and Chris are joined by Jim Walker, VP of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs. In a slight departure from a purely storage-based recording, this discussion follows the evolution of application packaging and deployment, from virtualisation to containers and serverless. The logical conclusion of any computing environment is to execute code and gradually, […]

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the level of innovation seen in the data storage industry over the last decade. This topic is one that comes up repeatedly as we review the market, startups and incumbents. In reality, of course there’s been innovation, whether the “micro-innovations” that move the storage media industry along, or the […]

With the news that VAST Data is moving to a software-only model, this week Chris and Martin debate the merits of the move, for both the vendor and customers. Does this transition for VAST represent a new move in the industry, or can we point to other companies that have already made the jump? What […]

The ongoing saga at OVH highlights the need to have solid disaster recovery plans that reflect the risk and impact of systems failure on the business. In this episode, Chris and Martin dig into the issues at OVH and how they represent a wake-up call for businesses in general. High profile failures have been apparent […]

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the issues of building a multi-cloud data storage strategy. The range of options for private, public and hosted data services is huge, with each offering a different set of services and implemented in subtly unique ways. How can an enterprise take advantage of these services, while maintaining data protection, […]

This week’s podcast episode continues the discussion on SmartNICs and DPUs with Fungible, a company that claims to have originally coined the term DPU. Chris and Martin talk with Pradeep Sindhu (CEO and co-founder) and Jai Menon (Chief Scientist) about Fungible’s storage cluster and host-based DPU. The Fungible architecture aims to solve the challenges of disaggregation, a topic we first looked at back in September 2017.

This discussion highlights some interesting challenges that new technology such as NVMe-oF is introducing into the data centre. As we move to a model of highly parallelised workloads, the interaction between storage and compute is back under the spotlight. Fungible is working on storage products today but claims to be able to disaggregate GPUs and in the future, potentially DRAM. Interesting times.

Find out more at https://www.fungible.com/

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:01:30 – What problem is Fungible looking to solve?* 00:02:45 – The benefits of Moore’s Law growth are almost flat* 00:03:35 – Modern applications are data-centric* 00:05:00 – Fungible is working on disaggregated architectures* 00:06:15 – There’s storage for  compute and storage for – storage!* 00:07:45 – What’s “hyper-disaggregation”?* 00:09:30 – Fungible offers volume-specific characteristics like encryption* 00:11:00 – Everything can be disaggregated except DRAM (for now)* 00:13:10 – Data I/O has specific requirements including in-order processing* 00:14:15 – Fungible can use an Ethernet network at 90% without packet drop* 00:15:30 – Data-centric workloads are heavily multiplexed* 00:18:45 – Does disaggregation finally deliver a real software-defined data centre?* 00:20:00 – Mainframes “reconfigured” overnight for batch workloads* 00:21:30 – Even hyperscalers operate in silos* 00:24:15 – The Fungible Storage Cluster – SAN 2.0?* 00:25:30 – New hero numbers!  15 million IOPS!!* 00:30:45 – Volumes are virtual across any or all storage clusters* 00:34:30 – Fungible claims better than local performance* 00:35:00 – The Storage Cluster gains additional benefits with a host DPU* 00:37:00 – Let’s not get diverted towards VSAM!* 00:39:20 – Disaggregated technologies could deliver truly reconfigurable data centres* 00:41:00 – Fibre Channel networks divide their traffic across multiple SANs* 00:42:00 – Who is using the Fungible technology?* 00:45:00 – Fungible is working on I/O primitives for SQL databases* 00:49:00 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #194 – ScaleFlux & Computational Storage Devices* #190 – NVIDIA BlueField SmartNICs & DPUs* #180 – SmartNICs – Pliops Storage Processor* #177 – SmartNICs and Project Monterey* #96 – Discussing SmartNICs and Storage with Rob Davis from Mellanox

Pradeep’s Bio

Pradeep’s career includes founding Juniper Networks,

In this week’s episode, Martin and Chris discuss Computational Storage with Tong Zhang, Chief Scientist and co-founder at ScaleFlux. Computational Storage devices add value to traditional NAND by offloading data processes directly onto the storage media. ScaleFlux offers two families of CSDs, including the CSD 2000 series, which implements inline data compression to improve endurance and logical device capacity.

In this conversation, Tong covers the benefits of using CSDs as well as some of the challenges of implementation. It’s likely we will se CSDs being used for AI/Analytics pre-processing, especially in the public cloud.

More information on ScaleFlux can be found at https://www.scaleflux.com/ with further technical details of Computational Storage on the SNIA Website.

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:04:00 – What is the ScaleFlux view of Computational Storage?* 00:06:45 – What will the drivers of Computational Storage be?* 00:08:40 – Compression can increase endurance and capacity* 00:11:00 – The CSD2000 does inline compression/decompression in FPGA* 00:13:05 – Why aren’t all vendors doing inline compression?* 00:14:45 – Databases make a good use case for CSD* 00:17:10 – Compression can be 2:1 or as high as 5:1, depending on data* 00:20:15 – SSDs do get hot!* 00:21:30 – FPGAs will be replaced by ASICs in the future products* 00:23:00 – AI/Analytics is a big target for Computational Storage* 00:25:00 – Advanced functionality may require APIs* 00:27:00 – NVMe will be used as a protocol to push code to CS drives* 00:30:20 – Compute and storage are going to have to work closer together* 00:35:00 – Computational Storage adoption will be evolutionary* 00:38:00 – How will RAID/erasure coding be affected with CS?* 00:40:20 – ScaleFlux will support PCIe-4/5 and possibly PLC NAND* 00:43:00 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #190 – NVIDIA BlueField SmartNICs and DPUs* #180 – SmartNICs – Pliops Storage Processor* #177 – SmartNICs and Project Monterey* #96 – Discussing SmartNICs and Storage with Rob Davis from Mellanox

Copyright (c) 2016-2021 Storage Unpacked. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #8vwo.

This week, Chris and Martin are talking to a podcast repeat offender, Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU. HYCU has recently announced the availability of Protégé for Microsoft Office 365, delivered as SaaS or Backup as a Service (BaaS). This continues an expansion of the HYCU and Protégé backup offerings that started with Nutanix data protection and has expanded past on-premises virtualisation to encompass the public cloud and now SaaS.

The conversation covers a wide range of topics relating SaaS and data protection, including the way in which services are implemented via APIs provided by SaaS vendors. With unlimited data storage, SaaS backup offers real opportunities for data mining and analysis.

To learn more about Protégé for Office 365, follow the link to https://www.hycu.com/tryhycu/. You can find more details on the support for Office 365 in the press release – here.

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:03:00 – Vendors do not back up your SaaS service (for you)* 00:04:45 – Office365 is a multitude of separate services* 00:09:00 – Where does HYCU BaaS reside?* 00:10:00 – The charging model for BaaS is different to on-premises offerings* 00:11:25 – How does the customer monitor success/failure in SaaS offerings?* 00:17:00 – Some businesses are happy with self-restore, others are not!* 00:18:30 – What features do SaaS vendors offer to do backup?* 00:20:00 – SaaS API users need to rethink how their services are built* 00:22:00 – Centralised credentials management is key to delivering SaaS* 00:25:50 – How can unlimited storage be justified and what does it mean?* 00:29:00 – Can unlimited storage be abused?* 00:31:50 – Can unlimited be used as deliberately limited (active deletion)?00:35:50 – Is BaaS a perfect tool for e-discovery?* 00:42:55 – How will HYCU bring in the existing non-SaaS service together with SaaS?* 00:44:20 – The Public Cloud is the right place to doing backup analytics* 00:45:30 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #165 – Homogeneous Data Protection with HYCU* #73 – HYCU – Data Protection for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure* HYCU Announces GA of HYCU for Azure* Backup os Your Responsibility – Even in Public Cloud

Copyright (c) 2016-2021 Storage Unpacked. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #tv7t.

This week, Chris and Martin chat to long-time friend and Kubernetes legend, Nigel Poulton. Nigel is well-known in the industry for producing training courses and books on Kubernetes, although was once a storage person in a previous life. The aim of this podcast episode is to examine how storage and Kubernetes come together. However, we start by asking Nigel to explain his pivot to containers and now the Kubernetes ecosystem.

This discussion touches on some interesting aspects of how persistent storage and Kubernetes should be managed together, which today is via the CSI (Container Storage Interface). Is this plugin a long-term solution for data mobility? We also manage to get an obligatory mainframe reference into the conversation.

Sadly we didn’t get through all of our discussion topics in this long-running episode, so Nigel will be back later in the year to continue the conversation.

You can find more on Kubernetes, over at Nigel’s Website: https://nigelpoulton.com/

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:01:00 – Nigel is looking for things to “read”* 00:05:10 – Why did Nigel pivot to Kubernetes?* 00:07:50 – Is Kubernetes the future of containers?* 00:09:55 – Kubernetes needs to avoid the OpenStack risk* 00:13:15 – Are we building permanent or temporary cluster?* 00:17:40 – Why did AWS open source EKS?* 00:22:30 – Shouldn’t we talk about storage now?* 00:25:40 – Networking is just “pass the parcel” (hot potato)* 00:28:00 – Customers should be using CSI-supported storage* 00:32:00 – Nigel believes data mobility should be an application responsibility* 00:35:10 – Obligatory mainframe reference (DFSMS)* 00:39:20 – How should autoscaling work for storage and Kubernetes?* 00:42:20 – Why is QoS in storage not seen more frequently?* 00:49:00 – Nigel is into muscle cars* 00:51:00 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #53 – Persistent Storage and Kubernetes with Evan Powell* #151 – Introduction to StorageOS v2.0* #145 – Anthos Ready Storage for the Enterprise* #129 – Choices for Persistent Container Storage with Niraj Tolia* Will We Care About Kubernetes in 2025?

Nigel’s Bio

Nigel’s a technology geek, author of three utterly mind-blowing and life-changing books, and creator of weapons-grade Kubernetes training videos (his words not ours).

Copyright (c) 2016-2021 Storage Unpacked. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #lx84.

This week, Chris and Martin are in discussion with Cathy Southwick, CIO at Pure Storage. The topic of conversation is the results of a CIO survey undertaken by Pure to look back at the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and how customers have changed their IT strategies. The discussion covers how Pure Storage has adapted to the lack of in-person site visits and adapting to remote installation and operations. Digital transformation projects have continued, while customers have adapted their priorities and goals to align with the challenges presented by COVID-19. Public cloud has been an easy target for migrations. Customers are now looking at how best to rebalance workloads between on-premises and the public cloud as companies stabilise and re-adjust to a COVID-compliant way of working.

You can find Cathy’s LinkedIn article and the results of the survey here – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-we-can-learn-from-cios-covid-19s-impact-cathleen-southwick/

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros * 00:00:30 – Martin gets trolled by Google Maps! * 00:03:30 – How has Pure and their customers managed the Pandemic? * 00:06:00 – How has data centre access being managed? * 00:09:00 – Digital transformation projects have continued to be delivered * 00:14:00 – Automation is top of the priorities, with security and customer experience * 00:16:30 – Employee well-being figured highly * 00:17:30 – How have customers adopted the cloud?  Tactical or Strategic? * 00:21:00 – FinOps – Financial operations for cloud will be the dream next job 00:24:00 – Will Cloud drive the “as a service” models? * 00:26:10 – The Portworx acquisition indicates a pivot towards data and data mobility * 00:28:35 – EMC – Where Information Lives – describes the future for storage companies * 00:30:40 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #152 – Post Pandemic Storage Efficiencies* #149 – Coronavirus 2.0* #146 – Coronavirus and Impacts on the Technology Industry* #185 – Pure-as-a-Service 2.0

Cathy’s Bio

Cathy Southwick joined Pure Storage in 2018 as Chief Information Officer. In this role, she leads Pure’s global IT strategy and advances the company’s operations through the delivery of next-generation technology capabilities and systems.

Cathy is an accomplished leader with over 20 years of experience defining and executing forward-looking IT strategies. Prior to Pure, Cathy held leadership positions at AT&T, including Vice President, Technology Engineering and Vice President, Cloud Planning & Engineering. During her tenure at AT&T, Cathy led the planning and execution of IT strategies from the Core Network, IT application modernisation, and the IT cloud.

Before joining AT&T, Cathy spent 11 years at Viking Freight System (now owned by FedEx) where she held escalating leadership positions in IT architecture and planning, software development, merger integration, strategic planning, human resources management, procurement, project/portfolio management, and process re-engineering.