Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin meet with Brian Carpenter, Senior Director of Unstructured Technology Strategy at Pure Storage, to talk about UFFO – Unified Fast File and Object. UFFO is a technology bringing together the two main types of unstructured data into a single platform – FlashBlade. The discussion centres on the benefits […]

In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin look at NVIDIA’s GPUDirect Storage (GDS), a technology for moving data directly from persistent storage to GPUs, bypassing the CPU. The aim of the technology is to provide greater throughput to keep GPUs active, and looking at some of the thoughts from our podcast with Liqid (#204), it’s […]

This week the team is back after a short break and ready to talk all things cloud – or at least about Elastic Block Store. AWS recently announced io2 and io2 Block Express, the first new EBS block storage offerings for eight years. With such a long gap since io1 was first released, what has […]

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow and President of NVM Express about the updates in NVMe 2.0. NVM Express (generally abbreviated to NVMe) is a storage protocol that was developed to overcome some of the shortcomings of traditional protocols when working with new high performance media such as NAND SSDs […]

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin have a great conversation with David Ngo, CTO for Metallic at Commvault, and Ranga Rajagopalan, VP Product Management for Commvault and Metallic. Commvault is celebrating 25 years in data protection, while Metallic, a SaaS data protection solution from Commvault has been available for nearly two years. In this […]

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Sumit Puri, CEO of Liqid Inc. Liqid has developed a composable infrastructure platform they call CDI or Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure. CDI enables IT organisations to take the building blocks of compute – storage, networking, CPUs, memory and GPUs then combine them dynamically in ways that address the processing […]

This week, Martin and Chris delve into cryptocurrency mining in a lengthy discussion on Chia with Robert Novak. Chia is a new cryptocurrency technology that differs from previous online currencies in that the basis for earning rewards (or coins) is based on the volume of data stored on disk, rather than raw compute performed. Rob […]

In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris and Martin talk to Phil Bullinger, newly appointed CEO at Infinidat. The company has reached their ten-year anniversary, shipping over seven exabytes of capacity in that time. With successful growth in every quarter during 2020, we discuss how Infinidat is helping drive the consolidation story for large enterprises and […]

In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin talk to Paul Speciale (Chief Product Officer at Scality) and Chris Tinker (Distinguished Technologist with HPE) about the launch of ARTESCA, a new lightweight, cloud-native object storage solution. HPE and Scality have announced the product jointly, delivering the solution on HPE hardware with an exclusive distribution agreement for […]

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/ Elapsed Time: 00:49.25 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,