DataCentric

Increasing datacenter density while managing HVAC and electrical costs is a hard problem, especially as processor and GPU vendors continue to push solutions that run hotter and consume more energy than ever before. This has pushed us into the age of liquid cooling. While Direct-2-Chip liquid cooling has become an acceptable alternative to the traditional air-cooled datacenter, cooling technology has evolved. The state-of-the-art is now 2-Phase Immersion Cooling, where servers are housed in an enclosure full of a dialelectric fluid that removes the heat, all without fans or heatsinks. It's a remarkable technology. In this episode, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell talk to the Mears Group, a Quanta Services company, about its approach to 2-Phase Immersion Cooling which is just coming to market. Joining the podcast are Todd Richard, senior vice president at Mears, and Trent Edwards, executive vice president of Mears. The group talk about what 2-Phase Immersion Cooling is, how it has benefits both within the datacenter at the edge, and what differentiates Mears. Special Guest: Matt Kimball.

Digital Transformation is full of promise, and full of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is around cloud – when to use, and to what extent. This week’s podcast has hosts Matt Kimball & Steve McDowell speaking with Dominique Bastos, Senior Vice President at Persistent Systems. In this episode, Dominique talks about what she sees with enterprise customers undergoing digital transformation, and how to find an on-prem/off-prem balance that drives best results for the business. Equally interesting is Dominique’s perspective as a woman’s journey through the tech ranks – from engineer to executive. Tune in for what may be our most interesting podcast yet! Dominique’s profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominiquebastos/ Persistent Systems: https://www.persistent.com/ Special Guests: Dominique Bastos and Matt Kimball.

There aren't many solutions that can tame the multi-cloud management problem, but Nutanix is one of them. In this episode, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell have a wide-ranging conversation with Nutanix's Lee Caswell about the challenges that face IT administrators and architects in 2023. Special Guests: Lee Caswell and Matt Kimball.

Hosts Steve McDowell and Matt Kimball, principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, kick off the new year with a conversation with both Nutanix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Joining the podcast is HPE's Mark Maguire and Nutanix's Aaron Delp. Nutanix and HPE are at forefront of IT modernization & digital transformation, helping customers globally deliver business critical apps in more efficient and cost-effective way with certified solutions that come with freedom of choice (flexibility of deployment and choice of consumption model). The guys talk about how to solve real world customer problems, where traditional infratructure is too costly, time consuming and complex; public cloud is not the panacea. Nutanix and HPE deliver a new way to operate and pay for infrastructure: delivering on the promise of the cloud, not the cost of the cloud, across key workloads and regulated industries: Special Guests: Aaron Delp, Mark Maguire, and Matt Kimball.

MySQL is the most popular open source database in the world. Oracle's new MySQL Heatwave makes MySQL the only cloud service with a built-in, high performance, in-memory query accelerator—HeatWave. In this episode, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, catch up with Oracle's Nipun Agarwal, Oracle's SVP of MySQL and Heatwave, at the recent Oracle OpenWorld event to about what it all means. This is wide-ranging conversation about the history of MySQL, where it plays well, and how Oracle MySQL HeatWave brings added value to the MySQL ecosystem. Special Guests: Matt Kimball and Nipun Agarwal.

It's all about Edge Computing as hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, welcome Jason Andersen, VP of Strategy and Product Management at Stratus. Jason brings Matt & Steve up-to-speed on what’s happening in the world of edge computing in a wide-ranging conversation about standards (or the lack of), the evolution of edge architectures, the fragmented edge market, the colliding worlds of IT & OT, and how Stratus helps its customers navigate through this confusing world. There is a whole lot packed into this hour-long discussion, but it's invaluable for anyone working in edge today. 00:00 Kick-it Off 01:25 Catching up with Strategy: Product updates, SGH Acquisition 03:57 Pivoting from Fault-Tolerance to the Edge 08:48 It’s all about Resilience! 11:00 How edge is evolving 13:00 Fragmentation at the edge 16:21 Containerization & Cloud-Native at the edge 20:48 Simplifying the edge control-plane while delivering QoS 23:20 Revisiting 2 Different Worlds as IT & OT Converge 30:10 Security at the Edge 37:22 General attitudes impacting edge deployments 41:14 Where’s Stratus focused in the near-term? 45:14 Importance of the overall solution stack 50:11 Wrapping-Up 50:26 Done Special Guest: Jason Andersen.

Buildings are becoming intelligent in ways that aren't always obvious, but that can make a huge difference to both tenants and property managers alike. Intelligent buildings are the epitome of the modern edge-to-cloud story, blending together process control, SaaS, and big data analytics to solve very practical problems. Nobody knows this space better than this week's guest, CTO and co-founder of Embue, Larry Genovesi. Larry, who has a long 20+ year history with hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, has spent his career solving interesting but non-obvious problems. Embue is Larry's latest venture, bringing bottom-line impacting intelligence into multi-tenent real-estate via its air ducts (quite literally). This episode talks about the real-world implications and challenges of solving practical problems at the edge. 00:00 Spiffy Theme Song & Intro 03:00 Who is Embue? 10:53 What's interesting about smart buildings and HVAC systems? 18:47 Edge is an operational problem, not a data problem. 26:00 Special considerations for making buildings smart. 28:22 Not your normal tech market: selling technology into the facilities management space. 31:14 Challenges of recruiting tech talent into a specialized engineering segment. 37:13 Intersection of Edge, SaaS, and IT: how do you create a new kind of environment? 40:41 What's next in this space, and for Embue? 45:59 Spiffy Outro Music. Special Guest: Larry Genovesi.

Nowhere is cybersecurity more critical than at an enterprise's edge, yet that's also an area with multiple owners and different approaches to the problem. It's a complicated environment. Gary Cohen, senior editor at CFE Media, joins hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell to give us his perspective. CFE Media focuses heavily on tracking the trends influencing the edge. This is a wide-ranging conversation that touches on IT vs OT, cybersecurity, and even a little baseball & Morrissey. Tune in! 00:00 Kick Off 01:02 Gary's history with the Chicago Cubs 05:00 Who is CFE Media? 07:00 The complexities of Edge: IT and OT 12:39 Cyber-Security at the Edge 20:23 Supply Chain Concerns 24:07 How does CFE Media engage with edge-focused audiences? 27:40 Cyber-Security Commonalities between IT & OT 29:25 A Conversation about Morrissey 31:08 Wrapping up. 32:44 The end. Special Guest: Gary Cohen.

Data is more critical, more abundant, and less structured than at any point in history. The attributes and uses of data are shifting, stressing traditional relational database management tools that we've come to rely on. NoSQL promises one answer to modern data management. Couchbase's VP of Product & Solution Marketing, Jeff Morris, joins hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, to talk us through the technology, where its best deployed, and how Couchbase plays in the space. 00:00 Show Open 00:03 Matt's Foolishness 00:45 Let's Talk about NoSQL 01:20 Introduce CouchBase VP Solutions & Product Marketing, Jeff Morris 02:46 How has data management evolved over the past decade? 05:39 Is there a performance hit when moving away from traditional RDMS? 07:54 Optimal use-cases for NoSQL databases 15:45 CouchBase Mobile & Devices 19:53 Is NoSQL a 'big lift' for IT practitioners? 24:44 Capella: CouchBase-as-a-Service 30:33 SQL & NoSQL, a Peaceful Co-Existance? 32:24 Where is CouchBase Focused over the next 12-18 months? 34:37 Wrapping Up. 35:43 The End! Special Guest: Jeff Morris.

There is nothing more critical to IT administrators (and their bosses!) than cyber-security and data protection. Old methods of securing our infrastructure are no longer as effective as they once were. Instead, we're moving into an era of AI-based decisions about what data and traffic to let in, and keep out, of our networks. Hillstone Networks is a strong innovator in this space. In this episode HIllstone's Tim Liu and Gary Wang join hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell to help us understand the evolving nature of cyber-security. 00:00 Kick it off 00:20 Who is Hillstone? 01:06 Application-aware Security 02:37 Using AI and Machine Learning to enhance security 08:05 How has the treat landscape evolved over the past few years? 10:00 Protecting data in the cloud 13:30 Security Kubernetes & container-based workflows 13:58 Who are Hillstone's customers? 16:33 What's next for Hillstone & cyber-security in general? 23:00 Evolving threat landscape 24:54 Wrapping up 25:19 It's over! Special Guests: Gary Wang and Tim Liu.

There is (arguably) no faster mainstream storage available than Infinidat's just-launched InfiniBox SSA II array. Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog joins host Steve McDowell, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, to walk us through just how Infinidat is able to increase throughput and IOPs by more than 50% in the new array, while also ensuring a compelling level of data protection and cyber-resilience. The guys also talk about the continuing evolution of storage, with a deep-dive into AIOps and how new workloads (such as cloud-native) impact storage architecture. This is a great podcast for anyone interested in high-performance storage. This podcast is sponsored by Infinidat. Special Guest: Eric Herzog.

The Data Center is changing, becoming more virtual, fungible, ephemeral... a whole load of adjectives that describe flexible infrastructure, whether delivered via the public cloud, an on-prem consumption-based model, or even a hyper-scale data center provider like Equinix, and its Equnix Metal offerings. Matt & Steve are joined by an expert in this field, Zac Smith. Zac is the co-founder of Packet, and the current head of Edge and Metal Infrastructure at Equinix. There isn't much talk about Equinix -- this conversation quickly focuses on how data center architecture is evolving, embracing various alternate consumption models. Cloud, hosted, consuption-based, and other emergent models are supplementing and, in many cases, replacing traditional on-prem infrastructure. This is one you don't want to miss. 00:00 Fade In. 01:00 Introducing Zac Smith 02:00 Zac's different thinking about the data center world and the founding of Packet 05:37 Shifting, often generational, views of data center and workload management 07:15 It's all about the workload: why servers may not ever fully commodtize 09:35 Where do providers like Equinix fit in data center architecture? 16:09 The Rise of ARM-based processors in the data center 20:08 What IT customers are choosing the ARM path, and why? 24:05 Open compute initiatives, and the Linux Foundation's Open19 Project 31:30 The Sustainabilty Impact 35:55 Consumption-based infrastructure's place in data center architecture 39:08 Fade to black. Special Guest: Zac Smith.

Deploying IT services into the "messy middle" between on-prem and cloud can be challenging. This episode finds hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, talking to Todd Brannon, Cisco's Senior Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Platforms, about the challenges of managing IT resources in a multi-cloud world. The guys talk about the challenges of managing a mixed cloud/on-prem, the adoption (or lack of adoption!) of autonmous infrastructure, 00:00 Podcast Opens 02:44 Introducing Cisco's Todd Brannon 04:58 What are the biggest cloud-related challenges facing IT today? 07:30 Solving the common needs of enterprise IT 12:25 Cisco Intersight Services for Cloud 22:51 Autonomous Infrastructure 26:05 We've talked a lot about software -- what's happening in the hardware space? 34:35 Cloud is one thing -- what's happening at the Edge? 39:50 Roll Credits! Special Guest: Todd Brannon.

VAST Data's pursuit of solving some of the world's hardest data problems is resonating with customers, as VAST demonstrates with released momentum numbers. On this episode of DataCentric, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell are joined by VAST CMO and co-founder Jeff Denworth. Jeff walks us through the VAST Data story, tells us why AI is particularly challenging, and hints at where VAST might go in the future. 00:31 What was missing in the storage industry that needed to be created in 2016? 03:36 What did VAST do differently to shake up traditional storage architectures? 06:52 Jeff talks about some of the early wins at VAST 10:44 Jeff goes into VAST's momentum story 12:25 What's the average VAST customer looks like? 13:10 The VAST Customer Experience, validated by Gartner Peer Insights 13:52 Decoupling the Software from the Hardware with Gemini 17:49 What's the future look like for VAST? 20:15 AI's Impact on enterprise data 25:56 Matt & Steve Wrap-up 28:34 We're done! Special Guest: Jeff Denworth.

Cloud Native is fast becoming the go-to model for deploying applications in the enterprise and is being used increasingly for production applications. This is happening both in the cloud and on-prem. But making containers production-ready requires more than just installing Kubernetes. Hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell spend time with NetApp's Eric Han, Vice President of product management for NetApp Astra, NetApp's cloud-native solution, to understand the complexities of deploying cloud-native technologies into a production IT workflow. This is great convesation for anyone involved in IT or application architeture. 00:00 Theme Song 01:10 Geting to know Eric 03:15 Forget DevOps, what's the value of cloud-native for Production Workloads? 06:20 Data Management in Cloud Native 09:10 Mapping Kubernetes to related services like NetApp Astra and its competitors 15:40 What is NetApp Astra 19:41 NetApp is playing in both storage and cloud native: how should we thinkn about NetApp? 23:11 Eric asks himself: How easy is it, really? 25:23 Matt & Steve wrap-up, plus talk a little about NetApp's most recent earnings call. 29:37 We're done. Special Guest: Eric Han.

The PCI SIG released the specification for PCIe 6.0 in January of this year. Long-time PCI SIG president, and IBM distinguished engineer, Al Yanes walks hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, both principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, through the specification, talking about what's new and different and the benefit that IT will ultimately enjoy. Additionally, AMD and Intel each released strong earnings overall, and very strong delivery in their respective enterprise data center segments. Matt & Steve talk about what the earnings say about the current state of the processor market. 00:00 Kick it off 00:50 AMD & Intel Earnings Discussion 11:20 Al Yanes walks us through PCIe 6.0 23:00 Who is the PCI SIG, anyway? And how do they operate? 25:30 PCIe and Automotive 26:44 How will enterprise IT benefit from PCIe 6.0? 33:25 When will we see PCIe 6.0 in the data center? 34:20 Matt & Steve Wrap it up 35:48 We're done! Special Guest: Al Yanes.

In this episode, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, kick off 2022 with a discussion on what to watch in the world of enterprise infrastructure during the upcoming year. This is a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from AMD and ARM in the server market, alternative processor architectures, supply chain, PCIe 5.0, and even some of the goings-on at this month's Consumer Electronics Show. 00:00 Start the show! 01:40 The Server Market: AMD Server market share numbers, Intel's current situation, and the impact of supply chain disruptions 10:38 AMD and Intel introduce new client parts: how much of this bleeds over into the server space? 17:33 ARM in the Server Market: Is this just a hyperscaler phenomia? Will we see expansion in 2022? 27:50 Where does RISC-V Play? 30:40 Disrupting storage: VAST Data, PCIe 5, and does CXL-attached memory supplant Intel Optane? 36:19 Consumption-based infrastructure in 2022 38:24 Over-and-Out

The cloudification of IT is happening. There is a trend in IT towards simplifying the IT experience, both technologies and IT services. Nowhere is this more evident than in how IT organizations deliver services, such as database services, to the broader enterprise. On this edition of DataCentric, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, principal analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, talk to HPE and Nutanix about how these two companies have partnered to help IT shops simplify both their own, and their user's, experience. Joining Steve and Matt are Kate Davis, Global Marketing Manager for HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, and Maggie Smith, senior solution manager for Nutanix database solutions. The Nutanix Cloud Platform complements the public cloud-like billing and standby capacity of HPE GreenLake, with fully integrated compute, storage and virtualization building blocks that provide turnkey, instant operations. Special Guests: Kate Davis and Maggie Smith.

Hybrid multi-cloud has become a standard part of nearly every enterprise's IT infrastructure, yet it often remains a disjointed element with complexities that are different from those faced in the traditional data center. In this episode of DataCentric, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell talk to Nutanix's Rakesh Sreekanth and Lenovo's Ritu Jain about how HCI can be a great way to address these challenges. Nutanix brings a unified range of solutions, spanning basic HCI all the way to full multi-cloud management solutions that tie together on-prem and cloud. Lenovo is one of fastest growing companies in enterprise infrastructure, and delivers Nutanix solutions as part of its Lenovo ThinkAgile HX series. Together, these companies deliver complete HCI solutions for the modern enterprise. Special Guests: Rakesh Sreekanth and Ritu Jain.

While DevOps offers IT organizations the tools required to deliver application transformation, it isn't until you start to incorporate an awareness of "Data" into a DevOps world that the real power to achieve digital transformation can be achieved. Host Steve McDowell, senior technology analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, has a wide-ranging conversation with Delphix CEO and founder Jedidiah Yueh about the power of DevOps and why data is the "last automation frontier". They also talk about the intersection of DevOps, machine learning, and MLOps, as well as fostering a culture of innovation. 00:00 Roll the tape... 01:01 Jedidah Yueh's path from high-school teacher to Silicon Valley founder 03:30 Haven't we already solved all the hard DevOps problems? 04:47 DevOps as part of your cyber-security strategy 07:58 DevOps and Application Transformation 10:08 The Delphix Vision 12:06 Intersection of DevOps and MLOps 14:00 ML Models are Just Another Kind of Data 15:50 What's on the horizon in the world of data-driven DevOps? 17:20 Jed's book "Disrupt or Die" and how to foster a culture of innovation 20:20 Data is the last automation frontier 21:27 Wrapping up 21:44 .. the band plays us out Special Guest: Jedidiah Yueh.