Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris talks to Sharad Kumar, Field CTO at Qlik about the value of good-quality data when developing AI solutions.

In this episode, Chris discusses the options available to storage system vendors when building modern storage appliances, with Bill Basinas, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Infinidat. The conversation derives from an observation on architectural choices, following the move to AMD processors from Intel for the latest G4 systems built by Infinidat. AMD offers a greater core count per processor compared to Intel, allowing Infinidat to move to single socket designs, while gaining improvements from PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory. Ultimately, this discussion highlights how modern storage system design can take standardised components and build flexible architectures, implementing most features in software. For Infinidat, that could mean expanding its range of solutions for smaller enterprise requirements, or building out products specifically for Edge use cases. Although Bill did not reveal any future plans, the implication is clear - watch this space for future evolution of the InfiniBox architecture to a wider and more varied set of hardwaree configurations. Elapsed Time: 00:37:13 Timeline 00:00:00 - Intros 00:01:15 - How do vendors choose the hardware components for storage systems? 00:02:30 - What are the main (storage) technology challenges for customers? 00:04:08 - Customers want predictable data features 00:05:55 - Capacity demand continues to grow relentlessly 00:07:30 - Infinidat features are built into software 00:09:35 - Most AI requirements wil run on existing performance storage 00:11:20 - Modern hardware provides significant flexibility for system design 00:15:00 - AMD gives access to single and high core-count processors 00:16:10 - PCIe 5.0 provides for faster SSDs and power efficiency 00:18:46 - Infinidat has introduced smaller form-factor solutions 00:21:32 - Multiple cores will always get used! 00:25:53 - Infinidat G4 architecture provides for in-place controller upgrades 00:28:22 - Storage arrays should become more “virtual” 00:34:10 - Data services implementations are very different between vendors 00:35:55 - Hybrid architecture still has value in the Infinidat world 00:36:20 - Wrap Up Related Podcasts & Blogs Storage Unpacked 258 - Introducing Infinidat G4, InfuzeOS 8 and InfiniSafe ACP #202 - Enterprise Storage Consolidation with Phil Bullinger from Infinidat Infinidat adds customer value with SSA Express and improved SSA capacity Copyright (c) 2016-2025 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #e4dr

In this episode, Chris discusses the enduring benefits of centralised storage, particularly with reference to storage virtualisation, with Dan Kogan, VP of Enterprise Growth and Solutions and Cody Hosterman, Senior Director of Product Management, both from Pure Storage.

In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Jeb Horton, SVP Global Services at Hitachi Vantara, discussing the capabilities of Hitachi Vantara's Global Services offerings, which deliver infrastructure management and infrastructure as a service to its customers. In addition to EverFlex, Hitachi Vantara has a long history of managed services capabilities that span more than just outsourced storage. As Jeb explains, the company also manages storage infrastructure from other vendors, in addition to non-storage systems. The interesting aspect of this discussion is the complex nature of the interaction between customers and Hitachi. Solutions offerings aren't merely "transactional", but have a human aspect and are tailored to meeting the specific goals of the customer. This conversation explores some of the nuances of working with customers to transfer the burden of infrastructure management to Hitachi, enabling businesses to focus on more strategic opportunities. To learn more about Hitachi Vantara check out the Infrastructure as a Service section on the Hitachi website - https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/services/infrastructure-as-a-service. Elapsed Time: 00:48:02 Timeline 00:00:00 - Intros 00:01:43 - What is “Infrastructure as a Service”? 00:03:25 - What else to customers want from a service (other than cost saving)? 00:05:20 - Public cloud has increased the appetite for service-based consumption 00:06:24 - What is the core of the Hitachi Vantara services offering? 00:07:14 - Hitachi added automation into a “services platform” 00:10:26 - The human aspect involves skills but also relationships 00:12:20 - A service contract involves a detailed commercial model 00:13:51 - Service also means service levels and agreements 00:16:53 - Cloud is transactional, what is Hitachi’s “value add”? 00:19:45 - Data has value, which is the focus of service offerings 00:22:26 - How does Hitachi help government institutions? 00:26:50 - What sort of data issues does Hitachi deal with? 00:28:33 - Data and AI will be a key issue to manage 00:30:40 - How does the engagement process work with Hitachi (and what is EverFlex)? 00:37:15 - What are real-world examples of Hitachi customers and requirements? 00:46:51 - Wrap Up Related Podcasts & Blogs Hitachi Vantara Microsite Storage Unpacked 260 - Hitachi VSP One Updates with Dan McConnell Storage Unpacked 254 - Announcing VSP One and Hitachi Vantara Reorganisation Copyright (c) 2016-2024 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #4d3x

In this recording, Chris talks to Subbiah Sundaram, SVP of Products at HYCU, Inc. about the 2024 edition of the HYCU State of SaaS Resilence Report. The report surveys customers to understand the gaps in perceived and actual data protection for SaaS platforms and the results are quite surprising.

In this podcast episode, Chris is in conversation with Jeffries Briginshaw (Head of EMEA Government Relations at NetApp) and Adam Gale (CTO for AI & Cyber Security, NetApp) discussing the EU AI Act and the regulation of artificial intelligence across the world. The EU AI Act is an early introduction into the regulation of the use of AI by businesses within their engagements and interactions with customers. As explained in this conversation, there are classifications of AI types and within that, restrictions on what businesses are permitted to implement based on those categorisations. Some AI usage will be banned, while others will require human intervention and close monitoring. How should your business engage with AI and ensure compliance with the act? Listen to the discussion for more details. As mentioned in the recording, for details on what NetApp can offer, point your favourite browser to https://www.netapp.com/artificial-intelligence/ to learn more. Elapsed Time: 00:52:17 Timeline 00:00:00 - Intros 00:01:19 - Why should we be regulating AI? 00:02:30 - What will the impacts of AI be on personal and work life? 00:03:55 - What if we get regulation wrong? 00:05:30 - What happens if AI goes wrong, such as data poisoning? 00:09:04 - Existing EU/UK law has been successful at regulation (GDPR) 00:10:25 - What is the EU AI Act? 00:11:46 - “Prohibited Practices” will be banned from 2025 00:14:00 - How will the use of business in AI be regulated? 00:18:05 - The EU AI Act appears to focus on protection for individuals 00:20:56 - EU citizens are broadly positive to AI - if it is successfully regulated 00:21:52 - Compliance has an overhead - in terms of hard costs (developers) 00:25:20 - What are the penalties for not complying with the EU AI Act? 00:29:50 - What about the rest of the world - the US and elsewhere? 00:35:10 - Could we see “cross-border” complexity? 00:37:40 - What are the technology implications for AI regulation? 00:40:07 - Should businesses be demonstrating their AI compliance? 00:44:03 - What does NetApp offer customers to help AI compliance? 00:47:38 - AI will require a “big red stop button” 00:50:00 - Wrap Up Copyright (c) 2016-2024 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #dfsx

In this podcast episode, Chris discusses the platform update announcements from Pure Accelerate 2024 with Prakash Darji, VP and GM of the Digital Experience BU at Pure Storage.

In this podcast episode, Chris catches up with Dan McConnell, Senior VP for Product Management at Hitachi Vantara. The company recently announced VSP One Block, a new mid-range appliance for block storage.

In this episode, Chris discusses the topic of building sustainable storage solutions with Shawn Rosemarin, Global VP of Customer Engineering at Pure Storage.

In this episode, Chris talks to Infinidat CMO, Eric Herzog. Infinidat has announced one of the biggest upgrades in eight years, with the release of InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA G4, the fourth generation of enterprise-class storage.

In this sponsored episode, Chris talks to Fred Lherault and Larry Touchette from Pure Storage on the evolution of storage in the enterprise and the impacts on storage administration.

In this episode, Chris chats to Rick Kutcipal, "At-Large Director" with the SCSI Trade Association. The topic of conversation is the adoption of SAS media (both HDDs and SSDs) by hyper-scale customers that include public cloud vendors and companies such as Meta.

In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Ryan Farris (VP Product and Product Marketing) and Brandon Whitelaw (VP Cloud and Strategic Partnerships) at Qumulo. As the IT world becomes ever more focused on a hybrid cloud model, file storage becomes increasingly important, due to the legacy of applications and data already written to work with file servers.

In this live episode, recorded at Hitachi Exchange in Paris, Chris chats to Gary Lyng, VP of Products and Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. The company recently announced the VSP One platform, plus some organisational changes that will take Hitachi Vantara back to a focus on core infrastructure.

In this episode, Chris chats with Abel Gordon, Chief System Architect at Lightbits Labs, discussing the challenges and benefits of building a virtual storage area network (SAN) on public cloud infrastructure.

In this episode, Chris meets with Pure Storage co-founder John Colgrove (aka Coz) to discuss where the future of data storage lies in the enterprise.

In this episode, Chris is in conversation with Prakash Darji, VP and GM at Pure Storage. The company has just announced a new Paid Power & Rack Space offering, new SLAs for service delivery and Pure Protect //DRaaS a new disaster recovery solution delivered as a service.

In this episode Chris gets an update on new announcements from Infinidat, including SSA Express and higher-capacity SSA II systems. SSA Express is a new feature of the InfiniBox "classic" platform that allows customers to implement what looks like a virtual SSA (all-flash array) within a hybrid InfiniBox. The solution effectively pins volumes in SSD rather than allowing the data to cascade to the HDD layer, with the benefit of SSA performance for no additional cost on 95% of hardware in the field. Infinidat has also introduced a new SSA II, the F4316T with up to 6.6PB of effective capacity, doubling the previous maximum. The F4304T has been discontinued, so to meet the requirements of customers to scale from small to large systems, the existing F4308T and new F4316T can be initially deployed at 60%, 80% and 100% full. This scale-up option gives customers choice on how to deploy and extend all-flash implementations. More information on the new offerings can be found at https://www.infinidat.com/ and more details on Infinidat at our Infinidat Microsite. Elapsed Time: 00:33:51 Timeline 00:00:00 - Intros 00:01:00 - Quick update on announcements this year 00:03:30 - Vendors need to be offering value-add 00:04:25 - SSA Express is a software upgrade to add an embedded all-flash array 00:05:30 - SSA gains expansion and scale-up capabilities 00:06:40 - What is the SSA (and SSA II)? 00:08:45 - SSA Express is a free software upgrade 00:10:55 - SSA Express is similar to pinned volumes 00:13:20 - Infinidat will validate the suitability for SSA Express 00:14:50 - Most vendors don’t retro-fit a feature across all historical platforms 00:16:55 - InfiniBox is generally deployed fully configured 00:18:20 - SSA now offers double capacity with F4316T 00:24:05 - The new scalability allows customers to grow capacity more easily 00:25:35 - Partially populated SSA II still runs at 100% performance 00:28:10 - Value add for the customer is important in the current market 00:31:35 - Wrap Up Related Podcasts & Blogs Storage Unpacked 247 - Infinidat announces InfuzeOS Cloud Edition and InfiniSafe Cyber Detection Storage Unpacked 231 - Introducing Infinidat InfiniBox SSA II Storage Unpacked 227 - Infinidat InfiniGuard Enhancements with Eric Herzog Infinidat Microsite The Quiet Success of Infinidat Copyright (c) 2016-2023 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #nf34

In this episode, Chris talks to Derek Dicker, CEO at Nyriad about the UltraIO storage array. Nyriad has developed a new storage architecture using GPUs that accelerate the calculations needed to store data using erasure coding. This enables UltraIO to implement system-wide data protection using erasure coding at the block level. In contrast to most storage vendors in the market today, the UltraIO platform uses hard disk drives, with a GPU to process data ingested by the system, while data is presented back through the CPU route. This dual processor architecture enables Nyriad to deliver a product with 20GB/s of throughput, scale to multiple petabytes of capacity and provide dynamic data protection defined by the customer. Nyriad sees UltraIO being used across four industries - HPC, Media & Entertainment, Backup and Recovery, and Active Archive. Essentially the solution excels at handling large volumes of unstructured data that needs high throughput processing. Learn more about Nyriad, the origins of the solution with the Square Kilometre Array and customer examples at https://www.nyriad.io/ Elapsed Time: 00:32:28 Timeline 00:00:00 - Intros 00:01:40 - UltraIO was introduced in 2022 00:02:25 - Why is UltraIO different to traditional storage systems? 00:03:30 - GPUs can be used within data storage systems 00:04:10 - The Square Kilometre Array was an early customer 00:06:15 - UltraIO fits a specific set of requirements around data ingestion throughput 00:06:55 - UltraIO uses hard disk drives and erasure coding 00:08:00 - Ingested data is processed via GPU, then accessed by CPU 00:10:00 - Erasure coding allows customer-based resiliency settings 00:12:00 - The hardware for UltraIO uses standardised off the shelf hardware 00:14:50 - What markets does UltraIO fit? (HPC, M&E, Backup/Recovery & Active Archive) 00:16:15 - The UltraIO architecture has strong sustainability characteristics 00:18:45 - Most vendors have moved away from HDDs 00:23:00 - Digital Image replaced three systems with an UltraIO 00:24:20 - Don’t keep data forever! 00:26:35 - UltraIO helped Digital Glue deliver a media asset management solution 00:27:30 - System capacities are from one to three petabytes raw 00:29:15 - Nyriad works through the channel 00:31:00 - Wrap Up Copyright (c) 2016-2023 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #3erd

In this episode, Chris talks to Dan Kogan from Pure Storage about the upgraded FlashArray R4 systems and new FlashArray//E platform.