The French Storage Podcast

Second participation for Storadera, a company I invited in Paris in September 2022. This time for the 61st edition of The IT Press Tour in London, we need a company and product update and Tommi Kannisto, CEO and founder, joined us to present a deep update on what they did for last few months, how the product works, what are te key differentiators and what he plans for the company and the product in the coming quarters. Storadera is pretty unique with a very simple pricing model with just €6/TB/mon everything included. I hope you will enjoy tis episode. Thank you Tommi.

We got the scoop during the recent IT Press Tour when we learned that CloudFabrix renamed itself into Fabrix.AI to surf and take advantage of the coming AI Tsunami. With this new positioning and AI integration we saw lots of progress for their platform and I decided to talk with Raju Penmetsa, the CTO of the company. We spoke about the architecture, how they leverage AI, Deepseek and other famous technologies, some specific LLMs... and land on their value proposition around Data, AI and Automation Fabric. We concluded with some future product directions and many things are coming. A very good talk, I hope you will enjoy this episode. Thank you Raju.

Young Block Software Defined Storage aka SDS player, Volumez joined recently the 60th edition of The IT Press Tour and it was the opportunity to measure all the progress made by the team in terms of product and market penetration. With the introduction of their Data Infrastructure as a Service, a super set above classic cloud IaaS and their recent performance results for the MLPerf benchmarks, it gave me idea to discuss with John Blumenthal, Chief Business and Product Officer at Volumez, about all these and much more. With John we spoke about his choice of Volumez and the challenge he found, the approach the company took on this AI storage infrastructure and how the product works, the value for users and developers, their business approach following impressive MLPerf results and we concluded with sone future directions. A very interesting talk with John, it was a good moment I hope you will like it as much as I enjoyed it. Thank you John.

Reference in Unstructured Data Management for on-premises and cloud open systems, Komprise continues to drive its product line at a rapid pace. Known for its modern file migration approach based on its Transparent Move Technology, aka TMT, Komprise invented a radical way to manage tiering without any stub files. The product supports a wide variety of NAS and S3 sources and targets, both deployed on-premises or in the cloud. As we met Komprise during the last IT Press Tour in January, I thought that it could be interesting to speak with its CTO, Mike Peercy to dig into a few technical aspects of their solution. And we did it, with Mike we spoke about the architecture of the product, how they leverage ElasticSearch, why and how the global File Index , aka GFI, works and its role, and we also covered the recent announcement related to AI and how the sensitive data protection is implemented. And we concluded with a bit of future directions. Komprise has been recognized, once again, as a leader in the Coldago Research Map 2024 for Unstructured Data Management. It was a pleasure to discuss and record tis episode, hope you will enjoy it.

Panzura is a pioneer in Cloud File Storage serving data at any points on the planet from a central data repository stored on public or private cloud. It mixes object storage with edge access points and maintains NAS protocols for edge clients. It delivers a strict consistency model across sides and has been designed with a pretty unique star and mesh topology across CloudFS servers and back to the central storage. Following the recent IT Press Tour in January, I decided to record this episode with Sundar Kanthadai, the CTO of Panzura for 2 and half years. In addition Panzura has acquired Moonwalk Universal and sells it today with some extensions as Symphony jumping into Unstructured Data Management. Panzura has been recognized, once again, as a leader in the Coldago Research Map 2024 for Cloud File Storage. We spoke about all these points with Sundar, starting with his motivation to join Panzura following his experience at Pavilion Data Systems. I really enjoyed this talk, hope you will as well. Thank you Sundar.

We unveiled to the world Leil Storage in April 2024 for the 55th edition of The IT Press Tour in Roma, Italy. It was the opportunity to discover the Estonian company who develops a scalable high end secondary storage approach based on SaunaFS, their Google like File System, coupled with erasure coding and ICE - Infinite Cold Engine - to reduce and control power usage coupled with SMR HDDs. I recorded this episode this week at Leil HQ in Tallinn, Estonia, speaking with David Gerstein, CTO, and Piotr Modrzyk, Principal Architect. During this talk, we go deeper explaining how their SaunaFS works, their differentiators, how they coupled it with erasure coding and integrate power control to reduce energy consumption. They leverage SMR HDDs with high capacity, more dedicated to sequential workloads, and use some techniques to reduce power and thus at scale cut significantly electricity bill. We learn also more about their future directions. Enjoy this technical talk. Thank you David and Piotr.

New year and new meeting during The IT Press Tour with CloudFabrix Software now morphed into Fabrix.AI to maximize its solution and impact on IT with AI. I talked with Raju Datla, CEO and co-founder of Fabrix.AI, and we covered the genesis of the company, his team, its solution approach fueled by AI, the recent announxements, the go-to-market and pricing model and a bit of future directions as well. Enjoy this new episode about Fabrix.AI, thank you Raju.

New meeting during The IT Press Tour with iXsystems, the company insisted on its TrueNAS brand wishing to be aligned with the success of its storage servers and as an effect from the sale of its server business to Amaara Networks. The company introduced a H30 model, covering the new TrueNAS 25.04 iteration and several other successes as 2024 was a good year. Really a good episode with Brett. Thank you. Enjoy.

New exercice or at least at a different frequency, this episode covers the first 2 months of 2025 with some market news I selected. I spoke about VC funding and investments, IPOs, M&A, new product iterations, people's moves, architecture and technology. Enjoy.

The 60th edition of The IT Press Tour took place last week of January in Silicon Valley, California. It's a major milestone for our organization, if you put things in perspective with 60 editions, what other event has reached that number, I let you check... but it will be tough to find some... Success is about regularity, consistency coupled with unique value proposition and innovation it introduces, The IT Press Tour is all about that, a special club. And check the numbers with this 60th edition: 330 distincts companies and 571 sessions since 2010 !! For this edition we met 9 organizations covering IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data and Storage Management, Big Data and Analytics and of course AI. In the alpha order, they're Aquila Clouds, CloudFabrix now Fabrix.AI, Crystal DBA, Hammerspace, Komprise, MLCommons, Panzura, TrueNAS aka iXsystems and Volumez.

2025 is well started and Coldago Research published a few days ago its Gem list 2025 with 5 key players to watch in the coming months: ExaGrid, Leil Storage, QStar Technologies, Volumez and Wasabi Technologies. Enjoy the listening of this new episode.

Classic exercice for a few years for Coldago Research, I share my predictions for 2025 covering AI and its impact, Cloud, Security, Platform, Infrastructure, Media and Connectivity and Energy. Enjoy this episode.

Regular exercice for the Coldago Research team publishing its bi-annual Storage Unicorn in June and December. The last report was published in December 2024 and lists 16 companies: Acronis, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, DataCore, DDN, Druva, ExaGrid, Infinidat, Kaseya, MinIO, Nasuni, Qumulo, Rubrik, VAST Data, Veeam Software and Wasabi Technologies. Enjoy the listening of this short episode.

Classic exercise I do every year, here is once again my choice for the key facts related to the data storage industry in 2024. I cover Funding aspects, IPOs, M&As, new Unicorns and Trends. All these elements are also key to follow for the coming year as they announce some real changes. A very interesting and promising year in perspective. And I should say it starts well with the Infinidat acquisition by Lenovo. Enjoy.

Coldago Research has launched and released a brand new Map about Modern Data Protection aka MDP as we live in a fast changing world with pressure and challenges in all domains. This study analyzed 16 companies: Acronis, Arcserve, Atempo, Bacula, Cohesity, Commvault, Dell, Druva, HYCU, IBM, Kaseya, N-able, OpenText, Rubrik, Salesforce and Veeam and we elect 4 leaders: Cohesity, Commvault, Rubrik and Veeam. I really hope this episode will meet your expectations. Enjoy.

New Map for Coldago Research with the new annual Map for Unstructured Data Management aka UDM. The 2024 report analyzes 17 companies: Arcitecta, Atempo, Congruity360, Data Dynamics, Datadobi, Dell, Hammerspace, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, IBM, iRODS, Komprise, NetApp, Spectra Logic, Starfish and Veritas and we elect 4 leaders: Arcitecta, Data Dynamics, Hammerspace and Komprise. I hope you'll like this short episode about a paramount function within enterprises. Enjoy.

Coldago Research has unveiled its 6th edition of its annual Map for File Storage. The 2024 report analyzes 27 distinct companies over 3 Maps: Enterprise, High Performance and Cloud File Storage: AWS, CTERA, DDN, Dell, Egnyte, Fujitsu, Hammerspace, HPE, Huawei, IBM, iXsystems, LucidLink, Microsoft, Nasuni, NetApp, Panzura, Peer Software, Pure Storage, Quantum, Qumulo, Quobyte, SUSE, ThinkParQ, Tiger Technology, VAST Data, Vdura and WEKA and we elect leaders for each category. I let you listen to this episode to discover who are the winners. Enjoy.

The 59th edition of The IT Press Tour took place early December in Valletta, Malta. We continue our European stops and this time for the 59th edition we landed in beautiful Malta. It was once again a fantastic edition as we had the opportunity to meet 6 European companies: DigiFilm, EasyVirt, Indexima, Manticore Search, ProxySQL and Scalytics. I hope you will like the episode and we'll be in a few weeks, for the 60th edition, amazing right, in Silicon Valley.

Wasabi Technologies, the reference in cloud storage, alternative to hyperscalers' solutions with a very efficient and cost effective S3 API service, participated to the recent IT Press Tour in Boston in October. It was the perfect opportunity to meet company's executives and David Friend, co-founder and CEO, who shared his view on the market, genesis of the project and of course directions of the company. It gaves me the idea to record a dedicated episode with David to go deeper in some aspects and we did it recently, we spoke about his background and the trajectory of Wasabi with today a status of Centaur passing the $100M ARR, his partner in crime Jeff Flowers, CTO of Wasabi, some new services around the classic offering especially with the AI engine acquired based on Curio AI, business model with a pure indirect model powered by 16,000 partners and a very unique pricing model charging only the capacity used. We also covered the directions of the company with a potential IPO and for the storage service with some ideas around a on-premises instance and w few other things. A very interesting dialog with David, I hope you will like this episode. Thank you David.

SuperComputing 24 took place a few weeks ago in Atlanta, Georgia, and once again it was a very good edition with the best ever number of attendees with 18,000+, 4,000 more than last year, very impressive show. The topic was about Acceleration in various domains such a HPC, AI, Storage, Memory or Network. I insisted on key trends, some technologies and products I saw very present on the floor. Enjoy the listening.