The French Storage Podcast

As a usual and classic note, twice a year, Coldago Research publishes its Storage Unicorn report which presents the club and its selection of storage unicorns. This June 2024 edition, the 15th one listed 17 companies with a few change with Rubrik now a public company, WEKA joining the club following its last round and Cohesity key events early this year. By alpha order, they're Acronis, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, DataCore, DDN, Druva, Infinidat, Kaseya, MinIO, Nasuni, OwnBackup, Qumulo, VAST Data, Veeam Software, Veritas Technologies, Wasabi Technologies. and WEKA. Enjoy the listening, it's a very short episode that invites you to dig into the topic.

Viking Enterprise Solutions, aka VES, a product division of Sanmina, a reference in compute and storage server design and manufacturing, participated recently to The IT Press Tour. It was the perfect time to understand who is Sanmina and VES, what they do, how they work for other IT companies developing their hardware solutions such as DDN, Infinidat or VAST Data, coupled potentially with some open source software. We discuss with Rick Kumar, SVP of VES, about the mission of the company, their expertise, the various use cases with AI of course but also go-to-market and revenue models. We conclude with some future directions, always interesting with entities like VES. I hope you would like this episode, enjoy your listening. Thank you Rick.

MaxLinear, a leader and fast data processing player with advanced connectivity for data center with ethernet and storage dedicated products, participated recently to The IT Press Tour. It was a good time to get a company and product update before FMS early August. We learnt MaxLinear storage product strategy and all details around Panther III and its roadmap. With Vikas Choudhary, VP & GM of the Ethernet and Storage Business, we spoke about all that and get some future directions for the company and product developments. A very interesting talk I hope you would appreciate as well. Enjoy your listening. Thank you Vikas.

Index Engines, a pioneer in enterprise content indexing, joined the recent IT Press Tour in California and announced their 99.99% SLA in ransomware protection. It was the perfect opportunity to learn more about the company, founded in 2003, by CrosStor founders, previously known as Programmed Logic, and get the full product pitch and demo around ransomware protection. With Tim Williams, CEO and founder of the company, we spoke about all that trajectory and covered in details how the product works, the business model with key oems, the pricing philosophy and touched a bit of the future directions. Plenty of good things coming and we should see the product in several new places soon. A very good talk with Tim I hope you would like as well. Enjoy your listening. Thank you Tim.

Among this CTO talk series, I recorded this one with Trond Myklebust, CTO, Hammerspace, during the last MSST conference in Santa Clara, early June, a few days before The IT Press Tour in Silicon Valley. It was the perfect opportunity to discuss the Hammerspace mission, GDE and HyperScale NAS, leveraging pNFS for multi-site, multi-client and multi-protocol file access and deliver an advanced data sharing service. We spoke about new features especially around pNFS Flex Files and services like erasure coding with RozoFS' Mojette Transform addition and the S3 client. S3-to-Tape is also covered as the team chose to partner with QStar, PoINT Software and Systems or Grau Data to offer a real end-to-end data management approach. A very good talk with Trond, I hope you will enjoy it. Thank you Trond.

A new talk, this time with Aron Brand, CTO at CTera, recorded a few weeks following the IT Press Tour early April in Rome where the company shared some exclusive news. Its was once again the opportunity to go deeper in their product and strategy especially around AI and how they will integrate it. We also spoke about their Data Services Platform and its role and how NAS and S3 are glued together. We have insisted on the security aspect of their product with recent additions around ransomware protection with vaulting technique, decoy and honeypot techniques. Good talk again with Aron, I really enjoy our discussion and hope you will enjoy it as well. Thank you Aron.

Object Storage is a long story almost 20 years if you consider the AWS S3 launch in 2006 but it has started before with the CAS wave. I invite you to read carefully the Coldago Research Timeline on the subject, it is available here. I discuss several of this evolution and especially insisted on the current 4 flavors: Capacity Oriented, High Performance, Single Node and S3-to-Tape. Enjoy your listening.

ISC 2024 took place in Hamburg, Germany, this week and it was the opportunity to meet vendors, discuss with various people, attend sessions and see some sort of convergence between HPC and AI as they some similarities or at least some constraints at sale. We saw several parallel file system vendors, flash at many places, a few HDD resistance, tape as well, of curse GPU and alterantives... in a nutshell a good show. Enjoy the listening.

Huawei Technologies organized its last Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum 2024 in Berlin, Germany, this week. It was the opportunity to meet company's executives. The Chinese giant announced a series of new product such as the 128TB NVMe SSD, again the A800 and a few others hardware and software solutions targeting high demanding environments such as AI. We learnt a lot again on the strategy in data storage from the company that innovates at a rapid pace. Enjoy the listening.

The 55th edition of The IT Press Tour took place early April in Rome, Italy. We met 6 innovative companies all playing in IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data Management, Storage and I added AI. By alpha order it was CTERA, Fujifilm Recording Media, Know and Decide, Leil Storage, QStar Technologies and Quickwit. A very good edition again and I hope you will really enjoy listening to it.

## Episode in French ## Know and Decide, a fast growing IT Asset Management company, joined The IT Press Tour organized recently in Rome. Emmanuel Moreau, CEO and founder, introduced the company and its solution to address IT resource management challenges representing a big issue especially within large enterprises and corporations. The product took advantage of deep CIO connection Emmanuel has to define and specify the product according large IT environments. We spoke about the genesis of the company, why he launched the project, how the product works, the key use cases, the go-to-market and pricing model of course. Emmanuel also insisted on the fact that he's actively looking for partners to distribute its solution even oems. A very interesting talk episode with lots of information. Enjoy your listening. Thank you Emmanuel.

QStar Technologies, a pioneer in the data archiving space, participated recently to The IT Press Tour organized in the beautiful city of Rome. The management team took advantage of their participation to launch their new product - Global ArchiveSpace - a scalable multi-node solution able to support very large volumes of data but also very large archived datasets and tape libraries. We also spoke with Riccardo Finotti about the genesis of the company, its evolution, QStar's product line, a bit how it works and the philosophy of archive, the go-to-market and pricing model of course. A very good episode, very interactive with tons of information on QStar. Enjoy your listening. Thank you Riccardo.

Leil Storage, an Estonian company joined The IT Press Tour, this week in Rome, to introduce their storage approach with Powered control storage system as a evolution of MAID coupled with erasure coding and SaunaFS, a distributed file system, inspired by the famous Google File System. With Aleksandr Ragel, founder and CEO, we spoke about the genesis of the company, their products and how they approach the market. I let you discover the interview with a very interesting solution. I think you will appreciate it. Thank you Sasha.

The 54th edition of The IT Press Tour took place early March in Denver, Colorado, and the bay area in California. We visited and met 9 innovative companies all playing in IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data Management, Storage and I added AI. By alpha order it was Arcitecta, BMC, Cohesity, Hammerspace, Quantum, Qumulo, Solix, StoneFly and WEKA. A very good edition again and I hope you will really enjoy listening to it.

Cohesity shook the storage industry with the M&A announcement with Veritas Technologies a few weeks ago, nobody has really anticipated that move. We met Sanjay Poonen, CEO, and his executive team, during the recent IT Press Tour and it appeared natural and logic for me to record this interview and we did a few days after our visit. With Sanjay we spoke about the genesis of the deal, the Cohesity business situation and business climate, the rationale behind the deal, the financial aspect of it, what it means for NetBackup users, also for DataProtect, the recent announcement about GAIA, the Cohesity RAG AI approach, and of course the future with some projections of the coming months. Super interview, I really hope you will love it as well. Thank you Sanjay.

A new talk with Shimon Ben David, CTO of WEKA, recorded during the Nvidia GTC following the recent IT Press Tour in California. Beyond a refresh about WEKA, the parallel file system background and the Modern Data Platform approach, we spoke about the recent performance public benchmarks available on SPEC web site where WEKA clearly takes the lead in various domains, the certification of the WEKApod, a hardware flavor of the WEKA solution offered as an appliance, with the NVidia SuperPOD reference architecture and program and we covered a bit the future. Good exchange again with Shimon as always, a real pleasure to discuss with one of the hot gems in the storage industry, so I hope you will enjoy it. Thank you Shimon.

During the last 2 decades, Google File System had a huge impact of the storage industry inviting several companies to imagine and design pretty similar distributed file system solutions clearly inspired by GFS. We had also Facebook with f4 and Haystack, of course Hadoop and HDFS, plus a myriad of several open source projects and products. I tried in this episode to rapidly cover each of them, I count more than 10 file system instances. I'm sure you know some of them and at the same time I'm also pretty sure you will discover some new names. Enjoy your listening.

With all the improvements developed and made by various vendors, I decided to record this episode dedicated to file sharing methods with NFS, its option like nconnect, multipathing and pNFS, but also SMB, its RDAM extension with SMB Direct also available for NFS and of course NVidia GPUDirect Storage extension. Enjoy this rapid overview of the file sharing protocols landscape.

A new episode this time with the CTO of XenData, Mark Broadbent, to discuss archiving and more precisely Active Archive, a few weeks following The IT Press Tour organized in Madrid in December 2023. The company founded more than 2 decades ago designed and developed the X-Series and the E-Series, a solution that combines disk space and tale storage to store massive amount of files data. The product is well deployed and recognized in some verticals such as Media & Entertainment. Mark told me that they plan to add Generative AI to make some additional processing on metadata but also they wish to extend the disk capacity of these products and will soon release a media browser. I let you discover this new episode, it was a real pleasure to record, so I hope you will enjoy it. Thank you Mark.

New talk and new format with an exchange with a product or technology executive and this time I invited Subbiah Sundaram, SVP Products at HYCU. We talked about R-Cloud of course, its last iteration with the integration with Anthropic Cloud Generative AI service in the module development process launched during the last IT Press Tour in January in California and of course all other aspects of it like R-Graph, the marketplace... I hope you will enjoy it, thank you Subbiah.