The French Storage Podcast

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.

I invited AirMettle, a company I discovered a few quarters ago, for the recent 53rd edition of The IT Press Tour in California, as I identified a real compelling story. Donpaul Stephens, CEO and co-founder of the company, has founded Violin Memory in 2005 to put things in perspective. The presentation was impressive, the team has built a very good solution and thus it was obvious for me to continue to talk with its founder so this interview. We spoke about many different things starting with Violin of course, the trigger that invited him to think about AirMettle with the identified pains at customers' sites not solved yet by the industry, how the product works, its values and key differentiators, a bit of the go-to-market strategy and the pricing model and what is coming. A very interesting talk with Donpaul, indeed, I hope you all will appreciate. Enjoy your listening. Thank you Donpaul.

The 53rd edition of The IT Press Tour took place a few weeks ago in San Francisco and the bay area. 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 AirMettle, Cerabyte, CloudFabrix, Graid Technology, Groq, Hammerspace, HYCU, Rimage and StorageX. Some of these companies are recent, others more established and all address modern IT challenges via key innovations. This tour edition was, once again, a very good one and I hope you will really enjoy listening to it.

Cerabyte joined us recently for the 53rd edition of The IT Press Tour in California and it was the right time to record an interview with its CEO, Christian Pflaum. We spoke about the genesis of the idea even before it was a project and then covered multiple aspects of the under development solution with the media of course, its nature, the writing and reading process and even tried to speak about the business model, go-to-market and pricing approaches even if we understand it is very early. Very interesting talk with Christian and above all, the project is initiated in Europe by a European company. I hope you'll like it, it was a real pleasure to meet and discuss again with Christian following several talks we had int he past, the tour session and even the recent visit of the prototype in December in Germany. Thank you Christian.

Rimage chose the 53rd edition of The IT Press Tour in California to launch their Digital Asset Management solution, Sophia. It is a big shift and news for Rimage who was a pioneer and reference of the CD, DVD and Blu-Ray disk publishing. With Christopher Rence, CEO of Rimage, we spoke about the genesis of the company, the market, the evolution of Rimage, users' challenges and needs and cover in details Sophia. We also covered the go-to-market and pricing model and we spoke about the future directions for the company and the product. With the launch in mind, recording this episode in California was a real pleasure and I hope you'll like it. Thank you Christopher.

2024 will continue the classic release of the Coldago Research with its Gem list and its 5 companies to watch in the coming months. I select Arcitecta, Nyriad, Tiger Technology, Tuxera and XenData. Enjoy the listening of this short episode.

2024 just started and it's time to share my predictions for 2024 as I will continue what I mentioned for my retrospective for 2023. We'll see if this year will be more dense especially on the technology and products side but also on IPOs, M&As and funds raising. It should be a good one. Enjoy.

Twice a year, Coldago Research produces its Storage Unicorn note, a dedicated report covering the market climate and its selection of storage unicorns. Last December, like in June 2023, the 14th edition of this report listed 17 companies without any changes. By alpha order they're Acronis, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, DataCore, DDN, Druva, Infinidat, Kaseya, MinIO, Nasuni, OwnBackup, Qumulo, Rubrik, VAST Data, Veeam Software, Veritas Technologies and Wasabi Technologies. Enjoy the listening, it's a very short episode that invites you to dig into the topic.

As a usual exercice, I tried at the end of each year to summarize what have happened during the last 12 months on our market. I cover company news, technology aspects, product announcements, M&A, VC rounds or IPOs. A pretty rich year again and 2024 should be even more dense. Enjoy the listening.