Our podcast has Brian introducing Jordan Winkelman from Quantum Corporation.  If you remember, we did a deep dive review of Quantum Myriad a few weeks ago. To prepare for that review, Brian traveled to the Quantum office in Denver, where he met up with Jordan in the breakroom. The discussion expanded to include AI topics like security and surveillance, all things storage and a bit of space-related topics.

Our podcast has Brian introducing Jordan Winkelman from Quantum Corporation.  If you remember, we did a deep dive review of Quantum Myriad a few weeks ago. To prepare for that review, Brian traveled to the Quantum office in Denver, where he met up with Jordan in the breakroom. The discussion expanded to include AI topics like security and surveillance, all things storage and a bit of space-related topics.

Jordan has spent over 25 years in the technology industry with technical roles supporting advertising, retail, medical, VoIP, and enterprise software and infrastructure solutions. More recently, for the past eight years, he has supported scale-out storage and field technology practices at Quantum. Jordan brings a wealth of experience in designing, testing, validating, and optimizing technology solutions for businesses of all sizes.

Quantum was very engaged in the review process and provided great support and detail. This podcast reveals the same level of attention from Jordan and provides a lively discussion on storage, security, containers, and a lot more.

Jordan and Brian go deep on technology and how the storage market has progressed over the years. There’s reminiscing about old 40MB storage drives and how difficult it is to get funding from Silicon Valley for a storage company startup. It’s a fun discussion and worth the time.

If you want to skip around the podcast, we have provided a timeline below, so feel free to jump to the topics that are more important to you.

Live on our Discord.

00:00  Introduction

• What isn’t Quantum
• 43-year-old storage company
• A bit of history around Quantum drives
• Purchased AIC Scalar Robotic Tape Library
• Myriad
  • What’s coming for Myriad

05:00 Talking about Hard Drives

• A bit of history about HDDs
• LTO tape
  • Tape rebound
  • Tape use
  • Tape densities
• Call it Cold Storage
• Erasure coding

10:00  Meeting customer SLAs

• Use cases for Object to Tape
  • Education
  • Medical
  • Financial
• Things that need to be stored for many years
• Financial incentives to retain tape
• Where will data be consumed
• Viewing in the MSG Sphere

15:00  Is it local, or is it streaming?

• Is there a massive secure pipe for video
• Is reliable transmission infrastructure available to stream
• Media companies are set up for any streaming failure
  • Multiple data centers
  • multiple network routes
  • It works for movies, TV shows, theaters, etc.
• How is Quantum addressing streaming vs. live content?
  • Premier League football
  • FI
  • Superbowl
  • Companies want to monetize all content
• Quantum is widely deployed throughout this industry
• Using a media asset management system
• High likelihood content is flowing through a Quantum product

20:00  Live clips

• Higher frame rate, higher resolution
  • May capture data in 8K but only stream 4K
    • Having the ability to upres at a later date
• Video capture
  • Cameras can ingest at different frame rates

25:00  Networking impact

• Serial Digital Interface (SDI)
• M&E still uses FC
  • mostly because of low latency
  • Ethernet still has latency issues
  • Moving to IP-based technologies called 2110

30:00  PCI is changing with Gen 4, Gen 5, and Gen 6

• GPU Servers
  • Storage Heavy
  • Filling the bays tends to oversubscribe lanes
• Use Myriad’s high-performance platform
  • Ability to support hundreds or thousands of concurrent connections
• Systems are designed differently today
  • Some support high performance for unstructured data
    • AI Workloads
• Requires high-performance Ethernet interconnects

35:00  AI means different things to different people

• Training and developing models
• Inferencing workloads at the edge
• It cannot be run in a silo
• Still a breakdown in structured vs unstructured data
• Integrated Deduplication and data reduction
• Find the place where data lives to generate money

40:00  Power and Cooling

• SSDs generate more heat than HDDs
• Keeping the GPUs fat
• Quantum’s take on liquid cooling
• Data center designers understand the physics of cooling
  • Quantum doesn’t get that involved
  • Focus on maintaining media stability
• Moving to an environmentally controlled box outside the data center

45:00  Where is the best place to store non-revenue data?

• Data may have intrinsic value
  • Where to store that data
  • The cloud may not be cost-effective for that data
  • Why didn’t Blu-Ray succeed in the data center?
• Why is tape still the best answer
• Talk about CD and the misconceptions
• DNA based storage, ceramic, optical
• Technologies entering the storage market

50:00  DNA Storage

• Still a long way off
• Quantum has invested heavily in that space
  • DNA Storage Alliance
• Consortiums contribute heavily  with knowledge and technology
• Hammer Technology has been in the news for over 20 years
  • Technology takes a long time to go mainstream
• New things
  • Object storage on tape
  • Tape is not slow

55:00  Fitting media into a footprint

• Is it tape?
• Is it drives?
• Is it tapes and drives?
• How can you make the most dense library
  • cost-effective
  • Physical footprint
• Redundant Array of Independent Libraries (RAIL)
• Build off-the-shelf consumer product
• Scale
• Physical deployment
• LTL consortium

60:00  Wrap up

Quantum

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The post Podcast #126: A Myriad of Storage Topics with Quantum appeared first on StorageReview.com.

45Drives has been a cloud-scale staple for some time, delivering some of the first purpose-built storage servers for service providers. Over time the company has added many more servers, most recently an exciting 15-bay rig designed specifically for the homelab enthusiast.

45Drives has been a cloud-scale staple for some time, delivering some of the first purpose-built storage servers for service providers. Over time the company has added many more servers, most recently an exciting 15-bay rig designed specifically for the homelab enthusiast.

Doug Milburn joins the podcast to discuss the origins of 45Drives and the considerations that went into the HL15. Doug also discusses some of the roadmap for the homelab line, which should get enthusiasts bubbling in the event the HL15 isn’t your cup of tea.

Doug describes himself as a “geek by birth.” He likes everything electronic, computer, mechanical, whatever, studying physics for a couple of degrees, a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, and picking up everything else along the way.

We are just starting our test and review of the HL15, to get up to speed on our progress check out our unboxing and setup video here.

The podcast was done live on Discord – join Discord to keep up to date with all the latest from the SR Lab!

We are transcribing the podcast here, so you can skip to sections that might be more interesting to our listeners. However, if you have time, catch the podcast in its entirety. You won’t be disappointed. The YT video in embedded below for those who prefer the visuals.

00:00  Introduction

• Personal background
• Life in Nova Scotia
• Education background
• Building metal things
• Challenges doing research
• Building enclosures

05:00  Integrating everything

• Materials, research, building, manufacturing equipment, etc
• Created 3D CAD software – Protocase Designer
• Backblaze cold storage
• Met with Netflix to build computers
• Drives operating in parallel
  • incredible data transfer rates
  • Multiplexing slows things down
  • Tripping over drivers

10:00  Get up to speed on the HL15

• Check out our YouTube Video
• Brian talks about building the server
  • Jordan and Kevin get top billing
  • Kevin and Jordan try to explain the reasoning
  • Brian closes his eyes and pretends not to listen
• Storage demands were not as significant as today
  • Data sets were smaller 15 years ago
  • AI is driving these massive data sets
• What’s different for 45Drives today
  • Focus
  • Customers drive 45Drives business direction

15:00  Working with government agencies

• Federal government creates lots of data
  • everything from law enforcement to scientific agencies to military
• University research
  • Univ of California San Diego
    • Wildfire project
    • Utilizing video cameras for fire observation
    • Using AI creating massive data sets
    • Lots of videos to process
• Municipalities
  • Video Everywhere
  • Forensic data
  • Body cams
  • Car dash cams
• Creating the Server Zoo
  • Data is here, there, everywhere
• Adopting clusters
• What’s interesting to 45Drives

20:00  Cold storage

• Enterprises like the reliability that comes from 45Drives
• Moving to flash
  • Flash 32 drive unit
  • SATA and SAS
  • First tri-mode unit
  • Building a machine
    • Hot-swap drives
    • 16 million IOPs
    • 32 Gb/s
  • Lab guys love the HL15
  • Impressive build

25:00  Delivering a clean build to customers

• Machines cut the die, but people inspect and clean up
• Why 45Drives build safe and solid chassis
• Sharing anecdotes

30:00  Building affordable home lab equipment

• Affordability range
• Get it down to $2K
• Business is brisk
• Sold in excess of 250 units
• Discord question: Why build a white server instead of the traditional black?
• Came from feedback from many resources
• Discord question: does adding color and graphics add to the cost?

35:00  Built in North America

• 45Drives is a believer in fair wages
• Employees are in with variable pay
• Build with quality
• Let customers add to it easily
• Cost-effective customization
  • Add whatever drives you want
  • Use the software you need

40:00  People have their own idea of what they want

• 45Drives fills 45 percent full builds
• 55 percent are built with other options

45:00  You can’t please all the people all the time

• People should buy what they can afford
• Just getting started, buy from eBay
• Get a used server like a PowerEdge
• build it so you can use it
• the HL15 is a premium server
• Is there a thin client on the way?

50:00  Looking at the hardware build design

• Keeping the price point
• Top loading caddy
• relieving repetitive stress injury
• Do you really need 240 screws?
• Reducing vibration on hard drives
• Flash vs HDD
  • The right tool for the job
  • Cost per terabyte

55:00  Question from Discord audience

• How do 45Drives characterize support and warrant for the HL15
  • Low defect rate
  • Ship it back, or they send the part via FedEx on 45Drive’s nickel

60:00. Things you should and shouldn’t try

• Don’t try what we did in the lab
• Want another podcast with 45Drives?

63:00  Wrapup

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The post Podcast #125: 45Drives and the Creation of the HL15 Homelab Storage Server appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Brian invited Seagate’s Colin Presly to the podcast this week to discuss research and developments in hard drives. Colin has been with Seagate for 20 years and is currently the Senior Director in the Office of the CTO. Originally from the UK, Colin moved to Minnesota over 20 years ago. The headline? HAMR is sampling with customers and 50TB HDDs are possible.

Brian invited Seagate’s Colin Presly to the podcast this week to discuss research and developments in hard drives. Colin has been with Seagate for 20 years and is currently the Senior Director in the Office of the CTO. Originally from the UK, Colin moved to Minnesota over 20 years ago. The headline? HAMR is sampling with customers and 50TB HDDs are possible.

Having grown up in the UK, Colin is a big sports enthusiast supporting teams like Liverpool Football Club (good pick), Formula 1, Rugby, and cricket. He is still a fan and continues to follow his teams from Shakopee, MN.

From a technology perspective, Colin considers himself to be an experienced engineering leader and technologist with over 20 years of broad technical and managerial experience in the disc drive industry. He has a proven track record managing diverse cross-functional teams, developing precision capital equipment, and productizing enterprise-quality disc drives.

After a few minutes of talking sports, Brian and Colin got serious about the real topic of this podcast: hard drives. The great thing about Colin is his enthusiasm for sport and technology.

This is a great discussion between two people who have been in the storage industry for a long time and still have the passion to get excited about what’s around the corner. Hear what is around the corner in hard drive development.

Streamed live with StorageReview Discord members.

Full video on YouTube

You should give this podcast a view in its entirety, but if you are stretched for time, the timestamp is below.

00:00 – Introduction

• Let’s talk sports
  • Football (real football).
  • Formula 1
  • Rugby
  • Cricket

05:00 – Let’s talk spinning disks

• Hard drive technology
• Open them up and see what actually goes into the hard drive
• Cloud is a hard drive
• Progressive increments in capacity
• What goes into the technology
• Hard drive inflection point for growth
• What are the limitations

10:00 – Hard drive direction

• Platters, heads, size, area
• Structure
• Preventing flipping bits
• Scale with larger platters
• Is 3.5 inches the right size going forward
• Hard to justify changing the HDD’s physical size
• Changing the size of the HDD is not the best approach

15:00 – Comparing Flash

• New ways to consume storage
• Hyperscalers
• Challenging in all sectors
• OCP
• We need the standards
• NVMe for hard drives?
• Watch this space – an exploration activity

20:00 – The appeal of one interface

• Convincing the market
• Hyperscalers have a major influence
• SMR
  • Writing wider tracks
  • Challenges on Read
  • PMR and CMR
  • Restrictions
  • Want to get to the next BIG step
  • ISOMER
  • HAMR- Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

25:00 – Intent to launch larger hard drive

• Game changer
• Increased drive capacity
• Shifts in data center technology take time
• A customer has nothing to change
• Plasmonic effect
• Heat in the media allows for changing media type

30:00 – Executing heating of an area

• Heat is localized – nanometers
• Heat makes the bit flip
• Seagate has put years of effort into the project
• Miniaturization journey

35:00 – Challenges in thermal and magnetic stability

• Directing heat to the interface
• Surviving that amount of heat
• Experiments to get where they are today
• HAMR is the next leap in technology
• Is HAMR a play for small drives
• Power consumption

40:00 – Replacing  older 4TB drives with 20TB drives – energy savings

• Big demand for that 2TB increment can save operation costs
• Positive environmental impact
• The demand will drive development

45:00 – GenAI driving storage capacity

• Density is critical
  • Legal reasons to increase density
  • Political trends
  • Video
  • Keeping the data long-term

50:00 – Referencing CORVAULT 106 Drive System

• Multi-actuator
• Colin ran the program
• Splits in two inside the drive
• Creates a parallel operation
• Performance per TB

55:00 – Wrap-up

Seagate HAMR

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The post Podcast #124: The Path to 50TB HDDs with Frickin Lasers appeared first on StorageReview.com.

This podcast features a conversation between Brian and Jeffrey Gregor (he prefers Gregor).  Gregor is the General Manager for OVHcloud® US, a leading cloud provider with a global presence. Prior to joining OVHcloud, Gregor was a Navy Officer,  a highly decorated Navy Officer, with over 15 years serving the US.

This podcast features a conversation between Brian and Jeffrey Gregor (he prefers Gregor).  Gregor is the General Manager for OVHcloud® US, a leading cloud provider with a global presence. Prior to joining OVHcloud, Gregor was a Navy Officer,  a highly decorated Navy Officer, with over 15 years serving the US.

OVHcloud was established in 1999, with some borrowed funds and hardware,  as a web-hosting startup in northern France and has grown steadily, expanding across Europe. Following the expansion into Canada in 2015,  OVHcloud opened offices in the US. Gregor joined OVHcloud when the company opened offices in northern Virginia. And the expansion continues.

We recently posted a deep-dive review for OVHcloud US, focusing on GPUs in the cloud and how to approach cloud training for AI. The review is worth the time as it provides background on OVH, how we performed our tests, and the results.

Gregor explains the

Streaming live on the StorageReview Discord.

00:00 Introduction

• What you need to know about OVHcloud
• Company structure
• Services offered
• New acquisition to target the edge market
• Partnerships
  • VMware
  • Nutanix

06:00  Competition

• Providing building blocks for multicloud
• Fitting in the multicloud environment
• Platform-as-a-Service
• Open Source Software support
• Footprint
  • New investments
  • Design and built servers
  • Adding new data center in central US

11:00  Expanding OVH

• Gridscale acquisition
  • Provides cloud workloads
  • growing points-of-presence
• Why metal-bending offers OVH advantages
  • Custom configurations
  • Proprietary water cooling system
  • Environmentally friendly
• 18-month hardware refresh
  • Repurpose existing servers
  • Not all customers need the latest and greatest

16:00  Making it cost-effective

• Low-cost options
• Access to a robust playground
• Flexibility
  • Avoiding long-term contracts
  • Build freedom in the cloud
• Delivering high-value, high-performance
• Sweet spot is SMB, small enterprises

20:00  Helping customers move to the cloud

• Providing a broad range of products and services
• Predictable pricing
• Taking the first step to migrate to the cloud
  • Modernizing applications
  • Familiarization
  • Understanding the ecosystem
• Managed services
  • Kubernetes
    • public cloud
    • private cloud
• Sustainability
  • Liquid-cooling
  • Repurposing storage
  • Getting more life out of products and systems
• Green from the beginning, not because it’s the right thing to do

26:00  Security

• SOC- and ISO-certified
  • PCI
  • DSS
  • HIPPA compliance
• Physical security
• Logical security
• Secure Infrastructure
• Customers secure their applications
• Great reputation for thwarting DDoS attacks
  • Anti-DDoS system
• Building your own has advantages

30:00  GPU Instances ties everything together

• Easy to use
• Cost-effective
• NVIDIA V100S
• H100’s are on the way when available
• Allows users to go to the next level
• No lock-in contract

35:00  Geeky, Nerdy Engineers

• Constantly testing hardware and software
• Building for the Next Big Thing
• DPUs, GPUs, accelerators
• Data sovereignty
• Cloud AI and LLMs

40:00  Toronto Data Center

• Discord users want to visit the Toronto site
• No FEDRAMP yet-maybe future
• SLED certification
• Getting started with OVH
  • private cloud
  • Credit is available when signing up

45:00 Wrap-up

YouTube Channel

OVHcloud US

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The post Podcast #123: Cloud-Based GPUs For AI appeared first on StorageReview.com.

This week Brian sits down with our own AI expert, Jordan Ranous, to discuss and speculate on the challenges facing enterprises and small businesses as they try to get a grip on the hot topic of the decade, Artificial Intelligence. If you have been following StorageReview, then you are aware of some of the tests, reviews, and trials we have been exploring in our lab. Jordan is engaged in almost all AI content posted on our site.

This week Brian sits down with our own AI expert, Jordan Ranous, to discuss and speculate on the challenges facing enterprises and small businesses as they try to get a grip on the hot topic of the decade, Artificial Intelligence. If you have been following StorageReview, then you are aware of some of the tests, reviews, and trials we have been exploring in our lab. Jordan is engaged in almost all AI content posted on our site.

Jordan is an experienced AI technologist with a background working with financial institutions. Brian always offers his guests some tough questions, and Jordan gets the same treatment. AI is such a hot topic, and the buzz in the industry just keeps getting louder, generating more questions than answers. Jordan has a rare talent of being an expert in AI and being able to articulate answers that can be easily understood.

This is the first podcast that we’re actually integrating live with our Discord community so they can interact and ask questions on topics we are hitting at that moment.

If it’s AI-related, Brian and Jordan talk about it. It is certainly worth watching the podcast in its entirety, but if you would like to hop around, we have the time-stamped transcript below.

Join the Discord to participate in future pods in real-time.

00:00 Introduction

• Setting the stage for the live event
  • Invited the StorageReveiw Discord community
  • Exploring AI in the lab
  • Hands-on
• Recapping Flash Memory Summit (FMS
  • AI Vision Demo
  • SR Sloths stole the show
• AI does not have a universal definition
  • Generative AI tools
    • ChatGPT
    • Dall-E
• Generative AI vs AGI (artificial general intelligence)
• Computer Vision
  • A subset of broader AI
  • Object recognition
  • Image Datasets

05:00  Finetuning the model

• Business Intelligence
  • Categorizing images
  • Identifying brands rather than just shapes
  • Self-checkout
  • Loss Prevention
• Creating the Datasets
  • Training data
  • Install disparity between enterprise and small retail shops
• Tools for AI
  • Leveraging the right tools for the job
• Implementation challenges
• Creating chatbots for various industries

10:00 Chatbots for customer service

• Chatbot is programmed to fix the problem, not initiate transferring the call
• Pressing zero doesn’t do anything
• Creating higher frustration for customers
• Catching AI doing something it shouldn’t
• AI has the potential to hyperextend in any direction
  • Keep an eye on your AI model to keep it honest and focused
  • Quality data means quality results

15:00 Security is paramount

• Inherent biases in AI
• Training data collection is critical
• Gather a diverse group to build the training data
• Proper finetuning
• Be careful of the persona you create
• Doom server demo
  • AI’s talking trash
  • AI gamers fighting each other and making disparaging jokes
  • AI understood the assignment and acted upon it
• Ethics
• Enterprises might be reluctant to provide too much information
  • Know where it should go
  • And where it might go
  • The fear of the unknown

20:00 Active Directory for access levels

• Keeping data secure and available to appropriate teams
  • Call centers probably do not need access to proprietary marketing material
  • NeMo Guardrails
  • How questions are asked or how to prompt the question
• Hiring Prompt Engineers
• Support tools
  • Democratizing the toolset

25:00 What’s the on-ramp for small businesses

• Set up internally
• Create solid prompts
• Do the simple stuff first
• Ease into the technology
  • Understand how it works
  • Understand limitations
• Use an AI model to analyze CRM data
  • Help with sales forecasts
  • Analyzing the sales funnel
• Use built-in tools
• Not every business needs a custom model

30:00 What’s a good starting point

• Fund IT for AI APIs
• Consume available tools
• Employ a paid version of ChatGPT4
• Monitor billing
• API provides additional freedom

35:00 What about the hardware

• Workstations with GPUs
• Keep GPUs busy
• Parallelize
• Rack space consideration
• Liquid or Air cooled
• TBs of storage
• GPUs take slots that might have been used for storage
• How much power can a rack support

40:00 Dell’s latest CPU servers

• Fast, shared storage
• Software
•  SSDs
  • E1.S
• Inferencing cards
• Ultra-high-speed servers and workstations

45:00 Where cloud can benefit AI

• OVH
• Cloud is a valuable resource
• Hourly billing

50:00 Wrap-up

 Podcast video

StorageReview Discord

Dell XE9680 Review

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The post Podcast #122: Navigating The AI Landscape: Real-World Insights And Challenges appeared first on StorageReview.com.

We recently spent some time with the Dell PowerProtect Appliance, posting an in-depth review that illustrates the operational simplicity often overlooked when securing mission-critical data. Dell put a lot of thought into ensuring simplicity in the setup, configuration, and management of the PowerProtect Appliance.  The intuitive interface walks a user through the entire process, from installation to data protection.

We recently spent some time with the Dell PowerProtect Appliance, posting an in-depth review that illustrates the operational simplicity often overlooked when securing mission-critical data. Dell put a lot of thought into ensuring simplicity in the setup, configuration, and management of the PowerProtect Appliance.  The intuitive interface walks a user through the entire process, from installation to data protection.

Brian went to Hopkinson to get an up-close introduction to the new PowerProtect Appliance and was duly impressed with the design and the software that powers the appliance. As a follow-up, Brian invited David Noy, the Vice President of Product Management at Dell Technologies, to join him for a podcast and find out what went into the design and where the product is headed in the future. The discussion gives us a better understanding of this seamlessly integrated appliance that can be up and running in just 15 minutes, ensuring data protection from the start.

David has been with Dell Technologies since 2021, but this was an encore, having worked with Dell EMC between 2012 and 2017. His background covers data protection and storage, so this was a perfect fit. David spent time with Cohesity and Veritas in a previous life, and before rejoining Dell, he was the Vice President of Product Management At VAST Data. A solid history working with data storage and securing that data.

Securing data is a critical topic, and this podcast covers topics that help Dell stay at the top of its game. Give it a listen, but if you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, check the timestamps below to jump to the topics that interest you.

00:00  Introduction

• Product background
  • Hardware
  • Software
• PDM -PowerProtect Data Manager
• Protect Data Domain
• Virtualization, cloud, containers

05:00  Reducing cloud backups

• Storing images for security
• Ability to scale
• IDPA
• Steps to a fully integrated solution
• Keeping it simple

10:00  Consolidating functions

• The litmus test to determine ease of use
• Consistent results in getting PowerProtect up and running
• Our interaction with PowerProtect Appliance
• Disparate teams working together
• Hardware descriptions
  • Built on PowerEdge Server
  • Future proof
• Penetration testing

15:00  Cybersecurity

• Integration with the cyber stack
• Snapshots
• Speed of backup and restore
• Easier licensing model
• Planned growth
• Built to be containerized
• Product focus
• Expanding enterprise markets

20:00  What customers ask for

• Targeting backup between 200-800 TB
• Maybe up to a petabyte
• Five PB versus five one PB backup
• Cloud protection
• Cyber protection vault
• Driving cloud consumption
• Ability to tier and replicate
• AI and retail
• Use case for internal cloud

25:00  Kubernetes integration

• Next-generation data protection
• NAS
• Adding support for Hadoop
• Workload support
• On-prem vs. public cloud
• Cloud Snapshot manager

30:00  Unifying management on a single product

• Multicloud strategy
• Protecting multi-availability zones, multiple regions
• Make a plan and test it

35:00  Create and test the playbook

• Integration with other Dell products
• Better Together story
• Giving customers choices

40:00  Data Mobility

• How to orchestrate mobility
• Simple, secure, modern, resilient
• The importance of resilience
• How to get hands-on

45:00  Conclusion

Podcast Video

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The post Podcast #121: Simplifying Data Protection with an Integrated Appliance appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Recently, Brian took a trip to Longmont, Colorado, to look at the Seagate Exos CORVAULT, a high-density storage platform five years in the making! We followed up his visit by posting a deep dive into the CORVAULT, looking at everything from unboxing to setup and highlighting the many features associated with this technology.

Recently, Brian took a trip to Longmont, Colorado, to look at the Seagate Exos CORVAULT, a high-density storage platform five years in the making! We followed up his visit by posting a deep dive into the CORVAULT, looking at everything from unboxing to setup and highlighting the many features associated with this technology.

Brian’s guest on this show is Erik Salo, Seagate’s vice president of product and business marketing. Erik has been with Seagate for over ten years and has had his hands on everything from distribution, storage, and cloud-edge technology. With that kind of background, Erik was the perfect choice to get some background on this new storage platform.

The concept for CORVAULT was hatched during a meeting, thinking about all the sophisticated and innovative technology used in building Seagate products. Erik believed that, instead of thinking of storage in single 3.5-inch increments, it might be time to think in terms of hundreds of those 3.5-inch products in a high-density platform. The discussion moved to cloud storage, and the numbers just kept growing.

This is a podcast with plenty of detail about what goes into creating a product like CORVAULT. It is certainly worth a view, but if you need just to hit some highlights, the video is transcribed below.

00:00  Introduction (recorded on-site in Longmont, CO)

• CORVAULT background
• Think about storage differently
• How to manage those disks
• Focus
• Erasure encoding
• Failure management

05:00  Dramatic changes in scale

• Server overhead
• Server management
• Inefficiency when making all products the same
• Built for resiliency
• Costs
• Erik’s history in replacing drives
• Smart drives

10:00  Smart drives know

• Servers are smart enough to know what capacity remains
• Self-resilient systems
• Who makes up the customer population
  • Enterprise
  • Cloud
• Staying focused
• How do customers decide on storage technology
  • What do they want to do
  • How do they want to do it
  • How much will it cost
  • What hardware is available

15:00  Building out infrastructures in the lab

• Focus on core competence
• How software uses storage
• Deciding what goes into a system
• Keep it simple
• Use cases for specific products
• What if a customer doesn’t need 106 drives
• A smaller unit with all the same features

20:00  Bigger, Bigger, Bigger

• From floppies to Terabytes
• How much of the data is useful
• Surveillance videos
• Sophistication

25:00 Helping customer figure out what’s next

• Seagate is an adopter of all the technology
  • AI
  • High volume manufacturer
  • Components are still hard to get
• Companies stopped ordering during COVID
• Seagate has a long-term view

30:00  How to get customers interested

• Three step process
  • Reference ArchitectureWhat about flash
  • Provide demo unit
• Performance of CORVAULT
• What is the system tuned for
• What about flash
• Managing supply chain

35:00  Conclusion

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The post Podcast #120: Seagate Exos CORVAULT appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Brian flew down to Houston to attend HPE GreenLake Day for Storage, where he caught up with Patrick Osborne, amongst many others, to gain insight into new HPE GreenLake solutions. Patrick has been with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for over 13 years with a laser focus on storage technology, Cloud Infrastructure, and Big Data.

Brian flew down to Houston to attend HPE GreenLake Day for Storage, where he caught up with Patrick Osborne, amongst many others, to gain insight into new HPE GreenLake solutions. Patrick has been with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for over 13 years with a laser focus on storage technology, Cloud Infrastructure, and Big Data.

Patrick holds the SVP & GM position running the Cloud and Data Infrastructure Platforms business for HPE. Before this, Patrick was VP Storage Business Unit and, before that, VP & GM, Big Data, Analytics, and Scale-out- Platforms. Patrick describes himself as a technology and business leader focused on growth and scaling teams.

In this podcast Brian and Patrick cover off on a lot of what’s new at HPE GreenLake like files services from VAST Data, new block storage options and even new data protection and replication offerings. The guys also get into what’s new with Alletra MP hardware, which underpins the new block and file services and how Alletra MP will impact HPE’s traditional SAN storage arrays in the near future.

We timestamped this podcast to help you navigate the show.

00:00 Introduction

• GreenLake Day for Storage Intro
• What’s new
• GreenLake Cloud Platform
  • Block Storage
  • GreenLake for Block Storage
  • Features
  • New OS
  • Alletra MP

05:00 Alletra MP

• What’s in the Alletra MP Platform
• Collect customer attributes
• Assess data and plug it into the sizing model
• Cloud physics
  • Review APIs
  • Deliver SLAs
  • RFPs are less focused on specs
• Are workloads really that different between customers
• Using the telemetry database
• Storage teams are smaller

10:00 Managing and protecting customer

• Data Protection
  • IP protection
  • Government requirements
  • Data Sovereignty
• Using Kubernetes, OpenShift, EKS
• New services
  • Web experiences
  • Mobile
• Acquisition integration
• GreenLake For File Storage
• Partnering with VAST Data
  • Partnering with known vendors
  • Bespoke hardware
  • Making it easy for customers
  • Shipping in volume
  • Space is the new edge
• Curated partnerships for GreenLake platform consumption

14:00 HPE Partnerships

• Open ecosystem
• Partner friendly
• Building the most modern partnerships for customers
• File storage
• Data services
• Zerto
• Protection for VMs
• Ransomware

18:00 Demos and Roadmaps

• HPE release cadence
• Waterfall release methodology
• GreenLake Cloud Platform
  • releases can happen more often
• Continuous delivery of improvement

25:00 Shift in investments

• CapEx vs. OpEx
• Flexibility

29:00 Wrap Up

• That’s a wrap

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HPE GreenLake for Block Storage

HPE GreenLake for File Storage

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The post Podcast #119: New HPE GreenLake File, Block and Data Protection Offerings appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Brian invited Ernie Costa to join him for this podcast. Ernie is a Team Lead at Commvault and a Microsoft Azure Hybrid MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Ernie’s LinkedIn profile lists his background as a Systems Administrator, Engineer, and Architect with 20 years of Enterprise, SMB, Financial, Hospitality, and Educational experience.

Brian invited Ernie Costa to join him for this podcast. Ernie is a Team Lead at Commvault and a Microsoft Azure Hybrid MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Ernie’s LinkedIn profile lists his background as a Systems Administrator, Engineer, and Architect with 20 years of Enterprise, SMB, Financial, Hospitality, and Educational experience.

He was involved with data center operations, on-premises and cloud infrastructure design and implementation, networking architecting, project management, vendor contract negotiations, and multi-tier Help Desk procedures. Ernie knows his way around the data center and the cloud.

As mentioned above, Ernie is also a Microsoft MVP. To put the MVP title into context, Microsoft describes the “award” this way:

“Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, or MVPs, are technology experts who passionately share their knowledge with the community. They are always on the “bleeding edge” and have an unstoppable urge to get their hands on new, exciting technologies. They have very deep knowledge of Microsoft products and services while also being able to bring together diverse platforms, products, and solutions to solve real-world problems. MVPs make up a global community of over 4,000 technical experts and community leaders across 90 countries/regions and are driven by their passion, community spirit, and quest for knowledge. Above all, and in addition to their amazing technical abilities, MVPs are always willing to help others – that’s what sets them apart.”

Taking advantage of Ernie’s MVP Award, their conversation gets into Microsoft Azure Arc, Managed SQL Server, HCI Stack, and more.

Podcast #87: What’s Next for Azure Stack HCI with Cosmos Darwin?

Podcast #119 timestamp:

00  Introduction

• Background
  • Current role with Commvault
  • Microsoft consumption
    • Azure
    • Hyper-V
    • Azure Stack HCI

05  Hypervisor and HCI

• Why Hyper-V?
• On-prem HCI
• Reasons for HCI from an internal perspective

10  Hybrid model

• Folding all Azure Cloud features into an on-prem HCI
• Governance and Security
• Azure Arc
• What is Arc
  • Branding term
  • A suite of cloud-connected technologies
  • Management

15  Virtual Appliance

• • SQL Server deployment
  • SQL on Linux
  • Everything gets handled for you
  • It’s less worry about
  • Containerization

20  Server Names

• • Naming conventions
  • Operational benefits
  • Test environments
  • Manual vs. Automation

25  Azure Stack vs. Azure Cloud

• Similarities
• On-prem vs. cloud management
• Kubernetes tools
• Arc delivers all the visibility

30  Costs

• It costs to have it cloud easy
• Azure Stack HCI is cost-effective and fast
• Early support was spotty
• Support today is better

35  Other services

• AVD – Azure Virtual Desktop on HCI
• Thin Clients
• Security
• Corporate espionage
• Data exfiltration

40  Dispersed Workforce

• Global workforces
• Data Gravity
• On-premise virtual desktops
• GPU Partitioning

45  Azure Stack HCI update cadence

• Management
• Microsoft remote support through Azure
• Network desired state
• How to experience Azure Arc
• Azure Arc Jumpstart

50  Sandbox

• SQL Server Managed Instance
• Powershell
• That’s a wrap

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The post Podcast #118: Going Deep on Microsoft Azure Arc, Cloud, Managed SQL, AVD, HCI and More! appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Brian invited his friend Nishant Lodha, Marvell’s Director of Emerging Technologies to sit for the podcast. Nishant has been with Marvell for over 13 years. His key responsibilities include subject matter expert, technology evangelist, driving growth in emerging markets, competitive analysis, product positioning, outbound marketing, and hands-on technology analysis.

Nishant has worked with StorageReview on several topics, most recently on Innovation and Reliability Make Fibre Channel the Choice for Data Center SANs. Nishant strongly believes that Fibre Channel is the best solution for SAN deployment, and he is not alone. Look to other vendors, and they will echo his thoughts (although maybe not as loudly).

This is an excellent discussion about SAN technology, where it is, and where it is going. It is worth the 45 minutes, but the time stamp is below if you need to jump around in the video.

00:00  Introduction

• Candid introduction
• VMware vSphere integration
• Bringing the data center on-prem
• Operational simplicity and reliability

05:00  It just works because of the engineering effort

• Fibre Channel versus the “new things”
  • NVMe
  • NVMe over Fabrics
  • ESXi support
  • Adoption

10:00  Deployment cycle

• Currently, a small number of adopters for NVMe over fabrics
• How to be successful with NVMe
• The hardware is pretty solid
• The software is taking longer
  • critical features are lacking
  • ESXi 8 should be the driving factor

15:00  What about DPUs

• How will it transform the industry
• Used as networking/accelerators
• VMware bringing DPUs on-prem
• Storage applications are typically mission-critical
• DPUs are proven for networking
• DPUs could offload storage processing
• CXL timeframe

20:00  CXL potential

• CXL opportunity
• How do technologies impact engineering
• How server vendors prioritize technology
• How lanes are utilized

27:00  CPU Interactions

• Cooling
• Green initiatives
•  Visibility into energy consumption

30:00  Economics

• Energy consumption
• Management and visualization
• vVols
• Loss of visibility
• Challenges with monitoring external applications
• Troubleshooting challenges
• VM-ID

35:00  More on VM-ID

• Worldwide unique IDs
• Using the data to determine the impact
• Future of performance capabilities
• Speed discussion
• 64G FC arrays

40:00  Performance dynamics

• Migrations with FC
  • Congestion issues
  • Drivers for increased speeds
  • Intelligent and value-driven
  • What’s at the edge
• Infrastructure is stretched
• Retrain the workforce

46:00  Edge challenges

• Unmanaged/unmanned
• We need to add more storage at the edge
• Higher performance at the edge
• Cost
• Making devices autonomous
• Vendor direction

50:00  Wrap up

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From Marvell: This podcast contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, any statement that may predict, forecast, indicate or imply future events or achievements. Actual events or results may differ materially from those contemplated in this podcast. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Listeners are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and no person assumes any obligation to update or revise any such forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. 

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The post Podcast#117: Fibre Channel Still Tops for Virtualization appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Brian tackles the concept of data deletion on this podcast and why it is essential. Brian’s guest is Dr. Vincent Berk, Chief Strategy Officer at Quantum Xchange.

Brian tackles the concept of data deletion on this podcast and why it is essential. Brian’s guest is Dr. Vincent Berk, Chief Strategy Officer at Quantum Xchange.

Dr. Berk has a Ph.D. in AI/ML and describes himself as an “energetic technologist, entrepreneur, and animated thought leader in cyber security, driving growth through innovative SaaS solutions. He was the founder and CEO of FlowTraq, a cyber security company that Riverbed acquired.”  Dr. Berk is also a blogger, public speaker, and startup advisor. Before his current role, he was a computer science faculty member at Dartmouth College. He urged boards and executives to start viewing their hoarded data as a liability rather than a ticket to incredible growth. He stressed the importance of instituting policies that dealt with data destruction.

Why do we covet our data so passionately? According to Dr. Berk, the affordability, low maintenance, and ease of use of the cloud mean that organizations have an increasing tendency to hoard data. He asserts that this hoarded data is a corporate liability, a detriment to organizations that increases their appeal to bad actors. For example, from December 2022 through February 8, 2023, there have been nine data breach incidents. The unlucky targets included MailChimp, T-Mobile, JD Sports, and others. The Roomba data breach included leaked images from iRobot customers. Check your smart vacuum.

Brian wastes no time jumping right into the discussion by asking Dr. Berk how he got into the notion of people deleting data. It’s an interesting topic that gets overlooked. If you don’t have time to listen all the way through, the time stamps are listed below.

00:00  Intro (Jumping right into the topic)

• Why the interest in data deletion
• Risk profile
• Why keep all that data
• Inexpensive to store
• Risk vs. Liability

05:00  Point of diminishing returns

• It depends on what you will do with the data
• Examples of value
  • Medication
  • Social Media
• Finding a way to use the data
• Risk profile
• Is the value higher for older or current data
• Purpose

10:00  Good hygiene for data

• Encrypt
• The cost of keeping data
• Reasons to keep the data
• Violation
• Remediation

15:00 It’s hard

• Data is stored everywhere now
  • files
  • databases
  • cloud
  • wire
• Who is responsible
• Risk justification
• Where to start
• Legal Ramifications

20:00  What are the processes

• Encrypt or destroy
• Long-term costs
• Green initiatives

25:00  Philosophical

• Should the Internet “forget” data
• Leaving the decision to the social media companies
• Clicking the “I agree” box without reading the content

30:00  What happens when companies get acquired

• Risk to backups
• Bad actors go for the backups
• Is it necessary to backup
  • What do cloud service providers say?
• Cloud is just different
• Encrypt
  • who has access to the keys
• What data does need to be kept
  • orphaned data

35:00  Is there an easy button

• Externalized cost of the benefit of the computing industry
• Drawbacks
• Losing data is the exception
• What happens to the data during troubleshooting
• What happens to the data when someone leaves the organization
• The industry doesn’t have this discussion

40:00  Shared docs

• File sizes
• Number of files shared
• Docs that get shared over and over
• What is the liability of the data
• Should SAS companies create a best practices

45:00 Wrap-up

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The post Podcast #116: Delete those files! appeared first on StorageReview.com.