Infosmack

This show is a cracker! Just the right level of technical detail and a topic that could be a game changer in the future of storage…

Hosts Nigel Poulton and Rick Vanover are joined by a couple of real techies –

• Joe Foster, Distinguished Technologist at HP
• Tim Symons, Principal Engineer from PMC Sierra

The topic of discussion is SCSI Express and the wider picture of unleashing the power o solid state storage. Taking off the shackles that exist in todays servers and storage arrays that currently hold it back.

Some of the topics discussed include –

• Bringing SCSI further in to the 21st century
• Bringing RAID controllers in to the 21st century
• Bringing hot plug capability to PCIe
• Placing SSD closer to the CPU in storage arrays (no more hanging of legacy back end loops and stacks)
• Does $/IOP cut the mustard
• SCSI Express versus NVM Express (with an obvious bias to SCSI Express)
• Some but kissing of the T10 standards bodies
• Rant about PCI Special Interest Group

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In this weeks Christmas Cracker, Nigel and Rick are joined by Dr Garth Gibson, a true legend of the computing world!

Dr Gibson is best known as one of the co-inventors of RAID technology - a technology known to all in the computing industry and still an key foundational technology of the modern computing world.  Among many other contributions to the industry, Garth is the founder and CTO of Panasas, a leading high performance parallel storage company.  And now, he can add to his already impressive resume that he has been a guest on Infosmack!

During the show the following topics were covered -

Future of RAID

What the "I" in RAID stands for

Future of Solid State Storage

Future of magnetic recording media

Sub-LUN Tiering

Commodity HW with smarts in Software

The rise of less and less reliable technology

Parallel NFS (pNFS)

Panasas

Technology predictions for 2012 Tons of other cool stuff

We recommend that listeners buckle themselves up before listening to this show as Dr Gibson has a brain the size of a planet and Nigel and Rick attempted to raid his brain (pun intended) in under an hour!

Nigel and Rick would like to thank Garth for not embarrassing them with his clearly superior knowledge and brain power.

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Last week Nigel hooked up with former podcasting washup deadbeat ass kissing loser old friend and Infosmack legend Greg Knieriemen at HP Discover in Vienna.

Nigel and Greg hooked up with Senior VP of HP Storage David Scott to shoot a joint Infosmack/Nekkid Tech podcast.  On the show they talk all things storage and all things HP.

Among the questions, was whether or not if David were to bump in to his peers, from the likes of EMC and NetApp, whether he'd like smack them in the teeth and then when they're on the ground put the boot in.  If you want to know the answer you'll have to listen......

We think you'll like the intro.

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Windows Server 8 is right around the corner, is it for real? That is the question. In this episode, Rick Vanover hosts Jeffrey Snover, a Distinguished Engineer from Microsoft and David Davis from TrainSignal. This show scratches the surface of Windows Server 8, there are so many new features with the next release of this server operating system. But, are all of them good? Some recommendations may have system administrators turning their heads. And why is there so much PowerShell involved with Windows Server 8? Are you ready for Windows Server Core? We’ll see.

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In this weeks show Nigel goes solo, without regualr co-host Rick Vanover, at the HDS Influencer Summit in San Jose CA.  Rick is out of vacation time at work and couldn't make the event where the show was recorded from.

Joining Nigel are Stu Miniman from Wikibon and Ray Lucchesi of Silverton Consulting.

HDS invited what felt like the entire analyst community as well as a handful of bloggers to a one-day event in San Jose California where they broadcast the message that they are more than just a big iron storage company.  There was lots of talk about cloud, services, strategies and integrated vertical stacks.

This show is a bit freestyle with the guys covering random topics in enterprise storage.  Things discussed include -

Vertically integrated stacks (HDS UCP, Vblock...) SSD Commodity vs custom Blade servers Technology vs Marketing

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On this weeks show the crew have a hack at defining what makes something “Enterprise”. And to be honest, when the show ends its far from mission accomplished, leaving the door wide open for more shows on the topic in the future.

If you think you have the definition nailed, get in touch with us @infosmack.

This weeks guests are both Infosmack virgins, so it was great to have them on the show –

Enrico Signoretti – @esignoretti Phil Jaenke – @rootwyrm Some of the things covered on the show included – VMAX, XIV, 3PAR, Windows Server…… performance, resiliency, availability, scalability……

As always, your show hosts are -

Rick Vanover – @rickvanover Nigel Poulton – @nigelpoulton

Enjoy the show!

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This weeks show see's the return of Smackdown, the industry's best, well errr..... only, enterprise tech quiz show!

Recording the show was both a blast and a disaster.  Technical difficulties stopped Chris Harney from joining the show.  Unforeseen circumstances stopped quiz fiend Chris Evans from joining.  Skype went mental on us and we had to drop two calls, and finally Ricks recording software failed half way through!

Technical difficulties aside, we had laugh, and one of us nearly fell asleep (we'll give a big shout out to anyone who catches Greg Schultz's audible yawn).

Questions covered topics from Supercomputing, through storage, and even including the Apple ][.

This weeks guests were -

Team Hackers:  Devang Panchigar and Greg Schultz Team Grey Beards: Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks Referee: Megan Mescher

Thanks go out to the guys for being on the show and putting up with both the technical difficulties as well as the ridiculous questions.

Have fun!

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In this weeks show we see a new standard set when it comes to geeky intros. The show starts out with the good ship HMS Fibre Channel being engaged The Borg, only this time the Borg is Ethernet. Once again Ricks acting skills make us wonder if he would be better off in Hollywood!

This week Nigel and Rick tackle the religious subject of storage protocols, covering all things from FCP, FCoE, iSCSI, SMB, NFS and even a mention of apparently boutique protocol AoE. Use cases, pro’s and cons as well as technical specifics are discussed.

This weeks expert guests are Stephen Foskett and Elias Khnaser, two guys with a ton of storage experience.

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In this episode of the Infosmack Deep Dive podcast, hosts Nigel Poulton and Rick Vanover are joined by Ray Lucchesi and Greg Schulz. If there is anything about the storage industry that Ray and Greg don’t know, then its not worth knowing.  These guys are like walking talking Wikipedias of the storage world, and Nigel and Rick burrow into their vast brains.

In this shows the guys talk about pretty much anything they want, getting pretty technical at times.  Some topics include –

• Commodity vs Custom
• Intel vs ASIC’s and FPGA’s
• Ethernet vs Infiniband
• Linux vs Windows
• NFS vs SMB

A fair amount of time is spent talking about storage startup Kaminario and how they have built a high performance DRAM and NAND flash based storage array out of essentially commodity hardware (they don’t design of fab any hardware of their own).

They also talk about differences between storage and memory and whether we will ever see a day when we do away with storage as we know it today (LUN, SCSI..).  They even get in to some of the weeds of Shingled recording techniques for disk drives.

As promised during the show, a link to some bedtime reading on the topic of Shingled recording - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/27/sw_tdmr/

Links to the hosts and guests websites -

Nigel Poulton – http://nigelpoulton.com

Rick Vanover – http://rickatron.us

Ray Lucchesi - http://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/

Greg Schulz - http://storageioblog.com/

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In this week’s Deep Dive episode Rick (aka 'the Rickatron') is outnumbered 3:1 by Brits as the infrastructure inquisitors turn the spotlight on to Cisco UCS.

The static at the opening is not your internet connection - it's the beginning of an Infosmack sci-fi theater (theatre?) segment where Nigel and the Rickatron gather intelligence from the planet Zircon on the mystical Cisco UCS platform. Nigel claims this was inspired by comments from Leo Apotheker (CEO of HP) who once said that he had never seen a Cisco UCS and that if Cisco were selling any it must be on planet Zircon.

This opening sets a new water mark of some sort. High or low? We'd appreciate your comments on twitter.

Joining Nigel and Rick this week are two independent practitioners of UCS; Chris Dearden and David Owen

Topics covered in this Deep Dive include:

• Service profiles
• Extended memory
• Innovation and keeping ahead
• What is different about Cisco UCS and is it really game changing
• Why Cisco is in the server market

At the end of the show both Rick’s and Nigel’s interest is stirred but neither are necessarily convinced, and the door is left wide open for further exploration.

Thoughts, comments and feedback welcome – @nigelpoulton @rickvanover @infosmack

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