In this episode, Nigel and Rick put the Pure Storage FlashArray under the microscope with the aid of Stephen Foskett (Gestalt IT, TechFieldDay and organiser of the Solid State Storage Symposium) and Matt Kixmoeller (VP of Products at Pure Storage).

This is a great episode that gets under the hood of the recently announced FlashArray, as well as explaining why flash memory is revolutionizing the storage world, literally leaving legacy array architectures in the dust. If you want to know why flash is changing all the rules and may be want to impress the girls with your knowledge of how inline deduplication really does work with flash then you need to listen!

Some of the topics discussed include -

• How inline deduplication is possible because of flash memory
• How flash memory changes most of the accepted rules of storage array design
• Scale out architectures vs dual controller architectures
• Why consumer grade MLC and TLC flash will win
• Differences between Tier 0 and Tier 1 markets

Marc returns as a guest to the show he co-founded.

Marc talks about -

His addiction to start-ups How he got in to tech and not rock music How much he loves the storage industry What he’s doing at storsimple How they hook in to the cloud What storsimple are all about What life was like at HP, 3PAR and Equaligoc What motivates startups

Enjoy the show

In the show, Nigel and Rick chill out on the luxurious couches at Infosmack towers with technology legend Barry Whyte (IBM) and talk all things technology. It’s a really laid back show with the guys just picking Barry’s brains.

Some topics o converstaion include -

• What got the guys in to technology Classical computers such as - Commodore 64 Commodore VIC-20 Sinclair ZX Spectrum BBC Micro Is it really all that cool working in high tech What are cool technologies of the future going to be What its like working at IBM

Enjoy the show

Some topics of dicussion incldue -

Content Delivery Networks

Metro distance storage tiering

Solid State Storage, including EMC VFCache

Combining Intel and FPGAs

As well as the technical stuff, other topics include -

What do you carry in your laptop bag

Seeing the future and seeing the past

Shinkansen (The Japanese Bullet Train)

The uniquely Japanese ATM experience

Getting drugs in Japan

Japanese Toilets

Wasabi

Enjoy the show

In this show, Nigel Poulton and Rick Vanover host Camden (Cam) Ford of Xsigo (pronounced zee-go, or see-go). Camden is the director of product management at Xsigo Systems and a bit of a nutty professor when it comes to networking .

Xsigo are makers of data center fabric solutions to consolidate I/O. This is analogous to consolidation of servers with x86 virtualization, and Xsigo wants to do that with your I/O. Some points discussed:

· Port consolidation strategies

· Core infrastructure lifecycles

· Virtualization and utilization

· Connectivity options for port consolidation

Nigel and Rick put Cam on the hot seat for tough questions such as cost and competition as well as realistically who converged I/O fits in today’s datacenters. Is their future bright and do you see a fit for your port reduction strategies? Tune in to see.

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

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.

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.

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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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!

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!

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.

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/

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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To help them do this, they are joined on the show by some folks who have been at heavily involved with the development of vSphere 5 -

Frank Denneman - consultant Arhitect at VMware Duncan Epping - Principal Architect at VMware Michael Heffernan - Chief Technologist responsible for Hypervisor products at HDS

In this show they dive deep into topics such as -

• ESXi
• Storage DRS
• HA
• VMFS
• VAAI
• VASA

If you want the low down on the latest and greatest features in vSphere 5, this is the place to be.

This is the 2nd Infosmack Deep Dive podcast featuring host, Nigel Poulton and co-host Chris Evans. This show hones in on the universe of VMware as Nigel, Chris and their guests, Mark Gritter from Tintri and Michael Heffernan from HDS debate the merits of building new technology form the ground up specifically for VMware, versus taking existing technology and bending and twisting it to work well with VMware.

Among other things, they discuss this week are:

• What it is like working with VMware
• VMFS strengths and weaknesses
• NFS and VMware
• Building technology for VMware with and without hooks into the VMware engineering teams

Highlighted topics:

• Chinese government role in the technology opportunities for western companies
• Prospects for US software and hardware companies in China
• Buicks in China
• Data sovereignty and the cloud in Asia
• Response to accusations of government sponsored hacking in the RSA case
• The thirst for power and the geo-political pressures it creates

This week Nigel and his guests discuss:

• Prevailing assumptions about blade and rack servers

• I/O capabilities of blades and racks

• Scalability concerns

• Management considerations

• Relative cost of server technologies

• Wish list for future server products