Greybeards On Storage

Sponsored By: I’ve known Theresa Miller, Director of Technology Advocacy Group at Cohesity, for many years now and just met David Jayanathan (DJ), Cohesity Solutions Architect during the podcast. Theresa could easily qualify as an old timer, if she wished and DJ was very knowledgeable about traditional file and object storage. We had a wide … Continue reading "135: Greybeard(s) talk file and object challenges with Theresa Miller & David Jayanathan, Cohesity"

We have known Dr. J Metz (@drjmetz, blog), Chair of SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) BoD, for over a decade now and he has always been an intelligent industry evangelist. DrJ was elected Chair of SNIA BoD in 2020. SNIA has been instrumental in the evolution of storage over the years working to help define … Continue reading "134: GreyBeards talk (storage) standards with Dr. J Metz, SNIA Chair & Technical Director AMD"

We saw a recent article in Blocks and Files (Storage facing trillion-row db apocalypse), about a couple of companies which were trying to deal with trillion row database queries without taking weeks to respond. One of those companies was Ocient (@Ocient), a Chicago startup, whose CEO and Co-Founder, Chris Gladwin, was an old friend from … Continue reading "133: GreyBeards talk trillion row databases/data lakes with Ocient CEO & Co-founder, Chris Gladwin"

We’ve been talking a lot about K8s of late so we thought it was time to get back down to earth and spend some time with Adi Gelvan (@speedb_io), Co-founder and CEO of Speedb, an embedded key-value store, drop-in/replacement for RocksDB, that significantly improves on its IO performance for large metadata databases. At Adi’s last … Continue reading "132: GreyBeards talk fast embedded k-v stores with Speedb’s Co-Founder&CEO Adi Gelvan"

The GreyBeards have been discussing K8s storage services a lot over the last year or so and it was time to understand how container apps and data could be protected. Recently, we saw an article about a Veritas funded survey, discussing the need for data protection in K8s. As such, it seemed a good time … Continue reading "131: GreyBeards talk native K8s data protection using Veritas NetBackup with Reneé Carlisle"

We had heard about Apache Arrow and Arrow Flight as being a hi-performing database with access speeds to match for a while now and finally got a chance to hear what it was all about with James Duong, Co-Fourder of Bit Quill Technologies/Senior Staff Developer at Dremio and David Li (@lidavidm), Apache PMC and software … Continue reading "130: GreyBeards talk high-speed database access using Apache Arrow Flight, with James Duong and David Li"

We haven’t talked composable infrastructure in a while now but it’s been heating up lately. GigaIO has some interesting tech and I’ve been meaning to have them on the show but scheduling never seemed to work out. Finally, we managed to sync schedules and have Matt Demas, field CTO at GigaIO (@giga_io) on our show. … Continue reading "129: GreyBeards talk composable infrastructure with GigaIO’s, Matt Demas, Field CTO"

Sponsored by: Once again Keith and I are talking K8s storage, only this time it was object storage. Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, Co-founder and CEO of MinIO, has been on our show a couple of times now and its always an insightful discussion. He’s got an uncommon perspective on IT today and what needs to … Continue reading "128: GreyBeards talk containers, K8s, and object storage with AB Periasamy, Co-Founder&CEO MinIO"

[Ray’s sorry about his audio, it will be better next time he promises, The Eds] This was supposed to be the year where we killed off COVID for good. Alas, it was not to be and it’s going to be with us for some time to come. However, this didn’t stop that technical juggernaut we … Continue reading "127: Annual year end wrap up podcast with Keith, Matt & Ray"

Keith and I had an interesting discussion with Alex Chircop (@chira001), CEO of Ondat, a kubernetes storage provider. They have a high performing system, laser focused on providing storage for k8s stateful container applications. Their storage is entirely containerized and has a number of advanced features for data availability, performance and security that developers need … Continue reading "126: GreyBeards talk k8s storage with Alex Chircop, CEO, Ondat"

We had some technical difficulties with Matt getting on the podcast so, Ray had to fly solo. This month we continue our investigations into K8s storage with a discussion with Tad Lebeck (@TadLebeck) US CTO, ionir, a software defined storage system that only runs under K8s. ionir Kubernetes Data Services platform is an outgrowth of … Continue reading "125: GreyBeard talk K8s storage with Tad Lebeck, US CTO for ionir"

Stateful containers are becoming a hot topic these days so we thought it a good time to talk to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) Rook team about what they are doing to make storage easier to use for k8s container apps. CNCF put us into contact with Sébastien Han (@leseb_), Ceph Storage Architect and … Continue reading "124: GreyBeards talk k8s storage orchestration using CNCF Rook Project with Sébastien Han & Travis Nielsen, Red Hat"

The GreyBeards move up the stack this month with a talk on big data and data analytics with Sean Owen (@sean_r_owen), Data Science lead at Databricks and Apache Spark committee and PMC member. The focus of the talk was on Apache Spark. Spark is an Apache Software Foundation open-source data analytics project and has been … Continue reading "123: GreyBeards talk data analytics with Sean Owen, Apache Spark committee/PMC member & Databricks, lead data scientist"

The GreyBeards had a great discussion with Floyd Christofferson, CEO, StrongBox Data Solutions on their big data/HPC file and archive solution. Floyd’s is very knowledgeable on problems of extremely large data repositories and has been around the HPC and other data intensive industries for decades. StrongBox’s StrongLink solution offers a global namespace file system that … Continue reading "122: GreyBeards talk big data archive with Floyd Christofferson, CEO StrongBox Data Solutions"

GreyBeards had an amazing discussion with Peter Thompson (@Lucid_Link), CEO & co-founder and George Dochev (@GDochev), CTO & co-founder of LucidLink. Both Peter and George were very knowledgeable and easy to talk with. LucidLink’s Cloud NAS creates a NAS storage system out of cloud (any S3 compatible AND Azure Blob) object storage. LucidLink is made … Continue reading "121: GreyBeards talk Cloud NAS with Peter Thompson, CEO & George Dochev, CTO LucidLink"

GreyBeards talk universal CEPH storage solutions with Phil Straw (@SoftIronCEO), CEO of SoftIron. Phil’s been around IT and electronics technology for a long time and has gone from scuba diving electronics, to DARPA/DOD researcher, to networking, and is now doing storage. He’s also their former CTO and co-founder of the company. SoftIron make hardware storage … Continue reading "120: GreyBeards talk CEPH storage with Phil Straw, Co-Founder & CEO, SoftIron"

This month we turn to distributed (cloud) filesystems as we talk with Glen Shok (@gshok), VP of Alliances for Panzura. Panzura uses backend (cloud or onprem, S3 compatible) object store with a ring of software (VMs) or hardware (appliance) gateways that provides caching for local files as well as managing and maintaining metadata which creates … Continue reading "119: GreyBeards talk distributed cloud file systems with Glen Shok, VP Alliances,Panzura"

Sponsored By: And Keith and I have talked with Stephen Bacon, Senior Director, Big Data Category, HPE, before (not on our podcast) but not Greg DiFraia, GM Americas, Scality. Both were very knowledgeable about how containerization is changing IT and the role of object storage in this transition. Scality’s ARTESCA, takes this changed world view … Continue reading "118: GreyBeards talks cloud-native object storage with Greg DiFraia, Scality and Stephen Bacon, HPE"

We return back to our storage thread with a discussion of HPC file systems with Frank Herold, (@BeeGFS) CEO of ThinkParQ GmbH, the makers of BeeGFS. I’ve seen BeeGFS start to show up in some IO500 top storage benchmark results and as more and more data keeps coming online every day, we thought it time … Continue reading "117: GreyBeards talk HPC file systems with Frank Herold, CEO of ThinkParQ, makers of BeeGFS"

Sponsored By: This past week, we had a great talk with Martin Hayes (@hayes_martinf), Distinguished Member Technical Staff at Dell Technologies about running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on VxBlock 1000 converged infrastructure (CI). It used to be that Cloud Foundation required VMware vSAN primary storage but that changed a few years ago. . When that … Continue reading "116: GreyBeards talk VCF on VxBlock 1000 with Martin Hayes, DMTS, Dell Technologies"