Grey Beards on Systems

Jason Goldschmidt and Nick Connolly, co-chairs of SNIA's Accelerated Object TWG, discussed the importance of S3 over RDMA for AI processing. SNIAs work addresses industries need for faster data transfer to improve GPU utilization during model training and inferencing.

Xsight Labs talks their latest SDN X2 network switch and E1 DPU chips with the GreyBeards

Once again in 2025, AI was all the news. We are seeing some cracks in the NVIDIA moat but it's early yet. Broadcom VMware moves and DRAM sky-high pricing sort of round out the year for us. Listen to our YE podcast to learn more.

At AIFD7, Articul8 AI presented a unique non-GenAI solution for industry-specific challenges. On our podcast, Dr. Arun Subramaniyan, Founder and CEO, Articul8 discussed how they deploy domain-specific models across verticals. Their technology ingests and maps corporate data plus business processes to help automate and augment those business critical systems of record. Listen to the podcast to lear...

SNIA's Storage. AI community is focused on addressing AI data challenges through industry standards. Dr. J discussed some of the current SNIA work going on to address AI IO challenges and identified more to come. The standards process is not the only way forward but often it can help industry advance. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

At FMS25 there was lots of discussion on HBM, QLC&SCM SSDs, UAlink/UEC, UCIe for SSDs and liquid cooled m.2 SSDs, listen to the podcast to learn more.

GreyBeards talk Agentic AI with Kamiwaza's CEO, Luke Norris. The world of large enterprise IT is about to undergo another revolution and Kamiwaza AI seems to be leading the charge.

Our YE GreyBeards podcast is often one of our most popular. In this edition. we discuss the impacts AI is having on IT infrastructure and how we see it playing out over the next year.

Cubbit is a Geo-distributed/Geo-fenced S3 compatible object storage where the customer supplies the hardware and Cubbit the software. Presently avalilable in Europe only, it will be coming to the USA in 2025.

Sponsored By: This is the first time we have talked with Hammerspace and Michael Kade (Hammerspace on X), Senior Solutions Architect. We have known about Hammerspace for years now and over the last couple of years, as large AI clusters have come into use, Hammerspace’s popularity has gone through the roof.. Mike’s been benchmarking storage … Continue reading "166: Greybeard talks MLperf Storage be...

Gina and I were at VMware Explore and we discuss some of the changes we saw there and what's the latest functionality coming out that matters to the enterprise.

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis, is our long, time goto guy on SSD and Memory Technologies and we were both at FMS (Future of Memory and Storage – new name/broader focus) 2024 conference last week in Santa Clara, CA. Lots of new SSD technology both on and off the show floor as well as … Continue reading "164: GreyBeards talk FMS24 Wrap-up with Jim Handy, General Dir., Objective Ana...

Dr J Metz, (@drjmetz, blog) has been on our podcast before mostly in his role as SNIA spokesperson and BoD Chair, but this time he’s here discussing some of his latest work on the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) (LinkedIN: @ultraethernet, X: @ultraethernet) The UEC is a full stack re-think of what Ethernet could do for … Continue reading "163: GreyBeards talk Ultra Ethernet with Dr J Metz, Chair o...

Steffen Hellmold, Director, Cerabyte Inc. is extremely knowledgeable about the storage device business. He has worked for WDC in storage technology and possesses an in-depth understanding of tape and disk storage technology trends. Cerabyte, a German startup, is developing cold storage. Steffen likened Cerabyte storage to ceramic punch cards that dominated IT and pre-IT over … Continue reading "16...

We talked with Andy Warfield (@AndyWarfield), VP Distinguished Engineer, Amazon, about 10 years ago, when at Coho Data (see our (005:) Greybeards talk scale out storage … podcast). Andy has been a good friend for a long time and he’s been with Amazon S3 for over 5 years now. Since the recent S3 announcements at … Continue reading "161: Greybeards talk AWS S3 storage with Andy Warfield, VP Distingu...

Sponsored By: This is the last in this year’s, GreyBeards-RackTop Systems podcast series and once again we are talking with Jonathan Halstuch (@JAHGT), Co-Founder and CTO, RackTop Systems. This time we discuss why traditional security practices can’t cut it alone, anymore. Listen to the podcast to learn more. Turns out traditional security practices are keeping … Continue reading "160: GreyBeard t...

Jason and Keith joined Ray for our annual year end wrap up and look ahead to 2024. I planned to discuss infrastructure technical topics but was overruled. Once we started talking AI, we couldn’t stop. It’s hard to realize that Generative AI and ChatGPT in particular, haven’t been around that long. We discussed some practical … Continue reading "159: GreyBeards Year End 2023 Wrap Up"

Sponsored By: This is the 2nd time Brian Dean, Technical Marketing, Dell PowerFlex Storage has been on our show discussing their storage. Since last time there’s been a new release with significant functional enhancements to file services, Dell CloudIQ integration and other services. We discussed these and other topics on our talk with Brian. Please … Continue reading "158: GreyBeards talk softwar...

Bryan Cantrill (@bcantrill), CTO, Oxide Computer was a hard man to interrupt once started but the GreyBeards did their best to have a conversation. Nonetheless, this is a long podcast. Oxide are making a huge bet on rack scale computing and have done everything they can to make their rack easy to unbox, setup and … Continue reading "157: GreyBeards talk commercial cloud computer with Bryan Cantril...

Sponsored By: This is another repeat appearance of Jonathan Halstuch, Co-Founder and CTO, RackTop Systems on our podcast. This time he was here to discuss whether storage admins need to become security subject matter experts (SMEs) or not. Short answer, no but these days, security is everybody’s responsibility. Listen to the podcast to learn more. … Continue reading "156: GreyBeards talk data secu...

Dr. J Metz (@drjmetz, blog), Technical Director of Systems Design at AMD and Chair of SNIA BoD, has been on our show before discussing SNIA research directions. We decided this year to add an annual podcast to discuss highlights from their Storage Developers Conference 2023 (SDC23). Dr, J is working at AMD to help raise … Continue reading "155: GreyBeards SDC23 wrap up podcast with Dr. J Metz, Tec...

Thanks, once again to The CTO Advisor|Keith Townsend, (@CTOadvisor) for letting us record the podcast in his studio. VMware Explore this year was better than last year. The show seemed larger. the show floor busier, the Hub better and the Hands-On Lab much larger than I ever remember before. The show seems to be growing, … Continue reading "154: GreyBeards annual VMware Explore wrap-up podcast"

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis and I were at the FMS 2023 conference in Santa Clara last week and there were a number of interesting discussions at the show. I was particularly struck with the progress being made on the CXL front. I was just a participant but Jim moderated and was on many … Continue reading "153: GreyBeards annual FMS2023 wrapup with Jim Handy, General Director, O...

Sponsored By: Once again we return to our ongoing series with RackTop Systems, and their Co-Founder & CTO, Jonathan Halstuch (@JAHGT). This time we discuss how agent-less, storage based, security works and how it can help secure many organizations with (IoT) end points they may not control or can’t deploy agents on them. But agent-less … Continue reading "152: GreyBeards talk agent-less data secur...

Ray’s known David Kanter (@TheKanter), Executive Director, MLCommons, for quite awhile now and has been reporting on MLCommons Mlperf AI benchmark results for even longer. MLCommons releases new benchmark results each quarter and this last week they released new Data Center Training (v3.0) and new Tiny Inferencing (v1.1) results. So, the GreyBeards thought it was … Continue reading "151: GreyBeard...