Grey Beards on Systems

Sponsored By: We have known Colin Gallagher (@worldc3), VP, Digital Infrastructure Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara, for a long time and he has always been an all around smart storage guy. Colin’s team at Hitachi Vantara are bringing out a brand new, midrange storage system and we thought it would be a good time to … Continue reading "0100: GreyBeards talk with Colin Gallagher, VP Dig. Infra....

Mike Harsch (@harschness) is a personal friend, a computer enthusiast with a particular and enduring interest in distributed systems and GPU computing. MIke’s been a longtime user and proponent of Folding@Home, a distributed system focused on protein dynamics that anyone can download and run on their personal computer(s) or gaming devices. We started the discussion … Continue reading "099: GreyBea...

Sponsored By: Even before COVID-19 there was a lot of file data being created and mined, but with the advent of the pandemic, this has accelerated considerably. As such, it seemed an appropriate time to talk with Christian Smith, VP of Product at Igneous, (@IgneousIO) a company that targets the protection and visibility of massive … Continue reading "098: GreyBeards talk data protection & visualiz...

Ray was at SFD19 a few weeks ago and the last session of the week (usually dead) was with MinIO and they just blew us away (see videos of MinIO’s session here). Ray thought Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy (@ABPeriasamy), CEO MinIO, who was the main presenter at the session, would be a great invite for … Continue reading "097: GreyBeards talk open source S3 object store with AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO"

In this, our yearend industry wrap up episode, the GreyBeards discuss trends and technologdies impacting the IT industry in 2019 and what’s ahead for 2020. This year we have Matt and Keith on the podcast along with Ray. Just like last year, we start off with NVMeoF. NVMeoF unleashed This year just about every major … Continue reading "096: GreyBeards YE2019 IT Industry Trends podcast"

We haven’t talked with a file synch and share vendor in a while now and Matt was interested in the technology. He had been talking with CentreStack, and found that they had been making some inroads in the enterprise. So we contacted S. Azam Ali, VP of Customer Success at CentreStack and asked if he … Continue reading "095: GreyBeards talk file sync&share with S. Azam Ali, VP Customer Success at Ce...

Sponsored By: At Hitachi NEXT 2019 Conference, last month, there was a lot of talk about new data services from Hitachi. Keith and I thought it would be a good time to sit down and talk with Scott Baker (@Kraken-Scuba), Director of Content and Data Intelligence, at Hitachi Vantara about what’s going on with data … Continue reading "094: GreyBeards talk shedding light on data with Scott Baker, Dir....

Supercomputing Conference 2019 (SC19) is coming to Denver next week and in anticipation of that show, we thought it would be a good to talk with some HPC storage group. We contacted HPE and given their recent acquisition of Cray, they offered up Larry and Mark to talk about their new ClusterStor E1000 storage system. … Continue reading "93: GreyBeards talk HPC storage with Larry Jones, Dir. Storag...

Sponsored By: NetApp NetApp’s been working in the AI DL (deep learning) space for a long time now and announced their partnership with NVIDIA DGX systems, back in August of 2018. At NetApp Insight, this week they were showing off their new NVIDIA DGX systems reference architectures. These architectures use NetApp AFF A800 storage (for … Continue reading "92: Ray talks AI with Mike McNamara, Sr. Ma...

There was a lot of news at CommvaultGO this year and it was our first chance to talk with their new CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani. Just prior to the show Commvault introduced new SaaS backup offering for the mid market, Metallic™ and about a month or so prior to the show Commvault had acquired Hedvig, a … Continue reading "91: Keith and Ray show at CommvaultGO 2019"

At VMworld2019 USA there was a lot of talk about integrating Kubernetes (K8s) into vSphere’s execution stack and operational model. We had heard that Portworx was a leader in K8s storage services or persistent volume support and thought it might be instructive to hear from Michael Ferranti (@ferrantiM), VP of Product Marketing at Portworx about … Continue reading "90: GreyBeards talk K8s container...

There were plenty of announcements at Pure//Accelerate in Austin this past week and we were given a preview of them at a StorageFieldDay Exclusive (SFDx), the day before the announcement. First up is Pure’s DirectMemory. They have added Optane SSDs to FlashArray//X to be used as a read cache for customer data. As you may … Continue reading "89: Keith & Ray show at Pure//Accelerate 2019"

Sponsored by: This is another sponsored GreyBeards on Storage podcast and it was recorded at Vmworld 2019. I talked with Jon Hildebrand (@snoopJ123), Principal Technologist at Cohesity. Jon’s been a long time friend from TechFieldDay days and has been working with Cohesity for ~14 months now. For such a short time, Jon’s seen a lot … Continue reading "88: A GreyBeard talks DataPlatform with Jon Hi...

Matt and Ray were both at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco this past week, and we did an impromptu podcast on recent news at the show. VMware announced a number of new projects and just prior to the show they announced the intent to acquire Pivotal and Carbon Black. Pat’s keynote the first day was … Continue reading "87: Matt & Ray show at VMworld 2019"

This is our annual Flash Memory Summit podcast with Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis. It’s the 5th time we have had Jim on our show. Jim is also an avid blogger writing about memory and SSD at TheMemoryGuy and TheSSDGuy, respectively. NAND market trends Jim started off our discussion on the significant price drop … Continue reading "86: Greybeards talk FMS19 wrap up and flash trends...

As most of you know, Howard Marks was a founding co-Host of the GreyBeards-On- Storage podcast and has since joined with VAST Data, an NVMe file and object storage vendor headquartered in NY with R&D out of Israel. We first met with VAST at StorageFieldDay18 (SFD18, video presentation). Howard announced his employment at that event. … Continue reading "85: GreyBeards talk NVMe NAS with Howard Mark...

We were at a recent vendor conference where Steve Foskett (@SFoskett) introduced us to Eric Bednash (@ericbednash), CEO & Co-Founder, RackTop Systems. They have taken ZFS and made it run as a ultra-secure NAS system. Matt Leib, my co-host for this episode, has on-the-job experience with ZFS and was a great co-host for this episode. … Continue reading "84: GreyBeards talk ultra-secure NAS with Eric...

This is the first time we’ve talked with Muli Ben-Yehuda (@Muliby), Co-founder & CTO and Kam Eshghi (@KamEshghi), VP of Strategy & Business Development, Lightbits Labs. Keith and I first saw them at Dell Tech World 2019, in Vegas as they are a Dell Ventures funded organization. The company has 70 (mostly engineering) employees and … Continue reading "83: GreyBeards talk NVMeoF/TCP with Muli Ben-Ye...

This is the first time we’ve had Sumit Puri, CEO & GM Co-founder of Liqid on the show but both Greg and I have talked with Liqid in the past. Given that we talked with another composable infrastructure company (see our DriveScale podcast), we thought it would be nice to hear from their  competition. We … Continue reading "82: GreyBeards talk composable infrastructure with Sumit Puri, CEO & Co-foun...

This is our first time talking with David Friend, (@Wasabi_Dave) Co-founder and CEO, Wasabi Technologies, but he certainly knows his way around storage. He has started a number of successful companies, the last one prior to Wasabi was Carbonite, a cloud backup company.  Before we get to the podcast, Howard Marks has retired from active … Continue reading "81: Greybeards talk cloud storage with Dav...

We haven’t talked with Tom Lyon (@aka_pugs) or Brian Pawlowski before on our show but both Howard and I know Brian from his prior employers. Tom and Brian work for DriveScale, a composable infrastructure software supplier. There’s been a lot of press lately on NVMeoF and the GreyBeards thought it would be good time to … Continue reading "80: Greybeards talk composable infrastructure with Tom Lyon,...

We’ve talked with Frederic before (see: Episode #33 on HPC storage) but since then, he has worked for an analyst firm and now he’s back on his own again, at HighFens. Given all the interest of late in AI, machine learning and deep learning, we thought it would be a great time to catch up … Continue reading "79: GreyBeards talk AI deep learning infrastructure with Frederic Van Haren, CTO & Founder,...

In this, our yearend industry wrap up episode, we discuss trends and technology impacting the IT industry in 2018 and what we can see ahead for 2019 and first up is NVMeoF NVMeoF has matured In the prior years, NVMeoF was coming from startups, but last year it’s major vendors like IBM FlashSystem, Dell EMC … Continue reading "78: GreyBeards YE2018 IT industry wrap-up podcast"

In this episode we discuss high performance databases and the storage needed to get there, with Brian Bulkowski, Founder and CTO of Aerospike. Howard met Brian at an Intel Optane event last summer and thought he’d be a good person to talk with. I couldn’t agree more. Howard and I both thought Aerospike was an … Continue reading "77: GreyBeards talk high performance databases with Brian Bulkowski,...

In this episode we talkindexing old backups, GDPR and CyberSense, a new approach to cyber security, with Jim McGann, VP Marketing and Business Development, Index Engines. Jim’s an old industry hand that’s been around backups, e-discovery and security almost since the beginning. Index Engines solution to cyber security, CyberSense, is also offered by Dell EMC … Continue reading "76: GreyBeards talk...