Podcast #3 – Chris & Matt review the SFD18 presenters

Here’s a little extra podcast Matt Leib and I recorded this afternoon in preparation for Storage Field Day 18.  You can tell this wasn’t recorded in a studio, but actually Matt’s hotel room!  Matt preps coffee in his mini-Nespresso device while we discuss each of the presenting vendors. The discussion is ad-hoc, off the cuff… Read more »

Thoughts from Hitachi NEXT 2018

Earlier this year I was invited to Hitachi NEXT in lovely San Diego.  As part of my trip, I took the time to learn a little more about some of the technology Hitachi has been working on and bringing to market either directly through Hitachi Ltd or Hitachi Vantara.  You may remember that Hitachi Vantara… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – exploiting the cloud

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – exploiting the cloud” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. No modern data platform would be complete if we didn’t talk about the use of public cloud. Public cloud can play a very… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Out on the edge

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Out on the edge” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In this series so far we have concentrated on the data under our control in our datacentres and managed clouds and protected… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Prevention (Office365)

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Prevention (Office365)” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In this series so far, we have looked at getting our initial foundations right and ensuring we have insight and control of our data… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Control

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Control” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In the first parts (here and here) of this series we have looked at ensuring the building blocks of our platform are right… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – Availability

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – Availability” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. In part one we discussed the importance of getting our storage platform right, in part two we look at availability. The idea that availability is a crucial… Read more »

Building a modern data platform – The Storage

This is a guest post by Paul Stringfellow from Gardner Systems and was originally posted at “Building a modern data platform – The Storage” where you can also find Paul’s “Tech Interviews” podcast. It probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who has read my blogs previously to find out that when it comes to the… Read more »

IDC 1Q2018 Data Shows a Rebound for Storage Hardware Sales

The latest IDC Storage Tracker numbers are out and in the spirit of recent analysis, I’ve put the numbers into my tracking spreadsheet.  The figures represent data for Q1, which now has 12 years’ worth of coverage.  With around 42% growth in the general storage hardware figures and 20% in external storage sales, the numbers… Read more »

Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Riverbed

This post is one of a series of previews of companies presenting at Cloud Field Day 3, an invitation-only event in Silicon Valley, taking place 4-6 April 2018.  For more information, see the dedicated CFD3 events page https://blog.architecting.it/events/cloud-field-day-3/. If someone asked me what business Riverbed was in, I’d have said WAN acceleration.  In past lives, I’ve… Read more »

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  • Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Riverbed

    This post is one of a series of previews of companies presenting at Cloud Field Day 3, an invitation-only event in Silicon Valley, taking place 4-6 April 2018.  For more information, see the dedicated CFD3 events page https://blog.architecting.it/events/cloud-field-day-3/. If someone asked me what business Riverbed was in, I’d have said WAN acceleration.  In past lives, I’ve… Read more »

  • Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Delphix

    This post is one of a series of previews of companies presenting at Cloud Field Day 3, an invitation-only event in Silicon Valley, taking place 4-6 April 2018.  For more information, see the dedicated CFD3 events page https://blog.architecting.it/events/cloud-field-day-3/. There’s a very interesting theme to the presenters at CFD3 and that highlights one of the challenges of… Read more »

  • Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Morpheus Data

    This post is one of a series of previews of companies presenting at Cloud Field Day 3, an invitation-only event in Silicon Valley, taking place 4-6 April 2018.  For more information, see the dedicated CFD3 events page https://blog.architecting.it/events/cloud-field-day-3/. When processes get too complex and time-consuming, there’s a temptation to stick in another layer of abstraction and… Read more »

  • Podcast #1 – Serverless and Containers 101

    In what might become a more regular series, I spent some time yesterday chatting with Christian Beedgen, CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic and Alex Chircop CTO and co-founder at StorageOS.  We recorded the conversation as a live podcast, which is an introduction to the concepts of containers and serverless computing.  The aim here was… Read more »

  • Data Mobility – Global/Scale-out Data Platforms

    This is one of a series of posts looking at data mobility for the hybrid cloud. You can find a link to all of the published articles as they become available here.  (link). Probably the most elegant solution to data mobility is to seemingly make data appear in many places at the same time.  Imagine… Read more »

  • Backblaze HDD Statistics for 2017

    For the last four years, Backblaze has been producing statistics from their pool of hard drives.  The company provides cloud storage that started with backup and now covers S3-like capabilities.  The figures for 2017 were recently released and make interesting reading. SMART Backblaze now has a set of data spanning just over 93,000 live drives. … Read more »

  • Storage Performance Benchmarks in Light of Spectre/Meltdown

    This week E8 Storage announced that the company had successfully beaten the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark, with a test based on an E8 appliance and IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS).  The test chosen was software build, which generates lots of I/O activity across many files.  As the press release from E8 says, this workload emulates the… Read more »

  • Data Mobility – Caching Technologies

    This is one of a series of posts looking at data mobility for the hybrid cloud. You can find a link to all of the published articles as they become available here.  (link). Caching is not a new technology.  In fact, it’s been used as a technique to cost-effectively accelerate I/O performance since computers were… Read more »

  • Public Cloud Comparisons – Account Creation

    I’m doing a little more structured work with public cloud, so have been going back and cleaning up and standardising the existing accounts I already have.  The first thing is to create accounts that are company, not user specific.  I like to use distribution groups or mailing lists for setting up accounts.  They are more… Read more »