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 »

Technology First? Requirements First!

As more an observer of the technology industry these days, something struck a chord with me as I listened to a recent podcast recording.  Paul Stringfellow hosts a weekly podcast called Tech Interviews.  In Episode 77, he spoke to Matt Watts from NetApp on “cloud first” as a strategy.  The TL;DR of the discussion is… 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 »

Automating HCI Data Protection

I recently wrote a number of posts covering HYCU, a data protection software solution from HYCU Inc.  During the testing I was curious to understand how easy it would be to automate the build of a dedicated backup environment.  Here’s what I found. HYCU Recap HYCU is a software product that was written specifically for… Read more »

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Latest

  • 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 »

  • VMware on Azure? Great! Or Maybe Not

    In recent days we’ve heard that Microsoft will assist VMware users in moving their workloads to Azure.  For the more “difficult” applications, customers can choose to simply run applications on vSphere hosted on the Azure platform.  This service will be delivered in conjunction with VMware-certified partners.  In response, VMware has released a blog indicating that… Read more »

  • Accelerating Workloads with NetApp Plexistor

    I hadn’t realised that NetApp acquired Plexistor earlier this year.  Depending on which site you look at, the acquisition was a pretty cheap $20m or $32m, based on an A-round investment of around $4.5m in September 2014.  NetApp demonstrated application acceleration using the Plexistor technology at Insight in Berlin last week (see the day 2… Read more »

  • Storage Field Day 14 Preview: E8 Storage

    I initially held off reviewing E8 Storage as we had a podcast scheduled with CEO Zivan Ori, which went live last Friday.  Rather than make assumptions about the technology, I wanted to ensure I was giving some credit to the architecture.  I’m glad I did wait because there were one or two fundamentals I hadn’t… Read more »

  • Storage Field Day 14 Preview: Scality

    I’ve followed Scality for a long time, through many previous presentations at Tech Field Days (see the further reading below) and at UK events too.  I also recently presented at Scality SDS Day in London talking about the future of Software Defined Storage.  So what is object storage and what do Scality do? Object Storage… Read more »

  • OK, Google – Where are my Docs?

    Hallowe’en turned out to be a real fright for some Google Docs users yesterday as access to content was blocked due to a buggy code push.  The result was that certain content was flagged to have broken Google’s Terms and Conditions.  As widely reported, for some users this could have been a real issue, had… Read more »

  • Storage Field Day 14 Preview: EMC

    Update: Looks like we’ll be seeing XtremIO again!  (link) It’s over a year since I did a full Tech Field Day event.  Where does the time go?  Next week I’m attending Storage Field Day 14, based in the Silicon Valley area.  Compared to most events, this one looks (at first glance) relatively quiet, with only… Read more »

  • Windows Server, Release Cycles and HCI

    The discussion on Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) seems to have generated a lot of interest and a lot of defensive posts. These posts seem to think that what has been written is either wrong or misinformation.  Actually, the issue is poor communication on Microsoft’s part.  However, what’s subsequently been said has left more questions than… Read more »

  • What Happened to Storage Spaces Direct?

    Can this article on The Register be true?  Has Microsoft removed Storage Spaces Direct from the latest Windows Server build? To be honest I’d initially not given this article much thought until I decided to have a look at the latest Windows Server build myself.  I was interested to find that I can’t actually download… Read more »