Ray Lucchesi Podcasts

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 CleverSafe …

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 job they were searc…

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 to have a talk with Reneé Carlisle (@VeritasTe…

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 developer at Voltron Data. Fir…

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. Also, please welcome Jason Collier…

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 change. Although MinIO is an open source, uber-…

[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 call the GreyBeards on Storage podcast. Once again we got Keith, Matt a…

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 sec…

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 Reduxio a “tin-wr…

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 Travis Nielsen (@STravisNielsen), bot…

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: Gr…

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 na…

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 mad…

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 hardw…

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 … Co…

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 … Co…

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 fi…

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 t…

We seem to be on a computational tangent this year. So we thought it best to talk with Moshe Twitto, CTO and Co-Founder at Pliops (@pliopsltd). We had first seen them at SFD21 (see videos of their sessions here) and their talk on how they could speed up database IO was pretty impressive. Essentially, they … Continue reading "115-GreyBeards talk dat…

Seeing as how one topic on last years FMS2020 wrap-up with Jim Handy was the rise of computational storage and it’s been a long time (see GreyBeards talk with Scott Shadley at NGD Systems) since we discussed this, we thought it time to check in on the technology. So we reached out to Dr. Tong … Continue reading "114: GreyBeards talk computational s…

Sponsored By: I’ve known Liran Zvibel, Co-founder and CEO of Weka IO for many years now and it’s the second time he’s been on our show, (see: Episode 56: GreyBeards talk high performance file storage...). In those days, WekaIO was just coming out and hitting the world with this extremely high-performing, scale out unstructured data … Continue readi…

It’s the end of the year, so time for our regular year end wrap up discussion with the GreyBeards. 2020 has been an interesting year to say the least. It started out just fine, then COVID19 showed up and threw a wrench in everyone’s plans and as the year closes, we were just starting to … Continue reading "112: GreyBeards annual year end wrap-up wi…

Sponsored by: I’ve known Matthew Tyrer, Senior Manager Solutions Marketing and Competitive Intelligence, Commvault for quite awhile now and he’s always been knowledgeable about the problems the enterprise has in supporting and backing up large file data repositories. But lately he’s been focused on Commvault Activate their data analytics solution. …

This months it’s back to storage and our annual wrap-up on the Flash Memory Summit Conference with Jim Handy, General Director of Objective Analysis. Jim’s been on our show 5 times before and is a well known expert on NAND and SSDs (as well as DRAM and memory systems). Jim also blogs at TheSSDGuy.com and … Continue reading "110: GreyBeards talk FMS…

We decided to take a short break (of sorts) from storage to talk about something equally important to the enterprise, networking. At (virtual) VMworld a month or so ago, Pat made mention of developing support for SmartNIC-DPUs and even porting vSphere to run on top of a DPU. So we thought it best to go … Continue reading "109: GreyBeards talk Smart…

The Greybeards get off the beaten (enterprise) path this month, to see what lies ahead with a discussion on DNA storage. David Turek, CTO, Catalog DNA (@CatalogDNA) is a long time IBMer that had been focused on HPC systems at IBM but left and went to Catalog DNA to pursue the commercialization of DNA storage, … Continue reading "108: GreyBeards tal…

Sponsored by: The GreyBeards have talked with Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy (@ABPeriasamy), CEO MinIO, before (see 097: GreyBeards talk open source S3… episode). And we also saw him earlier this year, at their headquarters for Storage Field Day 19 (SFD19) where AB gave a great discussion of what they were doing and how it worked … Continue reading "107…

We had talked with Intel at Storage Field Day 20 (SFD20), about a month ago. At the virtual event, Intel’s focus was on their Optane PMEM (persistent memory) technology. Kelsey Prantis (@kelseyprantis), Senior Software Engineering Manager, Intel was on the show and gave an introduction into Intel’s DAOS (Distributed Architecture Object Storage, DAO…

Neither Ray nor Keith has met Pradeep before, but Ray was very interested in Fungible’s technology. Turns out Pradeep Sindhu, CEO and Co-founder, Fungible has had a long and varied career in the industry starting at Xerox Parc, then co-founding and becoming chief scientist at Juniper, and now reachitecting the data center with Fungible. Pradeep … C…

Ray has known Siamak Nazari (@NebulonInc), CEO Nebulon for three companies now but has rarely had a one (two) on one discussion with him. With Nebulon just emerging from stealth (a gutsy move during the pandemic), the GreyBeards felt it was a good time to get Siamak on the show to tell us what he’s … Continue reading "104: GreyBeards talk new cloud…

Sponsored by: Ray has known Molly Presley (@Molly_J_Presley), Head of Global Product Marketing for just about a decade now and we both just met Ben Gitenstein (@Qumulo_Product), VP of Products & Solutions, Qumulo on this podcast. Both Molly and Ben were very knowledgeable about the problems customers have with massive data troves. Molly has been … …

It’s been a couple of months since we last talked with a startup, so the GreyBeards thought it was time. We reached out to Charles Fan (@CharlesFan14), CEO and Co-Founder of MemVerge to find out about their big memory solution or as Charles likes to call it, “software defined (big) memory”. Although neither Matt or … Continue reading "0102 GreyBear…

As most of you know, Howard Marks (@deepstoragenet), Technologist Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary at VAST Data used to be a Greybeards co-host and is still on our roster as a co-host emeritus. When I started to schedule this podcast, it was going to be our 100th podcast and we wanted to invite Howard and the rest … Continue reading "0101: Greybeard…

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: Gre…

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 start…

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 readin…

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 …

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: GreyBear…

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…

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 …

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: GreyBea…

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 re…

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 Commv…

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 … C…