Category: All-flash arrays

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Graybeards talk hyper-convergence with Kelly Murphy, Founder & CTO, Gridstore

In our 14th podcast we return to hyper converged systems and talk with Kelly Murphy, Founder and CTO of  GridStore. Gridstore is a startup supplying hyper-coverged systems for Microsoft (Hyper-V) virtualization environments. Howard and I had a chance to talk with Gridstore at SFD4, just about a year ago.

Gridstore has recently added an all-flash version of their hyper-converged systems to their hybrid and pure SATA storage lineup. Howard, in a recent post, wrote about how all-flash hyper-converged systems make as much sense as chocolate covered pickles. It just so happens that within a month of writing the post, there two hyper-converged vendors announced all-flash nodes. Kelly responds well to Howard’s critique of the idea.

Howard apparently has a mischievous side, as sometime in the past he blew-up a  Gridstore node to test its fault tolerance. The video went viral and made Howard a YouTube star.

In the podcast, we get into Erasure coding, EVO RAIL pricing vs. cost, and why Hyper-V and not VMware to name just a few of the topics covered.  At the end of the podcast there’s a nice bit about how Gridstore came about and it involves disposable motherboards? Listen to the podcast to learn more…

This months episode comes in at a little more than 48 minutes.

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Kelly Murphy, Founder & CTO
Kelly Murphy

Kelly Murphy, Founder and CTO, Gridstore

As a serial entrepreneur with a track record of bringing disruptive technologies to market, Kelly Murphy brings 15 years CEO experience with disruptive venture backed software companies. In 1998, almost a decade before the cloud became popular, Murphy founded Marrakech, the first software company that offered on-demand procurement and supply chain systems to over 30,000 trading partners including some of the world’s largest retailers, consumer food producers, packaging companies and utilities.

After selling Marrakech in 2007, he turned his sights onto what was his largest obstacle in growing his previous business — storage. In 2009, Murphy founded Gridstore — a pioneer of software-defined storage that is set to disrupt the traditional storage industry. Currently, he serves on Gridstore’s Board of Directors and is also the Chief Technology Officer.

Originally from Canada, Murphy obtained his BS in Computer Science from Michigan Technological University, played Division I hockey and was the seventh pick of the New York Islanders in the 1984 entry draft.

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GreyBeards talk all-flash storage with Vaughn Stewart, Chief Technical Evangelist Pure Storage

Welcome to our 12th monthly episode where we return to discussing all-flash storage arrays, this time with Vaughn Stewart, Chief Technical Evangelist for Pure Storage. This our third all-flash storage array vendor that the GreyBeards have talked with since the start of the podcast, not counting server side flash and scale-out/hybrid storage systems.

Vaughn has had a long and illustrious carreer in the storage business most recently prior to joining Pure, at NetApp in product strategy and marketing. Pure Storage seems to have disrupted the normal economics of Flash storage and as a result have seen success in the marketplace.

This month’s episode comes in at a little over 48 minutes long. 

In this podcast we discuss how Pure Storage is changing the economics of Flash storage, primarily through 5 forms of data reduction, some of which are unique to Pure Storage. Their storage solution is block storage, targeting tier 1 applications needing higher IOPS and with the consistent low response time of Flash at the economics of high performing disk storage.

Vaughn provides a good rational as to why we haven’t seen any Pure Storage SPC-1/SPC-2 benchmarks, mainly because SPC will not audit storage that uses data reduction.  Sometime in the podcast we have a good discussion on scale-out vs. scale-up solutions for block storage.

I would have to say that Vaughn is one of the more articulate storage geeks the GreyBeards have come across. We seem to take off on a number of tangents, not the least of which is all the innovation going on in storage these days, where Cisco may go, and where it will all end up,  but we try hard to bring it back to product technology.  Listen to podcast to learn more.

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Vaughn Stewart, Chief Evangelist, Pure Storage

Vaughn Stewart is the Chief Technical Evangelist at Pure Storage, where he shares his perspective on the emergence and capabilities of a flash-powered economy. Prior to joining the ‘flash revolution’ he spent 13 years in technical and marketing leadership roles at NetApp where he led the virtualization and cloud strategy and was awarded a US patent. Vaughn strives to simplify the technically complex and advocates to think outside of the box.

You can find his thoughts on the role of storage with cloud computing and big data online and in print. He publishes his blog, ‘The Pure Storage Guy’, has authored a number of books including his latest is “Virtualization Changes Everything: Storage Strategies for VMware vSphere & Cloud Computing” and is a frequent guest on various online mediums.

 

 

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GreyBeards talk all-flash arrays with Eric Herzog, CMO and SVP Alliances at Violin Memory Systems

Welcome to our 10th monthly episode where we return to discussing all-flash storage arrays, this time with Eric Herzog, CMO and SVP Alliances for Violin Memory. The GreyBeards haven’t talked with an all-flash array vendor for a couple of months now and it seemed a good time to return.

Eric’s claims to be a fellow Greybeard (even though he doesn’t have a beard) because he has been in the storage industry for over 29 years and has been at 7 startups and 2 of the largest storage companies in the world most recently EMC and previously IBM. Eric moved from EMC to Violin just four months ago and has been out talking about Violin Memory’s latest Concerto software functionality release.

This month’s episode comes in at around 49 minutes long. Very sorry for the length but Eric was a hard man to interrupt once he got going (need to work on that) and seemed to come more well prepared than our typical guest.

In this podcast we discuss the two current Violin Memory all-flash arrays, why there’s more to data storage than $/GB, flash’s economic tipping points, Eric’s view on how the world of storage will evolve, and how big companies can learn to adapt better  Somewhere in all of that, there was some pretty good insight on how companies can save lots of money ($Bs) and even make more money ($100Ms) by using all-flash arrays although the rest of us may not like the later that much. Howard called Violin the Drag Racer of storage, listen to the podcast to find out more …

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Eric Herzog, CMO and SVP Alliances

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Eric Herzog has over 29 years of marketing, business development, and sales experience in the storage software, storage hardware, and storage solutions markets. Prior to joining Violin, Herzog was Senior Vice President of Marketing for EMC’s Enterprise & Mid-range Systems Division. Before joining EMC, he was vice president of marketing and sales at Tarmin Technologies. Herzog has also held vice president business line management and vice president of marketing positions at IBM’s Storage Technology Division and Maxtor (acquired by Seagate). Herzog has held vice president positions in marketing, sales, operations, and acting-CFO roles at Asempra (acquired by BakBone Software), ArioData Networks (acquired by Xyratex), Topio (acquired by Network Appliance), Zambeel, and Streamlogic.

 

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Greybeards talk all-flash arrays with Dave Wright, CEO and founder of SolidFire

Welcome to our eight episode where we discuss all-flash storage with Dave Wright, CEO and founder of SolidFire. The Greybeards  just talked with Dave at the SDDC14  and Storage Field Day 5 in San Jose, CA last month.

In this podcast, we learn a lot about SolidFire and other storage arrays from a leading light in the all-flash storage industry. Dave seems to have been around a lot longer than his years and has worked extensively in the cloud gaming and service provider industries. All of which gives him a unique perspective on the needs of storage today.

This months episode comes in at just under 40 minutes. 

We had a wide ranging talk about the virtues of SolidFire’s scale-out, deduplicating Tier 1 & 2 storage, detour into flash technology and the problems benchmarking data reducing, all-flash arrays, and end up with a lengthy discussion on SolidFire’s QoS.

However, If you want to learn about Dave’s technical musings on all-flash architectures, the Greybeards suggest viewing his great video sessions at Storage Field Day 5. Dave did a presentation where he explains the inner workings of SolidFire and some of the other, competitive all-flash storage systems on the market today. The Greybeards seldom find CEO’s with this level of technical understanding of their own product, let alone the competition.

Somewhere during all this Ray learned yet another new acronym, listen to the podcast to learn more…

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DaveWright_SF_portraits-16Dave Wright, CEO and founder SolidFire

Dave Wright, SolidFire CEO and founder, left Stanford in 1998 to help start GameSpy Industries, a leader in online videogame media, technology, and software. While at GameSpy, Dave led the team that created a backend infrastructure powering thousands of games and millions of gamers. GameSpy merged with IGN Entertainment in 2004 to create one of the largest Internet gaming & entertainment media companies. Dave served as Chief Architect for IGN and lead technology integration with FIM / MySpace after IGN was acquired by NewsCorp in 2005.

In 2007 Dave founded Jungle Disk, a pioneer and early leader in cloud-based storage and backup solutions for consumers and businesses. Jungle Disk was acquired by leading cloud provider Rackspace in 2008 and Dave worked closely with the Rackspace Cloud division to build a cloud platform supporting tens of thousands of customers. In December 2009 Dave left Rackspace to start SolidFire.  Dave leads the team at SolidFire in the creation of the only storage architecture built specifically to guarantee true Quality of Service (QoS) in a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure.