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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 hyper-convergence with Jason Collier, CTO & Co-founder Scale Computing

Welcome to our 11th monthly episode where we return to discussing hyper converged systems, this time with Jason Collier, CTO and Co-Founder Scale Computing. The GreyBeards haven’t talked with an hyper converged system vendor since our 1st episode and we had talked with Scale Computing and Jason at Storage Field Day 5 (SFD5) a couple of months ago. Jason is a blast to talk with so it seemed like a good time to talk with him.

Jason started out in the IT end of this business helping to scale a Web 2.0 company transactions almost 300X with architectural innovations.   Scale Computing originally came out as clustered, scale out storage but their intent all along was to provide hyper converged systems which include storage, networking, compute and virtualization under one and the same system and UI. When they came out with the full solution they dropped their standalone, scale out storage offering.

This month’s episode comes in at around 42 minutes long. 

In this podcast we discuss the “true meaning” of hyper converged systems and how this differs from most of the rest of the industry’s converged system architectures.  They are targeting their solution to the SMB and mid-range marketplace.  Scale Computing offers a fully bundled solution, hardware and software for one fee, which includes all the server virtualization software.  As an example, a 3-node entry level cluster, using 1000 series nodes, only costs $25K MSRP. The GreyBeards go a little deep into how they do storage but it’s not as deep as some prior talks.  Nonetheless, Jason’s a gas to talk with and Howard and I really enjoyed talking again with him. The talk seemed to last only 10 minutes or so but when I looked at the clock we were already out of time. For some reason I never got around to asking Jason why his Twitter id is @bocanuts.  Listen to podcast to learn more.

If your interested in more of in-depth, deep dive on their technology the Greybeards would suggest you view the set of videos from Scale Computing’s SFD5 (link above) sessions.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:02 — 39.1MB) | Embed

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Jason Collier, CTO and Co-founder Scale Computing

Jason Collier 2

As a founder and Chief Technology Officer, Jason is responsible for the technology vision of the company. Previously, Jason was VP of Technical Operations at Corvigo where he oversaw sales engineering, technical support, internal IT and datacenter operations. Prior to Corvigo, Jason was VP of Information Technology and Infrastructure at Radiate. There he architected and oversaw the deployment of the entire Radiate ad-network infrastructure, scaling it from under one million transactions per month when he started to more than 300 million at its peak. 

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GreyBeards talk converged infrastructure with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO Nutanix

Episode 1: Converged Infrastructure

Welcome to our inaugural GreyBeards on Storage (GBoS) podcast. The podcast was recorded on September 27th, 2013, when Howard and Ray talked with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO Nutanix.

Our first podcast ran to ~48 minutes and was a broad, wide-ranging conversation that discussed everything from the specifics of Nutanix solutions to broader industry trends impacting IT today. In between, we talked about vBlock/FlexPod,  the gift of Moore’s law,  VMware’s Software Defined Data Center, VMware’s VSAN, and using Big Data open source to support enterprise class storage services in a clustered hypervisor environment among other things.  This last bit was pretty unexpected, if you ask me.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:42 — 45.3MB) | Embed

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Next podcast

Next months GBoS podcast  will be on server side flash.  So if you have any questions on this “IO accelerator” please let us know.

Thanks for listening,

Ray & Howard

 

Dheeraj Panday, CEO Nutanix
About Dheeraj Pandey
Dheeraj is a co-founder and CEO of Nutanix. He brings over 13 years of experience working at high growth enterprise software companies. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was the VP of Engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering team [from the] ground up. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases. Dheeraj is a Ph.D. dropout from University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of CS. He has a BS in CS from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Kanpur), where he was adjudged the “Best All-Rounder Student Among All Graduating Students in All Disciplines.”