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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:09 — 44.8MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Email | RSS

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.