GreyBeards talk backup with Rick Vanover, Product Strategy Specialist for Veeam

Welcome to our 9th monthly episode where we discuss data backup with Rick Vanover, Product Strategy Specialist for Veeam Software. The GreyBeards just talked with Rick and Veeam at last month’s Storage Field Day 5 (SFD5) in Silicon Valley and once again we would suggest everyone who wants to know more about Veeam backup and even better, new Veeam V8 restore capabilities view the video of their session.

Rick’s has been an icon in the backup industry for many years now and as Veeam’s strategy specialist he spends a lot of time in social media (twitter link below), writes the Rickatron Blog, travels the world attending various conferences and produces the award winning, Veeam Community Podcast. Moreover, Rick said this podcast will be co-distributed by Veeam on their community podcast page, so you can listen to it there as well.

This month’s episode comes in at around 36 and a half minutes.

In this podcast we discuss current IT data protection activities, such as the values and risks of elemental restores, Howard’s recent survey results on data protection for InformationWeek Analytics, and a bit about the best storage for backup.  All in all a good overview of the backup problems in the virtualized server market today and how many of them can be solved right now.

In addition, Howard identified the single “best thing to hit backup over the past 20 years”, (and it wasn’t tape libraries, Ray). Listen to the podcast to find out more …

Rick Vanover, Product Strategy Specialist

Rick Vanover (vExpert, MCITP, VCP, Cisco Champion) is a product strategy specialist for Veeam Software based in Columbus, Ohio. Rick is a popular blogger, podcaster and active member of the virtualization community. Rick’s IT experience includes system administration and IT management; with virtualization being the central theme of his career recently. Follow Rick on Twitter @RickVanover .

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…

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.