Grey Beards on Systems

This month we talk scale-out secondary storage with Jonathan Howard,  Director of Technical Alliances at Commvault.  Both Howard and I attended Commvault GO2017 for Tech Field Day, this past month in Washington DC. We had an interesting overview of their Hyperscale secondary storage solution and Jonathan was the one answering most of our questions, so … Continue reading "54: GreyBeards talk scale-out secondary storage with Jonathan Howard, Dir. Tech. Alliances at Commvault"

This month we talk new disk technology with Lenny Sharp, Senior Director of Product Management, responsible for enterprise disk with Western Digital Corp. (WDC). WDC recently announced their future disk offerings will be based on a new disk recording technology, called MAMR or microwave assisted magnetic recording. Over the last decade or so the disk … Continue reading "53: GreyBeards talk MAMR and future disk with Lenny Sharp, Sr. Dir. Product Management, WDC"

This month we talk with an old friend from Storage Field Day 7 (videos), Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, VP of Product Management for Maxta. Maxta has a software defined storage solution which currently works on VMware vSphere, Red Hat Virtualization and KVM to supply shared, scale out storage and HCI solutions for enterprises across the world. Maxta is similar … Continue reading "52: GreyBeards talk software defined storage with Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, VP Product Management, Maxta"

Sponsored by: VMware In this episode we talk with Lee Caswell (@LeeCaswell), Vice President of Product, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware.  This is the second time Lee’s been on our show, the previous one back in April of last year when he was with his prior employer. Lee’s been at VMware for a little over … Continue reading "51: GreyBeards talk hyper convergence with Lee Caswell, VP Product, Storage & Availability BU, VMware"

In this episode we talk with Jim Handy (@thessdguy), Director at Objective Analysis,  a semiconductor market research organization. Jim is an old friend and was on last year to discuss Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2016. Jim, Howard and I all attended FMS 2017 last week  in Santa Clara and Jim and Howard were presenters at the … Continue reading "50: Greybeards wrap up Flash Memory Summit with Jim Handy, Director at Objective Analysis"

Sponsored By: In this episode we talk with Brian Biles, CEO and Co-founder of Datrium. We last talked with Brian and Datrium in May of 2016 and at that time we called it deconstructed storage. These days, Datrium offers a converged infrastructure (C/I) solution, which they call “open convergence”. Datrium C/I Datrium’s C/I  solution stores persistent data … Continue reading "49: Greybeards talk open convergence with Brian Biles, CEO and Co-founder of Datrium"

In this episode we talk with Enrico Signoretti, Head of Product Strategy for OpenIO, a software defined, object storage startup out of Europe. Enrico is an old friend, having been a member of many Storage Field Day events (SFD) in the past which both Howard and I attended and we wanted to hear what he … Continue reading "48: Greybeards talk object storage with Enrico Signoretti, Head of Product Strategy, OpenIO"

Sponsored By: In this episode, we talk with ClearSky Data’s Lazarus Vekiarides, CTO and Co-founder,  who we have talked with before (see our podcast from October 2015). ClearSky Data provides a storage-as-a-service offering that uses an on-premises appliance plus point of presence (PoP) storage in the local metro area to hold customer data and offloads this data … Continue reading "47: Greybeards talk Storage as a Service with Lazarus Vekiarides, CTO & Co-Founder ClearSky Data"

In this episode Howard and I were both at Dell EMC World2017 this past month and Alastair Cooke (@DemitasseNZ) asked us to do a talk at the show for the vBrownBag group (Youtube video here). The GreyBeards asked for a copy of the audio for this podcast. Sorry about the background noise, but we recorded live at … Continue reading "46: Greybeards discuss Dell EMC World2017 happenings on vBrownBag"

In this episode, we talk with Andy Klein, Dir of Marketing for Backblaze, which backs up  desktops and computers to the cloud and also offers cloud storage. Backblaze has a unique consumer data protection solution where customers pay a flat fee to backup their desktops and then may pay a separate fee for a large recovery. On their … Continue reading "45: Greybeards talk desktop cloud backup/storage & disk reliability with Andy Klein, Director Marketing, Backblaze"