Grey Beards on Systems

Stateful containers are becoming a hot topic these days so we thought it a good time to talk to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) Rook team about what they are doing to make storage easier to use for k8s container apps. CNCF put us into contact with Sébastien Han (@leseb_), Ceph Storage Architect and … Continue reading "124: GreyBeards talk k8s storage orchestration using CNCF Rook Project with Sébastien Han & Travis Nielsen, Red Hat"

Sean Owen, Data Science lead at Databricks and a key figure in the Apache Spark committee, dives into the evolution and power of Apache Spark. He discusses its journey from functional programming to user-friendly data frame APIs, emphasizing its ability to manage structured and unstructured data effectively. Owen highlights Spark's significance in IoT data processing, cloud deployment, and the importance of security features like authentication and encryption. He also touches on Spark's extensive corporate adoption, showcasing its versatility in data analytics.

The GreyBeards had a great discussion with Floyd Christofferson, CEO, StrongBox Data Solutions on their big data/HPC file and archive solution. Floyd’s is very knowledgeable on problems of extremely large data repositories and has been around the HPC and other data intensive industries for decades. StrongBox’s StrongLink solution offers a global namespace file system that … Continue reading "122: GreyBeards talk big data archive with Floyd Christofferson, CEO StrongBox Data Solutions"

GreyBeards had an amazing discussion with Peter Thompson (@Lucid_Link), CEO & co-founder and George Dochev (@GDochev), CTO & co-founder of LucidLink. Both Peter and George were very knowledgeable and easy to talk with. LucidLink’s Cloud NAS creates a NAS storage system out of cloud (any S3 compatible AND Azure Blob) object storage. LucidLink is made … Continue reading "121: GreyBeards talk Cloud NAS with Peter Thompson, CEO & George Dochev, CTO LucidLink"

GreyBeards talk universal CEPH storage solutions with Phil Straw (@SoftIronCEO), CEO of SoftIron. Phil’s been around IT and electronics technology for a long time and has gone from scuba diving electronics, to DARPA/DOD researcher, to networking, and is now doing storage. He’s also their former CTO and co-founder of the company. SoftIron make hardware storage … Continue reading "120: GreyBeards talk CEPH storage with Phil Straw, Co-Founder & CEO, SoftIron"

This month we turn to distributed (cloud) filesystems as we talk with Glen Shok (@gshok), VP of Alliances for Panzura. Panzura uses backend (cloud or onprem, S3 compatible) object store with a ring of software (VMs) or hardware (appliance) gateways that provides caching for local files as well as managing and maintaining metadata which creates … Continue reading "119: GreyBeards talk distributed cloud file systems with Glen Shok, VP Alliances,Panzura"

Sponsored By: And Keith and I have talked with Stephen Bacon, Senior Director, Big Data Category, HPE, before (not on our podcast) but not Greg DiFraia, GM Americas, Scality. Both were very knowledgeable about how containerization is changing IT and the role of object storage in this transition. Scality’s ARTESCA, takes this changed world view … Continue reading "118: GreyBeards talks cloud-native object storage with Greg DiFraia, Scality and Stephen Bacon, HPE"

We return back to our storage thread with a discussion of HPC file systems with Frank Herold, (@BeeGFS) CEO of ThinkParQ GmbH, the makers of BeeGFS. I’ve seen BeeGFS start to show up in some IO500 top storage benchmark results and as more and more data keeps coming online every day, we thought it time … Continue reading "117: GreyBeards talk HPC file systems with Frank Herold, CEO of ThinkParQ, makers of BeeGFS"

Sponsored By: This past week, we had a great talk with Martin Hayes (@hayes_martinf), Distinguished Member Technical Staff at Dell Technologies about running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on VxBlock 1000 converged infrastructure (CI). It used to be that Cloud Foundation required VMware vSAN primary storage but that changed a few years ago. . When that … Continue reading "116: GreyBeards talk VCF on VxBlock 1000 with Martin Hayes, DMTS, Dell Technologies"

We seem to be on a computational tangent this year. So we thought it best to talk with Moshe Twitto, CTO and Co-Founder at Pliops (@pliopsltd). We had first seen them at SFD21 (see videos of their sessions here) and their talk on how they could speed up database IO was pretty impressive. Essentially, they … Continue reading "115-GreyBeards talk database acceleration with Moshe Twitto, CTO&Co-founder, Pliops"