GreyBeards on Storage

GreyBeards talk Agentic AI with Kamiwaza's CEO, Luke Norris. The world of large enterprise IT is about to undergo another revolution and Kamiwaza AI seems to be leading the charge.

Our YE GreyBeards podcast is often one of our most popular. In this edition. we discuss the impacts AI is having on IT infrastructure and how we see it playing out over the next year.

Cubbit is a Geo-distributed/Geo-fenced S3 compatible object storage where the customer supplies the hardware and Cubbit the software. Presently avalilable in Europe only, it will be coming to the USA in 2025.

Sponsored By: This is the first time we have talked with Hammerspace and Michael Kade (Hammerspace on X), Senior Solutions Architect. We have known about Hammerspace for years now and over the last couple of years, as large AI clusters have come into use, Hammerspace's popularity has gone through the roof.. Mike's been benchmarking storage … Continue reading "166: Greybeard talks MLperf Storage benchmark with Michael Kade, Sr. Solutions Architect, Hammerspace"

Gina and I were at VMware Explore and we discuss some of the changes we saw there and what's the latest functionality coming out that matters to the enterprise.

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis, is our long, time goto guy on SSD and Memory Technologies and we were both at FMS (Future of Memory and Storage – new name/broader focus) 2024 conference last week in Santa Clara, CA. Lots of new SSD technology both on and off the show floor as well as … Continue reading "164: GreyBeards talk FMS24 Wrap-up with Jim Handy, General Dir., Objective Analysis"

Dr J Metz, (@drjmetz, blog) has been on our podcast before mostly in his role as SNIA spokesperson and BoD Chair, but this time he's here discussing some of his latest work on the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) (LinkedIN: @ultraethernet, X: @ultraethernet) The UEC is a full stack re-think of what Ethernet could do for … Continue reading "163: GreyBeards talk Ultra Ethernet with Dr J Metz, Chair of UEC steering committee, Chair of SNIA BoD, & Tech. Dir. AMD"

Steffen Hellmold, Director, Cerabyte Inc. is extremely knowledgeable about the storage device business. He has worked for WDC in storage technology and possesses an in-depth understanding of tape and disk storage technology trends. Cerabyte, a German startup, is developing cold storage. Steffen likened Cerabyte storage to ceramic punch cards that dominated IT and pre-IT over … Continue reading "162: GreyBeards talk cold storage with Steffen Hellmold, Dir. Cerabyte Inc."

We talked with Andy Warfield (@AndyWarfield), VP Distinguished Engineer, Amazon, about 10 years ago, when at Coho Data (see our (005:) Greybeards talk scale out storage … podcast). Andy has been a good friend for a long time and he's been with Amazon S3 for over 5 years now. Since the recent S3 announcements at … Continue reading "161: Greybeards talk AWS S3 storage with Andy Warfield, VP Distinguished Engineer, Amazon"

Sponsored By: This is the last in this year's, GreyBeards-RackTop Systems podcast series and once again we are talking with Jonathan Halstuch (@JAHGT), Co-Founder and CTO, RackTop Systems. This time we discuss why traditional security practices can't cut it alone, anymore. Listen to the podcast to learn more. Turns out traditional security practices are keeping … Continue reading "160: GreyBeard talks data security with Jonathan Halstuch, Co-Founder & CTO, RackTop Systems"

Jason and Keith joined Ray for our annual year end wrap up and look ahead to 2024. I planned to discuss infrastructure technical topics but was overruled. Once we started talking AI, we couldn't stop. It's hard to realize that Generative AI and ChatGPT in particular, haven't been around that long. We discussed some practical … Continue reading "159: GreyBeards Year End 2023 Wrap Up"

Sponsored By: This is the 2nd time Brian Dean, Technical Marketing, Dell PowerFlex Storage has been on our show discussing their storage. Since last time there's been a new release with significant functional enhancements to file services, Dell CloudIQ integration and other services. We discussed these and other topics on our talk with Brian. Please … Continue reading "158: GreyBeards talk software defined storage with Brian Dean, Tech. Mkt., Dell PowerFlex"

Bryan Cantrill (@bcantrill), CTO, Oxide Computer was a hard man to interrupt once started but the GreyBeards did their best to have a conversation. Nonetheless, this is a long podcast. Oxide are making a huge bet on rack scale computing and have done everything they can to make their rack easy to unbox, setup and … Continue reading "157: GreyBeards talk commercial cloud computer with Bryan Cantrill, CTO, Oxide Computer"

Sponsored By: This is another repeat appearance of Jonathan Halstuch, Co-Founder and CTO, RackTop Systems on our podcast. This time he was here to discuss whether storage admins need to become security subject matter experts (SMEs) or not. Short answer, no but these days, security is everybody's responsibility. Listen to the podcast to learn more. … Continue reading "156: GreyBeards talk data security with Jonathan Halstuch, Co-Founder and CTO, RackTop Systems"

Dr. J Metz (@drjmetz, blog), Technical Director of Systems Design at AMD and Chair of SNIA BoD, has been on our show before discussing SNIA research directions. We decided this year to add an annual podcast to discuss highlights from their Storage Developers Conference 2023 (SDC23). Dr, J is working at AMD to help raise … Continue reading "155: GreyBeards SDC23 wrap up podcast with Dr. J Metz, Technical Dir. of Systems Design AMD and Chair of SNIA BoD"

Thanks, once again to The CTO Advisor|Keith Townsend, (@CTOadvisor) for letting us record the podcast in his studio. VMware Explore this year was better than last year. The show seemed larger. the show floor busier, the Hub better and the Hands-On Lab much larger than I ever remember before. The show seems to be growing, … Continue reading "154: GreyBeards annual VMware Explore wrap-up podcast"

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis and I were at the FMS 2023 conference in Santa Clara last week and there were a number of interesting discussions at the show. I was particularly struck with the progress being made on the CXL front. I was just a participant but Jim moderated and was on many … Continue reading "153: GreyBeards annual FMS2023 wrapup with Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis"

Sponsored By: Once again we return to our ongoing series with RackTop Systems, and their Co-Founder & CTO, Jonathan Halstuch (@JAHGT). This time we discuss how agent-less, storage based, security works and how it can help secure many organizations with (IoT) end points they may not control or can't deploy agents on them. But agent-less … Continue reading "152: GreyBeards talk agent-less data security with Jonathan Halstuch, Co-Founder & CTO, RackTop Systems"

Ray's known David Kanter (@TheKanter), Executive Director, MLCommons, for quite awhile now and has been reporting on MLCommons Mlperf AI benchmark results for even longer. MLCommons releases new benchmark results each quarter and this last week they released new Data Center Training (v3.0) and new Tiny Inferencing (v1.1) results. So, the GreyBeards thought it was … Continue reading "151: GreyBeards talk AI (ML) performance benchmarks with David Kanter, Exec. Dir. MLCommons"

Sponsored By: This is another in our series of sponsored podcasts with Jonathan Halstuch (@JAHGT), Co-Founder and CTO of RackTop Systems. You can hear more in Episode #147 on RansomWare protection and Episode #145 on proactive NAS security. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) has been touted as the next level of security for a while now. … Continue reading "150: GreyBeard talks Zero Trust with Jonathan Halstuch, Co-founder & CTO, RackTop Systems"

Ran across an article discussing ORION, ORNL's new storage system which had 100s of PB of file storage and supported TB/sec of bandwidth, so naturally I thought the GreyBeards need to talk to these people. I reached out and Dustin Leverman, Group Leader HPC storage at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL)answered the call. Dustin has … Continue reading "149: GreyBeards talk HPC storage with Dustin Leverman, Group Leader, HPC storage at ORNL"

Sponsored By: This is one of a series of podcasts the GreyBeards are doing with Dell PowerFlex software defined infrastructure. Today, we talked with Anthony Cinelli, Sr. Director Dell Technologies and Brian Dean, Technical Marketing for PowerFlex. We have talked with Brian before but this is the first time we've met Anthony. They were both … Continue reading "148: GreyBeards talk software defined infrastructure with Anthony Cinelli and Brian Dean, Dell PowerFlex"

Sponsored By: This is another in our series of sponsored podcasts with Jonathan Halstuch (@JAHGT), Co-Founder and CTO of RackTop Systems. You can hear more in Episode 145. We asked Jonathan what was wrong with ransomware protection today. Jonathan started by mentioning that bad actors had been present, on average, 277 days in an environment … Continue reading "147: GreyBeards talk ransomware protection with Jonathan Halstuch, Co-Founder and CTO, RackTop Systems"

We've known Brian Carmody (@initzero), Field CTO, Volumez for over a decade now and he's always been very technically astute. He moved to Volumez earlier this year and has once again joined a storage startup. Volumez is a cloud K8s storage provider with a new twist, K8s persistent volumes hosted on ephemeral storage. Volumes currently … Continue reading "146: GreyBeards talk K8s cloud storage with Brian Carmody, Field CTO, Volumez"

Sponsored By: We've known about RackTop Systems. since episode 84, and have been watching them ever since. On this episode we, once again, talk with Jonathan Halstuch (@JAHGT), CTO and Co-Founder, RackTop Systems. RackTop was always very security oriented but lately they have taken this to the next level. As Jonathan says on the podcast, … Continue reading "145: GreyBeards talk proactive NAS security with Jonathan Halstuch, CTO & Co-Founder, RackTop Systems"

Sponsored by Today we talked with VAST Data's Subramanian Kartik (@phyzzycyst), Global Systems Engineering Lead and Howard Marks (@DeepStorage@mastodon.social, @deepstoragenet) former GreyBeards co-host and now Technologist Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary at VAST. Howard needs no introduction to our listeners but Kartik does. Kartik has supported a number of customers implementing AI apps at VAST and prior … Continue reading "144: Greybeard talks AI IO with Subramanian Kartik & Howard Marks of VAST Data"

Today we interview Jonmichael Hands (@LebanonJon, LinkedIn), VP Storage at Chia Project , who has been in and around the storage business forever, mostly with Intel and their SSD team, before it was sold. He was technical marketing for NVMe. He also ran the security and crypto track at FMS2022. He recently worked on sustainability, … Continue reading "143: GreyBeards talk Chia cypto with Jonmichael Hands, VP Storage at Chia Project"

Software defined storage is a pretty full segment of the market these days. So, it's surprising when a new entrant comes along. We saw a story on Quobyte in Blocks and Files and thought it would be great to talk with Bjorn Kolbeck (LinkedIn), Co-Founder & CEO, Quobyte. Bjorn got his PhD in scale out … Continue reading "142: GreyBeards talk scale-out, software defined storage with Bjorn Kolbeck, Co-Founder & CEO, Quobyte"

Well it has been another year and time for our annual year end wrap up. Since Covid hit, every year has certainly been interesting. This year we have seen the start of back in person conferences which was a welcome change from the covid lockdown. We are very glad to start seeing everybody again. From … Continue reading "141: GreyBeards annual 2022 wrap-up podcast"

As our listeners should know, Matt Leib (@MBleib) was a GreyBeards co-host But since then, Matt has joined IBM to become Product Marketing Manager on IBM Spectrum Fusion, a data orchestration solution for Red Hat OpenShift environments. Matt's been in and around the storage and data management industry for many years which is why we … Continue reading "140: Greybeards talk data orchestration with Matt Leib, Product Marketing Manager for IBM Spectrum Fusion"

In honor of SC22 conference this month in Dallas, we thought it time to check in with our HPC brethren to find out what's new in storage for their world. We happened to see that IO500 had some recent (ISC22) results using a relative new comer, GekkoFS (@GekkoFS). So we reached out to the team … Continue reading "139: GreyBeards talk HPC file systems with Marc-André Vef and Alberto Miranda of GekkoFS"

We have never talked with Alluxio before but after coming back last week from Cloud Field Day 15 (CFD15) it seemed a good time to talk with other solution providers attempting to make hybrid cloud easier to use. Adit Madan (@madanadit) , Director of Product Management, Alluxio, which is a data orchestration solution that's available … Continue reading "138: GreyBeards talk big data orchestration with Adit Madan, Dir. of Product, Alluxio"

Jason Collier Principle Member of Technical Staff, AMD (@bocanuts), a current GreyBeardsOnStorage co-host and I both attended VMware Explore 2022 this past week and we recorded a podcast discussing VMware's announcements on the show floor. It turns out that Keith Townsend, TheCTOAdvisor (@thectoadvisor) had brought his Airstream &studio and was exhibiting on the show floor. … Continue reading "137: GreyBeards talk VMware Explore 2022 Wrap-up"

We have known Tom Coughlin (@thomascoughlin), President, Coughlin Associates for a very long time now. He's been an industry heavyweight almost as long as Ray (maybe even longer). Tom has always been very active in storage media, storage drives, storage systems and memory as well as active in the semiconductor space. All this made him … Continue reading "136: Flash Memory Summit 2022 wrap-up with Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Assoc."

Sponsored By: I've known Theresa Miller, Director of Technology Advocacy Group at Cohesity, for many years now and just met David Jayanathan (DJ), Cohesity Solutions Architect during the podcast. Theresa could easily qualify as an old timer, if she wished and DJ was very knowledgeable about traditional file and object storage. We had a wide … Continue reading "135: Greybeard(s) talk file and object challenges with Theresa Miller & David Jayanathan, Cohesity"

Sponsored By: I've known Theresa Miller, Director of Technology Advocacy Group at Cohesity, for many years now and just met David Jayanathan (DJ), Cohesity Solutions Architect during the podcast. Theresa could easily qualify as an old timer, if she wished and DJ was very knowledgeable about traditional file and object storage. We had a wide … Continue reading "135: Greybeard(s) talk file and object challenges with Theresa Miller & David Jayanathan, Cohesity"

We have known Dr. J Metz (@drjmetz, blog), Chair of SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) BoD, for over a decade now and he has always been an intelligent industry evangelist. DrJ was elected Chair of SNIA BoD in 2020. SNIA has been instrumental in the evolution of storage over the years working to help define … Continue reading "134: GreyBeards talk (storage) standards with Dr. J Metz, SNIA Chair & Technical Director AMD"

We have known Dr. J Metz (@drjmetz, blog), Chair of SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) BoD, for over a decade now and he has always been an intelligent industry evangelist. DrJ was elected Chair of SNIA BoD in 2020. SNIA has been instrumental in the evolution of storage over the years working to help define … Continue reading "134: GreyBeards talk (storage) standards with Dr. J Metz, SNIA Chair & Technical Director AMD"

We saw a recent article in Blocks and Files (Storage facing trillion-row db apocalypse), about a couple of companies which were trying to deal with trillion row database queries without taking weeks to respond. One of those companies was Ocient (@Ocient), a Chicago startup, whose CEO and Co-Founder, Chris Gladwin, was an old friend from … Continue reading "133: GreyBeards talk trillion row databases/data lakes with Ocient CEO & Co-founder, Chris Gladwin"

We saw a recent article in Blocks and Files (Storage facing trillion-row db apocalypse), about a couple of companies which were trying to deal with trillion row database queries without taking weeks to respond. One of those companies was Ocient (@Ocient), a Chicago startup, whose CEO and Co-Founder, Chris Gladwin, was an old friend from … Continue reading "133: GreyBeards talk trillion row databases/data lakes with Ocient CEO & Co-founder, Chris Gladwin"

We've been talking a lot about K8s of late so we thought it was time to get back down to earth and spend some time with Adi Gelvan (@speedb_io), Co-founder and CEO of Speedb, an embedded key-value store, drop-in/replacement for RocksDB, that significantly improves on its IO performance for large metadata databases. At Adi's last … Continue reading "132: GreyBeards talk fast embedded k-v stores with Speedb's Co-Founder&CEO Adi Gelvan"

We've been talking a lot about K8s of late so we thought it was time to get back down to earth and spend some time with Adi Gelvan (@speedb_io), Co-founder and CEO of Speedb, an embedded key-value store, drop-in/replacement for RocksDB, that significantly improves on its IO performance for large metadata databases. At Adi's last … Continue reading "132: GreyBeards talk fast embedded k-v stores with Speedb's Co-Founder&CEO Adi Gelvan"

The GreyBeards have been discussing K8s storage services a lot over the last year or so and it was time to understand how container apps and data could be protected. Recently, we saw an article about a Veritas funded survey, discussing the need for data protection in K8s. As such, it seemed a good time … Continue reading "131: GreyBeards talk native K8s data protection using Veritas NetBackup with Reneé Carlisle"

The GreyBeards have been discussing K8s storage services a lot over the last year or so and it was time to understand how container apps and data could be protected. Recently, we saw an article about a Veritas funded survey, discussing the need for data protection in K8s. As such, it seemed a good time … Continue reading "131: GreyBeards talk native K8s data protection using Veritas NetBackup with Reneé Carlisle"

We had heard about Apache Arrow and Arrow Flight as being a hi-performing database with access speeds to match for a while now and finally got a chance to hear what it was all about with James Duong, Co-Fourder of Bit Quill Technologies/Senior Staff Developer at Dremio and David Li (@lidavidm), Apache PMC and software … Continue reading "130: GreyBeards talk high-speed database access using Apache Arrow Flight, with James Duong and David Li"

We had heard about Apache Arrow and Arrow Flight as being a hi-performing database with access speeds to match for a while now and finally got a chance to hear what it was all about with James Duong, Co-Fourder of Bit Quill Technologies/Senior Staff Developer at Dremio and David Li (@lidavidm), Apache PMC and software … Continue reading "130: GreyBeards talk high-speed database access using Apache Arrow Flight, with James Duong and David Li"

We haven't talked composable infrastructure in a while now but it's been heating up lately. GigaIO has some interesting tech and I've been meaning to have them on the show but scheduling never seemed to work out. Finally, we managed to sync schedules and have Matt Demas, field CTO at GigaIO (@giga_io) on our show. … Continue reading "129: GreyBeards talk composable infrastructure with GigaIO's, Matt Demas, Field CTO"

We haven't talked composable infrastructure in a while now but it's been heating up lately. GigaIO has some interesting tech and I've been meaning to have them on the show but scheduling never seemed to work out. Finally, we managed to sync schedules and have Matt Demas, field CTO at GigaIO (@giga_io) on our show. … Continue reading "129: GreyBeards talk composable infrastructure with GigaIO's, Matt Demas, Field CTO"

Sponsored by: Once again Keith and I are talking K8s storage, only this time it was object storage. Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, Co-founder and CEO of MinIO, has been on our show a couple of times now and its always an insightful discussion. He's got an uncommon perspective on IT today and what needs to … Continue reading "128: GreyBeards talk containers, K8s, and object storage with AB Periasamy, Co-Founder&CEO MinIO"

Sponsored by: Once again Keith and I are talking K8s storage, only this time it was object storage. Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, Co-founder and CEO of MinIO, has been on our show a couple of times now and its always an insightful discussion. He's got an uncommon perspective on IT today and what needs to … Continue reading "128: GreyBeards talk containers, K8s, and object storage with AB Periasamy, Co-Founder&CEO MinIO"

[Ray's sorry about his audio, it will be better next time he promises, The Eds] This was supposed to be the year where we killed off COVID for good. Alas, it was not to be and it's going to be with us for some time to come. However, this didn't stop that technical juggernaut we … Continue reading "127: Annual year end wrap up podcast with Keith, Matt & Ray"