DataCentric

Earning's season for 4Q has come to a close, with Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NetApp, and Pure Storage all annouceing over the past two weeks. This is enough to giving us an idea of how healthy the enterprise storage & server markets are as we leave 2020. The news is actually pretty good. Hosts Matt Kimball & Steve McDowell, both senior technology analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, talk about it on this DataCentric.

Commvault is having a great run in the white-hot data management and data protection space. It's most recent quarter set records for the quarter-century old organization. Credit for its revitalization and success falls directly in the lap of its CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, who took the reins in early 2019. On this edition of the DataPodcast podcast, Steve McDowell of Moor Insights & Strategy goes one-on-one with Sanjay to get his unique perspective on the data management and data protection market, and how Commvault's strategy aligns with that vision. In a wide-ranging conversation, Sanjay and Steve talk about the new realities of a hybrid/multi-cloud world, re-thinking business continuity in the wake of COVID-19, why storage is critical to data protection, and how Commvault is thinking about the future .Special Guest: Sanjay Mirchandani.

Pure Storage, one of the original pioneers of all-flash storage, has released a slew of updates to the software behind both its FlashArray and FlashBlade products. In this episode of DataCentric, the gang goes into what's happening in storage today, before talking about how Pure's latest announcements move the ball foward, for Pure Storage and, more importantly, its customers. Host Steve McDowell talks with Pure Storage vice presidents Amy Fowler and Scott Baker about what's happening in enterprise storage, and what's changing with Pure's latest release. Amy is Pure's vice president for strategy and solutions in Pure Storage's FlashBlade business, while Scott is the vice president of product marketing for Pure's FlashArray Portfolio. There's big news for both FlashBlade and FlashArray. The participants talk about why FlashBlade is a "Unified Fast File & Object" (UFFO) solution, and what makes it different from more traditional storage technologies. We talk about where FlashBlade fits, and why. FlashArray has also received a bevy of updates, and Scott talks to us about where FlashArray plays best, where QLC makes sense, NVMe-over-fabric (including Pure's new support for NVMe-over-FC), and how Pure is thinking about the future of storage. Special Guests: Amy Fowler and Scott Baker.

Both Intel and AMD released earnings last week, with Intel's Data Center Group sliding a little bit, while AMD's server fortunes rise. What's it mean for the enterprise server market overall? And how is 2021 starting to shape up? Hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell talk about it on this episode of DataCentric.

It's a new year (2021!), which can only mean one thing: Predictions! Hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, both senior analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, turn their datacentric focus to the future of the data center and the trends that will be most impactful in 2021. 00:00 Let's start 03:01 Arm-based processors in the cloud: where's it going? Does it impact Arm server adoption? Will there be Arm-based general purpose servers? 14:15 Forget about Arm, what about AMD? Will they hit 15% server share in 2021? 18:15 Intel has had a monopoly in the nascent 3D XPOINT (Intel Optane) business, despite co-inventing the technology with Micron. Does that change in 2021? 20:50 Nutanix gained new private equity backing in 2020, changing CEOs, and positioning itself for.... something... in 2021. One of our hosts think its an HPE acquistion. 25:31 How impactful will the various OEM's as-a-service offerings be in 2021? Let the boys tell you. 30:20 A contrary prediction about the future of Nvidia's quest to absorb Arm 35:37 In-person conferences will come roaring back. Or not. That's it! Tune in wherever you find podcasts.

Digital Transformation is always front and center of every IT organization, but at no point has digital transformation been more critical than now, as we navigate uncertainty on a global scale. To help us understand how IT organizations are treating digital transformation projects as we exit 2020 and enter a new year, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell (senior technology analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy) welcome an expert in digital transformation. Bipin Sahni is the chief strategy officer for Persistant Systems, a global system integrator and solution provider who helps enterprises of all sizes navigate the waters of digital transformation. This is a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation touching on everything from IT in the time in the time of COVID, data migration, stack modernization, hybrid-cloud and as-a-service adoption, and the emergence of AI in the enterprise. Special Guest: Bipin Sahni.

You can't escape the Edge, but what does it really mean for IT? This is a world where there are limited standards and no "one true way" to deliver solutions, so IT practitioners look to middleware and common tooling to help mangage the complexity. What's working? What isn't? And is there a turf war brewing between IT and OT teams within the enterprise? This episode finds hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell talking to Jim White, the CTO of IOTech Systems, about the trends and technologies that are influencing the evolution of the IoT-driven edge. The guys also talk about some of the pitfalls and challenges faced by IT teams as they take on this challenging new area. Special Guest: Jim White.

As SuperComputing 2020 wraps up, it's a great time to catch up on everything happening in the HPC world. Nobody knows HPC better than Penguin Computing. In this episode of the DataCentric podcast, hosts Matt and Steve are joined by Penguin Computing's Chief Strategy Officer Matt Jacobs, and Penguin's Senior Vice President, Strategic Solutions Group, Kevin Tubbs. The gang talks about hardware abstraction in HPC, hardware complexity and specialization, software-defined architectures, containers, and much, much more. Tune in and you'll leave just a little bit smarter about the world of High Peformance Computing. Special Guests: Kevin Tubbs and Matt Jacobs.

It's KubeCon week, which means that we're all thinking about containers! Containers require a different way of thinking about persistent data, which deeply influences how data protection operates in a cloud-native world. It's really all about intelligent data management. And nobody understands intelligent data management quite like CommVault. CommVault's Global VP of Sales Engineering Don Foster joins hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell to talk about the intersection of data protection and container orchestration. The guys touch on everything from how data protection for containers is differerent from more traditional architectures, to how you integrate containers into an end-to-end DP strategy, to cloud-native backup-as-a-service. It's a great conversation for anyone charged with protecting data in an increasingly container-driven environment. Special Guest: Don Foster.

Flash storage continues to evolve, with that evolution triggering changes in how we think about and deliver enterprise storage. Andy Walls, IBM Fellow and IBM's CTO for its flash storage products, takes us through the big impactors affecting the flash storage industry, We hit on everything: QLC, NVMe-over-fabric, Server-Class Memory, and much more. 00:00 Introductions 02:07 The role of QLC flash in enterprise storage & overcoming its inherent limitations 12:55 Where does Server Class Memory fit? 17:44 NVMe-over-Fabric changes the interconnect game 21:21 Disaggregated storage: are the days of traditional block storage arrays numbered? 23:55 How is Storage for Mainfames different?, Steve asks from a position of ignorance 26:28 Impactful emerging technologies: CXL bus, Computational Storage, 32:00 Does storage need to change to support Quantum Computing?Special Guest: Andy Walls.