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Odds and SODs

September 8, 2011 By Farley View Comments


In this episode of the Infosmack Deep Dive podcast, hosts Nigel Poulton and Rick Vanover are joined by Ray Lucchesi and Greg Schulz. If there is anything about the storage industry that Ray and Greg don’t know, then its not worth knowing. These guys are like walking talking Wikipedias of the storage world, and Nigel and Rick burrow into their vast brains.

In this shows the guys talk about pretty much anything they want, getting pretty technical at times. Some topics include –

Commodity vs Custom
Intel vs ASIC’s and FPGA’s
Ethernet vs Infiniband
Linux vs Windows
NFS vs SMB

A fair amount of time is spent talking about storage startup Kaminario and how they have built a high performance DRAM and NAND flash based storage array out of essentially commodity hardware (they don’t design of fab any hardware of their own).

They also talk about differences between storage and memory and whether we will ever see a day when we do away with storage as we know it today (LUN, SCSI..). They even get in to some of the weeds of Shingled recording techniques for disk drives.

As promised during the show, a link to some bedtime reading on the topic of Shingled recording – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/27/sw_tdmr/

Links to the hosts and guests websites -

Nigel Poulton – http://nigelpoulton.com

Rick Vanover – http://rickatron.us

Ray Lucchesi – http://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/

Greg Schulz – http://storageioblog.com/

Listen Now –

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Infosmack Podcast MP3
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  • http://blogstu.wordpress.com stu

    Deep thoughts guys – hey @nigelpoulton how could you discuss commodity for 1/2 hr without discussing the merchant silicon wave for Ethernet switches? Intel recently bought Fulcrum Micro (which competes with Marvell and Broadcom) with only Cisco and Brocade left developing custom ASICs. My roots are probably too much in hardware as I would separate the commodity discussion from the open source or “standard” software where your conversation went. Ray and Greg definitely are amazing sources of information on the depths of storage.

  • http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com Nigel Poulton

    Stu,

    Thanks for the comment.  You’re right about missing an op re merchant silicon.  Now that you mention it Im staggered that none of us thought to bring it in to the conversation.

    Im sure we’ll discuss it in a future show.

    Thanks for lsitening

  • Greg

    Stu you say that Cisco and Brocade are left developing custom ASICs?

    You are kidding right, or, are you simply putting the scope and context around FC/SAN interconnect related?

    Move out away from port pieces that Brocade and Cisco play in and you will find other custom ASICs in a broad range of storage, networking and consumer products.

    In fact, there is a very high probability that what ever you used to make your post, or respond to this one will have custom ASICs involved.

    Now if your focus is around just Ethernet switches, have you talked with the Ciena’s, Fujitsu (e.g. carrier side of their house) among others? How about Mellanox or some of the other startups not to mention existing players dabbling in the converged space? Cracked open a low cost commodity Ethernet switch and look at the chip sets inside lately?

    As too why for a 1/2 hour discussion no Ethernet, we only had a half hour and there were many other ASIC areas that we could have gone in addition to Ethernet including PCIe items, SSD and HDD ASICs, adapters, handsets, serdes, packet inspection, dsp etc etc etc etc etc…

    Hope all is well.Cheers
    gs

  • http://blogstu.wordpress.com stu

    Greg – I was specifically talking about Ethernet switching (L2/L3) ASICs – Mellanox, Fulcrum Micro and Broadcom are the off-the-shelf suppliers. Cisco and Brocade make their own. Ciena and F5 are networking vendors, but it is nit the core networking space.

  • Greg

    So much could have been covered in different areas or nits…

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