Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris meets with Pure Storage co-founder John Colgrove (aka Coz) to discuss where the future of data storage lies in the enterprise. This recording was made at the October 2023 Pure//Accelerate event in London and has a little bit of microphone noise at the beginning (apologies!). However, keep listening for some great insights.

In this conversation, Coz explains how Pure Storage has put efficiency at the core of design and product evolution. However, this doesn’t just mean an increase in media capacity, but a vastly improved density and power consumption story. Gains are also being made in software, with continuous improvements in erasure coding overhead and data reduction techniques like compression.

Where will the future lie? NAND flash has many years to go yet, replacing the HDD entirely in the enterprise, if Pure Storage is to be believed. In the meantime, materials science improvements will continue to drive costs down and capacities up. Exactly how far those trends will continue remains to be seen, but we can guarantee that vendors like Pure Storage will be focused on continuous delivery of value to customers.

Elapsed Time: 00:20:36

• 00:00:00 – Intros
• 00:02:55 – Change is in place in the storage industry
• 00:03:22 – Power budgets are determining technology choices
• 00:06:02 – Customers want greater efficiency
• 00:08:35 – New chassis will allow more modules in the same physical space
• 00:09:54 – A modern SSD has the capability of an entire rack of storage from 2000
• 00:11:31 – Can we envisage an 11PB flash module?
• 00:12:24 – Gains aren’t always about increases, but about reductions
• 00:13:02 – Pure Storage merges engineering, software and commercials
• 00:15:44 – Materials science is driving the improvements in computing
• 00:17:39 – New technologies will appear to replace flash
• 00:18:20 – Optane was killed off by economics
• 00:20:03 – Wrap Up

• Storage Unpacked 251 – Modernising Storage as a Service with Prakash Darji
• Storage Unpacked 248 – FlashArray R4 Announcements from Pure Accelerate 2023
• Storage Unpacked 245 – Design Strategies fro 300TB Flash Drives with Shawn Rosemarin
• Pure Storage announces Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, SLA guarantees and operational cost rebates
• Pure Storage: No New Hard Drives WIll be Sold by 2028 – Really?

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