In this episode, Chris discusses the enduring benefits of centralised storage, particularly with reference to storage virtualisation, with Dan Kogan, VP of Enterprise Growth and Solutions and Cody Hosterman, Senior Director of Product Management, both from Pure Storage.

Centralised or shared storage has been around for over 30 years, providing efficiencies in infrastructure and operational management. In the virtualisation context, centralisation provides the ability to abstract workloads from the hypervisor and add flexibility and data management features to a centrally managed platform. Vendors, such as Pure Storage, have invested resources in making centralised storage efficient, while also providing significant security benefits that couldn’t be achieved with an HCI model.

Although this discussion was intended to focus on centralisation, the ultimate conclusion of the conversation is to realise that centralised storage is a precursor to storage-as-a-service. This is where the industry is headed, whether using on-premises or public cloud infrastructure.

Elapsed Time: 00:35:34

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:01:17 – Shared or Centralised Storage has become a perpetual feature of the data centre
00:02:00 – Where did centralised storage come from?
00:03:03 – VMware introduced compute efficiencies, centralised storage does the same
00:05:20 – Centralised storage now incorporates block, file and object protocols
00:07:10 – HCI was probably the biggest “challenge” to centralised storage
00:13:04 – Centralisation is bringing additional consolidation benefits
00:15:55 – Centralisation provides significant operational benefits
00:17:36 – Integrated storage (HCI) is inherently insecure compared to centralised storage
00:22:31 – Data mobility is a key requirement of modern enterprises
00:29:11 – Centralised storage is driving us towards storage-as-a-service.
00:31:10 – Storage is becoming an “endpoint”
00:32:31 – Wrap Up

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