The French Storage Podcast

Wasabi Technologies, the reference in cloud storage, alternative to hyperscalers' solutions with a very efficient and cost effective S3 API service, participated to the recent IT Press Tour in Boston in October. It was the perfect opportunity to meet company's executives and David Friend, co-founder and CEO, who shared his view on the market, genesis of the project and of course directions of the company. It gaves me the idea to record a dedicated episode with David to go deeper in some aspects and we did it recently, we spoke about his background and the trajectory of Wasabi with today a status of Centaur passing the $100M ARR, his partner in crime Jeff Flowers, CTO of Wasabi, some new services around the classic offering especially with the AI engine acquired based on Curio AI, business model with a pure indirect model powered by 16,000 partners and a very unique pricing model charging only the capacity used. We also covered the directions of the company with a potential IPO and for the storage service with some ideas around a on-premises instance and w few other things. A very interesting dialog with David, I hope you will like this episode. Thank you David.

SuperComputing 24 took place a few weeks ago in Atlanta, Georgia, and once again it was a very good edition with the best ever number of attendees with 18,000+, 4,000 more than last year, very impressive show. The topic was about Acceleration in various domains such a HPC, AI, Storage, Memory or Network. I insisted on key trends, some technologies and products I saw very present on the floor. Enjoy the listening.

Coldago Research has unveiled its 6th edition of its annual Map for Object Storage. The 2024 report analyzes 13 companies: Cloudian, DataCore, Dell, Hitachi Vantara, Huawei, IBM, MinIO, NetApp, Pure Storage, Quantum, Scality, VAST Data and WEKA and then elect 9 Leaders. I let you listen to this episode to discover who are the winners. Enjoy.

QStar Technologies exists since 1987 and embodies a real pioneer in its segment who continues to drive innovations and leads the market. The company is pretty small but agile and recognized for its expertise in this domain. It is illustrated by a strong footprint on the market with key end-users and installations for several decades. I decided to record this podcast with Max Finotti, its CTO, after The IT Press Tour we did in April in Rome, to better understand their last product, the soon to be famous Global ArchiveSpace or GAS. This solution introduces several key concepts to address new data and storage challenges in the secondary storage space and in particular in the data archiving landscape. So, with Max, we tried to cover that aspect to learn more about GAS, how it works, its design, what is coming... A great talk, I hope you will enjoy the listening. Thank you Max.

Congruity360, a fast growing player in unstructured data management, recently participated to The IT Press Tour in Boston. It was the opportunity to learn more about its company and product strategies. With Mark Ward, COO, we spoke about the root of the company, its architecture, its benefits and values, how it works, how AI is used, of course some business info related to the business and pricing models and conclude on the future with some new things coming soon. A very interesting dialog with Mark, I hope you will like this episode. Thank you Mark.

ExaGrid, the pure player and market leader in secondary storage with dedicated backup appliance, joined the recent edition of The IT Press Tour in Boston. The session we had with Bill Andrews, CEO, at the company HQ invited me to record a specific interview to cover the pretty unique trajectory of ExaGrid and one of the longest CEO tenure with 20 years in our industry. We spoke about the product and its special characteristics and of course benefits versus classic dedupe backup appliances, some key developments and backup software integrations with Veeam, Veritas and Commvault, the go-to-market and pricing model and of course some futures directions for the company and the product. Once again, an episode I like very much to record and I'm sure you will like this episode. Thank you Bill.

The 58th edition of The IT Press Tour took place early October in Boston, MA. After several years on the west coast, it was clear that we must come back on the other side of the country and we did it. We met 8 innovative companies all playing in IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Analytics, Data Management, Storage and of course AI. By alpha order it was Congruity360, ExaGrid, HYCU, Hydrolix, iRODS, Swissbit, Sync Computing and Wasabi Technologies. Another very good edition in the great place of Boston, I hope you will really enjoy listening to it.

Hydrolix, a fast growing data analytics US company, participated to the recent edition of The IT Press Tour in Boston. With what I saw and understood, I decided to record this new episode with Marty Kagan, CEO and co-founder, to go beyond that session and cover multiple aspects. Among them, we spoke about the genesis of the company, why companies need such technology, a bit of product info, their go-to-market model and pricing philosophy, of course some references and use cases plus competition and we conclude with the future around company and products. Very good episode once again with a simple direct exchange. I hope you will like this episode, I'm pretty sure it will be the case. Thank you Marty.

Swissbit, the European leader in Flash media and SSD, joined the recent edition of The IT Press Tour in Boston, MA. We had the opportunity to learn more about the company and its product strategy and then this podcast was a natural extension. With Silvio Muschter, CEO, we discussed about the genesis of the project, how did the company start, its mission of course that evolved over time, its product line, its M&A trajectory with Hyperstone and Burlywood Technology assets acquisitions and insisted also on their security products plus the go-to-market strategy and pricing model and we conclude with some future directions for the company and products. A very interesting episode with lots of informations, I hope you would like this episode, enjoy your listening. Thank you Silvio.

Very interesting NetApp Insight 2024 user conference a few weeks ago in Las Vegas with a train of strategic and products announcements especially regarding AI and associated storage infrastructure. The product team unveiled new ASA A-Series block storage arrays, 2 new FAS, BlueXP extensions, new cloud services and security features plus some key AI services and architecture with disaggregated and composable block storage architecture and pNFS for file access layer. NetApp understood that some new developments and new steps are needed as AI radically shakes enterprises and globally the IT industry. Enjoy.

Cleondris, a key partner for NetApp in the data security and protection domain, participated to the recent 57th edition of The IT Press Tour in Istanbul, Turkey. At the event, the company unveiled Cleondris ONE, an advanced ransomware protection, and officially launched it during the recent NetApp INSIGHT 2024 in Las Vegas. We spoke about the company, its genesis, the solution and how it works, the go-to-market model and pricing philosophy and we conclude with a few future elements related to the company and products. I think you would like this episode, enjoy your listening. Thank you Christian.

Amazing Huawei Connect 2024 conference and expo in Shanghai, China, a few days ago. It was the right moment to refresh users and partners on the various product lines and storage in particular. I recorded this episode as a recap of the conference and I insist on Pacific and Dorado with its brand new v7 architecture. Again, it was an impressive show with 20,000+ attendees that illustrated the rapid progress Huawei made in various domains. Enjoy.

The 57th edition of The IT Press Tour took place early September in Istanbul, Turkey. With this European format, we met 6 innovative companies all playing in IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data Management, Storage and of course AI. By alpha order it was Cleondris, Datashelter, EU eArchiving Initiative, Hopsworks, MooseFS and ZeroPoint Technologies. Another very good edition in the beautiful city of Istanbul, I hope you will really enjoy listening to it.

MooseFS, one of the few pioneers in scalable distributed file system, joined recently The IT Press Tour. It was the opportunity for the team to launch Moose 4.0 Community Edition. With Jakub Ratajczak, CEO, we spoke, in this episode, about the genesis of the project following the Google File System paper in 2003, the various flavors and key features, how the revenue is generated and pricing philosophy with business model. We conclude with future directions and next steps for MooseFS. I hope you would like this episode, enjoy your listening. Thank you Jakub.

A special episode today with some statistics with some notes and comments about the recent HYCU SaaS Backup Survey Report and my recent talk with Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU, and the acquisitions of Own announced yesterday by Salesforce. A short episode but these 2 elements deserve to be covered. Enjoy.

Large drives is a need and a reality for the industry but they have introduced some new needs to protect data and manage them at scale. I covered all these aspects in this episode and much more explaining some historical key points and then iterate of logical volumes, erasure coding and green with 3 key technologies to leverage to maximize a green effect. Enjoy your listenig.

New name for an established industry conference, the "Flash Memory Summit" has morphed into The "Future of Memory and Storage" which is definitely a good name with the acronym. Once again this year it was the rendez-vous of semi-conductor professionals plus a few other adjacent profiles. Plenty of new things, awards of course but also new products, technology directions and trends confirmed by vendors products iterations. A good show as usual, I hope you will enjoy this short recap.

The last FMS 2024 conference was the opportunity to celebrate Harriet Coverston, a real pioneer in the storage domain and especially in the data archiving space. Harriet just received the SuperWomen of FMS Leadership Award that rewards a brilliant carrier and strong industry contributions. After some times at Lawrence Livermore and Control Data Corp., she founded LSC in 1986 with famous SAM-FS and QFS, later acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2001 where she stayed 10 years. In 2011, she founded Versity Software as CTO with Bruce Gilpin, CEO, to address new data archiving challenges developing a modern data archiving platform. A great talk and a real honor to exchange with Harriet, a reference in storage, I hope you will enjoy the listening. Thank you Harriet.

Following the recent IT Press Tour and the very interesting session we had at MaxLinear, I decided to meet again the company and go more in details on Panther III, the storage accelerator card, well adopted by the market and recognized as one of the fastest in the industry. I talked with Mark Moran, Executive Director, and Pinaki Chanda, Director Software Engineering, during FMS, the famous conference now operating under a new name "The Future of Memory and Storage" and still with the same acronym. We discussed about the strategy of the company but go deeper into the product, its features, its performance and values delivered to users but also key partners. A very interesting exchange about this advanced technology paramount in this fast growing AI era. I hope you will enjoy listening to it. Thank you Mark and Pinaki.

Following ISC and the recent IT Press Tour with the 8th participation of DDN, not counting ones with Nexenta, Tegile or Tintri, before their respective acquisitions, I decided to record a new technical episode with the product leader at DDN, James Coomer. We spoke about the company of course but we insisted on ExaScaler and Infinia, their last high performance storage platform, and their approach of the HPC and AI with some differences but also many similarities. And many more things I hope you will enjoy. Thank you James.