The French Storage Podcast

A new episode this time with the CTO of XenData, Mark Broadbent, to discuss archiving and more precisely Active Archive, a few weeks following The IT Press Tour organized in Madrid in December 2023. The company founded more than 2 decades ago designed and developed the X-Series and the E-Series, a solution that combines disk space and tale storage to store massive amount of files data. The product is well deployed and recognized in some verticals such as Media & Entertainment. Mark told me that they plan to add Generative AI to make some additional processing on metadata but also they wish to extend the disk capacity of these products and will soon release a media browser. I let you discover this new episode, it was a real plessure to record, so I hope you will enjoy it. Thank you Mark.

New talk and new format with an exchange with a product or technology executive and this time I invited Subbiah Sundaram, SVP Products at HYCU. We talked about R-Cloud of course, its last iteration with the integration with Anthropic Cloud Generative AI service in the module development process launched during the last IT Press Tour in January in California and of course all other aspects of it like R-Graph, the marketplace... I hope you will enjoy it, thank you Subbiah.

I invited AirMettle, a company I discovered a few quarters ago, for the recent 53rd edition of The IT Press Tour in California, as I identified a real compelling story. Donpaul Stephens, CEO and co-founder of the company, has founded Violin Memory in 2005 to put things in perspective. The presentation was impressive, the team has built a very good solution and thus it was obvious for me to continue to talk with its founder so this interview. We spoke about many different things starting with Violin of course, the trigger that invited him to think about AirMettle with the identified pains at customers' sites not solved yet by the industry, how the product works, its values and key differentiators, a bit of the go-to-market strategy and the pricing model and what is coming. A very interesting talk with Donpaul, indeed, I hope you all will appreciate. Enjoy your listening. Thank you Donpaul.

The 53rd edition of The IT Press Tour took place a few weeks ago in San Francisco and the bay area.

We visited and met 9 innovative companies all playing in IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data Management, Storage and I added AI. By alpha order it was AirMettle, Cerabyte, CloudFabrix, Graid Technology, Groq, Hammerspace, HYCU, Rimage and StorageX. Some of these companies are recent, others more established and all address modern IT challenges via key innovations. This tour edition was, once again, a very good one and I hope you will really enjoy listening to it.

Cerabyte joined us recently for the 53rd edition of The IT Press Tour in California and it was the right time to record an interview with its CEO, Christian Pflaum. We spoke about the genesis of the idea even before it was a project and then covered multiple aspects of the under development solution with the media of course, its nature, the writing and reading process and even tried to speak about the business model, go-to-market and pricing approaches even if we understand it is very early. Very interesting talk with Christian and above all, the project is initiated in Europe by a European company. I hope you'll like it, it was a real pleasure to meet and discuss again with Christian following several talks we had int he past, the tour session and even the recent visit of the prototype in December in Germany. Thank you Christian.

Rimage chose the 53rd edition of The IT Press Tour in California to launch their Digital Asset Management solution, Sophia. It is a big shift and news for Rimage who was a pioneer and reference of the CD, DVD and Blu-Ray disk publishing. With Christopher Rence, CEO of Rimage, we spoke about the genesis of the company, the market, the evolution of Rimage, users' challenges and needs and cover in details Sophia. We also covered the go-to-market and pricing model and we spoke about the future directions for the company and the product. With the launch in mind, recording this episode in California was a real pleasure and I hope you'll like it. Thank you Christopher.

2024 will continue the classic release of the Coldago Research with its Gem list and its 5 companies to watch in the coming months. I select Arcitecta, Nyriad, Tiger Technology, Tuxera and XenData. Enjoy the listening of this short episode.

2024 just started and it's time to share my predictions for 2024 as I will continue what I mentioned for my retrospective for 2023. We'll see if this year will be more dense especially on the technology and products side but also on IPOs, M&As and funds raising. It should be a good one. Enjoy.

Twice a year, Coldago Research produces its Storage Unicorn note, a dedicated report covering the market climate and its selection of storage unicorns. Last December, like in June 2023, the 14th edition of this report listed 17 companies without any changes. By alpha order they're Acronis, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, DataCore, DDN, Druva, Infinidat, Kaseya, MinIO, Nasuni, OwnBackup, Qumulo, Rubrik, VAST Data, Veeam Software, Veritas Technologies and Wasabi Technologies. Enjoy the listening, it's a very short episode that invites you to dig into the topic.

As a usual exercice, I tried at the end of each year to summarize what have happened during the last 12 months on our market. I cover company news, technology aspects, product announcements, M&A, VC rounds or IPOs. A pretty rich year again and 2024 should be even more dense. Enjoy the listening.

Coldago Research has announced recently its 5th edition of its annual Map for File Storage, a classic annual rendez-vous for the industry. The 2023 report analyzes 29 distinct companies among 3 Maps: Enterprise, High Performance and Cloud. We elect various leaders in each category and we invite the reader to listen to the episode to discover all of them. Enjoy.

The 52nd edition of The IT Press Tour took place early December in the magnificent city of Madrid, capital of Spain.

In this innovative 2 days format, we met 6 companies playing in IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data Management, Storage and a few key other areas. By alpha order it was DataCore, Disk Archive, Inspeere, Tiger Technology, XenData and ZettaScale Technology. Some are already famous and established and others more recent and young and it is in our mission to promote innovations and leaders especially this time from US and Europe. This tour was, once again, a very good one and I really enjoyed producing this episode, happy listening.

XenData joined the recent IT Press Tour in Madrid, Spain, and it was the perfect opportunity to record this podcast with Philip Storey, CEO of the company. We discussed about the genesis of the company, the market, the role of tape, their active archive solution and also their recent object storage product. We also covered the go-to-market and pricing model and we spoke about the future directions for the company and the product. I enjoyed recording this episode in Madrid and I hope you'll like it. Thank you Philip.

Coldago Research has unveiled its 5th edition of its annual Map for Object Storage. The 2023 report analyzes 13 companies: Cloudian, DataCore, Dell, Hitachi Vantara, Huawei, IBM, MinIO, NetApp, Pure Storage, Quantum, Scality, Spectra Logic and VAST Data and elect 9 Leaders. I let you listen to this episode to discover who are the winners. Enjoy.

SuperComputing 23 took place last week in Denver, Colorado, and once again it was a very good edition with the best ever number of attendees with 14,000+. 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.

SuperComputing is always a good moment to announce or refresh products and several vendors did this. there is also coming the AWS Re:invent in a few days. It is the case for DDN with Infinia, Qumulo with ANQ and its Global NameSpace, Arcitecta, Hammerspace, Huawei, HYCU and GRAID. A short episode that invite our listeners to check vendors web site to learn more about these solutions. Enjoy.

Western Digital has imagined a split of its business, between HDD and Flash/SSD, but it didn;t go through due to external stakeholder pressure. We analyze these facts, put things in perspective with Toshiba and Kioxia story, spoke about Elliott and obviously cover as well Seagate. It is a very interesting story that should land somewhere very soon. Enjoy the listing of this special Tech Talk.

Object Storage is hot for many years and we see several trends and waves in its development and maturity journey. Coldago Research has produced and published the only available timeline in the domain and helps users to identify players and directions. Beyond that, AWS S3, introduced in 2006, became a de-facto standard and provides impressive data durability levels. On-premises tried to mimic and clone this but failed to deliver the same level as it is essentially one site solutions. I explained all this in this episode, I hope you will enjoy it like others.

ZFS and his companion OpenZFS are largely adopted and present in various products on the market. It offers a strong foundation for storage services and products with very advanced features. I wish to give an update on current release, developments and future directions following the last OpenZFS Developer Conference in San Francisco mid-October. We'll see soon dRAID and Fast Dedupe. Enjoy this short episode about one of the famous disk file systems on the market with VERITAS File System aka VxFS or SGI XFS aka eXtended File System.

Storage-as-a-Service aka STaaS is everywhere today as hardware vendors have to offer this without any options to stay in their historical model. Hyperscalers put pressure on them and we see plenty of offerings from big irons but also emerging vendors. Definitely an interesting trend to follow in the storage industry. Enjoy the listening of this short episode.