Last week, Rickatron and I had the privilege of having Dr Garth Gibson, the co-inventor of RAID technology, on the Deep Dive podcast.

To say that Garth is a legend of the technology world is an understatement. 

I’m posting this here in case anybody reading this site doesn’t know about the podcasts that I do over at http://infosmackpodcasts.com.  Hopefully the show is a great listen and may be something that you can listen to on a drive/flight/train home for the Christmas holidays (for those of us who celebrate Christmas).

I’ve not had a chance to listen to the show myself yet, but we touched on some cracking technology topics when recording.  Garth’s insight is tremendous.  This guy is thinking way way ahead and is extremely switched on.

Some of the topics we covered included -

• Future of RAID (obviously)
• Future of solid state storage
• Future of magnetic recording media – rotating rust
• Sub-LUN tiering
• Commodity Hardware with all of the smarts in software
• The rise of less and less reliable technology
• Parallel NFS (pNFS)
• Securing storage
• Technology predictions for 2012

The show is about 55 minutes long, and Rick and I did our best to raid this guys massive brain.  No small task.

Enjoy listening.

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With that in mind, the Infosmack Deep Dive team have worked extremely hard to put together 1 hour and 15 minutes of no nonsense deep dive podcasting with some of the most recognised experts on the topics.  We’ve done our best to cut through the crap and deliver technical content that you will find hard to find anywhere else.

If you want to know the craic with vSphere 5, this is the best place to find it…

In the show we cover what we feel are the hottest topics, and we spend time on them.  Topics such as -

• Virtual Hardware version 8
• Storage DRS
• The new HA engine
• VMFS 5
• 64TB LUNs
• ESXi
• Virtual Center 5

Joining us on the show this week we have some of most recognised professionals and experts on the topics -

Frank Denneman – Consultant Architect at VMware

Duncan Epping – Principal Architect at VMware

It’s fair to say that Duncan and Frank wrote the bible on VMware HA, DRS and Clustering.  There first book VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive is honestly one of the best tech books I own.  And I’ve ordered my copy of their new book – VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive.

Michael Heffernan – Chief Technologist at HDS.  Heff is responsible for HDS integration with hypervisor products and has some deep hooks in to VMware.

Add to the above, Rick Vanover and myself and we have a team of people doing our absolute best to give the information that you want!

I hope you enjoy the show and learn something. I did.

Listen to the show via the player below, or visit Infosmackpodcasts.com

If you enjoy the show, we have plenty more planned and plenty more already on the shelf an waiting to be listened to.  Go see for yourself at Infosmackpodcasts.com.

The short and skinny of this is that I've started doing Deep Dive podcasts for Infosmack.  And the whole point of them is to be interesting and useful to technical junkies like me.  So if you’re like me at all, you will want to read this.

Why?

First up, I’m a huge fan of audio podcasts. 

I swear I get more than half of what I learn from blogs and podcasts (worrying, I know). 

The problem I have with blogs is that my blog reader has well over 100 blogs that I haven’t had a chance to read yet, and also little chance of having enough time to properly catch-up. 

The audio podcast on the other hand allows me to consume technical content while; driving, gardening, working out, mopping the kitchen…. you get the picture.

The second reason being – while I really enjoyed most of the Infosmack podcasts, occasionally my technical appetite wasn’t satisfied.  So I talked with Greg about adding a Deep Dive brand to the Infosmack portfolio.  Greg loved the idea and I went ahead and started recording shows.  Shows that I personally would like love, figuring that there are other people out there who crave technical material in the same way that I do.

So…….. If you’re anything like me and love technical content, then you’re gunna love the Infosmack Deep Dive podcasts!

Blades vs Rack Servers

Cutting to the chase, the first show is up and available on The Register.  It’s titled Blades vs Rack Servers, and we (myself, Rick Vanoever, Kevin Houston and Bob Plankers) discuss blades vs rack servers.

You can listen to it directly from the Register site using their Reg media player, or by downloading the MP3 here (also linked from The Register).

We are planning tons more shows including things like – Designing for VMware, Flash memory, Deduplication, Protocol wars and a ton of other cool tech related topics.

As well as those, we’ll do speciality shows such as a vSphere 5 Deep Dive (when it comes out), VMAX vs XIV and a ton more.  And that’s just the Deep Dive side of Infosmack.  There’s more than just Deep Dives planned.

What Happened to Greg

Those of you who already know the Infosmack show may wonder what has happened to Greg Kneireimen, founder and host of the show for the last two or so years.  Greg puts it best in his own words on his own site.  I know both Greg and Marc personally and have huge respect for both of them.

The Deep Dive podcasts were planned with Greg over the past couple of months and Greg was hugely supportive of me bringing them under the Infosmack brand, so I’d publically like to thank him for that.  Ass kissing over!

Feedback

Some quick stuff before I finish.

If you've listened to one, do me a favour and vote on the poll over on the right hand sidebar of the website.

Yes, I know there are other technology podcasts out there, of varying quality both on content and recording quality.  But the plan is to make this the best.  Infosmack scmacks of quality.  Hopefully thee will be a little bit different.  Thats the plan anyway

If you do Twitter, the hash tag for the DeepDive series is #DeepDive

Also, the whole reason for me doing the shows (other than the fact that I have a great time doing them) is to deliver something of worth and interest to the technical community.  With that in mind, I’m more than happy to take suggestions for show topics and advice on what you think may add to the show – just add them as comments to this post, or contact me on Twitter, I’m @nigelpoulton.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully you will listen to the shows and enjoy them!

This is a ~10 minute off the cuff audio podcast hosted on Chris’s website – Click here to jump to Chris’s site where you can listen to the podcast.

Nobody ever seems to talk about IBM storage, its just boring right?

The above comment was arguably true, until IBM acquired the XIV Nextra product just over two years ago.  This acquisition seems to have propelled the IBM storage portfolio back in to the mainstream. People are actually talking about an IBM storage product!

In fact its probably fair to say that XIV is one of the most intruiging, most misunderstood and most talked about storage platforms on the market.  There's certainly not shortage of claims being made from both sides of the fence – from IBM, and from the competition.  As a result its hard to know who to believe.

In order to try and shed some light, I pulled together some of the most respected independent voices I could find, and got us all together on a call to openly discuss the pro’s and con’s of XIV.  The result is 50 minutes of XIV technical talk – definitely one for your MP3 player.

People joining me on this edition of the show -

NOTE: Apologies up front for the poor sound quality when Alan speaks – he was a late addition to the show and didnt have a good skype headset.  But his experience and contribution is hopefully worth it.

Enjoy the show – thoughts and comments welcome!

On the topic of I/O Virtualisation, we look into a product that takes I/O adapters (NIC and HBA) out of physical servers and places them into a Top of Rack switch and extends PCIe out of the server chassis to the ToR switch.  The notion of extending PCIe out of the server and plumbing a rack with PCIe is very interesting.

In this inaugural episode of the Technical Deep Dive Podcast I'm joined by Greg Ferro from Etherealmind.com and Camden Ford from Xsigo Systems.  Cam talks to us about Xsigo Systems and the technologies and solutions they offer.

This is available as a two-parter due to length.  Part 1 is about 30 minutes long and Part 2 is about 40.  What can I say, you cant dive deep in 20 minutes!

Comments welcome!