In this episode, the Greybeards discuss the year in storage and naturally we kick off with the consolidation trend in the industry and the big one last year, the DELL-EMC acquisition. How the high margin EMC storage business is going to work in a low margin company like Dell is the subject of much speculation. That and which of the combined companies storage products will make it through the transition make for interesting discussions. And Finally what exactly is Dell’s long term strategy is another question.

We next turn to the coming of age of object storage. A couple of years ago, object storage was being introduced to a wider market but few wanted to code to RESTful interfaces. Nowadays, that seems to be less of a concern and the fact that one can have onsite/offsite/cloud based object storage repositories from open source, proprietary solutions and everything in between is making object storage a much more appealing option to enterprise IT.

Finally, we discuss the new Tier 0. What with NVMe SSDs and the emergence of NVMe over Fabric coming out last year, Tier 0 has never looked so promising. You may recall that Tier 0 was hot about 5 years with TMS and Violin and others coming out with lightning fast storage IO. But with DELL-EMC DSSD: startups (E8 storage, Mangstor, Apeiron data systems, and others); NVMDIMMs, CrossBar, and Everspin coming out with denser offerings; and other SCM (Micron, HPE, IBM, others?) technologies on the horizon, Tier 0 has become red hot again.

Sorry about the occasional airplane noise and other audio anomalies. The podcast runs over 47 minutes. Howard and I could talk for hours on what’s happening in the storage industry. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Ray Lucchesi is the President and Founder of Silverton Consulting, a prominent blogger at RayOnStorage.com, and can be found on twitter @RayLucchesi.

Howard Marks is the Founder and Chief Scientist of DeepStorage, a prominent blogger at Deep Storage Blog and can be found on twitter @DeepStorageNet.