Although modern-day storage products let us do more with less, and is more capable than ever before, they are also way more complex, and often unintelligible to the masses. Recorded at the recent Storage Field Day event, in this On-Premise IT podcast, Stephen Foskett asks the attending luminaries from the storage industry to define storage in simple terms. With innovation piling high, storage, in the recent years, has slipped away from the grasps of IT professionals, causing add-on stress and pressure. Storage, as a disciple, has grown so vast, that it is only possible to either be a generalist and acquire a broad understanding, or a specialist with narrow focus in one thing. Listen to the discussion to learn how storage professionals working at the heart of IT view and interpret storage.

Edge is leading the hardware industry into a new era of innovation. In this episode of Utilizing Tech, Stephen Foskett, and co-hosts, Allyson Klein and Alistair Cooke, sit down to dissect this. In the wake of Intel’s discontinuation of its NUC product line, a question that is in everyone’s mind is, what’s next. Intel, and many behemoths like it, have a proud legacy of knowing how to break a stalemate and preserve the churn, and even if that means stepping up and pulling the plug on an old product. It oxygenates the marketplace, welcoming new solutions and keeping the wheel of innovation moving. In the context of the emerging paradigm of edge, this change will likely propel the market towards a new breed of powerful, low-cost, pocket-size hardware that delivers breakthrough energy-efficiency and compute performance with little infrastructure.

The storage industry is increasingly focused on memory rather than traditional storage, and this reflects an architectural shift in the compute stack. This episode of On-Premise IT focuses on the new storage stack, which now includes memory, with Andy Banta, Jim Jones, Vuong Pham, and Stephen Foskett, all of whom are attending Storage Field Day 26 and SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference. The difference between memory and storage was historically based on the technology at hand, but these lines are blurring. The latest systems can address storage and memory in very similar ways, and can apply advanced data management techniques to memory as well as storage. NVMe, NAND flash, CXL, and persistent memory technologies are blurring the lines, and the latest developments in software, as highlighted at SNIA’s SDC, bring new capabilities. As memory becomes more like storage, what was once primary storage has a new job to perform further down in the hierarchy focused on data management, ransomware, and data protection.

Personal devices are increasingly being used across enterprise IT, from smartphones to wearable devices, and these are becoming the true edge. This episode of Utilizing Edge brings Field Day delegates Mark Houtz and Jim Czuprynski together with Stephen Foskett to discuss the personal side of the edge. Mobile Device Management (MDM) has been used to manage smartphones and similar technology is used for personal computers, but it seems inevitable that there will be a mixing of business and private data. The mix and match of personal devices at the edge is sure to be a topic of future focus.

Storage Field Day 26 is happening on September 20th and 21st in coordination with SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference. We’ll be exploring the evolving storage technology landscape with presentations from CTERA, Solidigm, and SNIA. The event will be live-streamed on the Tech Field Day website and LinkedIn page and we hope to see you there. All sessions will be recorded and posted shortly after on our YouTube channel, and you can engage via Twitter, Mastodon, or LinkedIn. Get ready for Storage Field Day 26 and SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference!

As enterprises try to deploy infrastructure to support AI applications they generally discover that the demands of this application can disrupt their architecture plans. This episode of On-Premise IT, sponsored by Pure Storage, discusses the disruptive impact of AI on the enterprise with Justin Emerson, Allyson Klein, Keith Townsend, and Stephen Foskett. Heavy duty AI processing requires specialized hardware that more resembles High-Performance Computing (HPC) than conventional enterprise IT architecture. But as more enterprise applications leverage accelerators like GPUs and DPUs, and become more disaggregated, AI starts to make more sense. Power is one key consideration, since companies are more aware of sustainability and are impacted by limited power availability in the datacenter, and efficient external storage can be a real benefit here. This is still general-purpose infrastructure but it increasingly incorporates accelerators to improve power efficiency. One issue for general purpose infrastructure is the concern over security, and enterprise AI applications will certainly benefit from broad access to a variety of enterprise data. Enterprise use of AI will require a new data infrastructure that supports the demands of AI applications but also enables data sharing and integration with AI applications.

Although blockchain technology has been tainted by scammers, the core idea of distributed consensus is relevant for certain edge applications. This episode of Utilizing Edge focuses on practical application of blockchain technology in edge and IoT, featuring Jason Benedicic, Alastair Cooke, and Stephen Foskett. Two key concepts in blockchain are the distributed ledger and consensus approach. There is a lot of work being done to apply blockchain in medical, finance, IoT, and proof of provenance. Although many applications can rely on authority or quorum, larger and more heterogeneous applications might benefit from consensus instead. The other aspect of blockchain, chain of custody and immutability of data, is potentially relevant in preventing supply chain attacks and dealing with transient devices. It’s important to remember that many of the things that have put people off blockchain, from financialization to public exposure of transactions, are not necessarily required in all blockchains.

Perhaps no computing technology has been as consistently-compatible and yet cutting edge as PCI Express (PCIe). This Gestalt IT Tech Talk features Richard Solomon of the PCI-SIG discussing the journey of PCI through decades of compatibility and innovation with Stephen Foskett. Uncover the story behind the backbone of modern computing systems and gain insights into the future of PCIe’s evolution.

Computing and sensors have been deployed at the edge for decades, and this is certainly true in the agriculture sector. This episode of Utilizing Edge features Edge Field Day delegates Ben Young and Alastair Cooke discussing with Stephen Foskett the evolution of connectivity and orchestration at the edge. Governmental policies can have a huge impact on the deployment of technology, from connectivity to environmental regulations, as has the emergence of inexpensive sensors, batteries, and processors thanks to the mobile phone industry, along with solar power. Cloud-inspired automation and orchestration is another key enabler of technology in agriculture and at the edge, with zero-touch provisioning, management, and central maintenance. Containerized applications, caching, and cloud-derived control planes are very popular at the edge, though not exactly the same way as in the cloud.

As companies embrace chiplet technology, the need for a standard like UCIe is becoming critical. Explore the realm of chiplet integration in this Gestalt IT Tech Talk with Brian Rea, Co-Chair of UCIe’s Marketing Work Group, and Stephen Foskett. Uncover how UCIe is revolutionizing chip design by establishing open standards that foster collaboration, interoperability, and cutting-edge custom chip solutions. As UCIe continues to refine its specifications and garner industry support, its impact on the chip landscape promises to be transformative, ushering in an era of specialized processors.