The French Storage Podcast

A few weeks ago, a small of group key industry players joined together and unveiled The Open Flash Platform initiative aka OFP to address storage for AI challenges. The goal is to reach new capacity, density and performance level levering open standard and open source such as Linux, pNFS and DPU models. I summarized the initiative and added some remarks and comments as OFP approach is very interesting and more members should join in the coming months now. Enjoy the listening.

8/22/25 • 08:18

New edition of The Future of Memory and Storage conference aka FMS and the annual summer rendez-vous confirms its role and place in the industry. Several key vendors were present as exhibitors or not and tons of informations have been presented, unveiled and shared with new products, technologies, synergies, partnerships or just corporate directions. I tried to summarize what I saw there, enjoy the short recap and listening.

8/15/25 • 09:33

Twice a year, Coldago Research produces its long awaited Storage Unicorn in June and December. The last report was published in June 2025 and lists 18 companies: Acronis, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, DataCore, DDN, Druva, Eon, ExaGrid, Infinidat, Kaseya, MinIO, Nasuni, NinjaOne, Qumulo, VAST Data, Veeam Software, Wasabi Technologies and WEKA. Enjoy the listening of this short episode.

8/8/25 • 03:58

The last session we had early June during the 62nd edition of The IT Press Tour with Phison presenting the Lonestar case study was a real trigger inviting me to think that I need to talk to the master of this project. And with the help of Phison, we secured the recording with Chris Stott, chairman, CEO and co-founder. We talked about the utopia this kind of project could represent in people's mind or let say the unrealistic idea it crystalizes. In fact, the reality is different they already did a mission so Chris shared lots of informations, what they develop, their partner ecosystem like Phison and why they chose Phison and the Pascari product line, what kind of services they offer, who need this and why they need it, the pricing and business model and of cours we conclude with the calendar of next phases. I hope you'll enjoy this episode, really unique approach. Merci Chris.

8/1/25 • 44:32

The 62nd edition of The IT Press Tour took place early June in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, California. The event was very good, dense with a very compelling program. We met 9 companies and organizations: Cohesity, DDN, Graid Technology, Hunch, Lucidity, Phison Electronics, PuppyGraph, Tabsdata and the Ultra Link Accelerator Consortium, all having something to say in IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data and Storage Management, Big Data and Analytics and of course AI. It also means that we beat new records with 340 distinct companies and 586 sessions for more 26,000 generated articles since 2010 !!

7/25/25 • 29:49

We had the opportunity and privilege to meet again Phison during the recent 62nd edition of The IT Press Tour in California early June. Michael Wu, president, Phison US, and his team delivered a very good session with lots of informations. It gave me the idea to record a new episode this time with Phison's CTO Sebastien Jean to cover some technical aspects, strategy choices and of course technology and product elements about Pascari and we even spoke about Lonestar. A great episode I hope you will enjoy. Thank you Sebastien.

7/18/25 • 37:02

Following the sad news last week, I wrote this new episode based on the StorageNewsletter Top News we published July 2nd, 2025 with future directions and perspectives for the #1 Worldwide Data Storage Industry News website. The adventure continues, believe me.

7/11/25 • 04:20

Jean-Jacques Maleval, the man behind StorageNewsletter passed away February 3rd, 2025. This episode is the audio of the article I wrote on his publication July 1st, 2025 and officially marked the transition to a new phase led by me. RIP JJM.

7/4/25 • 05:12

With a fantastic session with DDN during the recent IT Press Tour in California early June with Paul Bloch, President and co-founder, and Sven Oehme, CTO, covering HPC Storage but above all AI Storage and all connected domains and challenges, I got the idea to extend this with a special talk with Sven. We spoke about the product strategy of course, ExaScaler and Infinia in details, new design requirements to deliver new performance levels, how their installed base and new customers adopt Infinia and of course spent some time on the directions and the future. A great episode I invite you to listen carefully. Enjoy, Thank you Sven.

6/27/25 • 35:35

Cohesity, I should say the NEW Cohesity, participated to The IT Press Tour for the 4th time and this moment was again key to learn about the current state of the union 6 months after the effective date last December. We had a dense meeting with Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President, and his executives team and based on that I decided to record a episode with Vasu Murthy, Cohesity's CPO. We spoke about the products convergence, roadmap, new features, synergies and what is coming... a very good and dense program that protects users' investment. This also confirms that Cohesity is now the market leader in terms of Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software based on revenue, market share and protected data volume. Enjoy the episode, a really good one with lots of info. Thank you Vasu.

6/20/25 • 25:35

Participating to the Storage Technology Showcase for a few years, I decided this time to record a special interview with Quinn Mitchell, creator and owner of the conference. We spoke about the genesis of the event, the mission, goals, objectives and future directions. A very interesting episode to learn more about a unique conference in the industry. Enjoy, Thank you Quinn.

6/13/25 • 09:15

I follow Lucidity since they wen tout of stealth and became visible on the market and I was intrigued by the mechanism they used behind. Lucidity decided to join the recent 62nd edition of The IT Press Tour in California to launch their new product Lumen, a block tiering solution in addition to AutoScaler, their current and first product. In this episode with Nitin Bhadauria, founder of Lucidity with Vatsal Rastogi, we cover the genesis of the project, what challenges the team wish to solve, how the 2 product work, where and how they're deployed, their go-to-market model and pricing philosophy and of course cover a bit of the future directions. A very interesting talk and I invite you to watch carefully Lucidity. Enjoy the listening, thank you Nitin.

6/6/25 • 24:04

The LTO Consortium has made a significant step with the LTO-10 and a few vendors have announced its availability with, again, some disappointments as it offers only 30TB raw. If you consider the original roadmap it represents a big drop. I discuss all these points in this episode as tape is today only considered for archive and deep archive with a key advantage, its cost associated with its nature being a passive media. Enjoy.

5/30/25 • 04:07

Beyond classic annual Coldago Research End-Users Surveys I had the idea to collect, around the end of 2024, opinions and comments from the field asking only end-users about the most impacting data storage technologies in the first 25 years of the century. And we got amazing results, I let your discover the top 3 and if you insist I can even share the #4, #5 and #6. Enjoy.

5/23/25 • 08:59

I discovered Quesma during The IT Press Tour we ran in Boston in October 2024 with the Hydrolix session explaining why Quesma is key for their solution adoption and integration and what they offer. I invited Jacek Migdal, CEO and founder of Quesma, for this last edition in Europe, this time in London, UK, as I wished to learn more and understand better how it works. With Jacek, we spoke about the genesis of the project, what pains they address, how they solve these, their GTM and pricing model and conclude with some future directions. Very good episode, hope you will enjoy it. Thank you Jacek.

5/16/25 • 16:54

The 4th edition of Huawei Technologies Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum 2025 took place in Munich, Germany, last week. With several announcements, news, updates and refreshes plus a good comprehensive expo zone, the Chinese giant continues its pressure on the markets with AI Storage, All Flash Data center products, High scalability and resiliency at a very attractive dense, cost effective and green dimensions. We understand that a new A600 is coming, the 122TB SSD will be shipped overseas, the Dorado v7 architecture penetrates the marketOceanProtect with impressive capacity plus DCS and DME. A great event where I had the privilege to deliver a keynote. Thank you.

5/9/25 • 04:24

The Huawei Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum 2025 in Munich, Germany, was the opportunity to talk with Michael Fan, Marketing Director of the Data Storage product line at Huawei. We spoke together about the Huawei strategy, innovation in cloud, flash, data protection, HPC and AI with the A, Pacific and Dorado Series. A very good exchange with Michael, hope you'd like it. Enjoy.

5/2/25 • 20:00

The 61st edition of The IT Press Tour took place early April at Battersea Power Station in London, UK. It was, once again, a very good event with 15 European IT journalists and reporters at a fantastic place, modernized, perfect to host our new edition. With that 61st edition, we beat new records with 335 distincts companies and 577 sessions for more 26,000 generated articles since 2010 !! For this edition we met 6 organizations covering IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data and Storage Management, Big Data and Analytics and of course AI. In the alpha order, they're AppsCode, Auwau, DAOS, FerretDB, Quesma and Storadera.

4/25/25 • 23:44

Second participation for Storadera, a company I, first, invited in Paris in September 2022, this time for the 61st edition of The IT Press Tour in London. We had the privilege to get a company and product update from Tommi Kannisto, CEO and founder. He joined us to present a deep update on what they did for last few months, how the product works, what are the key differentiators and what he plans for the company and the product in the coming quarters. Storadera is pretty unique with a very simple pricing model with just €6/TB/mon everything included. I hope you will enjoy tis episode. Thank you Tommi.

4/18/25 • 28:08

We got the scoop during the recent IT Press Tour when we learned that CloudFabrix renamed itself into Fabrix.AI to surf and take advantage of the coming AI Tsunami. With this new positioning and AI integration we saw lots of progress for their platform and I decided to talk with Raju Penmetsa, the CTO of the company. We spoke about the architecture, how they leverage AI, Deepseek and other famous technologies, some specific LLMs... and land on their value proposition around Data, AI and Automation Fabric. We concluded with some future product directions and many things are coming. A very good talk, I hope you will enjoy this episode. Thank you Raju.

4/11/25 • 17:50

Young Block Software Defined Storage aka SDS player, Volumez joined recently the 60th edition of The IT Press Tour and it was the opportunity to measure all the progress made by the team in terms of product and market penetration. With the introduction of their Data Infrastructure as a Service, a super set above classic cloud IaaS and their recent performance results for the MLPerf benchmarks, it gave me idea to discuss with John Blumenthal, Chief Product and Business Officer at Volumez, about all these and much more. With John we spoke about his choice of Volumez and the challenge he found, the approach the company took on this AI storage infrastructure and how the product works, the value for users and developers, their business approach following impressive MLPerf results and we concluded with sone future directions. A very interesting talk with John, it was a good moment I hope you will like it as much as I enjoyed it. Thank you John.

4/4/25 • 50:53

Reference in Unstructured Data Management for on-premises and cloud open systems, Komprise continues to drive its product line at a rapid pace. Known for its modern file migration approach based on its Transparent Move Technology, aka TMT, Komprise invented a radical way to manage tiering without any stub files. The product supports a wide variety of NAS and S3 sources and targets, both deployed on-premises or in the cloud. As we met Komprise during the last IT Press Tour in January, I thought that it could be interesting to speak with its CTO, Mike Peercy to dig into a few technical aspects of their solution. And we did it, with Mike we spoke about the architecture of the product, how they leverage ElasticSearch, why and how the global File Index, aka GFI, works and its role, and we also covered the recent announcement related to AI and how the sensitive data protection is implemented. And we concluded with a bit of future directions. Komprise has been recognized, once again, as a leader in the Coldago Research Map 2024 for Unstructured Data Management. It was a pleasure to discuss and record tis episode, hope you will enjoy it.

3/28/25 • 20:00

Panzura is a pioneer in Cloud File Storage serving data at any points on the planet from a central data repository stored on public or private cloud. It mixes object storage with edge access points and maintains NAS protocols for edge clients. It delivers a strict consistency model across sides and has been designed with a pretty unique star and mesh topology across CloudFS servers and back to the central storage. Following the recent IT Press Tour in January, I decided to record this episode with Sundar Kanthadai, the CTO of Panzura for 2 and half years. In addition Panzura has acquired Moonwalk Universal and sells it today with some extensions as Symphony jumping into Unstructured Data Management. Panzura has been recognized, once again, as a leader in the Coldago Research Map 2024 for Cloud File Storage. We spoke about all these points with Sundar, starting with his motivation to join Panzura following his experience at Pavilion Data Systems. I really enjoyed this talk, hope you will as well. Thank you Sundar.

3/21/25 • 23:08

We unveiled to the world Leil Storage in April 2024 for the 55th edition of The IT Press Tour in Roma, Italy. It was the opportunity to discover the Estonian company who develops a scalable high end secondary storage approach based on SaunaFS, their Google like File System, coupled with erasure coding and ICE - Infinite Cold Engine - to reduce and control power usage coupled with SMR HDDs. I recorded this episode this week at Leil HQ in Tallinn, Estonia, speaking with David Gerstein, CTO, and Piotr Modrzyk, Principal Architect. During this talk, we go deeper explaining how their SaunaFS works, their differentiators, how they coupled it with erasure coding and integrate power control to reduce energy consumption. They leverage SMR HDDs with high capacity, more dedicated to sequential workloads, and use some techniques to reduce power and thus at scale cut significantly electricity bill. We learn also more about their future directions. Enjoy this technical talk. Thank you David and Piotr.  

3/14/25 • 30:33

New year and new meeting during The IT Press Tour with CloudFabrix Software now morphed into Fabrix.AI to maximize its solution and impact on IT with AI. I talked with Raju Datla, CEO and co-founder of Fabrix.AI, and we covered the genesis of the company, his team, its solution approach fueled by AI, the recent announcements, the go-to-market and pricing model and a bit of future directions as well. Enjoy this new episode about Fabrix.AI, thank you Raju.

3/7/25 • 17:16

New meeting during The IT Press Tour with iXsystems, the company insisted on its TrueNAS brand wishing to be aligned with the success of its storage servers and as an effect from the sale of its server business to Amaara Networks. I spoke with Brett Davis, EVP, about the company strategy, the new direction around storage, new products especially the H30 model, next release TrueNAS 25.04 and several other successes as 2024 was a good year plus some future steps. Really a good episode with Brett. Thank you. Enjoy.

2/28/25 • 37:41

New exercice or at least at a different frequency, this episode covers the first 2 months of 2025 with some market news I selected. I spoke about VC funding and investments, IPOs, M&A, new product iterations, people's moves, architecture and technology. Enjoy.

2/21/25 • 06:19

The 60th edition of The IT Press Tour took place last week of January in Silicon Valley, California. It's a major milestone for our organization, if you put things in perspective with 60 editions, what other event has reached that number, I let you check... but it will be tough to find some... Success is about regularity, consistency coupled with unique value proposition and innovation it introduces, The IT Press Tour is all about that, a special club. And check the numbers with this 60th edition: 330 distincts companies and 571 sessions since 2010 !! For this edition we met 9 organizations covering IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data and Storage Management, Big Data and Analytics and of course AI. In the alpha order, they're Aquila Clouds, CloudFabrix now Fabrix.AI, Crystal DBA, Hammerspace, Komprise, MLCommons, Panzura, TrueNAS aka iXsystems and Volumez.

2/14/25 • 31:22

2025 is well started and Coldago Research published a few days ago its Gem list 2025 with 5 key players to watch in the coming months: ExaGrid, Leil Storage, QStar Technologies, Volumez and Wasabi Technologies. Enjoy the listening of this new episode.

2/7/25 • 04:20

Classic exercice for a few years for Coldago Research, I share my predictions for 2025 covering AI and its impact, Cloud, Security, Platform, Infrastructure, Media and Connectivity and Energy. Enjoy this episode.

1/31/25 • 07:10