Home Enterprise StorageReview Podcast #48: Steve Searles on OpenStack and the All-Flash Data Center

StorageReview Podcast #48: Steve Searles on OpenStack and the All-Flash Data Center

by Brian Beeler
Zimcom Data Centers

In this podcast Brian talks with Steve Searles, CTO of Zimcom, a public cloud service provider. Steve launched an effort to move to an all-flash datacenter a few years back and as of last year, successfully made that transition. Zimcom is also a big believer in OpenStack as a cloud management platform, they’ve managed to leverage OpenStack well, shuttering much of their more expensive VMware environment. They also use Cinder for block storage provisioning in OpenStack.

In this podcast Brian talks with Steve Searles, CTO of Zimcom, a public cloud service provider. Steve launched an effort to move to an all-flash datacenter a few years back and as of last year, successfully made that transition. Zimcom is also a big believer in OpenStack as a cloud management platform, they’ve managed to leverage OpenStack well, shuttering much of their more expensive VMware environment. They also use Cinder for block storage provisioning in OpenStack.

searles openstack

Beyond all of that, Steve talks about a number of other topics on the podcast including:

  • Discussing his current primary storage including Nimble and Pure Storage
  • The power savings of consolidating all of their old HDD-based Compellent storage to all-flash storage
  • The need for inexpensive secondary storage, where Steve is evaluating Pure FlashArray//C,  Dell EMC PowerStore, and TrueNAS, amongst others
  • The challenges of moving to OpenStack from VMware
  • Why HCI isn’t an answer for Zimcom
  • Benefits of blade servers
  • Thoughts on Veeam Cloud Connect…and much more…

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