It’s the kind of thing us podcasters like to do this time of year, we like to take a bit of a retrospective view of the previous year as well as a look forward to the new, so not wanting to miss a trick on the Tech Interviews podcast, that’s exactly what we do in this episode.
To help me to look forward and look back at the tech industry I’m joined by Analyst Chris Evans (@chrismevans), Chris has over 25 years of varied IT experience, starting his career on mainframes, Chris also successfully built and floated his own dotcom business, started his own consultancy practice and today is a widely read and respected industry analyst and hosts his own (excellent) podcast, Storage Unpacked.
With that background he’s the ideal person to provide some perspective and thoughts on the direction of the tech industry, especially the data and storage elements of it, so that is exactly what I ask him to do.
We take a look at a whole range of topics, we discuss how a move to a more software defined future has not stopped the re-emergence of the importance of hardware, with technologies such as NVMe becoming more prevalent and how the ever-increasing criticality of data and performance is driving this hardware evolution.
Chris also explores some thoughts around the development of hybrid cloud infrastructure and how this is not only driven by the traditional on-prem vendors, but by the big cloud providers, how the likes of Microsoft and AWS are investing increasingly in technology to help their customers simplify the process of moving data into their cloud platforms. (For example Chris references Microsoft’s purchase of Avere Systems, you can read more here).
We also ask why some of the technologies we expected to really take off didn’t, for example why a personal favourite of both myself and Chris, Object Storage, hasn’t quite captured the market as we thought.
We don’t of course just look back, we look at some of the technologies that we expect to be the big bets for CIO’s and IT decision makers in 2018.
We investigate why high performance and scale out file systems, both on-prem and in the cloud, will continue to grow and as we increasingly look at how to keep our data at the edge while taking advantage of cloud computing.
Will NVMe really take off in 2018? we discuss some potential use cases and why, if you are making those tech investment decisions in 2018, NVMe maybe for you.
Of course, we round up with a look at data privacy, no doubt 2018, at least the first half, will be the year of GDPR, Chris gives some thoughts on what technology can help and how the technology industry can be more helpful in the way it approaches this challenging topic.
To find out more from Chris, you can find him on twitter @chrismevans and Linkedin.
His writing and analysis can be found at https://blog.architecting.it/
And if you are interested in storage industry related content, then I strongly recommend Chris’s excellent Storage Unpacked podcast you can listen to that here http://storageunpacked.com/.
Next week, sticking with the theme of data privacy as the topic for 2018, I’m joined by my favourite data privacy guru Sheila Fitzpatrick as we look at the upcoming impact of GDPR, the Myths and the areas you should be focussing on ahead of May 25th.
To ensure you catch that show, why not subscribe, you’ll find the show in all of the usual places.
Thanks for listening and have a great 2018.
Techstringy 
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