Joining us this week is Ash Young, Chief Evangelist of Cachengo and OPNFV Ambassador. Cachengo builds smart, predictive storage for machine learning.

NOTE – We had a microphone problem that is solved at the 9 minute 19 second mark of the podcast. Start there if you find the clicking noise an issue

Highlights

• 1 min 34 sec: Time to Change Basic Storage Architecture
  • Converged Protocol Appliances & Nothing has changed form early 90s
• 7 min 8 sec: Sounds like Hadoop?
  • Underlying hardware still used proprietary protocols
• 9 min 19 sec: Single Drive Cluster – it’s built?
  • 24 Servers and 24 Drives in a 1U ; has done 48 drives
  • Working on a new design for 96 drives in a 1U
• 11 min 52 sec: Truly a Distributed Storage Array
  • Storage focused microservers
• 13 min 24 sec: Limitations in Operations with Hardware
  • Hinders Innovation
• 15 min 40 sec: Lessons Learned on Managing Devices
  • Over-dependence on tunneling protocols requiring full networking (e.g. VPN)
  • Move to peer-to-peer network slicing
• 17 min 28 sec: Software Defined Networking Topology
  • Introduce devices to each other and get out of the way
• 18 min 33sec: Every Storage Node is Part of the Network
  • Moves into a world of networking challenges
  • Ipv4 cannot support this model
• 21 min 06 sec: Networking Magic in the Model
  • Peer to Peer w/ Broker Introduction and then Removal from Traffic
  • Scale out for Edge Computing Requires this New Model
  • 5G Energy Cost Savings are a Must
• 27 min 28 sec: Issues of Powering On/Off Machines to Save Money
  • Creating a massive array of smaller GPUs for Machine Learning
  • Build a fast, cheap, lower power storage system to get started in the model
• 34 min 09 sec: Doesn’t fit the model that Edge infrastructure will be Cloud patterned
  • Rob makes a point to listeners to consider various ideas in future Edge infrastructure
• 36 min 48 sec: State of Open Source?
  • Consortium’s and open source standards
  • Creating the lowest common denominator free thing so competitors can build differentiation on top of it for revenue
  • Not a fan of open core models
• 41 min 44 sec: Does Open Source include Supporting Implementation?
  • Look at the old WINE project financing
  • You can’t just deploy people onsite for free<
• 48 min 24 sec: Wrap-Up

Podcast Guest: Ash Young,Chief Evangelist of Cachengo

Technology leader with over 20 years experience, primarily in storage. Created the first open source NAS (network attached storage) stack, the first unified block/file storage stack for Linux, the first storage management software, and the list goes on.

Since 2012, I have been heavily involved in NFV (Network Functions Virtualization). I wrote a bunch of the standards and was editor for the Compute/Storage Domain in the Infrastructure Working Group for NFV. And then I started up the open source effort to close the gaps for achieving our vision of the NFVI. This was the precursor to OPNFV.

The best way to understand what I do is to imagine being a high-level marketing exec who comes up with a whiz bang product and business idea, including business plan, competitive analysis, MRD, everything, but now comes the hand-off with your engineering organization, only to hear a litany of nos. Well, I got tired of being told “No, it can’t be done” or “No, we don’t know how to do it”, so I started doing it myself. I call this skill “Rapid Prototyping”, and over the years I have found it to be a very missing gap in the product development process. When Marketing comes up with ideas, we need a way to very efficiently validate the technology and business concepts before we commit to a lengthy engineering cycle.

I’m just one person, working in a company of over 180,000 people and in a very dynamic industry. My ability to get creative and to influence businesses is never a dull moment; and I will probably be 100 years old and still writing open source software.