Techzine TV podcast
In the Techzine TV podcast we analyze B2B IT solutions, strategies, and trends. IT companies are happy to invite us to talk about what they are working on and what they are going to bring to market. We visit them all around the world, and in some cases, they visit us in our office.
We have a good understanding of how technologies work, or how they should work. We also hear a lot from the market about what companies need or where things go wrong. This gives us the ability to have really in-depth conversations on technology, strategies, and products, but we always try to keep it practical and easy to understand.
We explain innovations, interpret new IT concepts, and use practical examples to make complex technology understandable for everyone. Where necessary, we bring in experts to clarify matters further. The goal is to help IT professionals, decision makers, and other listeners better understand IT developments, but also to help them in their search for new solutions for their business and not get stuck on buzzwords and one-liners.
The Techzine TV podcast is an evolution of the previous Techzine Talks on Tour series. We still bring a lot of conversations and interviews from events to this series. We record so many video interviews nowadays, so we can select the best ones for this podcast series.
The topics still vary greatly, as Coen and Sander attend a total of 50 to 60 events each year, ranging from open-source events like KubeCon to events hosted by Cisco, IBM, Salesforce and ServiceNow, to name only a few. With a lot of experience in many walks of IT life, Coen and Sander always manage to produce an engaging, in-depth discussion on general trends, but also on technology itself.
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Techzine TV podcast
NetApp Novus: solving the AI data bottleneck at exascale
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At NetApp INSIGHT in Las Vegas, Techzine TV sat down with Jürgen Hofkens, CTO EMEA at NetApp. We talked about why enterprises are struggling to get the most out of their data for AI. Storage is a major bottleneck, until now. Hofkens talks about the core tension between AI's voracious appetite for data and the practical constraints organizations face when trying to feed that data to GPU clusters at scale.
The conversation centers on NetApp's new Novus architecture, which tackles a fundamental bottleneck: the metadata service. By disaggregating the metadata layer from compute and storage, a concept borrowed from high-performance computing, Novus enables near-infinite namespace scaling using parallel NFS (pNFS) while staying fully ONTAP-compatible. This means enterprises can expose their existing data to neocloud GPU clusters without copying it. They also don't have to sacrifice governance or give up any encryption keys.
Key takeaways:
• Enterprises currently use less than 5% of their data for AI due to structural and throughput constraints
• A cluster of 50,000 GPUs needs 100 TB/s of storage throughput. Today's storage typically tops out at 5 TB/s
• Novus disaggregates the metadata service, removing the architectural bottleneck and enabling exascale namespaces
• Novus runs on ONTAP and uses pNFS (so no proprietary protocols). This makes it compatible with existing enterprise data estates
• Neocloud providers can use ONTAP compatibility as a differentiator to attract enterprise customers
• NetApp's strategy centers on delivering intelligent data infrastructure anywhere: on-premises, hyperscalers, and NeoClouds
Chapters:
2:00 The biggest data trends in the AI era
3:54 Which industries lead in AI data maturity
6:27 Technology challenges: data copies and governance complexity
7:31 The GPU throughput bottleneck: only 5% of data accessible
9:34 Introducing NOVUS: disaggregating metadata for exascale storage
13:13 ONTAP meets NeoCloud: enabling enterprise AI workloads
17:13 Sustained performance and flexible hardware with Supermicro
23:33 The rise of CPUs, AI agents, and enterprise file systems
25:41 Future-proofing with a flexible data architecture