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Earlier this month, I was lucky enough to attend my fourth Veeam Vanguard Summit; if you aren’t familiar with the event, this is an experience like none other. I’ve written about the Vanguard program before, and chances are I’ll write about it again. The Summit is one pieceof the program, but in my opinion it is one of the most noteworthy components. In a nutshell, it is an opportunity for the Vanguards to spend time with some key Veeam staff, talk about current and upcoming technologies, and have some very deep NDA-level discussions. ...

At VeeamON 2017, Veeam announced support for AWS workloads via a partnership with N2W Software (founded in 2012). Earlier this year, in January 2018 specifically, Veeam announced that it had acquired N2W Software. What better way to ensure a fantastic experience with a partner than to buy them? While at VeeamON this year, the first session I attended was “Backup and disaster recovery for AWS”. With more and more workloads moving to the cloud, having a risk management/data availability strategy is vital. Whether it be application specific (e.g. compute), or storage (e.g. EBS), the data needs to be protected. So, how is this accomplished? ...

In my last post about Oracle Ravello Bloggers Day 2, I mentioned the distinction between OCI and the Ravello Systems product. I wanted to take some time to dive a bit into what Ravello has been up to because there is some cool stuff going on there. If you happen to not be familiar with Ravello Systems, it is a cloud service where you can run VMs. OK, doesn’t sound special in this day and age, right? The differences become apparent once you start using it. The interface and approach strike me as being quite different than most offerings on the market today. ...

I was recently fortunate enough to be invited to the second Oracle Ravello Blogger Day. A previous blogger day was held in 2017, and although I couldn’t attend, the content I saw generated from it showed that it was a great event. I was excited to see how far Oracle, and by extension Ravello has come in the past year. With about 30 bloggers in attendance, of which about %40 were there last year, it was a great event. ...

With 2017 behind us, I found myself doing some reflecting on the tech industry. In particular I found myself looking back at some of the trends I saw at Tech Field Day 14 & 15, which were about 6 months apart. As it turns out, it was interesting to see some small signs of change in May, and then see additional and more prevalent changes in September. CONTAINERS & THE DEVOPS MOVEMENT There is no doubt that the use of containers continued to grow in 2017. We saw more and more announcements around products, as well as what seemed to be a larger adoption in use. Some recent buzz in the industry was created when Red Hat announced its intent to acquire CoreOS. Although we saw this announcement in 2018, it builds on the direction from 2017. ...

In a market with multiple options available for hyperconverged infrastructure, Scale Computing is no new face. Making their sixth appearance at a Tech Field Day event is a fairly good indication that they must be doing something right. Going into this, I was familiar with Scale primarily only in name, and not much deeper than that. Scale is a big player in the SMB HCI space, and I touch on why that likely is below. But that isn’t to say that they are a SMB-only solution. ...

Earlier this year I set some goals for myself, one of which was certification-related. For the sake of learning something new and with my VMware VCP-DCV expiring later this year, I want to try and recertify on a different track. It has been a bit of a toss-up between VMware NSX and VMware Horizon, but given that I implemented Horizon at work recently, I will be going that route. My home lab consisted of three Intel NUCs, which is great, however, I was running into some issues. First off, I seemed to keep running into all-flash vSAN issues. I suspect this is related to the Intel NVMe’s that I’m using. It also doesn’t help that my hardware isn’t on the HCL, but I haven’t dug too deep into it. The second issue that I found was that although three hosts are great, a fourth would be helpful, even if just for management. Despite having a FreeNAS that I use for shared storage, running it over 1 GbE isn’t ideal. With that in mind, I knew that I needed to solve storage issues first, followed by a fourth host, if possible. ...

As readers of this blog may know, I was invited to participate in Tech Field 12 last November. For those who are not familiar with TFD, it is an event where a panel of delegates (consisting of bloggers, analysts, industry folks, etc.) get to sit down with vendors of all sizes. The delegates get to pick the brains of the vendors, and the whole event is recorded and streamed live. ...

Igneous Systems recently presented at Tech Field Day 12, and honestly, I was quite looking forward to learning more about them. All I really knew going into the presentation was that they provided ‘cloud storage, on premises’. Once we started picking into the details, things definitely got interesting, along with some mind-crippling moments when trying to digest what was presented. A Quick Overview Igneous’ stance is that data is growing at a tremendous rate. Things such as IoT sensors, media (4K video for example), and just raw data (think bio-medical or mineral data), chew up lots of space. In fact, one of the delegates I was talking to mentioned that he goes through petabytes a year! So, the problem is very real, even though it may not be common. ...

I could have sworn that I have written about this before, but a search of my blog didn’t return anything. Oh well, if I did write about this, please point it out if you find it so I can see if my viewpoint has changed / wavered at all. A common ’trait’ (for lack of a better word) that I have come across in IT folks in the past is a hesitation to engage vendor support. I know I was guilty of this early on in my career, but now I definitely try to avoid this. So, what do I mean by this? ...