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With HPE Discover 2018 all wrapped up now, I’ve spent some time thinking over some of my key takeaways from the show. I was invited as a blogger, which came with the privilege of being in sessions with various leaders at HPE. So although we didn’t get too technical, we did have some great insights into where the company is headed. One big eye-opener was the amount of innovation going on at HPE Labs. We all hear about companies that spend money on R&D, but after hearing the labs mentioned many times in many different conversations, it is clear that this is a huge initiative. ...

When it comes to IT, performance is not always solved by throwing more resources at the problem. A lot of us might be familiar with problems that arise when over provisioning vCPUs on a vSphere host. The host ends up spending more time trying to schedule and coordinate the vCPU tasks than it does to actually perform the tasks. Recently at Tech Field Day 15 we received a briefing from DataCore. As part of my preparation, I put together a primer on the company. As it turns out, it was useless - in a good way though. DataCore has recently launched a brand new product called MaxParallel, which is the first in a series of solutions. So what problem do they solved? Essentially they work around or minimize bottlenecks when it comes to processing workloads. The first product in the series is aimed squarely at SQL Server running on Windows. ...

Earlier this year at TFD 14 in Boston we were given a great run-through of Turbonomic’s new HTML 5 interface. The interface itself breathed new visual life into the product. What I mean by that is while the product was still very functional and extremely useful, it just looked dated. But despite the new interface and features, we had to remember that we were seeing version 5.9. I say this because it felt like a major release. ...

One of the greatest benefits that I have received with the Veeam Vanguard program is the people. Being able to chat with some of the brightest folks in the industry is something that is hard to put a price on. That’s why I have come to really look forward to Vanguard Day before VeeamON. This is the time where we get some great presentations and great conversations going. Kicking the day off was a great presentation from Michael White, who is heading up the Veeam Availability Orchestrator project. To get us all in the right mindset, he did a great presentation on the nuances of Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity. What was great about this presentation is that Michael, who has years of relevant experience, was able to give us real-world examples of issues that he has run across in the field. ...

Just a short post on this one. I am very pleased and excited to announce that I have secured my first sponsor for my blog: Turbonomic. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo), they offer a management suite that determines pain points and bottlenecks, but also alleviates and rectifies them before they turn into problems. Turbonomic does have an offering for a ‘free for forever’ monitoring tool, which you can also check out here. ...

The past few weeks have been one of the longest stretches without a post on here. I’ve been quite busy with work, family, sickness and community commitments. I wanted to toss out some information on the community front, so if you happen to see me at any of these events, feel free to yell ‘Hey, Matt! How you doing’ from across the room and I’ll awkwardly give you a half wave in acknowledgement. ...

Let me preface this post with this: I currently hold a handful of certifications from SNIA, CompTIA, Microsoft, and VMware (and possibly some others that I may have forgotten). I was listening to the newest SysAdministrivia podcast which briefly touched on the topic of certifications and whether they have any value. It seems that the common consensus is that they do not hold value and are a waste of money. Although I can definitely appreciate that and respect that opinion, I also disagree with it to some extent. ...