I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a ‘cozy’ conference call hosted by Tintri. I say cozy because excluding Tintri staff, there were less than 10 of us customers and users who were invited. The purpose was to give us a demo of some of Tintri’s recently announced products and features, and the small size definitely gave it a nice touch. There was also no shortage of talent on the presentation end to take us through these new additions. ...

Cohesity will be presenting at the upcoming Tech Field Day 12 event, and I opted to do some research on them ahead of time. Cohesity was founded in 2013 and has gone through two rounds of funding, totaling $70 million. Headquartered in Santa Clara, they currently have over 100 employees. So, what does Cohesity do? They focus on secondary storage, which could include domains such as test/dev, but particularly backup storage / repositories. Cohesity is an interesting mix in that they provide storage, features using said storage, and services, namely backups. In a nutshell, they bill themselves as ‘hyperconverged storage’. ...

For those of you who subscribe to my blog, be forewarned, you are about to be barraged with blog posts. After serious contemplation earlier this year, and last year, I have decided to take part in the VDM 30 in 30 challenge. I have no idea what my posts will look like, and I’ll try to keep them somewhat technical / IT related, but I may go off-topic at some point - you have been warned. ...

Given how big of a success the last SWOVUG (Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group) meeting was, planning the next one started shortly after. Now that we’ve come far enough along, I am excited to announce the details for the next gathering. The upcoming SWOVUG meeting will be held Wednesday, November 23rd 2016. We’ll be sticking to the Mississauga area given the great turn out from the last meeting. This time around we’ll be at: ...

Just a short (but exciting, for me anyways) post today. I’ve been having some pretty good Friday’s as of late - that being said, Monday couldn’t come fast enough for me this week. Why would I say something crazy? Let me paint picture: October 18th, 2016 - it was a simpler time: the Blue Jays were still a contender for the World Series, the third US Presidential debate still hadn’t taken place, and Anthony Spiteri was still a Veeam Vanguard (massive congrats to him!). Meanwhile, I happened to catch the latest Tech Field Day Extra, which was great because I didn’t even know that it was going on. The stars must have been aligned because Paessler (the makers of PRTG) were presenting. The timing couldn’t have been better as I am currently evaluating their solution (which I quite like so far). Something cool happened shortly after the event ended - I had a new Twitter follower: Stephen Foskett (cool!). ...

Earlier this year I wrote a few posts ( here, here, and here) where I collected a bunch Veeam Repository Best Practices; the purpose of those posts were somewhat two-fold at the time: a) I needed something to present at my first SWOVUG meeting, and b) I desperately needed a new repository at work. Despite being several months later, I still seem to be getting questions about what repository I went with and how I like. I figure if I at least blog about it I can point future questions here. ...

If you look *really* hard, can you find me? Probably not … I wasn’t there. I looked at my calendar recently while trying to book an appointment, and I quickly realized that I have a lot of vCommunity stuff going on for the next little bit (assuming my plans don’t get altered). In the off chance you are reading this and will be attending one of the events below, please feel free to reach out, even if for no other reason than to say ‘Hi’. ...

Hands-down, one of the new features I was most excited about with Veeam’s Next Big Thing announcement was the Office 365 integration. I know I’m not alone in this one either, as doing a quick Google for terms like ‘Veeam Office 365’ shows that this has been a demand from customers for a while now. To be specific, Veeam is introducing a backup product that will protect your hosted Exchange Online email. ...

Veeam’s ‘Next Big Thing’ announcement did take some flack as far as how ‘corporate’ it was to start things off. To their credit, I did receive a survey within a couple of days asking me to review the event, and there were a lot of questions focusing on the content. I think that their overall vision may have been lost due to the fact that folks got bored with the ‘business stuff’ and just took the product announcements at face value. ...

VMWorld 2016 is in the books and now it’s time to decompress. This was my second VMWorld and my first one in Las Vegas, as well as my first time being in Las Vegas. Pros and Cons to SFO vs LAS, but at the end of the day I think I prefer Vegas. It is better suited for large conferences and rooms can be quite cheap, unlike SFO which only has Moscone Center and expensive hotels. Either way, VMWorld 2017 will be back at Mandalay Bay. The downside is that it is ridiculously hot. ...