Cloud is a hot topic these days. Public cloud solutions are available in all shapes and sizes and from all sorts of vendors. However, public cloud isn’t for everyone. A lot of organizations have a heavy investment in their own enterprise cloud. This investment might be in custom applications, or possibly in policies and procedures one may require for compliance. With that in mind, today Tintri announced some new improvements aimed squarely at enterprise cloud. In this post, I am focusing mainly on the improvements made to their scale-out solution. ...

It is my pleasure to announce that the next SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) will be on Tuesday, September 12, 2017. This time around we’ll be meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn Toronto (Airport West). Given that summer is a popular time for vacation, we opted to skip anything sooner. Timing wise, we’ll also be very soon after VMworld where we might be able to hear some new details on Veeam Backup & Recovery V10. ...

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. ...

Over the past three months or so, I have found myself wandering into the same conversation over and over again: what makes a user group good? We all too often hear about what is wrong with a user group. It might be locations, sponsors, food, etc.. But I feel like we often overlook what is good, or great, about specific user groups. First off, we have to define what “good” is. Good for the leader can be very different than good to the attendees. Are there sponsors? If so, what does “good” look like to them? If we don’t know what “good” is, then chances are you’ll eventually end up with an empty room. ...

I’ve been using Veeam Backup for Office 365 since somewhere around November 2016. Being part of the Vanguard program, I was afforded an early glimpse at it. I quickly found that I was getting some great use from having it though. Although generally smooth, I do occasionally run into issues. Most recently, I ran into an interesting error message while exporting a mailbox: Unable to read beyond the end of the stream. Definitely not an intuitive message, however it does sound like some sort of read issue. Being the type of person that I am, I immediately took a look to see if I could fix things myself before evoking support. ...

With my second Tech Field Day event in the bag, I have come to start to notice patterns throughout the event. I wouldn’t say that I made any judgements or assumptions because of them, but rather I found that identifying them helped me take in more this time around. One non-technical attribute that I started picking up right away was product identity. I’m not referring to brand identity, which would be akin to something like immediately recognizing logos, tag lines, etc. Rather, I’m referring more so to “what problem are you going to solve for me?”. ...

I recently wrote about my experience with seeing Turbonomic as part of Tech Field Day 14. Despite the fact that it is almost a month later, I still find myself thinking about their product. Specifically, how it can result in real-dollar savings in a lot of environments. A lot of tools can give you ROI calculations, or other “soft” savings. Turbonomic, on the other hand, is able to give you a solid, real-world dollar figure, based on your own environment. ...

As many readers of my blog know, I run the SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG), so it was very welcomed when Rick Vanover reached out to me earlier this year regarding a new initiative. Although there are Veeam User Groups located all over the world, they can sometimes be hard to come by. Issues like scheduling or transportation might get in the way and stop you from attending. With that in mind, Veeam is putting together their first online Veeam User Group, and I am honoured to have a presenting spot. ...

Datrium was the last of the presenting companies at Tech Field Day 14. Although I did some research for my primer post, I still wanted to learn more about their tech. There’s no better way to do that than to toss some of their folks into a room full of IT professionals. Another point that I was hoping we would touch on is what the term “Open Converged” meant to them. In a nutshell, Datrium took the typical hyperconverged model and split it into two components: compute & storage. So how is this not just a traditional setup? The magic happens in their software. In theory, with Datrium’s DVX solution you still have a chunk of storage and a bunch of compute nodes. The difference comes with that “open converged” philosophy. The two pieces are tied together through software, however, either side can be scaled independently. The solution also isn’t tied to proprietary hardware, thus making the solution “open”. ...

One of the big draws towards any cloud-based storage is expandability: you aren’t responsible for maintaining drives, adding shelves, or even for the cooling and caring of the arrays. The biggest downside is typically speed. Moving data to the cloud usually means that what used to be sub-millisecond to access can now take significantly longer. ClearSky Data saw this challenge and wanted to provide a solution. We went for a bit of a deep into their storage offering at Tech Field Day 14 in order to get a better understanding of how their platform works. ...