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. ...
Skyport Systems, founded in 2013, will be participating in its second Tech Field Day event at TFD 15. While reading up on Skyport Systems, I was immediately reminded of the “good old days” when having an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) was state of the art. After taking a look at the SkySecure system, I immediately felt like I was comparing a Model T to a Ford Mustang. SECURITY IN A BOX Let’s dive a bit deeper into what SkySecure is. Skyport bills the solution as “Cloud Managed, Secure, Hyperconverged”. Yes, there are a lot of buzzwords in there, but it is also a very fair description. To start, SkySecure is a hardware appliance that you rack in your DC. After that, you can power it up, provide internet access, and you’ll see the new device appear in your cloud management portal. For those folks who are looking for a no-touch solution, centralized management such as this is about as good as it gets. ...
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. ...
DataCore Software is presenting at their first Tech Field Day event, which I find somewhat surprising. I find this surprising as the company was founded in 1998. Their flagship product, SANsymphony was first released in 2011. When you consider this, as well as the fact their flagship product is a storage virtualization platform, you can likely see where I am coming from. The idea of software-based storage solutions clearly isn’t a new one. However, in the past few years, these types of solutions have gone from fringe use-cases to the mainstream. ...
Earlier this year I decided that I wanted to renew my VCP cert via a different track (as opposed to getting a VCAP). The reason being is that I was just looking to broaden my knowledge. I don’t do a lot of super technical work on the daily basis, so something like the VCAP might be “overkill” (for lack of a better term). It was a toss-up between the VCP-NV and VCP-DTM. In the end, DTM won out. ...
A big thank you to the 50+ attendees who made it out to the Q3 SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) yesterday. As always, it is great to see returning faces, as well as new folks. The one downside I find personally as the group grows is it is hard to chat with everyone. Not a bad problem to have though! We were also fortunate enough to have Paula Melvin from Veeam’s Ohio office come up for the event. In addition to that, the Guest of Honour was Vanny Vanguard - the “unofficial, official mascot of the Veeam Vanguard” (pictured above). ...
Things have definitely been busy as of late, between VMworld, studying, and yeah … work. September is not shaping up to be any different either.. Whenever I have a few “events” all close together, I like to toss together a quick post to let folks know where I will be. The point is so that if anyone reading this is there, that hopefully they’ll let me know and we can get together for a quick “hi"if nothing else. ...
I was invited to attend a session at Tech Field Day Extra recently as part of VMworld 2017. In my case, the session was being put on by Kingston, the storage and memory folks. I wasn’t sure what to expect, given that Kingston has been in the industry for years. 30 years, in fact! There are not too many tech companies that can hold that claim. Over that time, they have managed to remain a private company, and have grown to have distribution in 125 countries. Not to mention that they have expanded to many different market segments - just take a look at the image above. No small feat! ...
While at VMworld 2017, I received an invite to attend a HPE Blogger Briefing hosted by Calvin Zito. The idea was to layout some of the current, and upcoming, goings on that HPE has coming down the pipe. The areas that we covered were primarily storage-focused, which I’ll cover in more depth below. First, however, I wanted to give a quick shout out to the HPE team for not dancing around the question of how their relationship with VMware has changed since the Dell EMC acquisition. The short version is that Dell fully recognizes that competition is natural in the market; along with that, it is also clear that VMware has a neutrality that it needs to keep in regards to partners and solutions. My take away was that Dell EMC and HPE are competitors, whereas VMware and HPE are still partners. ...
VMworld 2017 will be my third consecutive VMworld. I am by no means a veteran or a pro when it comes to this conference, however, I wanted to provide some tips for first-timers. I feel like my first time attending VMworld in 2015 was of massive value, but that paled in comparison compared to my experience last year. I’m hoping that some of the tips below will help first-timers make the most of the conference. Some of these might be too late to plan for this year - sorry about that; VMworld kind of snuck up fast on me this time around. ...