The second keynote during VeeamON started off with a strong focus on “cloud”, so much so that we were greeted by Paul Mattes, Vice President - Global Cloud Group. Between both keynotes, we saw lots of numbers and stats thrown out, which I usually don’t take much value in. However, what is noteworthy is that the stats illustrated tremendous growth via revenue, customers growth, and the number of companies using cloud technologies. ...
A slew of announcements came out yesterday via partner day, and if you were following along on Twitter, you hopefully caught some of them. Today though, with the general session, we dove into those a bit more. I’ll recap those announcements in this post, with a bit of a high-level overview. Expect to see some more in-depth posts on some of these features in the near future. Before we jump into the announcement, I wanted to focus on Veeam’s messaging. Over the past little while, there has been a definite shift in the messaging: what was once Backup & Recovery, is now all about Availability. Availability means that’s organizations will keep running, regardless of disaster. As Peter McKay put it “Poor experience is just as bad as no experience”. Veeam is focusing on keeping business running, no longer are we in a position where companies want to react to disasters, rather business now needs to make disasters non-disruptive through proactive planning. ...
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. ...
Although not part of the initial announcement, NetApp stepped up to the challenge and will be joining us for Tech Field Day 14. I was quite happy to see them added to the list as they are a company that I have been following for a long time. Although I am no longer a customer of theirs, I do know that they have a lot of very smart people doing very cool things there. ...
Datrium is a company that I have heard of, but I am not overly familiar with. Even though they were founded in 2012, admittedly the first time I really paid attention to them was at VMWorld 2016. Now in all fairness, I was talking to the engineers there as I was picking up my vExpert Raspberry Pi. Then again recently, at the Toronto VMware UserCon, I struck a conversation with an SE to get a better idea of what Datrium does, but more specifically, what makes them different. ...
ClearSky Data was founded in 2014 with the goal of simplifying primary storage by turning it into an on-demand service. They set out to accomplish this by leveraging both on-premises and cloud technologies, and by tossing a bit of flash storage in there, they came up with a fairly nifty solution. LIVING ON THE EDGE Prior to being invited to Tech Field Day 14, the name ClearSky Data did not ring a bell, but some research has turned up an interesting product / service offering. What ClearSky Data offers is a tiered storage solution: an on-premises appliance (handily enough called the Edge), warm storage (located ’nearby’), and cold storage (AWS S3). The Edge appliance, which is the caching / performance tier, is located alongside your compute. It contains a pool of up 24TB raw of flash storage used for caching hot data and can scale up to four appliances. ...
SWOVUG Q2 2017 - Nimble Storage This past Thursday (April 20th, 2017) was the first SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) meeting of the year. Considering the weather, attendance was pretty good and with that, we had some lively conversations and presentations, which is the whole point of a user group. There were lots of new faces, and many familiar ones, which is always a great mix. ...
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. ...
I love talking about Veeam with folks, whether it is at a VMUG, the Veeam User Group I run, or even over a couple of drinks. Many of these talks lead to folks finding out about features that may not be all that well known (and for the record, it is not uncommon for me to find out something new). For example, did you know that Veeam Backup & Recovery has a vCenter plugin? Do you know what version it was released in? (the answer is V7). ...
Today was that magical day of the year known as the Toronto VMUG UserCon, and it t’was a good day. I was fortunate enough to make it down early for opening (which involved me leaving the house at about 05:30), which was great because I wanted to make sure to catch the keynote by Frank Denneman ( @FrankDenneman on Twitter). It was also nice to get there in time to pound back a couple of cups of coffee. ...