Storage

In my previous post, I covered off a lot of the hands-on activity at Camp Rubrik: Insiders Edition. That was only one item on the agenda. Rubrik packed a lot into what was really only a few hours of the day. To their credit, we still managed to keep things mostly on time, despite seemingly going over for almost every agenda item. The entire day was initially meant to be free of NDAs, but that changed. We were fortunate to hear from Bipul Sinha, Co-Founder & CEO, and he gave us a good glimpse of behind the curtain. Unfortunately for anyone not there, his session turned NDA. What I will say is that I was impressed with the openness and willingness to share information. That holds true for throughout the day. ...

With 2017 behind us, I found myself doing some reflecting on the tech industry. In particular I found myself looking back at some of the trends I saw at Tech Field Day 14 & 15, which were about 6 months apart. As it turns out, it was interesting to see some small signs of change in May, and then see additional and more prevalent changes in September. CONTAINERS & THE DEVOPS MOVEMENT There is no doubt that the use of containers continued to grow in 2017. We saw more and more announcements around products, as well as what seemed to be a larger adoption in use. Some recent buzz in the industry was created when Red Hat announced its intent to acquire CoreOS. Although we saw this announcement in 2018, it builds on the direction from 2017. ...

Last month I was invited to attend my first HPE Tech Day held in Anaheim, California. Actually, it was held at the Grand Californian Disneyland Hotel … pretty cool for someone like me who had never been to Disneyland. Although the location was definitely head and shoulders above most events that I have gone to, I didn’t let that get in the way of when it came to assessing what I saw. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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”. ...