2016 was a big year for me from a personal and career growth standpoint; I obtained vExpert for the first time, I launched my own Veeam User Group and became apart of the Veeam Vanguard, and I also presented at a couple of VMUGs. That in of itself was far more than I thought I could achieve, but something that I thought would never happened did: I was invited to a Tech Field Day event. ...
Late last year, I wrote up some goals and intentions for 2018. I’ve often felt that actually writing things like that down holds you accountable, and at least for me, it tends to make the likelihood of it coming true much higher. One of those points revolved around career and making a change, whether it be a shift where I am currently or moving on to somewhere else. And that is where this post comes in: a change is in the winds. ...
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. ...
When it comes to IT, performance is not always solved by throwing more resources at the problem. A lot of us might be familiar with problems that arise when over provisioning vCPUs on a vSphere host. The host ends up spending more time trying to schedule and coordinate the vCPU tasks than it does to actually perform the tasks. Recently at Tech Field Day 15 we received a briefing from DataCore. As part of my preparation, I put together a primer on the company. As it turns out, it was useless - in a good way though. DataCore has recently launched a brand new product called MaxParallel, which is the first in a series of solutions. So what problem do they solved? Essentially they work around or minimize bottlenecks when it comes to processing workloads. The first product in the series is aimed squarely at SQL Server running on Windows. ...
The first Steelhead appliance ever sold. Riverbed is synonymous with WAN acceleration, and rightly so. The company has been doing this, and doing it well, for a number of years now. As a little bit of trivia, the first Steelhead server was sold in 2004 to Environment Canada. But with so much of the world going mobile-first, Riverbed intends to keep serving their customers. There are a number of wireless AP vendors out there, so what characteristics make Riverbed’s Xirrus attractive? ...
Disaster Recovery is something that can be critical to every business, but not every business has a good DR plan. Heck, I would be willing to bet that a lot of SMBs don’t even have a plan that is made up of much more than “fix the problem”. A large reason for this is designing a good, versatile DR environment is not cheap. Not every organization has the money to lay out for equipment, facilities, maintenance, etc. ...
Imagine a world where you don’t need to worry about the security of your data. Concerns such as malicious attackers, trojan horses, and insider threats are non-existent. Doesn’t that sound nice? Of course it does, but let’s face it, that isn’t the real world. Quite the opposite in fact. Most organizations are constantly under attack, and not necessarily just from the outside. The good news is that Skyport Systems is aiming to be your best friend in defense. ...
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. ...