Vdm30in30

There are several tasks that I find myself doing often enough (not necessarily daily), to warrant automation. But even more so, it is those tasks that I don’t necessarily do often where I really appreciate the automation. Part of it is because of the time savings, but even more so, if it is automated, there are a lot fewer steps that I need to remember. A good example of this is employee terminations. A simple, but typical workflow that I see is along the lines of: ...

Today I was fortunate enough to present at the Toronto VMUG. That’s two talks that I’ve given at the TO VMUG this year - not bad considering I only started ‘participating’ in the vCommunity earlier this year! As always, I see these opportunities not only as a way to give back to the community but also as a way to practice and develop my own skills. I am constantly trying to improve my public speaking - I have found that the key for me is to be able to turn my presentations into a conversation (admittedly it is a one-sided conversation). It still takes me a bit of time to ‘slip into’ that mode, but I’m definitely getting better at it. ...

Since I was first alerted to the fact that you didn’t need an iPod to listen to a podcast (that probably dates me), I have been consuming podcasts whenever I get a chance. I am usually able to squeeze in a couple of hours of listening a day. This comes from listening to them at 2x (this may require some ‘practice’), but also finding the opportunities, such as when driving, walking the dog, cleaning the house, barbecuing, etc.. ...

Something that I think is often over looked when it comes to backups is security. I’m not referring to physical security (e.g. locking the media up in a vault), but rather making sure that the backups aren’t being abused. There are plenty of horror stories kicking around about folks who have their backups wiped out. This might be due to a malicious admin, bad hardware, or (more and more common) something like Cryptolocker. ...

Igneous Systems, founded in 2013, is a Seattle-based company who will be making their first Tech Field Day appearance. According to Crunchbase, they are under the 50 employee mark, so still very much in startup mode, which can have its benefits alongside some challenges. I have not heard of them prior to the Tech Field Day 12 event, but I am definitely curious to see what they bring to the table. Doing some research, I found out that Igneous Systems currently holds 11 patents with the US Patents Office - so not a huge number, but it is an indication of some sort of innovation. One of those patents appears to be for their ‘distributed erasure-encoding protection (DEEPr)’ - I’m not sure what that scheme is, but hopefully we’ll find out. ...

Rubrik will be presenting at Tech Field Day 12 on Day 2 (November 16th, 14:00 PDT), and I’m quite looking forward to hearing more from them. I had a chance to chat with some engineers from Rubrik in the Solutions Exchange at VMWorld 2015, and a couple of times at local VMUGs since. At the time the product struck me as unique in that it seems to revolve around simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency. ...

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a ‘cozy’ conference call hosted by Tintri. I say cozy because excluding Tintri staff, there were less than 10 of us customers and users who were invited. The purpose was to give us a demo of some of Tintri’s recently announced products and features, and the small size definitely gave it a nice touch. There was also no shortage of talent on the presentation end to take us through these new additions. ...

Cohesity will be presenting at the upcoming Tech Field Day 12 event, and I opted to do some research on them ahead of time. Cohesity was founded in 2013 and has gone through two rounds of funding, totaling $70 million. Headquartered in Santa Clara, they currently have over 100 employees. So, what does Cohesity do? They focus on secondary storage, which could include domains such as test/dev, but particularly backup storage / repositories. Cohesity is an interesting mix in that they provide storage, features using said storage, and services, namely backups. In a nutshell, they bill themselves as ‘hyperconverged storage’. ...

For those of you who subscribe to my blog, be forewarned, you are about to be barraged with blog posts. After serious contemplation earlier this year, and last year, I have decided to take part in the VDM 30 in 30 challenge. I have no idea what my posts will look like, and I’ll try to keep them somewhat technical / IT related, but I may go off-topic at some point - you have been warned. ...