Vendors

With HPE Discover 2018 all wrapped up now, I’ve spent some time thinking over some of my key takeaways from the show. I was invited as a blogger, which came with the privilege of being in sessions with various leaders at HPE. So although we didn’t get too technical, we did have some great insights into where the company is headed. One big eye-opener was the amount of innovation going on at HPE Labs. We all hear about companies that spend money on R&D, but after hearing the labs mentioned many times in many different conversations, it is clear that this is a huge initiative. ...

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. ...

With my second Tech Field Day event in the bag, I have come to start to notice patterns throughout the event. I wouldn’t say that I made any judgements or assumptions because of them, but rather I found that identifying them helped me take in more this time around. One non-technical attribute that I started picking up right away was product identity. I’m not referring to brand identity, which would be akin to something like immediately recognizing logos, tag lines, etc. Rather, I’m referring more so to “what problem are you going to solve for me?”. ...

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. ...

Just a short (but exciting, for me anyways) post today. I’ve been having some pretty good Friday’s as of late - that being said, Monday couldn’t come fast enough for me this week. Why would I say something crazy? Let me paint picture: October 18th, 2016 - it was a simpler time: the Blue Jays were still a contender for the World Series, the third US Presidential debate still hadn’t taken place, and Anthony Spiteri was still a Veeam Vanguard (massive congrats to him!). Meanwhile, I happened to catch the latest Tech Field Day Extra, which was great because I didn’t even know that it was going on. The stars must have been aligned because Paessler (the makers of PRTG) were presenting. The timing couldn’t have been better as I am currently evaluating their solution (which I quite like so far). Something cool happened shortly after the event ended - I had a new Twitter follower: Stephen Foskett (cool!). ...

I’ve recently been working with quite a few vendors as we are in the process of doing a decent size (for us) infrastructure upgrade. We finally have it narrowed down to two solutions, but we can’t decide which one is the better fit. A large part of the indecision comes from the fact that we don’t know how these things work in real-world conditions vs. what the marketing material claims. ...