Enterprise tech. From storage to cloud, and everything in between!
Episodes
Thursday Mar 05, 2015
Thursday Mar 05, 2015
Intros
Hans, Marc, and Nigel host this weeks show.
We start the show off paying respects to Leonard Nimoy, an absolute legend and friend to science and technology. We share some stories about Spock and Star Trek and how they influenced some of our lives.
Hans is struggling with an ailing MacBook, Marc is brewing more beer, and Nigel is getting carried away with a new breed of Linux servers like RancherOS from the guys at Rancher Labs.
We make a call out to the vSphere-land.com Top vBlog 2015 survey. Apparently we're listed among the podcasts and would love your vote. Hell.... it's hard work making these podcasts and we sweat blood and tears for you guys the listeners ;-)
We're also running a mini-survey to find out what you might want to hear more of on the show etc.....
Following on from last week....
We pick up the "making money from open source" discussion again, referencing a recent Linux Insider article where Marten Mikos states that "open source" itself is not a business model. And we pick up on the statement that while at MySQL, they had ~15 million users but only ~15 thousand paying customers!
Tech News
In tech news of the week, we try and decipher what SanDisk is up to with its InfiniFlash and InteliFlash products. Are they getting into the the AFA business, or just building backend components such as JBODs?
Business News
HP continue to throw cash at their networking portfolio with their intent to acquire Aruba Networks for ~$3BN. How will this affect OEMs like Dell, Brocade and Juniper. And why oh why can't HP save themselves a few billion dollars in M&A spend by investing in their staff and existing products..... why the need for R&D through M&A?
Western Digital/HGST acquiring Belgian object storage startup Amplidata
Sketch
In this weeks end-of-show sketch Captain Dogger recounts a mission to put containers in the cloud. You'll need to have your OpenStack head on to keep up with all the OpenStack tech references (we count 10 references to OpenStack technology, plus some Chef and Puppet action too).
Thursday Feb 26, 2015
Thursday Feb 26, 2015
Last week
- Jef Wilson takes on our rant on Microsoft HCI in a blogpost & LinkedIN discussion
- who's making money on OpenStack? Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 launched.
Product & Tech News
- HDS breaking 2million IOPS barrier. Chris Evans sums it up here.
- Whitebox switches from HP? Greg Ferro (@packetpushers) shares his thoughts.
- EMC [doesn't] goofs with ViPR - article 1 > article 2
- Linux 4.0 - it's just a number :-)
- Nutanix to release a free community version later this year (now in alpha)
- SolidFire announcements: software on commodity
Business News
- Emulex to be acquired by Avago Tech (Singapore) $600mln
- HP to fire a total of 58.000 ?
- Eucalyptus CEO Mickos leaving HP after barely 5mth
- Brian Pawlowski to leave FlashRay team (NetApp)
- Bask Iyer, CIO Juniper to become CIO VMware
- Don Jaworski new CEO of SwiftStack
Footnote: 420 code ;-)
Thursday Feb 19, 2015
Thursday Feb 19, 2015
disclaimer: this week is so full of non-news that we decided to name the title of the show and its artwork to the Secret Windows Phone App at the very end of it.
Introduction
- As Marc wasn’t with us last week he shares his thoughts on how the departure of David Scott at HP could jeopardize their whole storage vision.
- Openstack Vancouver session votings are open till February 23rd, off course Nigel is only interested in container sessions.
Last week's show
- VSPEX:BLUE - the reason it's partner focussed is that EMC has nothing to do with it. VSPEX means it's a blueprint architecture for VARs
- Pivotal open sourcing Greenplum & Hadoop activities
- HCI: & what about Microsoft?
News Topics
- IBM $1bln storage play - is this the new HP?
- FalconStor comes with a ‘new’ platform called FreeStore. Please don’t go read the press release.
- Violin Memory adding once more a couple of AFA boxes.
Stories
- Google is going to crash? YAWN
- Gartner & 95% of Private Clouds are failing; more YAWN! This is how a Gartner makes themselves irrelevant.
- Cisco is going to crush Facebook & VMware and having fun doing it.
- Wallmart is running an over 100k cores Openstack environment. This ain’t no science project anymore!
- Isilon CTO jumps to Micron & Micron gets an alliance deal with Seagate.
M&A & Investments
- Nimboxx acquires Virtual Bridges, weird for a Co half a year out of stealth with barely $12mln funding.
- StorVisor comes out of stealth, gets $34mln round and changes name to 'springpath'.
And this week we have yet another Secret Windows Phone App!
[UPDATE] one of our listeners Jeff Wilson has a couple of things to say about our Microsoft HCI rants on his blog. He also took the conversation to our LinkedIN discussion group. Feel free to jump in on the conversation.
Thursday Feb 12, 2015
Thursday Feb 12, 2015
In our introductions we have 2 practical things to share:
- Our friends at GigaOM ask our listeners if they want to take a couple of minutes to fill in their Experience with Cloud and Containers survey.
- Nigel and Hans will both spend a couple of days in London for TECH.UNPLUGGED on April 22nd, following with VMUG London on the 23rd. Needless to say there will be a podcast recording at some point ;-)
Updates on vMageddon 6.0
- After their ‘biggest’ launch ever, there were probably hundreds of blogposts and tweets givens the new speeds and feeds of vSphere 6. Apparently there have been issues with false information or better said; things VMware changed between the last beta their bloggers got and current RC version. So they had to set the record straight on false information
- So VSAN 6.0 is part of vSphere 6.0. So VSAN now has support for all-flash. So they charge you 60% uplift for that !?! There is no way we can hide our disagreement on this rip-off.
- Some people in our industry have second thoughts on the value of VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) as it requires both NSX for a full deployment and at least a 50 socket deployment to get support. Blogpost from Maish Saidel-Keesing is worth reading as well
Things we didn't cover and other HCI news
- EMC released VSPEX:Blue last week, which is their version of an EVO-RAIL. The crew specifically likes that EMC has put enough effort in making sure there is added value on top of what is the same box for al other vendors. Well played EMC!
- And on a related note,HP releases their EVO-RAIL called ConvergedSystem 200-HC EVO:RAIL and does exactly the opposite; no added value at all. If you don’t really really have to buy from HP, why would you? They at least are not going to give you a reason for it. Maybe because they still want to push the Lefthand VSA version?
Gabriel manages to get Hans sidetracked on a feisty rant about the true definitions of HyperConvergence. In the end this was absolutely a great discussion!
Containers & Snapshots
- Although we disagree that the new snapshot technology VMware would be introducing is technically to be compared to containers, it would probably be closing the same business gap where containers are currently used for. Definitely worth keeping an eye on this.
- In other container news, Docker released version 1.5 which adds read-only support for containers and full IPv6 support. I know there we a couple of people waiting for that to happen someday soon.
Sidenote: Hans mentions this book by Edward Horley if you want to dip your tows in the basics of IPv6.
Big Data news
- So far it’s still all rumours but some things would be changing at Pivotal with their Big Data / Hadoop distro.
- Hitachi Data Systems to acquire Pentaho for over half a billion US dollar. Is HDS planning on a heist of IBM’s target market here?
Sad Trombones in storage land
- David Scott, the former CEO of 3PAR is leaving HP to go on his retirement. The whole crew likes to show their gratitude to the accomplishments of this great man in storageland. We sure hope to see more of him as an advisor to newbies in the industry.
- The saddest trombone is for the passing of Lee Johns (@storageologist). Lee was a beloved man in our community and will definitely be missed. To show our respect we will end the show with a minute of silence instead of our weekly shenanigans. Our thoughts are with Ann and the rest of the family.
Good night Lee!
Thursday Feb 05, 2015
Thursday Feb 05, 2015
Introductions
Just for this once we will let Nigel have his very own Docker commercial in this introduction. Only because this week it is in fact a news item. Nigel is an author on Pluralsight and just released this week a docker deep dive course.
[11:43] VMware partners with Google
The Public Cloud joins the Enterprise Datacenter. Is VMware trying to become the broker no matter what cloud you are sitting in? And what about Google, do they even care about the datacenter or are they just in it for driverless cars and curing world hunger?
[23:50] VMware PEX week announcements
Announcing the announcement to announce something that cannot be announced yet ... What’s new in vSphere6?
- Long Distance, Cross-vCenter & Cross vSwitch VMotion
- Content Library; easy to find location to put your templates or ISO files
- Virtual Volumes (VVOLS) is this the next VAAI where all storage players will have to adopt or lose ground? Or has everyone already lost excitement because it took over 2 years to bring to market?
- vSphere 6 adds support for NFS4.1. We do challenge the value of it in the market if it doesn’t even support VAAI or the new Virtual Volumes, leaving the lack of pNFS even aside for a minute. What it will bring is a lot less chatter due to the fact that NFS4 is stateful and NFS3 was stateless.
- Fault Tolerance (FT) now supports multi-vCPU which makes it finally viable for snapshots and backups as well!
- VSAN6.0 … or was it 2.0? Although we don’t like the skipping 5 product versions, we do like a lot of what’s in there. Support for All-Flash, Rack-aware failure domains, … Something Nigel liked was they changed the underlying disk format and apparently they are able to do that in a rolling upgrade (unlike XtremIO). And of course, who doesn’t like blinking lights?
- VMware Integrated Openstack (VIO) is the final part of the announcement we cover. Although it is ‘free’ for the Enterprise Plus customers to play around with, Gabriel doesn’t believe it’s of any use.
[1:01:46] Other ...
Over the top of the hour there are a couple of topics we didn’t manage to cover but were in our agenda:
- EMC announced VSPEX:BLUE, their interpretation of an EVO:RAIL solution
- EMC also announced a new VCE product with built-in NSX
- VMware picks up Immidio to complete their EUC portfolio
- Nigel and Hans will be speaking, with Enrico Signoretti, Chris Evans, Martin Glasborrow and Stephen Foskett at the first episode of a new concept event called TECH.UNPLUGGED in London on April 22nd. The event is free so join us there!
Thursday Jan 29, 2015
Thursday Jan 29, 2015
This week we have no less than 8 people on the show as we promised to record from Cisco Live in Milan. Lot's of (different) content and a great group of guests.
left to right: Tom Hollingsworth, J. Metz, Matt Oswalt, Hans De Leenheer, Blake Krone, Andrea Mauro, Stephen Foskett, Samuel Clements.
Non-stories gone wild
- IBM was supposedly going to lay off 110.000 staff members (26%). In a response IBM said that for this one time they would brake their policy of not responding to rumours but it was too ridiculous to let go. (wth J.Metz)
- The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) finally got an official statement out on the whole Marriott Hotel chain that got ‘caught with their hands in the cookie jar’ by blocking MiFi on their premises. (wth Blake Krone).
Cisco Live & TechFieldDay
Everyone one the show, except for J. Metz was at Cisco Live as a TechFieldDay delegate and the sessions will come online soon on the event’s portal. One of the sessions we like most was the Meraki people. According to us, a startup within the behemoth. (wth Matt Oswalt, Samuel Clements & Tom Hollingsworth).
Sidenote 1: mind that ‘murican Samuel is using the word premises properly! :-)
Sidenote 2: Samuel and Blake run their own WiFi podcast TheNSAshow
Adoption of VMware new market products (VSAN & NSX)
Apparently, at least according to the Q4 earnings call which should be the truth and nothing but the truth, VMware is not doing too shabby with both VSAN (1000 customers) and the SDN play NSX (400 customers). (wth Andrea Mauro & Matt ).
Merger, Acquisitions and Investment rounds
- We get some more insights into Pluribus Networks of which we reported a $50 million D-round in last-weeks episode (wth Stephen Foskett, Tom and Matt).
- Stephen helps us understand what happened with NexGen of which we reported in episode 18 a spin-off out of SanDisk (after being acquired through FusionIO). A good conversation we have here is about is there actually such a thing as a “hybrid array market” or an “all flash array market”?
- Which was a perfect segway into Kaminario raising another $15mln round after there $53mln E-round of last december (episode 12). (wth J. Metz)
- We all chime in for our final topic, being Symantec spinnout out the complete Data Protection portfolio back into Veritas Technologies. Is it not too late to try and get the Symantec backup products back on track? And is it even about technology or more about splitting up the branding towards selling the pieces?
AND - we do have a gift from the home-team as there is a new Secret Windows Phone App to close the show.
Thursday Jan 22, 2015
Thursday Jan 22, 2015
In the dull days of January all vendors are preparing their campaigns for the rest of the year. Whether it be just marketing campaigns with jumping trucks or real product announcements.
Marc, Hans, Nigel and Gabriel share their experiences and insights in how product announcements are planned and which times a year would never work. They also talk about the bigger trade shows like VMworld or Cisco Live.
(note: Hans mentioned Cisco Live doing not only US, EMEA and APAC but also South-America. That apparently is Mexico so close but no cigar)
A second big topic was a new IDC research paper (link: The Register) which you can buy for $15,000 (note: moehahaha) in the HyperConverged market space. As we all have come across quite a few analyst papers we take our shot at what their value is, to us at least.
In merger, acquisition and investment land there are a couple of interesting rounds this week:
- VMturbo brings in a $50mln D-round for global growth.
- Ravello gets a push through with a $28mln C-round
- SDN player Pluribus Networks also brings a $50mln D-round to the bank
I you want to know more about Pluribus, Hans did mention their participation last year at Networking Field Day (NFD7 & NFD8). Well worth your time if you are interested. By the way, VMturbo also joined at a couple of editions at Virtualization Field Days.
Thursday Jan 15, 2015
Thursday Jan 15, 2015
In our introduction this week, Marc comments on comments that could exclude himself from commenting on what he’s actually working on at Quaddra Software
We dig a little further on the Object Storage Market research paper rom IDC that we touched on last week. Where TheRegister found that EMC’s presence was shrinking, this apparently is caused by the fact that IDC only allows one product per research category and EMC chose to switch the focus from Atmos to ECS. Follow up article 1 and article 2.
Speaking of EMC, apparently Eliott Management, the aggressive investment company that wants to split up the Federation, has now kissed and made up with Joe Tucci (for a while).
The mainframe is back! IBM has build a new beast (Z13) that either looks as a black Tardis or a portal to the dark ages. We get a heavy discussion with loads of different (opposite) opinions here. Is this going to be the ultimate HyperConverged Mainframe? Definitely something to follow!
Following up in mergers & acquisitions we see two new rounds of fundings coming into the NoSQL companies Basho & MongoDB. Why are these types of databases so popular and are they eating at Oracle’s market share?
This week at Citrix Summit the company announced the acquisition of distributed storage player Sanbolic. It’s fair to say that no-one really saw that coming and that all hosts this week had second thoughts if Citrix even understands storage enough to pull this off.
A final news item in this area is NexGen storage being spun-off from SanDisk, that in itself got it through the FusionIO acquisition. Although these are not people that are new to the market (founded Lefhand before) or a new product (same product since 2008), Marc and Gabriel don’t see a fortunate future in this overly saturated market.
Special feature this week is another Captain Dogger episode
Thursday Jan 08, 2015
Thursday Jan 08, 2015
This is our first general news show after the holidays. Speaking of which, in the first couple of minutes, Hans questions the other hosts of this week - Rick, Marc & Gabriel - about their activities during the holidays and their favourite gifts.
Following up on last week's 5 trends review show we want to point out that we may have misstated that EVO:RAIL is not shipping. Both Hans and Rick have some factual comments to make. We do go on talking about the challenges for EVO:RAIL following a discussion Matthew Brender (@mjbrender) started in our LinkedIN discussion group.
Gabriel also wrote his own thoughts on our HyperConvergence conversation last week. A good point that was brought up by Stu Miniman (@stu) is why did Gabriel not include the ServerSAN software plays like Maxta. We elaborate on that as a second topic.
As a final topic of HyperConvergence we learned this week that VMware will officially support ScaleIO as a kernel-based storage plugin through the PVSP Program. Are some vendors more equal than others?
This week an article on the Register about the market evolutions in Object Storage leads us into some basic conversation topics of why Object Storage is the odd-one-out for infrastructure people. This topic is probably worth a couple of deep-dives later this year.
Finally we close the show with everyones favourite Consumer Tech toys and at the very end we have another Captain Dogger story by Nigel Poulton.
Thursday Jan 01, 2015
Thursday Jan 01, 2015
Hey Now! Following a crazy full house show for our Christmas Quiz we bring you yet again 5 golden hosts for this 2014 recap edition. We look back at the bigger trends of last year in a full hour show.
TREND 1: decoupling software from hardware
IBM spins off MicroElectronics to GlobalFoundries and pays $1,5 billion for that move. Shortly after they spin off their server business to Lenovo for $2,3billion. Is there a bigger trend going on here? How can Cisco, HP or DELL remain relevant in a world where SuperMicro, Lenovo, Quanta, ... eat up all the margin that is left?
TREND 2: the adoption of FLASH
In 2014 we can safely say that all storage vendors are offering an all-flash solution, whether it is through acquisition, an evolution of a startup product or bolted on a 20yr old filesystem. The result is that we finally are able to decouple the cost of performance from the cost of capacity.
TREND 3: 2014 was the year of the Hyperconverged solution
We see VMware EVO:RAIL here as a big topic of discussion. It's a validation of a market shift but we do have some second thoughts on the specifics of the VMware solution; it's not shipping yet, it's built on a gen1 storage product and from what we have heard, it's going to be quite pricy. Can Nutanix, SimpliVity and ScaleComputing monetize their head-start? Do new players even stand a chance?
TREND 4: will the real new Microsoft please stand up
Microsoft is changing. Aidan Finn (@Joe_Elway), a well respected Microsoft blogger, gave us some stuff to think about. According to him a couple of changes that emerged this year were Cloud First, Windows not first and the comeback of feedback.
TREND 5: Open Source takes over the Datacenter
We have talked about OpenStack and containers a couple of times on this podcast and we can only expect this to come back even more next year! These are early stage technologies but with a lot of potential to change the way we think about the enterprise datacenter. (OpenStack analytics link: Stackalytics.com)
