In Tech We Trust Podcast

015: Our first annual Christmas Quiz

You'll never guess: we have all our hosts on the show this week. And it's a special episode. Because you are probably bored by now listening to Auntie Margaret's drunk babbling, we made sure you have something to escape with and get a good laugh at us.

Nigel has locked himself in a container for a couple of days and came up with a ridiculous amount of Quiz questions for the other 4 hosts. And it wouldn't be a real quiz if we did not have teams; 

1. First team, with Marc and Hans, is team TINGELING!
2. Second team, with Rick and Gabriel, is team HOHOHO!

014: The Stuff of Stuff

Never mind the Internet of Things..... we've got The Stuff of Stuff!

Anyway...... this weeks episode sees Rick, Gabriel and Nigel come together to discuss everything important that's happening in the world of enterprise infrastructure.

First up, we get Gabriel and Ricks views on the NetApp + EVO: RAIL thing. It seems that file services is where its at for the Frankenstorage combo. Wonder what'll happen if VSAN comes to market with native file services though?

Rick highlights a controversial article written by Greg Ferro, in which Greg calls into question the reliability of VSAN. The crux of the matter seems to be the use of L2 multicast traffic for node-to-node comms. Full article here.

The discussion then moves on to Western Digital's mopping up of the IP left lying on the floor at floundering Skyera. It seems Skyera have several interesting and low-level solid state related patents - motherboard design for huge flash density etc...

Mesosphere and the whole notion of a Data Center OS is next on the agenda.  We LOVE the idea of a Data Center OS, and we applaud the guys driving this next gen OS architecture forward. But we wonder if it's still a ways off for regular enterprises.

2015 Predictions

And as it's approaching the end of the year, we throw out some predictions for 2015

Rick thinks 2015 will be the year of hyperconvergence. He thinks the winners and losers in this market will be decided quicker than in the flash storage market.  He also thinks it'll be a big year for VMware VSAN.

Gabriel thinks we'll see at least one, may be two, IPOs in the hyperconverged space.  He also thinks we should keep an eye on Stratoscale and others in the software-only hyperconverged space.

Marc - via email - thinks 2015 will be the year of beer.  And he's certainly positioning himself well to take advantage if that does happen. While everyone else is looking at microservices, Marc is looking at microbreweries! Marc also thinks Microsoft will exit the phone business in 2015.

Nigel thinks 2015 will be the year of containers and mass public cloud adoption. On the container front he sees Docker and CoreOS keeping each other on their toes. And on the cloud front he sees public cloud adoption kicking on another level in the enterprise, leaving OpenStack a long way behind. Though he's keeping his fingers crossed it'll be a good year for OpenStack too.

Feature

And the show closes out with a parody interview with Captain Dogger, as he fails to containerize Santa Claus but sets off on a new mission to containerize Santa's Elves.

013: Is NetApp Making EVO: RAIL Look Like a Pig

Episode 13..... unlucky for some!

This weeks sees Hans and Nigel reviewing the previous week in enterprise tech. Gabriel joins briefly, but bombs out due to comms issues - guess he's using legacy old Nortel kit!

Nigel starts the show by talking about the 3PAR news from the recent HP Discover event. As always, plenty of stuff happening with the 3PAR platform, but Nigel seems concerned the codebase will bloat and the platform will end us as a lumbering jack of all trades, but master of none.

We then pivot to talk a bit more about Kaminario. First of all, we have apology to make following comments in last weeks show where we claimed certain comments from Kaminario were from a press release, when in actuality the comments were from interviews with the press. Nigel then waxes lyrical about what a cool product the Kaminario K2 is.  Citing experience from a previous POC and working closely with Kaminario engineering. But then the guys bemoan Kaminarios lack of top-notch marketing - could this be yet another great technology that fails due to marketing that's not equal to engineering!?!?!

Next on the agenda is the recent IDC numbers for all-flash revenues and shipped capacity. As things stand, the numbers look strange.... either IBM is giving the stuff away for dirt cheap, or EMC are over-charging. Or both!

Then we chime in on the recent NetApp + EVO: RAIL announcement. 

It's kinda old news now, but we didn't get to discuss it much on last weeks episode, so we cover it this week.  The skinny....... we've not got anything good to say about it. Shame! We did mention something about Howard Marks, writing a good article on the prices of EVO:RAIL.

Then we cover the recent news that Cisco appear to be doing what all incumbents do when they start bleeding customers and revenue to smaller rivals..... they sue them! And while suing your smaller competition is usually compliment and validation that they actually are serious competition... could this potentially side-track Arista for a while.

Next up is DataGravity - sinking an additional $50M in c-round funding. Is $92M a lot for a small startup with relatively small customer base and a very new product? And how does somebody like DataGravity compare to somebody like Primary Data?

And speaking of Primary Data....... Are those guys on to something huge? Or is it all hype and no product? We can't seem to decide due to the awesome complexity of their message (and potential lack of detail)..... Who knows?  Hans mentioned an article by legendary blogger Enrico Signoreti that might be worth a read.

And Nigel wraps the show up by purring over a film he watched recently - holding it up as the best film he's watched all year!

And don't forget to join us in Linked-In and Facebook where the techie conversation never stops!

012: growing the VMware kernel and threatening influencers

In this week’s show, Hans and Marc are finally joined again by our prodigal son Rick Vanover (aka The Rickatron) whom we seem to have lost since episode 5! In the mean time we are missing Nigel who is trying to find a captain and crew for his containerships at HP Discover in Barcelona and Gabriel is doing a dog and pony show which is probably not a metaphor in his case.

There was a lot of related and unrelated news this week in the datacenter technology realm. First of all we got back to the rants on public clouds going titsup. But we also had good news of Google being certified by the PCI (Payment Card Industry).

In the VMware ecosystem the most important news fact was EMC shoving ScaleIO in a future release of the ESXi kernel (link, French). The federation proves to be strong again. note: there also was NetApp announcing some EVO:RAIL stuff but we’ll cover that next week.

From the Open Source community we noticed that CoreOS, a main contributor to Docker has announced their own container technology called Rocket. And SUSE announced a distributed storage layer in their distribution build on CEPH.

Good news in the startup market where Kaminario adds a $53mln round but did make some booboos in their messaging. note: the remarks we talk about are not specific in the press release but are quotes in the article on The Register and Gigagom.

Lastly we have some good and very bad news in the influencer community. One of our friends, Enrico Signoretti, was threatened by the CEO of NimbusData which is NOT OK! But the better news was another friend in the community, Amy Lewis is shifting roles to become the director of influencer marketing at SolidFire. We all agreed that SolidFire did a major hire there! God speed ;-)

011: Archiving Fiber Channel connections to a Titsup Cloud

This week Hans is joined by Marc and Gabriel. We almost had the Rickatron back but he got pulled away at the very last moment. In the mean time Nigel is in the Middle-East, negotiating his billion dollar investments in containerships.

After an entertaining introduction about brewing Hoppy Beers (not that horrible IPA stuff!) we had a general conversation on Archiving. Gartner released their Enterprise Information Archiving magic quadrant where according to Marc no member should be in the leaders-quadrant.

Further discussed in this show:

• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage going titsup ... again (link).
• Primary Data comes out of stealth. And the biggest news is The Woz joining the team.
• NimbleStorage is pulling Fiber Channel to WallStreet.
• Mellanox adding 100,000 GB Infiniband to connect active/active arrays across the ocean.

If you would like to know what the real uptimes of public clouds are, we found this website where you can pull and compare all that data.

010: Is Docker About to Rock the Virtualization World

In this weeks rockin episode the guys start out talking about Docker. Nigel has clearly been drinking deeply from the Docker kool-aid, but Gabriel, Hans and Marc keep him real -  

• When Will Docker take over VMware and rule the virtualization world?
• How can Microsoft deliver on the promise of Docker support in the next version of Windows Server?
• Will dSAN (Docker SAN) take over from VMware vSAN?  <-- Joke!

NOTE: You can hear Randy Bias state that he sees more Docker in production than OpenStack at around 23:55 on episode 1 of the The OpenStack Podcast. See it's true!

Also on the show, the crew discuss - 

• Did Joe Tucci have a "foot in mouth" moment when mentioning internal competition within the EMC Federation?
• Can Joe EVER retire with Elliott Management holding substantial VMware stock?
• Is VMware vSAN fit for production?
• In light of recent vSAN issues, what is the value of an HCL?
• Has interest in the private cloud peaked and now on the way down in the face of all the innovation and maturity of public cloud offerings?
• Will there always be some data and some systems that we'll never trust to the public cloud?

The guys also discuss Robin Harris's recent post about EMC trying to insert itself as a public cloud intermediary.

Marc uncovers an absolute gem in another Secret Windows Phone App segment!

009: Startups vs Big Companies

In this weeks episode, Gabriel, Hans, and Nigel round-up what's been doing on in the enterprise tech world in the past week.

Topics of discussion include....

• David Flynn (formerly of Fusion-io) steps aside as CEO of Primary Data to become CTO. Is this the sign of a true techie? And how much influence on a startup does a CTO have?
• Who are Stratoscale, and in an increasingly competitive hyperconverged market, what's gonna be their differentiator?
• Nexenta strikes a win for software defined data centers with their new business with leading global IT service provider Wipro
• Did you know, at least according to a CloudPhysics study (and we can believe it) ....

26% of space vSphere environments is dead

20% of vSphere admins wish we were back in a physical world (we made that one up ;-)

16% of VMs are unused

25% of Windows VMs will be end of support next year

22% of vSphere 5.5 servers still vulnerable to SSL heartbleed

43% of companies risk downtime every week due to potential out of space conditions on disk

Closely related to these, check out HDL's recent blog post titled vSphere Storage Array Feedback Requested

• And what's the deal with EMC vs Pure. How can EMC be winning 95% of the time against Pure, but Pure be winning the vast majority of the time against EMC...?
• Nigel wraps the show up with Geeks Review of Christopher Nolan's recent blockbuster Interstellar 

And don't forget to continue the discussion with us on our new LinkedIn Group. And say Hi to us on Facebook.

008: Here be Open Clouds

This week we had to trust on one single host. Hans took the honours of being the last one standing but brought us two great guests – Melissa Palmer & Caroline McCrory -  to discuss Openstack and more specifically the current status knowing that it was OpenStack Summit in Paris this week.

OPENSTACK Summit:

• Good to see the momentum though no(t enough) European companies
• If I’m not into OpenStack today, am I late to the party?
• Consolidation in the Openstack space?
• I don’t want 800 versions of NOVA for compute.
• How will a customer find the tree in the forest?
• Which Enterprises can afford to do major upgrades every 6 months?
• Should customers be the first to enter new features from the business rather than the technology?
• How can I contribute? I’m just an author/blogger.

Merger and Acquisitions:

1) Samsung is acquiring ProximalData. Most SSD manufacturers now own a server side performance enhancement technology. Does it makes sense for a flash manufacturer to wanting to sell the caching software?

2) Riverbed is forking out their SteelStore product line (fka WhiteWater) to NetApp who officially want to bring it to market by Q3-2015.

 

Links:

Caroline McCrory – twitter - GigaOm

Melissa Palmer – twitter – blog – Virtual Design Master Challenge - 

Current Status Podcast

007: Not So Pure Storage

This week Hans and Nigel are on the road in Europe visiting the Powering The Cloud conference in Frankfurt Germany. While there, they stumbled across a couple of shady characters that some listeners might already know...

• Martin Glassborow
• Chris M Evans

...and decided to get together and record a show. Now then...... think of this weeks show as In Tech We Trust Unplugged - the audio isn't the best. But the content is great.

Topics discussed on this weeks show (in order)

• Wigs (don't ask, just check out the link to the pictures)
• Data Direct Networks (DDN)
• GPFS vs  Ceph vs OneFS...
• In a software world.... should EMC decouple OneFS from Isilon
• VMAX vs VNX
• Trouble ahead for Dothill?
• Marketing vs Engineering - bad products that kicked but with good products
• Pure Storage and rumours of them branching out into the Converged space
• VCE Vblocks without Cisco UCS

And instead of a Secret Windows Phone App review, we round off the show with a Geeks Film Review.....

006: Cisco Divorces EMC

What an episode we've got this week! We're not sure its possible to cram more enterprise tech into an hour of podcasting!?

In this weeks episode Marc, Hans, and Nigel talk about all of the following - 

• IBM goes absolutely fab-u-less by selling off its Power fabrication business. Can we even call it a sale when IBM has to grease the buyers palm to the tune of $1.5BN!
• The EMC Federation goes from strength to strength, while Cisco quietly walks out of the VCE Family home
• What's the value of Cisco UCS vs white-box servers
• VCE Vblock vs Nutanix SimpliVity Maxta....
• Do the big players need to think about buying SimpliVity or Nutanix
• Does EMC have a play in the hyperconverged market - could they take EVO:RAIL and package it up?
• Is lock-in ever worth it?
• Microsoft partners with Dell to launch Azure private-cloud-in-a-box (Cloud Platform System)
• What's going on with StorSimple since the MS acquisition
• Are HP starving LeftHand (StoreVirtual)
• Hans can't believe that XtremoIO is doing $500M

Plus another hilarious Secret Windows Phone App!