In this CTO Dose, Keith Townsend takes a look at if Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a viable alternative to AWS. He got to learn about the platform at both Ravello Blogger Day and Cloud Field Day earlier this month. He breaks down how Oracle compares as an IaaS offering to the other public cloud providers.
Moving SAP and other legacy apps to the cloud
Keith Townsend outlines two solutions he saw that enable organizations to abstract the time-consuming challenges involved with provisioning ephemeral workloads. At Cloud Field Day this month, he saw Delphix present on how their solution allows organizations to automate the process of masking sensitive data through their abstraction solution. At Tech Field Day last year, Keith also saw Actifio present on a similar solution, but aimed at abstracting legacy workloads.
Rubrik – A metadata company in backup company’s clothing
In this piece, Keith Townsend outlines his experience that data protection is often a way for a vendor to get a foothold within a company’s IT strategy. After seeing Rubrik at Cloud Field Day last week, Keith sees them as getting ready to move beyond being a data protection company, with their Polaris platform signaling a move to becoming a metadata company.
Cloud Field Day Interview: Nick Janetakis
In this CTO Dose, Keith Townsend interviews first time delegate Nick Janetakis about his experience at Cloud Field Day. The company that really stood out to Nick was Droplet Computing, which came out of stealth at the event. As a developer and educator, he found their methodology of running containerized apps in a browser intriguing.
Serverless computing highlights new security challenges in hybrid IT
Hybrid IT and cloud native services, like AWS Lamba, require a different approach than traditional IT security. A simple lift and shift approach to security will quickly reveal deficiencies of policy once compute and storage moves beyond your four walls. In this piece, Keith Townsend was able to talk to Forcepoint Security as part of Tech Field Day last month. Keith thinks the company has made the acquisitions needed to eventually provide the firewall and cloud access security broker granularity needed for hybrid IT.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview – Data Protection
Keith Townsend prepared an overview of the data protection companies that will be presenting at Cloud Field Day. He looks at Druva, Rubrik, and Veritas, which all have the same overall goals for data protection, but go about it in very different ways.
NetApp Data Fabric Cloud Field Day 3 Preview
The CTO Advisor himself, Keith Townsend, will be heading out to Cloud Field Day next month. Presenting at the event will be NetApp. In this CTO Dose, Keith discusses what to expect from them at the event, focusing on the company’s proclaimed transition to a data company.
Mitigating the risk of Cloud Lift & Shift
Keith Townsend isn’t a fan of straight cloud lift and shifts. But if you must, he outlines how VMware Cloud on AWS and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help mitigate some of the issues. Keith will get to see more from Oracle’s approach on this at Cloud Field Day next month.
An update on Oracle’s Cloud
Keith Townsend recently attended Oracle Ravello Blogger Day, and got to hear from the engineers and product manager building their public cloud platform. He gives an overview of Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure, and the possibilities of their HVX hypervisor. Oracle will be presenting at Cloud Field Day next month, and Keith can’t wait to ask about their support for traditional layer-2 datacenter networking.
HCI/Not HCI – It doesn’t matter
For Keith Townsend, it doesn’t matter much if a solution is called HCI or CI. “At the end of the day, the label doesn’t matter. You can call a hotdog a sausage or a sandwich (Just as long as you don’t put ketchup on it).” In general, HCI’s promised simplifiation of IT operations works great for smaller teams, but breaks at scale. This becomes another management stack that adds to, not reduces, complexity. NetApp has an interesting approach by allowing IT to use existing SolidFire management tools on their HCI platform, thereby not introducing yet another management stack.
Storage is boring
After hearing from DellEMC on their XtremeIO and VMAX solutions at Tech Field Day, Keith discusses why storage is boring. Of course, for the enterprise, boring is not a bad thing.
Understandig CASB for SaaS Security
Tech Field Day delegates Keith Townsend and Sonia Cuff discuss he concept of cloud access security broker, or CASB. This is done in light of a presentation by Forcepoint at the event.
Solarwinds Orion Integration
At a recent Tech Field Day event, Keith Townsend was able to talk to Solarwinds Orion Product Manager Michael Yang about some of the integration points between their extensive portfolio of products.
Converged Infrastructure died a long time ago, right?
Should converged infrastructure have died a long time ago? Keith Townsend discusses on this CTO Advisor video, in light of the release of the Dell EMC VxBlock 1000. He argues that while CI might not be the hot new trend in IT, lots of customers still want and need it, especially in cases where applications aren’t certified to run on HCI. Keith is excited to hear more from Dell EMC on this at Tech Field Day next week.
Are network vendors ignoring serverless security?
The move of servers to the cloud has integrated more complexity to network security, as the assumptions of static rules based networking break down. Keith Townsend saw a presentation how network companies are addressing this from Juniper Networks. But this caused him to question if not enough attention is being paid to the emerging serverless market like AWS Lambda.
CTO Advisor 068: Commvault HyperScale
Recorded on the show floor at Commvault GO 2017, the CTO Advisor himself, Keith Townsend, spoke with Scott Lowe, Justin Warren, and Ray Lucchesi about the show. In this episode, they focus specifically on Commvault’s transition from a backup company to data management. Their recently released HyperScale solution is a venture into the secondary storage market.
Why Docker is finally embracing Kubernetes
At DockerCon Europe this year, Docker made a big splash by announcing support for the Kubernetes container orchestrator with Docker Enterprise Edition. Keith Townsend wrote up why the company is finally embracing its Swarm rival, and why it’s big news for the container company.
CTO Advisor 067: Should you worry about GDPR?
On this CTO Advisor podcast episode, Keith Townsend sat down with Justin Warren and CommVault’s Nigel Tazor to discuss GDPR. This new regulation can incur a penalty of up to 4% of organizational revenue for each violation. They discuss why compliance is more important than ever.
Should you worry about GDPR?
Keith Townsend sat down with Justin Warren and Commvault’s Nigel Tazor to discuss GDPR. This new regulation can incur a penalty of up to 4% of organizational revenue for each violation. They discuss why compliance is more important than ever.
Don’t call it back up
Keith Townsend posted his discussion with Justin Warren from Commvault GO 2017. They discuss how Commvault has successfully moved from being a backup company, and embraced data management.
