John White takes a looks at Turbonomic, which is the new name for the company formerly known as VMTurbo. With the new name comes a refreshed UI. Gone is the old Flash interface, replaced with a modern and fast HTML5 interface. John finds it emblematic of the company as a whole, taking a solid foundation and making it even more mature. This includes a wide spectrum of available integration points for their application assurance platform.
DockerCon 2017 Keynote: Is the Enterprise listening?
After listening to the DockerCon Keynote, John White wrote up his thoughts on if what he saw indicated greater adoption for Docker in the enterprise. The best use case John saw was security, and the ability to quickly build in numerous compliance requirements, and to have them easily verified in operation. And the new ability to run Linux containers on any platform prevents a technological turf war before it can prevent mass adoption. John has one lingering and poignant question: where does VMware fit into Docker’s plans going forward?
Backups suck, rubrik does not
John White knows the pain of being a backup engineer. At an old job, the problems came down to two simple issues, software and hardware. You know, minor issues. Seeing what Rubrik presented at Tech Field Day in November, John likes what they offer as a solution for local backups. Built on the back of their Atlas file system with a clean graphical user interface, John thinks it offers a compelling package for any organization that can’t do backups with a service provider.
DriveScale is a new kid on the block with a very seasoned past
DriveScale clearly had the right idea for their Tech Field Day presentation. They led off listing the pedigree of the founding and senior staff, including a deep history with Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and green technology. It certainly made an impact on John White. From there the company laid out their ambitions: give enterprises the configuration flexibility to scale out horizontally in the datacenter. They do this with a 10GbE network adapter to pool a JBOD of storage to traditional pizza box servers with CPU and RAM. This allows storage to be a totally separate concern for scale. John also liked their strategy of initially targeting Hadoop as a primary use case. It’s not a huge market, but definitely one they could become well known within, given the strength of their solution.
Cloud Storage? In my DC? Yes please! Enter Igneous
John White reviews what he saw from Igneous Systems at Tech Field Day last month. Overall, while cloud storage in your datacenter isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, he likes the approach that Igneous is taking. He particularly calls out the RatioPerfect Architecture, which puts compute on each drive. This eliminates a lot of I/O bottlenecks. John found the price competitive, especially compared to AWS. Add in the latency benefits on on-site storage, and Igneous has a compelling solution.
Tech Field Day 12
John White writes about going from attending the OpenStack Summit in Austin earlier this year to attending Tech Field Day Extra in Vegas this August. Now he’s been invited to Tech Field Day next week, and he calls it a “dream come true.”
John White
Dad, technology lover, softball players, car guy, cloud guy, product strategy executive at Expedient.
