NetApp Insight 2019: Part 1

NetApp Insight 2019: Part 1

Chris Brandt
Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Shows, Workplace, Storage

NetApp held their annual Insight conference in Las Vegas again this year. There is always a lot going on in Vegas, and there were several shows in town. There was a Crypto Currency conference happening in my hotel. I can only imagine what kind of shenanigans a bunch of risk taking crypto math geeks could get up to in this town.

There were not a lot of new product announcements this year, it seemed to be more focused on delivering of promises previously made. This is not a bad thing. This is an opportunity to refocus on the fundamentals of the business and realizing their multi-could/hybrid-cloud data fabric story.

Pure Storage's Accelerate 2019 Conference Part 2

Pure Storage's Accelerate 2019 Conference Part 2

Chris Brandt
Cloud, Pure Accelerate, Shows, Storage

Hi welcome back to Part 2 of Pure Accelerate conference coverage. 

By the Book
One of the things that came with the swag bag at the show was this book, “Flash Was Only The Beginning. The creators of Pure Storage who reimagined data storage and built the fastest growing enterprise technology company in history.

It walks through the history of Pure. Probably really for the extreme fanboy crowd, but I did enjoy the pictures. They highlight a lot of the folks who were there in the early days and have some pictures and a little blurb.

VMWorld 2019: A Quick Interview With Liqid

VMWorld 2019: A Quick Interview With Liqid

Chris Brandt
Cloud, Cool Tech, Emerging Tech, VMWare, Composable Infrastructure

So I have talked in the past about the rise of disaggregation and compassable infrastructure, and a lot of that was on display at VMWorld. I first ran into Liqid at the Open Compute Platform summit a few years back. They drew a lot of attention for showing how you could provision hardware assets as easily as you could provision VMs. Because it is all REST based, you could add physical hardware provisioning into your DevOps process. Basically, all of the components are joined together over a PCIe fabric to allow the dynamic provisioning of components.

VMWorld 2019: A quick conversation with Abhijit Ghosh, CEO and Founder of Confluera.

VMWorld 2019: A quick conversation with Abhijit Ghosh, CEO and Founder of Confluera.

Chris Brandt
Cloud, SaaS, Security, Shows, VMWare

Confluera is a newly launched security company that provides real-time attack interception and defense to detect and stop attackers navigating your infrastructure. Confluera is headed by Abhijit Ghosh and is backed by VCs like Lightspeed Venture Partners. Recently Bipul Sinha who is a legendary investor, a founder of Nutanix, CEO of Rubrik among other things came on board to Confluera as co-CEO. This company has attracted investment from the likes of John Thompson, chairman of Microsoft’s board. I was able to catch up with CEO and founder Abhijit Ghosh at VMWorld, and here is that interview.

VMWorld 2019: Quick Chat with Cohesity CEO and Founder Mohit Aron

VMWorld 2019: Quick Chat with Cohesity CEO and Founder Mohit Aron

Chris Brandt
Cloud, Data Protection, Shows, VMWare

Cohesity had a great showing at VMWorld, they had a mini golf course activation at the show and they were there to raise money for Special Olympics. They had Football Hall of Fame receiver, Jerry Rice overseeing the event which featured a couple of Special Olympians going head to head in a game of miniature golf.

Special Olympics has been a long time passion for Cohesity’s President and COO, Rob Salmon and he and CEO Mohit Aron were there to present a large (in size and amount) check to Special Olympics. 

VMWorld 2019: Hands On WIth Clumio

VMWorld 2019: Hands On WIth Clumio

Chris Brandt
Cloud, AWS, Data Protection, SaaS, Shows, VMWare

There has been a lot of interest in Clumio for some time. When I posted my last video on our dinner with Poojan Kumar, CEO and founder of Clumio, I couldn’t say a whole lot because they were still in stealth.

As I mentioned before, there was a lot of interest because they are back by Sutter Hills Ventures and Mike Speiser who typically invests a lot of time and effort in nurturing young companies in his portfolio. Then there was a lot of buzz in the community because they began hiring some of the best in the field. They hired a lot of people with experience in early stage companies that have been hugely successful.

VMWorld 2019-Avi Networks

VMWorld 2019-Avi Networks

Chris Brandt
Cloud, Cool Tech, Networking, SaaS, VMWare

VMWare acquired Avi Networks this year. This is a quick video interview overview of what the company is about. This next generation load balancer is cloud native and can work with on-prem, hybrid cloud, cloud and intercloud workloads, so if any of those things are on your agenda, you might want to give them a look.

VMWorld Part 2

VMWorld Part 2

Chris Brandt
Cloud, Cool Tech, Open Source, Shows, VMWare

“With Project Pacific, we are brining the largest infrastructure community the largest set of operators, the largest set of customers directly to the Kubernetes. We will be the leading enabler of Kubernetes.” -Pat Gelsinger

The big announcement of the show was the acquisition of Pivotal Software and Carbon Black.

I mentioned in my previous video that I thought the show was well attended. Part of this could be because they moved the show to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, which isn’t as large and sprawling as their Vegas shows had been. I also heard comments that there were a lot of VMWare employees in attendance to help boost the numbers. While that may be true, the booths were all pretty packed and there was a lot of good conversations happening. I don’t think the vendors who had booths were disappointed. 

VMWorld Part 1

VMWorld Part 1

Chris Brandt
Cloud, Data Protection, Cool Tech, Emerging Tech, SaaS, VMWare

My last stop in SanFrancisco was for VMWorld 2019, and let me tell you it was quite a show. Last year my perspective was that it was a show in decline, and that VMWare was trying to stay relevant in a world that is increasingly being dominated by Cloud.

Clearly VMWare’s CEO Pat Gelsinger was on top of it, because they made some impressive and bold moves over the last year or so.

Data Centers: EMP Shielding, What it is and Why it Matters

Data Centers: EMP Shielding, What it is and Why it Matters

Chris Brandt

Today I want to talk about a fascinating, frightening and complex topic, EMP. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the idea of an Electromagnetic Pulse, and have seen depictions of EMPs in popular culture and science fiction, however the reality of an EMP can be far scarier.

In my past life, I used to build high security facilities. One project I worked on was building an EMP shielded data center facility 225 feet below a mountain. Now, you might be thinking, if you are building something 225 feet below ground underneath a mountain of Limestone, wouldn’t that be enough to protect your equipment? The mountain would help shield you from the force of the blast, but it does almost nothing to protect you from EMP.

Emerging Tech and the Asian Markets

Emerging Tech and the Asian Markets

Chris Brandt
Cloud, Drones, Emerging Tech, Editorial, Market Analysis

To quote statistician, Hans Rosling from his 2018 New York Times Best Seller:

“If the UN forecasts for Population growth are correct, and if incomes in Asia and Africa keep growing as now, then the center of gravity of the world market will shift over the next 20 years from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Today, the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11 percent of the world population, make up 60 percent of the Level 4 consumer market. Already by 2027, if incomes keep growing worldwide as they are doing now, then that figure will have shrunk to 50 percent. By 2040, 60 percent of Level 4 consumers will live outside the West.”

Generation Cloud

Generation Cloud

Chris Brandt
AWS, Cloud, Editorial, Lifestyle

There is an old show I loved called Kung Fu, starring David Carradine. In it he plays a Shaolin monk named Caine. He flees China a wanted man to wander America’ old west, and along the way puts the hurt on bad guys picking on the weak.

In one of the flashbacks to his childhood, he sees a somewhat disheveled man collecting shards of broken pottery. He turns to his blind master and asks, “Is he a confused one?” To which his master replies, “Not to understand a man’s purpose does not make HIM confused.”

Great new stuff from 12 for 12

Great new stuff from 12 for 12

Chris Brandt
Cool Tech, Entertainment, Shows, SXSW

My good friends over at 12 for 12 have finally posted their SXSW episode. If you look closely, you might notice someone familiar being interviewed. Even though they labeled me a Solutions Architect, I still love them. I wish I could architect a solution, but solutions to all the worlds problems. Seems like SXSW would be the place to start. They have some good interviews with Brad Spies who is the Director of Special Projects for SXSW and one of the main folks making it happen.

Can’t wait for next year!

On-Prem The New Legacy?

On-Prem The New Legacy?

Chris Brandt

Gartner has come out with a new report on the database market, and their conclusion is that on-prem is the new legacy.

Now this is a rather bold statement, but the data does seem to support that. Does this mean that all on-prem databases are going away? Probably not in my lifetime, but the question is what is the direction for the industry, and that is trending strongly towards cloud.

So, let’s look at the numbers.

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