Re:Invent 2019 Part 1

Re:Invent 2019 Part 1

Chris Brandt
AWS, Cloud, Shows, AWS Re:Invent

Hi Everyone, this is Chris Brandt with another AWS Re:Invent update. Before I get started I just wanted to say, if you enjoy these videos, please like and subscribe, click the bell to get notifications when I post new content. I usually do that at the end, so I thought I would try it up front for a change.

AWS Re:Invent was held once again in Las Vegas Nevada. This show has grown so large, there are few cities that can house it. Re:Invent this year had capacity for 65,000 attendees, and by all accounts they were pretty close to maximum capacity. The show spanned 6 properties in Las Vegas, and rumors have it that they are going to be adding in Mandalay Bay next year in an attempt to hit 80,000 in attendance which is absolutely mind-blowing.

AWS Re:Invent 2019 Interviews - Instana and Infinidat

AWS Re:Invent 2019 Interviews - Instana and Infinidat

Chris Brandt
Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, AWS, Shows, AWS Re:Invent

Managing complex environments has always been tricky, and having good tools to provide you with actionable information is invaluable. When you start talking about cloud native applications and micro services, this challenge is magnified.

I have always felt that Application Performance Monitoring tools are very under deployed. They can be such an invaluable tool to IT, but the value proposition has often been hard to translate up the chain to CFOs. While there isn’t a direct line to greater profits, reducing the time to resolution or proactively addressing problems can have enormous value. In a micro services world, having some sort of APM in place is simply a requirement. 

AWS Re:Invent 2019 Interviews - Fivetran and Perimeter81

AWS Re:Invent 2019 Interviews - Fivetran and Perimeter81

Chris Brandt
AWS, Cloud, Shows, AWS Re:Invent

We all know the story that data is a strategic asset and this is causing companies to become IT organizations at their core. Companies are also increasingly leveraging SaaS applications. Companies now often have hundreds of SaaS vendors. With all of this comes data sprawl.

Since data is critical to organizations now, collecting and analyzing that data is key, but that can be a challenge when the data lives on many different platforms in many different forms, so bringing all of it together into a data warehouse can be hard.

NetApp Insight 2019 Part 2: Interview with Igneous and Cleondris

NetApp Insight 2019 Part 2: Interview with Igneous and Cleondris

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

A lot of the show floor was taken up by NetApp itself. The show floor was divided into different sections. Some for the Partner community, some focusing on their products and some focusing on specific use cases. And there were areas devoted to play and areas to relax.

Like other shows this year, there has been a focus on Social Media, which mostly involves tracking Twitter feeds talking about the company and show. I probably need to get plugged in with these folk a bit more.

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.

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