Quite a lot has happened for StorMagic since presenting at Virtualization Field Day 4. They’ve had plenty of good coverage from my fellow VFD4 delegates, and I highly recommend you go and read their perspectives: Jeff Wilson has a conversation with himself about StorMagic. Marco Broeken compares VMware VSAN to… Read More
I can’t run the numbers on Dell like I did previously, because Dell has, famously, gone private again. From a purely personal perspective, I think this was absolutely the right thing to do. Why? Because Wall Street sucks. The efficient market hypothesis is bollocks. People invest for all sort of… Read More
I first met Scale Computing at Storage Field Day 5, and I was impressed. Their gear is ideally suited for small- to mid-size companies, often without oodles of bandwidth to the Internet to use cloud based services, and with on-site systems that need to be controlled, like manufacturers. The HC3x… Read More
Solarwinds I last looked over the Solarwinds financials in the lead up to Tech Field Day 9, and was impressed at their ability to generate cash. They seemed to be a well run business, and were converting cash into acquisitions in order to grow. They were great hosts, and I… Read More
SimpliVity make a series of “hyper-convered” arrays. The devices are a mix of commodity CPU, RAM, and storage in a single OmniCube with a special bit of custom hardware: a PCIe card dubbed the OmniCube Accelerator. This custom hardware offloads the high-overhead calculations required for things like compression and de-duplication… Read More
What a difference 18 months makes. I last reviewed Commvault for Tech Field Day 9 in June 2013 in a series of posts. My post-TFD9 review focused on their new-at-the-time Sympana 10 release, but prior to the event, I did some old-fashioned financial analysis, since they’re a public company and… Read More
Platform9 bill themselves as “the simplest way for Enterprises to implement an OpenStack based, agile, self-service Private Cloud.” Ok. They’re offering a Software-as-a-Service OpenStack Controller. It looks like they have some fancy software that lives somewhere out there on the Internet, and talks to your infrastructure over HTTPS. You sign… Read More
StorMagic make a Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) storage product called SvSAN that provides an iSCSI virtual SAN appliance (VSA) as a Linux virtual machine. It works as a 2-node synchronously mirrored cluster of VMs that provide storage services. There are some excellent blogs on the details, such as this one… Read More
VMTurbo appear to make a piece of fancy monitoring software that uses “free-market principles” to make optimisation decisions. All the resources in your data centre are modelled as sources of supply and are demanded by other parts of the data centre. CPUs are basically raw ‘compute’ commodity, as is storage.… Read More
I get to go to another Tech Field Day event! Yay! <glee mode> Stephen, Tom, Claire and the crew have kindly invited me to attend Virtualization Field Day 4 in Austin, TX in January 2015. The invitations only just went out, so the details are still coming through about who… Read More
