Events I’ve attended
Cloudera is a commercial bundle of Apache Hadoop and a few other related open source projects to create what Cloudera call an Enterprise Data Hub. Hadoop itself is a big collection of technologies that can work together, but in the same way that the Internet is a big collection of… Read More
The Tech Field Day site for Data Field Day 1 has my picture on it, so I guess it’s official: I’m going to Data Field Day 1 in San Francisco, from 13 to 15 May 2015. As this is the first Data Field Day, I’m not sure what to expect.… Read More
The Melbourne VMUG UserCon 2015 was held last week, and was a great success. The vibe on the day was wonderful, and aside from the usual niggles that always crop up, attendees and sponsors alike told me they enjoyed the day. Numbers were slightly down on last year, but it… 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
