Useful Vendor Swag

Inspired by a question from @jfrappier, here is a bunch of vendor swag I’ve received over the years that has actually proved useful. Hopefully this will help marketing at the various vendors to invest in useful swag and not pointless landfill. The biggest issue with swag is its marginal utility:… Read More

Tech Companies With An OPiuM Problem, Part 3

If you haven’t read them already, check out Part 1 and Part 2 in this series. We discussed the rule of thumb for investor returns of 10-20x money raised in the first post in this series. Let’s have a look at some numbers that we actually know to see if… Read More

Video from Melbourne VMUG Meeting 14 May 2014

I recorded the presentations at the Melbourne VMUG meeting last week, and have finally uploaded them all to YouTube. You can view the entire playlist here, or watch pieces embedded in the post below. The slides for the talks are available here. Introduction and Update Craig Waters introduced the meeting… Read More

SFD5 Prep Work: Scale Computing

Scale sell a converged platform: compute and storage in pizza boxes that glom together to make a cluster of 3 to 8 nodes, like Voltron. It’s based on KVM, with proprietary bits added into the mix. Scale make a big deal about “no licensing” or, as they call it, a… Read More

SFD5 Prep-work: PernixData

PernixData sell storage cache software, essentially. Their Flash Virtualization Platform, or FVP, is a software shim that sits between the Hypervisor (VMware only, according to their datasheet [PDF]) and the SAN (block only, so FC, FCoE or iSCSI attached, no NFS or SMB). It uses server-side flash to hold the… Read More