Audio Enlightenment: Podcasts you should be listening too.

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Gabriel

I listen to a lot of podcasts to keep up with current technical information. It helps a lot since in my line of work one must be abreast of a lot of the most current trends and technical marketecture. Here is a list of my must-listen-too podcasts. I’ll continue to add to the list as it grows. I know there are tons of podcasts out there so if you want yours listed, shoot me a note. I’ll be adding my own soon, but thats like double top secret probation material for now. Furthermore, that little listing at the top of the page that says “Podcasts” will push directly to all podcast related threads so you can always hit it to see the updated list that I will keep live in this post.

 RUN! Marc Farley,  Matthew Brender,   and Roger Strukhoff  are on their 4th episode of a new podcast where they discuss technology and how we use it and how it uses us.

Professional VMware’s Brownbag series – primarily focuses on VMware VCAP deep dives and lots of training for VCP/VCAP certfications. Damian Karlson, Josh Atwell, and Cody Bunch plus a host of others all contribute to a highly valuable resource for those of you deep into the VMware realm.

Technical Deep Dive – Nigel Poulton and Rick Vanover are now running the show there, and its great  deep dives into much of the enterprise storage space (formerly Infosmack)

Speaking In Tech – Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch, and Sara Vela have one of the more entertaining podcasts as the group has great chemistry, and great insights into the world of Enterprise tech, plus they get some really awesome guests

VMware Communities:  John Troyer and various VMware luminaries go over the who what when and where of VMware

vSoup:  provides the international flair for all things virtualization with your hosts  Chris Dearden ,  Christian Mohn , and Ed Czerwin 

Packet Pushers: Greg Ferro of Ethereal Mind and Ethan Banks cover all things networked and networking. Highly valuable for all levels of networking knowledge. There are also several sub-casts that revolve around networking and security to check out.

Infosec Daily:Rick Hayes and a big cast of others provide your daily source of Pwnage, Policy and Politics in the InfoSec community.

Veeam Community Podcast: Rick Vanover is busy, traveling, presenting, podcasting and being all things Veeamish. Its not all backup, there is a ton of great material related to Virtualization and enterprise tech.

And a guilty pleasure, The Adam Carolla Podcast. Adam will make you laugh daily, and its great to kill time when driving long distances or flying. I often times find myself laughing out loud and getting puzzled looks from strangers. Go get some Mangria.

Edited to add MOAR!

Check out Craig Waters  and the APAC Virtualization Podcast as well as the Blog.Rack.Org.AU podcast

GS-Gurusimran  has a most excellent podcast list as well, and you can find it at VBrowncoat.

The Geek Whisperers hosted by Amy Lewis, Mathew J Brender, and John Mark Troyer with a focus on Social Media and Marketing within the technical arena.

The Cloud Cast: all things cloudy hosted by Aaron Delp and Brian Gracely a highly valuable resource for learning about Cloud Computing and the world around it.

 AdaptingIT with Laruen Malhoit which has a larger focus on the women in IT

Thats the list for now. As I said, if you want yours listed shoot me a note and I’ll throw it up there and give it a listen.

Posted in Podcasts | 1 Comment

Baby 3PAR to the rescue

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Gabriel

As someone who was very keen to get my hands on 3PAR gear before HP bought them and who had seen his last storage array vendor gobbled up by Dell, I had mixed feelings about HP being the winner in the 3PAR bidding war.  At the time I had not had evaluated the EVA platform in 2006 but wasn’t overly impressed. I still thought of HP as printers, PC’s, and servers, not storage. The XP line didn’t interest me either and I had evaluated LeftHand when it was LeftHand and for me Equallogic won the iSCSI battle of the day.

I think I can chalk up that mindset as stemming from my lack of exposure to the HP side of things. The shops I had worked at had all been Dell, Compaq, and IBM, so the familiarity wasn’t there. But there was also in my view a legitimate case to be made that HP was a very large poorly run company that didn’t really know what their direction was. Perhaps the CEO merry –go-round had something to do with this.

Times Change

As we all know the times they are a changing, and yesterday was HP’s time. The primary announcement being the introduction of the 7000 series of 3PAR entry and mid level arrays. The 7200 and 7400 series arrays are shipping right now, and as you hear HP tell it they have orders lined up and ready to go. I had heard that the initial production ramp was significant, I’m willing to guess this is because there are thousands of EVA customers out there who are dedicated to HP but didn’t have the budget for a full fledged 3PAR system but were desperate to get off a system that was very long in the tooth.

 

 

 

 

First off we get two base models, a dual node 7200 and the quad node 7400. Entry level pricing of 25k for the 7200 and 40k for the 7400. Now what exactly you get for those prices is still not known to me, but that initial price point will be very, very, very, attractive to a good number of customers, and it won’t just be the enterprise. This is targeted directly at the Dell Compellent and EMC VNX/e based arrays which have been eating up a significant portion of the SMB space. Not to say this is an SMB array, it has true Tier 1 functionality within it and the potential to scale big enough for a wide swath of customers. I constantly have to remind myself that the days of a terabyte of data being “big data” are long long gone. Many small businesses today generate Terabytes of data annually and data growth is one of the key metrics on storage admins minds, right after performance.

Devil is in the details

Do keep in mind though that the devil will be in the details when it comes to pricing these systems out. 3PAR like, EMC, and others love to charge for the goodness, and these systems will be no exception. The base system will get you the entry level feature set, that will include thin-provisioning and some other basics, but 3PAR doesn’t shine fully unless you license the best features.  As usual HP’s website is nearly impossible to navigate, but here is the best product link I could find to go into specifics.  See only the base configuration is available, you have to pay for all the best stuff.

I can see the Application Suite  for VMware specifically being a must have for any 3PAR customer, as well as Data Optimization. The Reporting Suite is also one of those things I as a storage administrator would want to have especially given the reliance upon thin provisioning with 3PAR. I won’t go into the ins-n-outs of all these various packages, Nate over at TechOpsGuys already did that for me 🙂 And trust me, he knows the systems far better than I do so his input is highly valuable. Also if you’re an existing 3PAR or EVA customer, here is a good breakdown on the functionality being made available for migration.

The Next Era of Storage


To get a better idea of the direction that HP is taking, take a look at this video. Not only did it channel every 80’s Hair Metal Band with its soundtrack, it manages to put together the direction in which HP is heading.

Bottom Line

I will say is that HP has in my view caught up with the rest of the storage industry when it comes to having a modern mid-tier array platform to sell to its customers with the new 3PAR 7000 series. There is now ample competition with the VNX line from EMC and in my view competition is good. HP is making steps into the right direction with its desire to unify the look and feel as well as the management console across their storage platforms. This is something IBM did with the XIV GUI which was ported over to the StoreWise v7000 and DS8000 lines. EMC to an extent is trying to do the same but in a far less successful manner (there are just too many product lines to do this). A common look and feel and functionality set goes a long way towards adoption of disparate platforms from the same vendor. Many of the mysteries of storage administration have become abstracted from the end user, and the move towards the “IT Generalists” (a phrase I loathe) has started to permeate throughout the interfaces for many systems. While the C-Level guys might like the fact that you can drive storage from an iPAD, many of us will continue to use the command line. Its good to see that functionality has not yet been removed.

There is a lot more to this announcement than just the new 7000 series systems, HP has gone through its portfolio and revamped nearly everything, and as HP says, The Next Era of storage is here. The decoder ring goes like this:

  • Protection = StoreOnce and StoreEver
  • Connect = StoreFabric
  • Converged = StoreEasy

Keep those names in mind as you see more discussed in the coming months. I expect the markets to take this new product offering as a sign that HP is turning the corner with one of their most profitable product lines, which should be good for HP overall especially after the recent Autonomy news.

Oh and of course, as a lover of all things FUD, I would be remiss in linking to Dells response on the day of the launch.  I don’t think that will be the case going forward.

Posted in Storage | 9 Comments

Blog Changes

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Gabriel

So blogging has been very light as of late. The transition to the dark side has been interesting to say the least. As all 3 of you who read this site know I am still active on the twitters, but the actual content writing for the blog has been neglected to say the least.

VMworld was crazy this year, and honestly after reading 200 other “hey this is what happened at VMworld” blog posts, I just didnt feel the inspiration to actually write one myself. Honestly this is a shame because the birth of something awesome happened there this year. Keep an eye out for #vDB which will be unleashed upon the world soon enough.

That said, news posts forthcoming. Oh and I got tired of the old theme and changed it to this one, and I’m still tweaking it, and the blog title has changed to reflect my desire to see RAID replaced as a protection method. Do I have a replacement for it yet? Not really, but lets just allow it to reflect my continual astonishment that its the primary data protection scheme we have available today. Oh and then lets think about how long it takes to rebuild a 4 TB disk drive.

Posted in Whazzup | Leave a comment

And just in case you missed it

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Gabriel

 

 

 

 

The round of applause when the #vTax / #vRAM announcement was made at VMworld keynote solidifies what many of us thought about that. Good companies listen to their customers. VMware listened.

 

 

Posted in VMWare, VMworld | Leave a comment

#vTax is dead, long live #vTax

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Gabriel

Cat is out of the bag now, and the #vTax is dead. My bet is that VMware might be a tad bit pissed that this leaked ahead of schedule (like the CEO change) due to leaks and or rumors even though the article notes that this has not been confirmed (code for yes its been confirmed but no one wanted to lose their job for going on the record).  I had been hearing about this for a while now but as usual did not want to discuss it openly as it appeared to me as an embargoed topic of discussion. I’m guessing that this was going to be release at VMworld as part of either a keynote or some other conference discussion. That said, this news will make a lot of the SMB crowd very happy.

The original #vTax was highly unpopular, so much so that I had to re-evaluate how our clusters were going to be built and deployed. I think initially VMware had bad data behind the vRAM entitlements based on the very small consolidation ratio’s they cited as part of their reasoning (5:1) not to mention they may have simply misjudged how badly the idea would go over within the community. Yes they made a change to the memory per socket allotments by doubling them, but even then, that wasn’t enough for a lot of customers who had scaled up significantly, and with RAM being dirt cheap the whole concept of tying  licensing to memory just sucked. Not to mention, no one can out Oracle Oracle when it comes to licensing evil.

This also takes away a key leg of the Microsoft Hyper-V 3 marketing playbook. Dropping the convoluted memory based licensing and moving back to per socket will make the smaller customers more likely to not focus as intently on Hyper-V3 as they may have been. With its imminent release this October, the announcement now may take a little wind out of those sails. Still its hard to discuss a product that isn’t even shipping.

Now if only all VMware products were licensed per socket (*cough SRM/VCOPS/Etc *cough).

Edited to add:

One thing I did notice when I was railing against the #vTax when it first was announced was that after the dust had settled, and I did the calculations, I wasn’t actually going to have to initially change anything to my existing clusters as they were conceived and built, it was only as I was planning to move forward that the licensing changes would start to affect me negatively.  I think that if you started to actually analyze a good swath of the customer base, you would find that they were in the same boat and what essentially you had was a disconnect between the customer and the client and some poor execution and messaging. Ultimately though, the idea did rub a lot of people the wrong way and the chatter involved (much of it negative) gave what many view as a company that really has a lot of “love” thrown its way getting its first significant black mark against it.

Nate over at TechOpsGuys has several posts that elaborate on his thinking on the situation and I’ve followed those posts since their inception. Worth a read as well.

Posted in VMWare, vSphere 5 | 3 Comments

Booth Bacon and Dream Labs

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Gabriel

Proving once again that the power of Bacon is infinite, the good folks over at Veeam are going to be providing Booth Bacon at VMworld this year. Now that is way better than a t-shirt that I will use to wash my car with any day.

Not only that, they are providing a chance to win a pretty dope home lab setup for all your virtual testing needs.

  • 2 HP ProLiant Servers with memory upgrades
  • NETGEAR ReadyNAS storage system with SSD storage
  • HP V1410-16G Ethernet switch

That’s a pretty nice setup. I will most certainly be hoping to win that this year.  So do yourself a favor and swing by the Veeam booth for some Bacon, but do me a favor and don’t try to win the home lab because I really want it. 🙂

Posted in Veeam, VMworld | Leave a comment

VMworld 2012: Smithers unleash the hounds

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Gabriel

So VMworld 2012 is right around the corner. Unlike last year when I went and had no idea who/what/where/why/how this year I have a pretty good understanding of what I want to do, who I want to meetup with, yadda yadda.

First, #VMUnderground party, its like the Skull and Bones for the vCrowd. Tickets for sold out in 7 minutes, yes 700 tickets in 7 minutes if you didn’t get one, hit up any of the sponsor vendors and perhaps they will take pity upon you, or beg (thats how I got in last year).  VMunderground was where I met some of the coolest people in the social media/blogger community for VMware and it essentially launched my interest in blogging about Virtualization. It also is how I met other vExperts and got interested in giving back to the VMware community.

#v0dgeball: This year, all proceeds go to the Wounded Warrior Project  one of the best charities out there. I will be on the vExpert team with  Doug Baer, William Huber, Kyle Ruddy, Jay Weinshenker, Tim Antonowicz, Randy Stanley, James Bowling, Jim Millard, and Luke Gray yeah our team has 3 of the 91 VCDX’s on the planet. The combined VMware knowledge pool is pretty deep, so if we can’t beat the other teams, we can certainly out design them. Oh and since Amy Lewis from Cisco stole #TeamBacon, I had to go to extreme measures to exact revenge by going to my local medium to converse with Rip Torn, and he assured my victory, and a sandwich. You can’t mess with that kind of destiny.

Lots of cool sessions this year, I’m going to be focusing on VXLAN, Cloud Foundry, Networking, and of course Storage.

 

 

 

 

 

Still the nice thing about VMworld is being able to watch recorded sessions that you miss in person. Also new this year is booth duty. I’ll be pitching in at the Emulex booth #2023 so come on by and say hello. Also as a special treat, I’m  setting up some private tech discussions around 16G Fibre Channel and its use cases, if that’s something you are interested in please let me know ASAP. Several of my tweeps have shown interest so I’m trying to schedule something that works for everyone who wants to attend.

That’s it for now, hope to see you all there.

 

Posted in Emulex, Social Media, Storage & Virtualization, Tech Marketing, VMWare, VMworld | Leave a comment

Shameless Plug: vExpert Edition

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Gabriel

Blogging has been light as work and family has taken precedence. That said, I would be remiss in not plugging my vExpert Spotlight over at VMTN Blog. Other crazyness, I’ll be on the vExpet #v0dgeball team with several other vExperts. I scored tix to the #vmunderground party as well as the #veeam part (always a good one, I hear they will have bacon). Lots going on for VMworld, I’ll be hosting some private deep dive tech discussions into the future of 16G Fibre Channel at VMworld so hit me up on Twitter @Bacon_Is_King if you want a private invite to hear me flap my lips about bits and bytes and the future of ultra high performance at the block level.

Posted in Storage & Virtualization, Tech Marketing, vExpert, VMWare, VMworld | Leave a comment

Go to VMWorld for FREE!

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Gabriel

vDestination.com rounded up some truly great sponsors to put a package together to send a lucky guy/gal to VMworld2012 for free.

*VMworld 2012 Full Conference Pass
*Air fare to SFO up to $500 USD
*5 nights hotel accommodations (Sun-Thurs)

Boy howdy sounds pretty awesome. I would enter, but I’m already going, and this is a contest thats based on need. So how do you enter?

This trip contest is based on need and need alone. If you can’t afford to go to VMworld, if your company won’t send you then this is your chance. In order to enter to win you will need to make a comment on this blog post and include the following three points in your comment:
(1)Describe to me and my sponsors why you need to go to VMworld 2012, (2)What you are most looking forward to (it’s okay if it’s Bon Jovi, it may be what I’m most looking forward to!) and (3)How you plan on paying it forward.
This shouldn’t take more than one paragraph really, you won’t have a better chance if you write a novel, keep it short and concise. You will be chosen by a panel of vExperts based on your answers to the questions above.

Doesn’t sound too bad at all. Thanks to the sponsors for this, Veeam continues to provide a great product and they continue their longstanding tradition of embracing the VMware Community. Same for the good folks of Train Signal, if I havn’t plugged the utterly awesome all you can eat Train Signal subscription enough, I’ll do it one more time because its the best $999 you will ever spend. And even though I’ve had my differences with them *cough* I’ll throw a link to Symantec who is putting up hotel for the winner.

Posted in VMworld | Leave a comment

So your VMWorld Session got denied too.

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Gabriel

Well join the club. Honestly, I’m not entirely surprised, but I still held out hope that I could get the nod. It was my first submission, and won’t be my last. I have mad ideas for next year. #Dr.EvilLaugh

That said, @CXI is floating the idea of VMWorld “Unconference”. Scott Lowe has a blog post up about it as well.

Here are some of the ideas that were/are being tossed about:

  1. A physical “unconference” where people gather and we select people to talk. The big problem with this idea is money—who will pay for such a venue? Would we even be able to find such a venue at this stage in the game?
  2. A virtual “unconference” (perhaps associated with the vBrownbag series) that would allow people to share the sessions that were not accepted. This option offers more scalability with almost none of the cost (no venue to book and pay for, and a lot more people could potentially attend online).
  3. A series of 10-minute “flash talks” at the conference. Most people are suggesting that VMware utilize the Communities lounge for this. The benefit here is that we have the face-to-face interaction that is so valuable at events such as VMworld, and we don’t have a book a separate venue. The disadvantage? You only get 10 minutes to talk

I like the idea of longer sessions working through the #vBrownbag group. Their format lends itself well to a longer and deeper technical dive into a session. The whole crew do a great job and I think their current setup is well suited to this kind of concept. Not to mention, the ability to save sessions for later viewing on iTunes is very helpful.

The 10 minute flash talks are intriquing as well. I think that would work at VMWorld itself, but I wanted to throw out the idea of setting up a kind of photo booth, like the one you get pictures taken at with your peeps at the mall. Instead, this would allow you to go in and do your 10 minute flash session, and then VMWorld could upload those to the VMWorld site. I think that would probably garner a lot of interest.

And before I forget, I’ve got my ticket for this years VMWorld so this will be my second year running. I’m excited to get to meetup with a lot of my vFriends and attend some great sessions. So I’ll be looking to see a lot of you there.

 

Edited:  For those of you who wish to submit to the vBrownbag Unconference, go here

Posted in Podcasts, Social Media, VMWare, VMworld | 2 Comments