Globally Federated & Hyperconverged

So I have hinted at some changes that were to be taking place in my near term future. For the last year I have been working as a Sales Engineer with Emulex, covering the South Western Territory and focusing primarily on IO Storage & Networking product technologies for Data Centers large and small. I’ve written about my move into the Sales Engineering side of Information Technology, and how I perceive the functions of the role and its place in the IT Sales cycle. Emulex was a great first starting off point for me primarily because as a company that wasn’t a lead-in technology, it allowed me to view from an somewhat impartial standpoint how the larger OEM companies operate. The joke was that we were Switzerland. So while one day I would be working alongside HP, the next it could be IBM, or Dell, or EMC.

For now, my time with Emulex has come to a close. The reasons were many, but ultimately I believe that I wanted to focus more on the technologies that I am most passionate about, Virtualization & Storage. So, I have accepted a position with SimpliVity as the Solutions Architect for the West. I will be working much in the same capacity that I was with Emulex, except the technological focus will be geared towards the Virtualization and Storage spaces, and the product is a leading technology, instead of a secondary one.

Globally Federated & Hyperconverged

I have always had a keen interest in disruptive technologies that challenged the status quo and the traditional way of thinking for many who work in the IT field. I felt the same way about the Equallogic platform when I first started using it in 2006/2007 and XIV in 2009.The same goes for VMware with ESX/ESXi. For me the SimpliVity solution is a similar disruptive force.

So, what is SimpliVity you may ask? The term that gets thrown about most commonly is “Data Center in a Box”, but I believe that this technology goes well and above that line of thinking. Think of it as a globally federated  converged infrastructure building block. Take a quick glance at this ESG  write-up last year for the analysts take.

At the heart of the SimpliVity solution is the Omnicube, a 2U Data Center appliance with a primary focus of providing a highly available federated storage and compute platform with a key goal of being simple to deploy, configure, and manage. The additional benefits lies in the fact that data is compressed and de-duplicated. And while many other platforms make those same claims, how SimpliVity approaches those two technological facets is unique.

One nice thing about the new position is that my focus will be directly on Virtualization and Storage technologies, and this is going to allow me to blog more regularly on those technologies. I never really got the chance to go that route with my last position, so this is yet another thing I am thankful for in making the transition. I’m sure that I will have much more to expound upon in the coming months as I start to ramp up with the team. For now I am very happy and very excited to be joining a very talented team full of highly accomplished professionals and working with technologies that truly excite me.