Rich Stroffolino

About the Author:

Rich has been a tech enthusiast since he first used the speech simulator on a Magnavox Odyssey². Current areas of interest include ZFS, the false hopes of memristors, and the oral history of Transmeta.

Articles by Rich Stroffolino

A Conversation with Congruity360 COO Mark Shirman

November 9, 2017

At Commvault GO 2017, Stephen Foskett sat down with Congruity360 COO Mark Shirman. They discuss how the company’s engineering talent allows them differentiate in their emerging services around infrastructure business. This builds on their legacy storage reseller business, but has expanded to providing services across the data center. This is all provided by their brand new 200,000 sq ft data center located in Fall River, MA. 

Looking at Commvault GO 2017

October 26, 2017

Commvault has a long legacy for an enterprise IT company, but their GO conference still has that new car smell. Commvault GO 2017 will be their second annual conference, this year moving up from Orlando to Washington, DC. The company has an interesting slate of sessions and speakers lined up for this year.

MoSMB, Less Problems

October 25, 2017

You might not have heard of Ryussi, but their MoSMB solution is certainly worth your attention. In a world where SAMBA the benefits of legacy and being free, Ryussi makes the case that there’s a market need for a proprietary SMB protocol specifically designed for enterprise NAS vendor needs.

SNIA Hops on DePop with Hyperscalers

October 24, 2017

SNIA and hyperscalers are working together on storage standards to better optimize for their particular needs. SNIA’s Mark Carlson recently gave a talk describing how the DePop standard was developed to get around the problem of tail latency seen in these massive scale-out data centers.

OpenFaaS: Serverless for Containers Made Easy

October 18, 2017

I like my functions like I like my Chinese takeout: in containers. OpenFaaS provides an open-source framework to make this an easy process. Creator Alex Ellis recently showed how to run it on a Raspberry Pi cluster with Kubernetes, as well as showed off some interesting demos at DockerCon EU 17.

Cisco Launches Intersight: Cloud Managed UCS and HyperFlex

September 21, 2017

Sometimes a company’s code name for projects in development can give you some insight into how they view it. The one that always stick in my mind is “Revolution”, Nintendo’s code name for what ultimately became the Wii. It showed how different the console was than anything in the company’s past, and reflected the impact Nintendo expected of it.

In the same way, Cisco’s Project Starship has now been launched as Intersight. The name loses some geek factor, but is probably much better for IP. Much like the codename implies, this is a project that is clearly linked to how Cisco sees the future of their business. Cisco has been working on this for a while, and it’s a natural extension of their Unified Computing Systems that they’ve had for almost a decade.

Excelero’s NVMesh Magic

June 14, 2017

Excelero recently came out of stealth, and wants to provide the software layer to allow businesses to build a high performance scale out storage infrastructure. It’s a software only play, running on commodity hardware. That may not sound like the new hotness, but I’m here to tell you, Excelero is exciting!

Datera Elastic Data Fabric

June 7, 2017

The public cloud certainly has profoundly changed enterprise IT. It provides limitless scale, impressive utilization, and changed capital investments. However, it often fails to provide enterprise level performance on a consistent level, and can lack the fine tune controls organizations have come to expect. Datera is building a cloud data management foundation for on-site clouds. Their goal is to make this autonomous and transparent layer to the organization to offer the agility of the public cloud, but with enterprise class performance and control.

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