Can a framing metaphor be a product differentiator? In Turbonomic’s case, I think it can. They use a supply and demand model for their application assurance platform. This brings some interesting implications into the overall solution.
You don’t have to follow enterprise IT too closely before you become familiar with the idea of SD-WAN. It’s the chili of enterprise networking. Everyone seems to have their own recipe, but when you look in the pot, they all look similar. Some come canned from a company, making it easy to deploy into a bowl. Others provide a few secret spices to add to what you’re already cooking. And some organizations just roll their own from scratch. There’s great debate whether IWAN is chili, or simply a very complicated stew. In the SD-WAN chili cook-off, TELoIP might not have the biggest booth at the fair, but they’ve got a pretty unique recipe to test your palate.
Joe McKendrick at ZDNet posted an interview with Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB, and Monty Widenius, the creator of MySQL. The conversation began by talking about if open source solutions are a disruptive force in the enterprise. It’s a discussion that seems to have been hashed out many times over the last decade, and while it’s certainly interesting to get the perspective of people with an impressive pedigree, their answers aren’t all that groundbreaking. When they shift to the future of the cloud, it gets interesting.
StarWind offers what they are calling a hardware-based “cloud gateway”, in partnership with AcloudA. I’m honestly surprised a lot of other storage vendors aren’t trying something similar, but I imagine StarWind has done all the hard work on the backend to make this appear deceivingly simple. The basic hardware is a single board with a SATA/SAS interface. This would be connected to your server or storage appliance just like any other drive.
If you live in the world of containers and Docker, then DockerCon is probably a pretty big deal. It’s being held out in Austin, April 17-20. For those of you who’re not getting their fill of all things Docker during those days, Tech Field Day Extra is planned for the Monday before DockerCon, on April 17. This event is being done in partnership with Docker, and they will be presenting to TFD’s inquisitive panel of delegates along with other companies from their ecosystem. Full video of all presentations will also be available after the event. Tech Field Day was there last year, and they’re excited to return to DockerCon!
After hearing about it for too long, Intel finally released its first product using 3D XPoint memory, the Optane P4800X. For a cool $1,520, you can buy the 375GB PCIe based SSD.
I recently watched a brief talk given by Dave Hitz, a founder and Executive VP at NetApp. His particular portion didn’t get down into the weeds of what NetApp is bringing to the table with their Data Fabric or StorageGRID. There were presentations before he spoke that sated my need for technical details. Instead, Dave focused on giving a broader vision of what NetApp was trying to do. This is always a bit of a risky bet when addressing a more technically minded crowd. It’s easy to sound grandiose with your overall corporate vision, and too often these talks stray into marketing. Fortunately, Dave took the time to make it an engaging discussion.
The Internet of Things in a technological hypebeast, being both clearly defined and a marketing ploy at the same time. Cisco has clearly defined what they think IoT is all about: adding connectivity to devices. Using LoRaWAN, Cisco has a compelling technical solution to making connectivity possible on a mass scale.
At Cisco Live Europe last week, we finally saw some of the results of the partnership between Cisco and Apple. It was stressed that this wasn’t the end-result of the collaboration, simply the first deliverable result. It’s interesting enough on its own to make we wonder what else is on the roadmap.
When first learning about Platform9, it was easy to overlook what they are offering. They’re essentially offering OpenStack via a SaaS platform. It’s easy to overlook the implications of that.
