We’re giving away a 2017 Microsoft Surface Pro on our Facebook page! Click for details.

Confused by what exactly “storage class memory” means now that Intel Optane is finally on the market? You might want to listen this episode of the CTO Advisor. Keith Townsend is talking to Intel Director of Data Center NVM Solutions Architecture, James Myer. 

Coming out of VMworld this year, we’re seeing some interesting announcements from Dell EMC. The company has refreshed and expanded a number of solutions in the end-to-end VMware portfolio, touching on everything from HCI to storage arrays.

In this piece, Gabriel Chapman makes an interesting case for the demise of the storage admin. He compares the state of storage to the smartphone pre-iPhone. The market is poised for someone make storage radically simpler, from providing a service that has to be laboriously constructed, to something that’s more of a platform to be built on with accessible APIs.

While I’ve never used their service, CrashPlan was always on my radar as a competent home backup solution. I really liked the peer-to-peer element on top of their centralized cloud backup, the more options the better, right? Sadly, the company is leaving the consumer market. Dan Frith weighted his options, and opted to return his backups to Backblaze.

In this iteration of Gestalt Networking News:
– Monitoring Network Flows with Plixer
– The best of both worlds with Array Networks’ Flexible NFV
– A deep dive into Aruba’s new 8400 series switch
Plus Network Collective digs into networking history with Fred Baker!

Apple announced a partnership today with Accenture. If you’re not familiar, Accenture is a prominent consulting firm, which according to their website “partner(s) with more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500” (so at least 376). They’re the outsourcing solution for CTOs that want to modernize a creaky IT backend, but just want someone else to deal with the headaches. 

Whenever you’re attending a giant show like VMworld for the first time, it’s a good idea to get some insider tips from a more experienced attendee. With that in mind Matt Crape put together his tips for first timers at VMworld. 

Cloud lock-in, sounds bad right? Well on this episode, the roundtable takes a detailed look at the actual impact of lock-in with public and private cloud providers. They look at how this impacts business agility, innovation, and overall company strategy.

I wrote about Forward Networks when they came out of stealth late last year. They’re on the forefront of the intent-based networking wave, using formal verification of a network in real time to model every possible location a packet can go on the network. 

At launch, they had built search, verification, and predication tools. They just announced a new offering called Essentials to basically offer their search functionality in a freemium model.