It’s a question that’s boggled the great minds of our age. What’s the absolute cheapest modern PC you can make? I decided to find out. Welcome to the grotesque world of bargain basement PC building.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our new podcast! The podcast was created to reflect the same diversity of coverage from Gestalt IT. We’re going to be gathering knowledgable speakers from across the enterprise to gather around the table (spoiler: not always round), and discuss a hot topic. We’ll give you engaging twenty minute discussions at a time, and all we ask is for your attention.

To reflect the fact that each episode revolves around a single idea, we’ve decided to name the podcast The On-Premise IT Roundtable! We decided to take the grammatical failing of our industry and embrace it. By actually using the term in a reasonably appropriate context, we hope to bring some sanity to those who otherwise find the term grating.

In the light of the vSphere 6.5 release, moderator Stephen Foskett asks the roundtable about the impact of VMware integrated containers. This runs on Photon OS , a lightweight Linux distribution that runs a single container. What is the impact of this integration, in terms of security, training, and administration? And more importantly, does the industry need vSphere butting into the container space?

Windows 10 S has a chance to combat the surge of Chromebooks. Education is a market Microsoft understands, and it’s clear this release is almost exclusively catering to its needs. In a lot of ways the OS is a result of the lessons they learned with Windows RT. They kept with a x86 platform for technical compatibility, and gave users a way to use legacy apps, albeit with a paid upgrade. But if deployed too widely, where users chafe at the constraints inherent in the OS, it may become know as Windows 10 Minus.

With RecoverX 2.0 from Datos IO, big data may finally feel at home in the cloud.

On tap for today’s roundtable, the panel discusses the state of locations and beacons. Moderator Stephen Foskett asks the panel to consider how location services factor into the greater enterprise mobility landscape. This goes from using beacons to give turn-by-turn navigation indoors to using location to cue print jobs. Often the backend of these application has been available for a while, but now new use cases are emerging.

Wasabi launched today, offering a new entrant into the cloud storage game. How do you differentiate against S3? By offering cloud storage that works for all existing use cases. It’s cost-effective pricing is competitive with Amazon Glacier, while being dramatically faster than S3. It’s an exciting launch.

Moderator Stephen Foskett poses a completely non-controversial question: is DevOps a load of crap? Does DevOps just turn into NoOps? What are these darn kids doing with our infrastructure? The roundtable debates all these questions and more.

Welcome to the inaugural On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast! This episode, we’ve gathered our esteemed panel to discuss software-defined wide area networking, SD-WAN. In this emerging market, how do you compare the various offerings in the space? Is the market bound for consolidation, or will it remain full of vibrant competition? And how does the ease of use of SD-WAN impact the market for network professionals?

With an eagle eye for the emerging problems of moving current business application storage to the clouds come a newly announced partnership between Talon and SoftNAS. Now that the (terrible) puns are out of the way, let’s get into the announcement.