X-IO Technologies understand the dilemma of reinvention. They’ve been around since 2002, originally as part of the Seagate Advanced Storage Group. A fifteen year company history and a focus on traditional storage arrays combine to make it hard for the company to seem like the new hotness. This is not to take away from the company’s accomplishments. The traditional enterprise storage market is ruthlessly competitive, and they’ve carved out over 1,500 customers. The company remains dedicated to these customers.

But the company can also read some tea leaves. There is a decided move away from custom hardware, and an embrace of commodity, perhaps best exemplified by the announced death of Dell EMC’s DSSD. In response to this, X-IO looks to pivot with an entirely new line of business. They’ve moving to the edge.

Whenever a public cloud rival launches a new feature, it’s always put into the relief of comparison to AWS. That status as a benchmark is incredibly valuable, both in terms of market perception, and the competitive pressure it puts on all other players. And the 800 pound public cloud gorilla shows no signs of slowing down. They continually lead in capital expenditures, to extend the infrastructure lead they already have in the space.

But as the saying goes, it gets lonely at the top.

Jordan Martin has a problem. The idea of moving the control plane from a device to a central controller sounds like it makes a lot of sense in SDN. I mean, it’s called a control plane, why not move it to a controller? Despite the phonic similarity, this isn’t actually what happens.

Riverbed is a well known name in the WAN optimization market, and increasingly in the SD-WAN space as well. The company recently acquired Xirrus. It may seem like a curious move to acquire wireless assets. But Tom Hollingsworth does a great job of putting it into the perspective of Riverbed’s existing business. He sees the wireless edge as the next market for them to expand into. Given the success Riverbed has had integrating Ocedo assets into their SteelHead line, I think the company is capable of moving into a new market.

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.

Flocker is dead, long live Rook! Or maybe not. Chris Evans gives a look at this ersatz replacement to the recently deceased Flocker, who decided to shutdown in December when they released they had no path to revenue, bucking typical venture capital wisdom.

I’ve joked that if you’re ever confused by a new technology in IT but want to look like you know what you’re talking about, just say it looks like it has potential, but reference how someone tried the exact same thing in the mid-90s. More often than not, whoever you’re talking to will fill in the gaps as you laugh nervously at your own ignorance. Gina Rosenthal’s post on the history of virtualization and containers largely bares out this premise.

After reading this post about the inherent problems of TCP connection termination, I almost feel sorry for the protocol. It seems to be trying so hard, but doomed for inevitable failure. Martin Sustrik goes through all the reasons this is problematic in great detail.

Software-defined scale-out storage is a hot area in enterprise IT. Qumulo is an emergent player in the space, having been out of stealth now for two years, with a heavy founding dose of Isilon DNA. Their particular solution is a scale-out NAS that offers some “data aware” advanced analytics. Dave Henry sat down for a conversation with their CEO.