Networks are a lot like teenagers, you can trust them, but trust works a lot better with verification.

If hype was something that had mass, containers would affect the tides. In this State of the Industry, we look at the state of container storage. Various companies will tell you it’s broken. We’ve consulted with experts to find out what the specific issues are, and what the future will look like.

The data center is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Ravaged by an invasive new species called “The Cloud”, previous enterprise technology has been decimated, destroyed or completely mitigated. As fickle CTOs furtively abandon their previously hallowed IT principles, only a select few of the true believers keep the hope alive against an all out victory by The Cloud.

Even these courageous few are forever changed by the experience, for one cannot experience The Cloud an remain inert. No, to survive this powerful force, one must emulate it to survive. From the ashes of the old data center, comes a new, lean, agile force. This is one of their stories. This is Permabit.

Whenever I visualized SD-WAN, it always seemed like it would have to be a relatively top-down solution. A lot of what I’ve seen in the category certainly seems to shift this way, with SD-WAN companies working with service provides to implement their solutions. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, as long as it delivers the intended functionality.

I’m heartened by Google’s promotion of Project Brillo into the more official but awkwardly named “Android Things”. Lazy naming aside, it should provide a reasonably secure, updatable and transparent network communication fabric for IoT device. The problem still is that it currently only supports platform boards, Intel Edison, NXP Pico, and the Raspberry Pi 3. Still, a player with Google’s clout goes a long way to pushing a standard.

Persistent distributed storage for Docker is the focus of a lot of attention in the enterprise space. Heck, Docker bought Infinit to help them do it internally. But that solution is quite a bit down the road. Right now, Ajeet Raina has a walkthrough of how to accomplish this with Dell EMC’s ScaleIO. Essentially, ScaleIO creates a server-based SAN to function as this storage.

Still Matthew thinks the true value of The Machine isn’t necessarily in its success generating public interest, or as a great monolithic contraption that will redefine computing. Rather it is out of the multitude of solutions devised to make The Machine that HPE might be able to see some value. He’s particularly bullish on the Intelligent Edge appliance. He sees this as HPE’s convereged solution that should have big appeal for enterprises with Big Data and IoT needs.

I was talking about what I wanted to do for this Raspberry Pi project with a friend, rattling off all the possibilities kind of aimlessly. My friend, rather sheepishly, asked what exactly a Raspberry Pi was. He follows the tech press pretty regularly, and has built a PC or two in his day, but didn’t have a clear understanding. The knowledge gap actually makes sense, given that most times you hear about a Raspberry Pi, it’s about the crazy project someone has done with it. There’s a lot of assumed knowledge there. So let me define the term.

The Raspberry Pi is a computer. Done, easy!

Monitoring of the data center is critical in the enterprise. The problem isn’t necessarily that monitoring data is unavailable, but rather that it’s hard to manage. It’s hard to troubleshoot issues, or even know how to provision your data center is you can’t tell the signal from the noise in all your monitoring data. This brings the issue up of too much abstraction. Enterprise IT is necessarily complex, these are multifaceted systems that are used in production. Any monitoring solution needs to strike a balance between gathering all the needed information, presenting it in a consumable manner, but provide analysis to give you meaningful insights. Uila seems to offer a solution that nicely strikes this balance.

After looking at some of the announcements from AWS re:Invent, the most interesting was the AWS Snowmobile, an insane 100PB SAN on wheels. This seems like the ultimate in sneakernet, giving you a ton of throughput, but really slow latency. What if instead of offering a big pile of storage with bad latency, you could simply use your own storage, but distribute it with extremely low latency? ClearSky Data claims they can deliver this. I sat in on a product briefing to figure out how.