This week’s Tech Field Day roundtable discussion is an audio chat on the subject of stack wars – the creation of all-in-one “stacks” of IT equipment by the major vendors. These stacks have been quite a hot topic of discussion both inside Gestalt IT and in the community as a whole.

The discussion was wide-ranging, and we’ve split it into two episodes. This first episode includes discussion of the following:

• What is a stack anyway? Is it enough to have a pile of kit or do you need unifying management?
• Why are vendors doing this? Are they trying to lock us in or is there some progressive concept here?
• Are stacks and clouds synonymous? Ed jokes that stack is the new cloud, but perhaps there’s something deeper here.
• Are stacks just for high end? Edward points out that some companies are offering much smaller options, and even software-only stacks.
• Greg and Robin talk about the progress made in the 1980’s and 1990’s towards exploded “best of breed” architecture and point out that the new stacks are opposed to this concept.
• Who are we marketing the stack to? Rich and Ed note that it’s more appropriate for new customers (high-level management, service providers) not the old IT folks.
• Rich brings up the topic of VDI. Perhaps stacks and blocks make sense for VDI where they might not be applicable in the server-oriented data center space.
• Another concern is the balance of resources in stacks or blocks – what happens if you run out of storage or some other resource? And what happens if, as Greg points out, somewhere inside the stack is a piece of “rubbish” equipment?

Joining the call are the following Gestalt IT authors and Field Day delegates:

• Jason Boche (@JasonBoche, Boche.net)
• Rich Brambley (@RBrambley, VM /ETC)
• Carlo Costanzo (@CCostan, VMware Info)
• Chris Evans (@ChrisMEvans, The Storage Architect)
• Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind, EtherealMind)
• Edward Haletky (@Texiwill, The Virtualization Practice)
• Joerg Hallbauer (, Joerg’s Storage Blog)
• Robin Harris (@StorageMojo, Storage Mojo)
• Rod Haywood (@Rodos, Musings of Rodos)
• John Hickson (@StudioSystems, Studio Sysadmins)
• Scott Lowe (@Scott_Lowe, ScottLowe.org)
• John Obeto (@JohnObeto, Absolutely Windows)
• Devang Panchigar (@StorageNerve, StorageNerve)
• Bas Raayman (@BasRaayman, Bas Raayman)
• Ed Saipetch (@EdSai, Breathing Data)

Download the stack wars roundtable podcast now, or  subscribe in iTunes to tune in to the discussion!