Tag Archives: Announcement

You Can Find Me in the Cloud with HubStor

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It’s funny. The last thing I posted here was on January 1st. In it, I mentioned that 2019 had been a hard year. How foolish I was before 2020 came into its own…

In the midst of whatever all of 2020 will continue to bring, I’m pleased to be able to report some good news. I’m employed again — much faster than I was during my either of my last two rounds of job searching. In all, one month passed from the day I was informed that my position had been re-organized out of existence to my first day at the new job. Continue reading →

Time to Retire the #HireDaveNow Hashtag

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You read that right. After what felt like a very long job search (to be fair it only felt that way because it was, in fact, very long), I no longer need to use the #HireDaveNow hashtag. This frees me up to focus on other Dave-related hashtags, like the very timely #WriteInDave2020, the crowd favorite #ThanksDave (which I’ve only learned just now some people are using in a very serious fashion), and the one that started the Dave-related hashtag phenomenon, #LetDaveDrive.

Acronis logo

By the time you’re reading this, I will have already started my new job as a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Acronis. I’ll be way over at the technical end of the marketing spectrum, helping folks understand how Acronis solutions work and helping people understand the business value of technical features. Continue reading →

Summary of the Announcements From CommvaultGO 2018

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Commvault GO 2018I’m at the CommvaultGO conference, and the new announcements are coming out at a rapid-fire pace. It’s hard enough to keep track of everything while I’m here and can ask questions in real time — I can only imagine how difficult it is trying to keep track if you’re not here.

To make it easier, I’ve summarized the big announcements below. Continue reading →

Cisco Names Champions for 2018

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At the end of last last week, Cisco sent out the official “Welcome” emails to the folks they’ve named as Cisco Champions for 2018.

What are Cisco Champions exactly? you might ask.

It’s a fair question, I’ll admit. Started in 2014, the Cisco Champion program is a way for Cisco to recognize those members of the IT community — who are not Cisco employees — who are going above and beyond their job descriptions to find ways to contribute to and share knowledge with that IT community.

To quote from Cisco’s website:

Cisco Champions are passionate experts who share their perspectives with the community.

In my experience, that’s exactly who they are. Sometimes I feel like there are people out there who are only interested in joining community programs like this one in order to grab some free swag, but I’ve never gotten that vibe from any of the Cisco Champions I’ve met in person or interacted with online. In general, I find them to be very enthusiastic about the technology we all use and very eager to learn — and help others learn, too. I find that I get energized when I spend time with this community.

Cisco recognizes Champions in the following interest areas:

  • Data Center
  • Collaboration
  • Enterprise Networks
  • Internet of Things
  • Security

With that said, I’m both proud, humbled, and a little nervous to have been named a Cisco Champion for Data Center for my 5th year. Proud because, well, it’s a honor to be selected. Humbled because when I look at the other folks who’ve been selected, I see several folks who I’ve looked up to for a while, and someone has decided that I belong in the same grouping as them. And a little nervous because someone has decided that I belong in the same grouping as these folks — a little concerned about not living up to expectations.

Anyway, thank you Cisco, and congratulations to all the other Cisco Champions, both new and returning!

Microsoft Enters Agreement to Purchase Avere Systems

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Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it had entered into an agreement to purchase Avere Systems, a maker of software and hardware appliances that can perform filesystem virtualization, file-to-object gateway services, and allow customers to easily connect their onsite storage to public cloud storage.

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been a big fan of the Avere platform. In my reseller days, I was involved in a few deals on solutions and designs involving Avere filers.

If you’re not familiar with Avere, you can read these quick overviews of their cloud gateway capabilities, their virtual filer, and their complete onsite storage solution.

Avere Systems customers include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Hopkins University, and Sony Corporation’s entertainment division. (I’m fairly familiar with how two of those three customers are employing their Avere filers.)

If I were to sum up what the Avere filers provide for customers, it would be that they provide the performance of local (onsite) storage for data that’s stored remotely (offsite). Clients access the Avere systems front-end using either the NFS or SMB protocols. The back-end can connect to multiple storage sources using either NFS, SMB, S3, or some combination. The Avere filers present clients with a single global namespace, meaning the client has no knowledge of where the data’s source actually is. Data can be migrated between sources on the Avere’s back-end with no interruption of service to clients connecting to the front-end.

With the virtual filers, Avere can also allow offsite compute clients in the cloud to access data in a customer’s private onsite data center…

In all, it’s not difficult to see why Microsoft might want to acquire them — especially since they’ve announced their intent to move it into their Azure division. What’s surprising, really, is that no other cloud provider saw Avere as an acquisition target earlier.

If Microsoft is able to incorporate that ability to have cloud computing resources accessing data from private onsite data centers into Azure, it will be a big differentiator for them as no other cloud providers currently offer a similar capability.

At this time, there’s been no news regarding the purchase price. Estimates and specualtion range from $300 Million to $500 Million. If true, compared to the potential Avere’s intellectual property has to add to a cloud service provider, this could turn out to have been quite the bargain for Microsoft.

Today, Avere Systems supports Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Obviously we should expect closer integration with Azure in the future, but Microsoft says they’ll continue to support AWS and Google, which I’m sure is welcome news to existing Avere Customers.

Resources

 

VMware Names First vExpert Cloud Recipients

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On Friday, VMware announced the recipients of their first-ever vExpert Cloud designation. This will be called “vExpert Cloud 2017”.

This is the third specialization added to the long-running vExpert program, after vExpert VSAN and vExpert NSX. Already holding a current vExpert designation is a prerequisite for any of the specialty vExpert programs.

What is a vExpert? Well, in VMware’s own words, they are people who have:

demonstrated significant contributions to the community and a willingness to share their expertise with others. Contributing is not always blogging or Twitter as there are many public speakers, book authors, scriptwriters, VMUG leaders, VMTN community moderators and internal champions

I am very proud to have my name included on this first-ever list of vExpert Cloud recipients. I am humbled and a bit nervous to have my name included on this first-ever list of vExpert Cloud recipients… I feel like I’ve been given something that I now have to earn and live up to.

You can see the full list of 134 VMware vExpert Cloud 2017 designees here.

 

Aparavi Emerges From Stealth with an SaaS Solution for a Multi-Cloud World

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Yesterday, Aparavi, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) start-up company, emerged from stealth with a SaaS offering for managing long-term data retention in a multi-cloud world.

The company says their name is derived from the Latin word apparare which means “to prepare”. Now, I’ve never had any formal training in Latin, but my own research suggests that apparare is actually a noun that is more accurately translated as “preparations”, so it’s still in the neighborhood they were shooting for. (There are some readers asking themselves right now: “Was that bit of nit-picking really necessary?” To them, I answer, “You haven’t known me very long, have you?”)

Whether you view it as preparing or making preparations, the name is a fitting one. Aparavi’s software offers a solution to make managing long-term retention of data across multiple clouds simple. Continue reading →

Zadara Storage Offers Hurricane Relief to Business Hit by Harvey, Irma, or Maria

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Zadara Storage, a Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) start-up company, is offering disaster relief to businesses affected by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, or Maria. The relief Zadara is offering comes in the form of up to 1PB of free data storage for six months. This storage can be installed on-site, in the Cloud, or as a hybrid model.

(I’m so pleased to be writing about some good news related to the hurricanes that have caused so much destruction in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico.)

How do businesses qualify for their six months of free storage?

  • Be a business that operates in the hurricane-affected areas and lost storage
  • Be a business that operates elsewhere, but lost storage in a data center or at a colocation site in the hurricane affected areas

If your business meets either of these two conditions, you can apply for your free storage here.

I know what you’re thinking — What’s the catch? There is none. If your company qualifies, Zadara will either ship storage — to your site or to your colocation data center — or provide you with access to cloud-based storage in Zadara’s data centers. When the six months is up, you can choose to sign up for Zadara’s Storage-as-a-Service, or you can return the storage to them, no questions asked.

I spoke with Zadara’s CEO and co-founder, Nelson Nahum, last week. He told me that as he was watching news coverage of the hurricane disasters, he and other members of the company’s management team found themselves inspired by things people were doing to help each other: sharing food and resources, working together to rescue people who were trapped, opening their homes to shelter strangers who lost their homes to the storm. Seeing this caused the management team to ask themselves and each other what they could do to help. The answer was: up to 1PB of Storage-as-a-Service for six months, either on-site or in the Cloud, for free, no strings attached.

Zadara’s Storage-as-a-Service supports multiple data types (block, file, and object), providing access via multiple storage protocols (FC, iSCSI, iSER, NFS, SMB, S3, and Swift). (I’ll do a follow-up blog post later to take a closer look at how they accomplish this.)

So, if you’re with a business that could use a hand getting back on its feet following the triple-whammy of hurricanes — or know someone in that situation — go here to have the business apply.

Amazon Adds Per-Second Billing for Some EC2 Instances

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Amazon’s per-second billing is now available for some types of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Announced back in September, this billing model change went into effect on 2 October.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) first launched their EC2 service in 2006. The success of AWS and cloud computing in general proves that there are uses for leasing a virtual server for an hour at a time.

Recently, some AWS competitors have moved from per-hour to per-minute billing. This move by AWS seems like an attempt to leapfrog past their competitors by offering billing that’s even more granular. In this post, I’ll look into some of the details of this billing change. Continue reading →

Cisco Announces Intention to Acquire Springpath

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SpringPathOn Monday, Cisco ended over a year of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) speculation and announced their intent to acquire Springpath.

In this case, instead of Cisco the networking company, we’re looking at Cisco the manufacturer of the Unified Computing System (UCS) compute platform. Springpath makes hyperconvergence software. Cisco has been running that software — rebranded as the Cisco HX Data Platform — on their UCS servers and offering that bundle as their HyperFlex HCI solution. You may remember that I wrote about HyperFlex when it first launched back in March of 2016.

I’ve been a fan of the UCS platform since its launch, and I’ve been a fan of Springpath since they came out of stealth.  HyperFlex has always looked like a great HCI solution to me, and I’ve been surprised it hasn’t taken off more than it has.

Cisco’s been making an overall change to put more emphasis on software and its value-add, and the Springpath acquisition obviously fits well with that shift. The Springpath team will be joining Cisco’s Computing Systems Product Group.

At the price — $320Million in cash — it’s a bargain for Cisco even if they’re only acquiring Springpath to ensure exclusive access to the intellectual property, or ongoing support for HyperFlex. The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 of 2018, pending regulatory review.

Cisco Press Release