You Can Find Me in the Cloud with HubStor

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

Microsoft Enters Agreement to Purchase Avere Systems

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

 

The Virtustream MicroVM

Very soon after I joined Virtustream, I quickly realized that one piece of Virtustream technology in particular was something that was causing confusion for customers, prospects, and even employees — especially me as our group’s FNG (you know, the group’s New Guy).

That technology was Virtustream MicroVMTM — often abbreviated as µVMTM. There has been so much confusion about what the MicroVM is — and how it works — that a lot of folks didn’t seem to understand the full benefits that Virtustream MicroVM can provide.

The short version is that MicroVMs are what enables customers to use Virtustream Enterprise Cloud in a true pay-as-you-go consumption model. I’ll get into the longer version in just a little bit. Continue reading

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

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

Amazon Adds Per-Second Billing for Some EC2 Instances

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

Job Search Successful — I’m Headed to the Cloud

First things first: I want to thank everyone who has followed along and supported me during the recent job search. It’s meant a lot to me to know that I was never really alone during it.

A special thank you to all of you who contacted me and acted as “connectors”, connecting me to people, companies, and job opportunities.

During the search, a few people asked me why I kept mentioning my job search on social media. My answer was always the same — every time I mention the job search, someone new contacts me with ideas, suggestions, or to help connect me to a job opportunity I was previously unaware of. In fact, a tweet about my job search is directly responsible for connecting me to my new job. I’ll do a future blog post with more details about how social media helped my job search.

But, none of that is what you came here to read at the moment. You came here to hear about:

My New Job

I’m very happy to announce that, starting today, I’m joining the team at Virtustream.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Virtustream is a cloud provider. (And one of the Dell Technologies companies.) Their offerings are designed for enterprises and global IT organizations. While they’re not a “household name” like the “Big Three” in cloud (AWS, Azure, and Google) are, I think Virtustream’s in a great place to get there because of the things that make them different than the Big Three.

The main difference I see is that using any of the Big Three is essentially a do-it-yourself experience. While you can do it all yourself with Virtustream, they also offer a full suite of managed services to choose from. Additionally, they also have offerings specifically built for Enterprises, for Federal, and for Healthcare.

What Will I Be Doing?

In the job posting, the official job title was listed as:

Senior Consultant: Technical Product Marketing

But, yeah, that doesn’t really tell you much about what I’ll actually be doing.

I’ll be in an individual contributor role, working with almost every team within Virtustream to create technical content, both for internal and external use. This will include articles, presentations, white papers, trainings, videos, whiteboards, demos, blog posts, and, well, pretty much any other format that folks would find as an effective way to consume information.

The job looks to be the perfect mix of “everybody already has a good idea of what they need from me” and “go forth to create and define this role for yourself”.

As a big plus, I’ll be getting to work with several folks I’ve known for years now who have not only earned my professional respect, but who I also actually like a lot.

So I’ll still be working with storage and virtualization, but I’ll also be moving that work deeper into the Cloud than I have in the past. Definitely looking forward to it.

Premise vs. Premises: A Modest Proposal

If you’ve ever listened to, or been involved in, a conversation about Cloud, you’re familiar with the idea that the infrastructure that runs any specific cloud can be either on-premises (local or private cloud), off-premises (remote or public cloud), or a combination of both (hybrid cloud).

If you’re familiar with that, then I feel safe predicting that you’re also familiar with the seemingly-eternal debate over whether the term is “premises”, “premise”, or if it actually matters. In this case, there is, in fact, only one correct answer.

In the rest of this article, I will:

  • Make the clear case for the correct answer
  • Explain why it does, in fact, matter
  • Discuss three approaches for handling this, including a proposed solution that, if adopted, would end the premises/premise confusion in cloud forever

Continue reading

Virtustream Launches Cloud Offering Designed for Healthcare

Today, at Dell EMC World, Virtustream — the enterprise-class cloud provider company in the Dell Technologies family of businesses — announced that they are offering a new service called Virtustream Healthcare Cloud.

This service provides cloud-based hosting of mission-critical healthcare platforms and applications in an environment that is completely compliant with all Health Insurance Portability  and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) regulations. Customers are able to get the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud with fully-managed services and availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of 99.999% uptime. The service can be deployed in both public and hybrid cloud models.

As healthcare organizations transition to the near-exclusive use of digital Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, they are faced with the dual challenges of access to records and securing them. EMR data needs to be accessible to patients, doctors, and analytical medicine applications, all while remaining fully-secure and compliant with a complex set of regulations. The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud offering enables healthcare organizations to achieve these goals as a managed service.

To give an idea of why this is a big deal, several other public cloud providers will allow customers to run this type of workload in their infrastructure, but the customers are 100% responsible for ensuring the HIPAA and HITECH compliance. The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud provides that compliance built-in.

With consolidation happening across the industry, and more hospitals and healthcare organizations joining into collaborative “Medical Group” type organizational structures, the ability to store, protect, and share EMRs in a secure and compliant public cloud solution becomes even more desirable.

Today, the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud service has been certified by Epic, a leading provider of EMR applications. I’ve spoken with a few of the folks at Virtustream and I believe we’ll see the certification with additional EMR software vendors coming in the near future.

You can read the Virtustream press release on their Healthcare Cloud here and read more details on the solutions here.

Avere Systems Announces New Complete Storage Solution

avere-c2nToday, Avere Systems announced its first complete storage solution. Avere is known for their Edge Filers that virtualize NAS systems and/or act as a file-access gateway to object storage.

The just-announced C2N solution combines Avere FXT Edge Filers with Avere’s own new scale-out object storage platform. This combination allows the C2N to be used as a standalone storage solution, while still using the FXT as to virtualize other NAS devices and as a gateway to other object storage platforms — either on- or off-premises. I’ll walk through the solution below. Continue reading

IBM to Acquire Object Storage Vendor Cleversafe

Yesterday, IBM announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cleversafe. Cleversafe is a manufacturer of object-based storage appliances. Cleversafe positions themselves as a software-based storage solution, but I’ve only ever seen their software available on the hardware appliances they sell.

I’ve been impressed with the ease-of-use and robustness of the Cleversafe platform. I have a few customers using it and they’re very happy with it.

IBM intends to move Cleversafe into their Cloud business unit to assist with on-premises and hybrid cloud solutions. As of this date, no information has been made public on the price of the acquisition.

You can get more details by reading the IBM press release, which is a good read despite their use of “on-premise” instead of the correct “on-premises”…