As with the other videos in the “Vendorwag in the Valley” we have diced & sliced them into 3 course, or one jumbo portion. First video is the “elevator pitch” which gives an introduction from the CEO about who Pure Storage are, what they do, and what their unique value-proposition is. What this video if you have never come across Pure Storage before. The second video is a slightly more technical video were we discuss in detail the advantages and disadvantages of the solution. The third video is for the geeks who are in technical stuff – learn more about how it works with the Techknowlegy series.

Scott Dietzen, CEO

Scott Dietzen is a three-time successful entrepreneur with WebLogic, Zimbra, and Transarc. Most recently, he was President and CTO of Zimbra, a vendor of open source messaging and collaboration software. Zimbra (now part of VMware) was a pioneer of the Web 2.0 and Open Core paradigms. Zimbra was originally acquired by Yahoo!, where Dietzen served as interim SVP of Communications and Communities. Prior to Zimbra, Dietzen was CTO of BEA Systems, where he helped craft the technology and business strategy for WebLogic that drove BEA from $61m in annual revenues prior to the WebLogic acquisition to over $1B. Dietzen came to BEA in 1998 via the acquisition of WebLogic, an innovator in Java and web application server technology. Prior to WebLogic, Dietzen was Principal Technologist of Transarc (acquired by IBM), a developer of distributed transaction and file sharing systems. He also currently serves on the board of big-data trailblazer Cloudera. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

The Elevator Pitch Video

Matt Kixmoeller, VP of Products

Matt Kixmoeller is a storage veteran who saw first-hand the last major storage technology media upgrade: the move from tape to disk in the backup market. Matt was Vice President of enterprise product management for Symantec’s Information Management products, including the NetBackup and Enterprise Vault. Kixmoeller oversaw product strategy and vision, engineering direction, and go-to-market activities for this $1B+ global product line. During his tenure Kixmoeller also held similar roles managing other Symantec products such as the Storage Foundation and CommandCentral Storage. Kixmoeller joined Symantec in 2005 as part of the merger with VERITAS Software Corporation. Prior to joining VERITAS Software, Kixmoeller was co-founder of Centrata, a leading provider of IT service management software. He has also held positions with Adaptec and Gemini Consulting (now Cap Gemini, Ernst & Young). Kixmoeller holds a degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Product Lowdown

Ravi Venkat, Virtualization Solutions Architect


Ravi Venkat is Pure Storage’s Virtualization Solutions Architect and an expert at the intersection of flash and virtualization.  He tests the Pure Storage FlashArray in the lab in a variety of virtualization use cases (server virtualization, VDI, backup, DR, migrations, etc.) and across all the major virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, etc.).  Ravi also works closely with customers in key virtualization deployments, helping them understand how flash can improve their virtualized datacenters. Prior to Pure Storage, Ravi was the lead virtualization Solutions Architect at Cisco, helping drive the momentum that Cisco has had with the Unified Computing System, UCS.  Prior to Cisco, Ravi was part of the storage engineering team at VMware, and was part of the engineering team at VERITAS working on storage virtualization and file system technologies.

The Techknowledgy Demo 1: Provisioning New Storage

The Techknowledgy Demo 2: Pure Storage and Virtual Desktop IO

I’m getting all setup for my next trip to the US of A. First stop is to speak at the Columbus, Ohio Regional Conferrence/VMUG on the 22nd May. The agenda for the meeting has been released over here and it will be held at:

Hyatt Regency Columbus
350 North High Street
Columbus, OH 43215

I will be speaking about SRM again, and hope to have an updated deck of slides based on a recent NDA/Roadmap session with VMware that I did a week or so ago. Lets just say the future is very bright and very interesting. I will be joined by fellow vExpert and virtualization guru, David Davis who will be doing a separate talk about the VCP5.

Other notable sessions that I hope to attend on the day is VMware session on “A Vision for User-Centric Computing” by then I suspect that next version of VMware View will have been released, and we will be on the cusp off, or even released some of the new raft of EUC offerings from VMware. So I will be hoping for less chalk/talk, and more a look at the technologies in the flesh. Another notable session will be delivered by Tom MacKay dubbed a “VMware NDA Session”…

Once I’m done in Ohio, I’m getting an internal flight down to Austin,Texas where I will be spending a couple of days with Dell. Were still working on specifics – but I hope it will be similar to the sessions I enjoy with the Dell Equallogic team in Nashua, New Hampshire. I imagine some that content will be NDA based, but there will plenty of stuff I can share, and we are also planning an on-site “Vendorwag” podcast…

If you missed the youtube version of my vendorwag with Nlyte Software, its now available to listen to via my iTunes subscription. I chat with Craig Ledo and Claudia Hanson

There’s three videos – the Elevator Pitch, the Product Lowdown and the Techknowledgy Demo.

With Mike Laverick of RTFM Education and Stu McHugh of stumchugh.wordpress.com/

Stu McHugh and I discuss a whole series of stories including:

Formats:
MP3 Download
MP3 iTunes Subscription
Video iTunes Subscription
Generic RSS Feed
YouTube
High-Resolution Full-Screen Video

In my last day on the Vendorwag in the Valley I toddled down to X to see guys at Xangati. Xangati delivers the leading infrastructure performance management solutions designed to overcome virtualization stall for both server virtualization and VDI environments. Xangati’s ability to track cross-IT silo interactions in 360° in a live and continuous fashion is entirely unique in the market. Xangati’s IPM solutions track the performance health of a given infrastructure and automatically alert an administrator when a performance shift occurs. These alerts are wholly unique as they are accompanied with Xangati’s heralded alert recording capabilities that show the set of negative interactions that were driving poor performance.

As with the other videos in the “Vendorwag in the Valley” we have diced & sliced them into 3 courses. First video is the “elevator pitch” which gives an introduction about who Xangati are, what they do, and what their unique value-proposition is. Watch this video if you have never come across Xangati before. The second video is a slightly more technical video where we discuss in detail the advantages and disadvantages of the product. The third video is for the geeks who are in technical stuff – learn more about how it works with the Techknowlegy series.

Nathanael Iversen is currently Director of  Technical Marketing at Xangati, Inc and works in a variety of technical and product management capacities.  Previously, he has held technical positions at several startups, SBC Communications and the US Airforce, giving him intimate knowledge of enterprise and service provider networks and data centers .  He blogs at http://www.avirtualpond.com and spends most of his day in virtualization related activities.

The Elevator Pitch:

The Product Lowdown:

The Techknowledgy Demo:

Today I had an interesting re-experience. What is a re-experience? A re-experience is problem/error/bug you had a while ago – but forgotten about. Then when it appears months or years later you scratch your head and wonder – hang-on what’s going on here.

For years I’ve warned people about the perils of renaming portgroups on Standard vSwitches. Firstly, their per-host. So any rename will have to be consistent done across EVERY host that’s touched by that rename. Secondly, renames of portgroups can be dangerous because it can leave affected VMs orphaned from the switch. This shows itself in a couple of ways. On the properties of the affect VMs (and there could be more than one…) you would find the portgroup dimmed/italicized.

Here my F5 BIG-IP load-balancer has become disconnected from the portgroup. Here it happens to be an internal switch. I set up just to keep the management network of the BIG-IP private. It’s not a recommendation from F5 to do this incidentally. It was just a quick way of me isolating the appliance when I need to. If you edited the settings of VM like this – you would find that NIC interface lacking a portgroup reference (because of the rename) and also set not connect at power on. That’s pretty critical. Suppose an ESX host died and a HA event kicked in… Well, these orphaned VMs wouldn’t get powered on….

So where did my re-experience come in? Well, I was renaming portgroups (without engaging the brain, I should add). I couldn’t work out why the “Network View” in the vCenter – were showing portgroups that didn’t exist. I thought it was a “refresh” or “GUI” thing. Turns out the Network View kept hold of those old portgroup names until the VMs were mapped to the new name…

The portgroups highlighted in red – still had VMs “connected” them – despite the fact they didn’t exist on any host. Once the VMs had been mapped to the new networks – they disappeared.

Just to let everyone know that registrations are now open for the Carolina VMware User Summit. In case you don’t know it was really this VMUG and couple of the others that first got these big VMUG events started. I’ve attended every Carolina Summit since they started, but this year I’m taking a break. I think the folks down Carolina deserve a break from me – they must wonder how this funny-sounding Brit keeps popping up every year. It so happens that this year Carolina Summit falls in the same week as the London User Group. I missed the #lonvmug first meeting this year, and didn’t want to miss the 2nd as well. Plus the week after I will be in Columbus, Ohio – so travel was getting increasingly complex and ardorous.

Fortunately, I have sent my British Ambassador who acts as the UK presence when I’m otherwise engaged. He’s called Alan Renouf. And no he’s not French but from Beligium.

• Morning Keynote presentation from Satyam Vaghani & Vinay Gaonkar
  • Two perspectives: The past and future of VMware storage
• Afternoon Keynote presentation from Jake Howering, Cisco
  • Data Center Interconnect Strategies
• Self-paced labs provided by Varrow
• Instructor led labs provided by eGroup
• Educational sessions including topics on:
  • PowerCLI 201 presented by Alan Renouf
  • vCenter Orchestrator presented by Cody Bunch
  • vCloud Director Deep Dive presented by Chris Colotti
  • vSphere and Network-Attached Storage Design Considerations presented by Scott Lowe
  • Discover your Enterprise Social Network with VMware SocialCast presented by Bryan Kuhn and Daniel Stevenson 
  • vCloud Director PowerCLI presented by Alan Renouf

Anyway to register follow the link below:

http://www.vmug.com/index.php?mo=cm&op=ld&fid=158

http://www.panologic.com/images/logo.png

My very last “Vendorwag in the Valley” is with Zero Client specialists, PanoLogic. Pano System 5.0 includes everything you need to deploy virtual desktops on top of your VMware, Microsoft or Citrix virtualization platform. In one package and for one low price you get both our unique award-winning Pano Zero Client and the comprehensive hypervisor-independent Pano Controller management front-end, and the new Pano Maestro cross-group management tool. Together they provide a proven and integrated solution that lets you easily provision, deploy, monitor, and control your virtual desktops.

As with the other videos in the “Vendorwag in the Valley” we have diced & sliced them into 4 courses. First video is the “elevator pitch” which gives an introduction about who PanoLogic  are, what they do, and what their unique value-proposition is. Watch this video if you have never come across PanoLogic before. The second video is a slightly more technical video were we discuss in detail the advantages and disadvantages of the product. The third video is for the geeks who are in technical stuff – learn more about how it works with the Techknowlegy series.

In last episode I take part in the PC Challenge where I try to work out which device is a PC, Thin Client or PanaLogic Zero Client!

Mike Fodor – Executive Vice President of Customer Success

As executive vice president of customer success, Mike ensures Pano Logic customers have the dedicated technical resources that ensure a smooth transformation from PCs to zero client VDI. The first to occupy the position at Pano Logic, Mike assumed the role after more than five years asPano Logic’s vice president of product management. In that post, Mike developed and maintained close ties with the customer community and leveraged that insight to influence product development cycles to meet evolving end user needs. Mike began his career in Southern California as a technology manager for Walt Disney Feature Animation. He has spent more than a decade in Silicon Valley, holding management posts at NetIQ and PeopleSoft before joining Pano Logic. Mike holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

The Elevator Pitch:

The Techknowledgy Lowdown:

The Techknowledgy Demo:

The PC Challenge:

On the second day of the Vendorwag in the Valley series I stopped by the offices of NetApp in Sunnyvale. Sunny it definitely was not – considering it rained for seemed like all day in the Valley. When I say “offices” of NetApp that’s being a bit throw away – there’s actually 10 or more large building all around which makes it feel like a business park dedicated to NetApp. My main speaker is Vaughn Stewart who I have known for some time.

NetApp are company which hopefully don’t need an introduction – so we had to dispense with the formality of a “Elevator Pitch”. Instead we focused on three main areas:

• OnCommand Insight Balance – which is the companies new performance analysis tool, from an acquisition of Akori a couple of years ago. I first came across OnCommand Insight Balance whilst at the first Virtualization TechField Day organized by Stephen Fosket of GestaltIT.com
• OnTap8 – The new version of OnTap introduces the concept of the VServer – and adds a layer of “virtualization” to the storage layer
• Virtual Storage Console v4.x – This is a new version of the Virtual Storage Console, which RTFM readers will know that storage vendor plug-ins in vCenter are one of my favourite things! This video outlines the new functionality including a new method to make sure all your VMs are aligned, without needing to modify the guest operating system…

Each technology comes with a video discussion between myself and Vaughn. Watch out – we have a few laughs along the way! Each discussion is accompanied by on-screen demo of the tech. One of those was done live at NetApp, and the other two were provided later because we kinda ran out of time, and folks were busy with deadlines for the end of the week.

Vaughn Stewart is a Director for Cloud Computing and ‘the virtualization evangelist’ at NetApp. He represents NetApp in the Open Virtualization Alliance, publishes The Virtual Storage Guy blog, is a co-author of the forthcoming book, ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’, has a patent pending, is recognized by VMware as vExpert, and holds several industry certifications.

OnCommand Insight Balance – Product Lowdown with Vaughn Stewart

OnCommand Insight Balance – Techknowledgy Demo 

Neil Glick is a virtualization expert at NetApp. He designs and implements end to end virtualization solutions and drives integration between storage and virtualization platform.  He has authored several virtualization best practice and deployment technical papers at NetApp.

OnTap8 – Product Lowdown with Vaughn Stewart

Virtual Storage Console v4.x – Product Lowdown with Vaughn Stewart

Just to let everyone know that registrations are now open for the Carolina VMware User Summit. In case you don’t know it was really this VMUG and couple of the others that first got these big VMUG events started. I’ve attended every Carolina Summit since they started, but this year I’m taking a break. I think the folks down Carolina deserve a break from me – they must wonder how this funny-sounding Brit keeps popping up every year. It so happens that this year Carolina Summit falls in the same week as the London User Group. I missed the #lonvmug first meeting this year, and didn’t want to miss the 2nd as well. Plus the week after I will be in Columbus, Ohio – so travel was getting increasingly complex and ardorous. Anyway to register follow the link below:

http://www.vmug.com/index.php?mo=cm&op=ld&fid=158