NOTE: The first couple of minutes of this weeks vendorwag suffers from a bit of Skype latency, where the odd word is lost here and there. However, the call quality does improve massively after the first 2 or 3 minutes. Stick with us!

This weeks vendorwag is with Gil Levonai of Zerto. In case you don’t know Zerto are company that provides replication of VMs for DR purposes – and they use a virtual appliance model to add a replication layer to virtualization – as well as automating the failover and failback for both test and real DR events. In case you haven’t figured it out yet the company name is a pun on the phrase “Zero RTO”…

Here’s Gil’s bio:
Gil Levonai is vice president of products for Zerto. He spearheads marketing and product management, supporting the corporate vision by leading the go-to-market strategy. With more than 20 years of experience in various technology management disciplines including marketing, product management, sales, business development and R&D, Gil most recently served as principal at Gil Levonai Strategic Marketing, a consulting firm specializing in high-tech marketing. He previously served as vice president of marketing and strategy at NextNine, a company providing service automation solutions to global enterprises.

Here’s my list of questions…

Q. I was quite struck by some “unique” features in Zerto that haven’t seen elsewhere. The one that really made me smile was the CDP/Journal rollback. Can you explain how this works and give us a quick demo???

Q. Replication in Zerto is “Async” but you also talk about it consistently replicating. I’m confused… I thought asynch meant every N minutes, so how can it be constantly replicating???

Q. There will be some who say that replication is now a commodity – given that many storage vendors now roll that into their products. How would react to such an assertion? Isn’t it really about automation, not replication???

Q. What controls are there if on bandwidth, latency – what happens if a link goes down or WAN link becomes unexpected saturated???

Q. I’m thinking of new future of storage – Cheap, commodity based storage for capacity with no fancy features – with a VA’s on top doing fancy things like backup, DR… Is that the future you see too???

Q. What improvements, enhancements are planned for Zerto? What are customers really asking to be improved or added?

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

If you want to see the video in hi-resolution and full density – you can open it here.

If first meet Ed Czerwin in the flesh last year at the Boston TechField Day. We bumped into each other again in VMworld, and I’ve been planning to have him on my show for a while. Ed is prolific blogger and is co-host of virtualization podcast vSoup.

If you want to follow Ed on Twitter then you can locate him here

We chat around a number of topics including:

• Is a multi hypervisor datacenter a real future option
• What is virtualization adoption in Asia pacific like? Where are they on their journey?
• Is vSphere5 is proving as popular as vSphere4?
• What’s your opinion on the whole VMTN Subscription Movement?

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

In this vendorwag I chat to Jay Judkowitz, Product Manager for Nimbula. Before Nimbula, Jay was at VMware for over eight years where he drove products like Site Recovery Manager and Storage VMotion.  Before that, he was at Scale 8, an early innovator in what would now be called cloud storage.  Jay started his career as a hands on IT practitioner at Intel for four years where he gained first hand experience with the real challenges of managing a dynamic large scale IT deployment.

As every I had a range of questions for Jay including:

Q.  Given your team is built on ex-VMware and ex-Amazon folks – how does that inform the vision of the company – who do you feel your competing against – Amazon?

Q. I notice your solution currently only supports KVM. Whilst I know that the cloud isn’t just about virtualization. Can you explain how that support decision came about – and will you be supporting Xen, ESX, HyperV in the future?

Q. I’ve been recently concerned about fault-tolerance and redundancy is being delivered to the “cloud layer”. How does Nimbula achieve that…

Q. Nimbula has its own method of how to segment the network without excessive use of VLANs – could you give us a quick demo of how to setup VMs within Nimbula, and get them communicating on the network

Q. Can you explain how “Collaborative Permissions” work – I think I need to another example – for the penny to drop

Q. Let’s talk about Federating different cloud vendors together – how do you see authentication working?

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

If you want to see the video in hi-resolution and full density – you can open it here.

This week we have two flavours of the vendorwag. The first is the full version which includes an “elevator pitch” from Jay together with my Q&A with him. The second is Jay’s elevator pitch on its own. So depending on how much time you have it’s up to you which one you watch…

[For those people out of the UK - he's a definition of what a "Mackem" is]

This weeks chinwag is with David Owen – aka vMackem.  He’s a Virtualisation Soultions Consultant working for a large UK organisation. He’s worked in the IT Industry since 2003,and worked for several companies including JP Morgan,Barclays Bank PLC and BAE Systems. He has worked across a wide variety of fields including finance and UK defence and has a full set of clearances. He’s  currently working my way towards his VCDX amongst other qualifications. he started this blog to aid himself and hopefully others with experiences that he faces in his day to day career and any useful information he thinks will be worth passing on. Like everyone nowadays you can find him on LinkedIn. He’s also available on twitter as @vMackem and his is vMackem.co.uk. David was award the vExpert Award from VMware for services to the vCommunity in 2011.

In our chinwag we discuss vBlock and Flexpod – and then we move on to discuss this months hot topic – the VMTN Subscription Movement.

I first met Josh Atwell at RTP, in North Carolina – I just happened to be in town, and got to speak at the VMUG he runs there. Josh is a Husband, Dad, Golfer, & Audiobookphile. VMware VCAP-DCD/VCP/Engineer/Architect – and does a lot of work for Cisco. He also runs a blog called: http://www.vtesseract.com/

In this miniwag about the VMTN Subscription I asked Josh about his personal experiences of having to use 60-day evals, and whether there was any possibility that the VMTN Subscription could “undermine” the partner programs because they get NFRs licenses as part of other benefits.

I think youtube is doing something weird to the audio because the local .mov file sounds, great but once upload Josh sounded like he was talking through a paper cup. I had to put through another media encoder before uploading before it worked how I wanted it too.

This weeks vendorwag is with Ash Ashutosh, who is CEO of Actifio.

If you’ve not come across them – here’s an in-a-nutshell paragraph from their website about what they do:

“Actifio’s Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform is the industry’s first solution optimized for managing copies of production data, resulting in the elimination of redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management applications. By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio transforms the chaos of multiple silos of infrastructure and point tools traditionally deployed for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, analytics, and test and development into one, Service Level-driven, virtualized Protection and Availability storage device. Actifio PAS delivers a radically simple, application-centric, policy-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure, resulting in 10X reduction in costs.”

Ash comes with quite a pedigree and experience – as you would expect with a founder and CEO:

Ash Ashutosh brings more than 25 years of storage industry and entrepreneurship experience to his role of CEO at Actifio. Ashutosh is a recognized leader and architect in the storage industry where he has spearheaded several major industry initiatives, including iSCSI and storage virtualization, and led the authoring of numerous storage industry standards. Ashutosh was most recently a Partner with Greylock Partners where he focused on making investments in enterprise IT companies. Prior to Greylock, he was Vice President and Chief Technologist for HP Storage. Ashutosh founded and led AppIQ, a market leader of Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions, which was acquired by HP in 2005. He was also the founder of Serano Systems, a Fibre Channel controller solutions provider, acquired by Vitesse Semiconductor in 1999. Prior to Serano, Ashutosh was Senior Vice President at StorageNetworks, the industry’s first Storage Service Provider. He previously worked as an architect and engineer at LSI and Intergraph. Ashutosh remains an avid supporter of entrepreneurship and is an advisor and board member for several commercial and non-profit organizations. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Penn State University.

As ever I spent sometime with the guys – which helped me build up list of questions dealt with towards the rear of the podcast.

Here’s my list of questions:

Q1. How has storage evolved over the past few years to better handle virtualized workloads and where do we need to get to to achieve the full promise of cloud/virtualization?

Q2. How is Actifio implemented into my existing environment and what are the implications? (Actifio sits in front of my storage – and add additional features – How does that work? Do I need give Actifio rights to my existing storage? Won’t this add an “overhead”?)

Q3. How does Actifio gain access and provide application/hypervisor-aware information protection? (You say you don’t need an “agent” for some of the advanced features – but isn’t a “connector” just another word for an agent?)

Q4. Where does Actifio work? (Currently you support iSCSI and FC. Do you plan to support NFS in the future? What made you choose iSCSI and FC in the first instance?)

Q5. Can you walk us through a restore process? Say my manager has deleted a photo of his daughter from an email, and wants it back – how would I go about doing that?

Q6. What are the main challenges to adopting Actifio – If a listener wanted to adopt the technology, what gotchas should they look out for

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

If you want to see the video in hi-resolution and full density – you can open it here.

Click the Tintri logo to visit their site; Click Ed’s photo to subscribe to his twitter.

This week’s “Vendorwag” is with Ed Lee of Tintri. I’ve kept on bumping into the Tintri guys over the last year, as I did my tour around various VMUGs in the US. I was lucky enough to get a breakfast meeting with Kieran Hearty the CEO and Founder of the company back at VMworld. This represent a bit of theme now – of new storage vendors. I had Nimble on recently, and now Tintri… I’ve been trying to get in contact with Astute but not heard back from them….

Anyway, I’ve done the usual research before jumping in with the QA with them. I must say I’ve been quite impressed with their fresh approach, and its certainly offers food for thought about whether the last decade of handling storage is up for a major review.

In the “hot seat” is Ed who is one of the main architects – here’s a bit of bio on Ed:

Most recently, Ed was Principal Systems Architect at Data Domain, and a key contributor to the first and subsequent releases of Data Domain’s file system. He was responsible for innovations like the BOOST deduplication protocol and replication. Prior to Data Domain, Ed was at Zambeel and Compaq Systems Research Center. He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Computer Science, where he was an original member of the Berkeley RAID team.

These are the questions I posed to Ed:

Q. Tintri claims to have “unique per-VM insights”. Can you say what those are – how you achieve that?

Q. One of your “hidden features” is “auto-alignment” of VMs virtual disks – can you explain the problem, and how you resolve it…

Q. Tintri does away with management like LUNs, volumes, RAID groups and so on – a present a single “datastore” per-array. That’s a big change especially to storage admins – how do they react to that? Are we going to see the end of the “storage admin”, are Vmware Admins becoming storage admins – or is that something that “just happens” in the SMB/SME space anyway – people have to wear many hats…?

Q. Because Tintri is so different – do you see that best practices need to change? Does VMware need to update its recommendation based on the changes technology like Tintri introduces?

Q. Mature storage technologies – support snapshots, replication and APIs from Vmware like VAAI, VASA, VM Cloning for VDI, SRM SRA’s… Where is Tintri on the journey to supporting these – do you think you will support some but not all?

Q. Management. Let say we buy into this new simplified model. Do I buy Tintri and fill it – then order another one…? How would I manage multiple Tintri arrays – Is this end of “storage teiring” or auto-teiring – do I just put each Tintri into a jumbo datastore cluster, and have Vmware SDRS deal with that?

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

If you want to see the video in hi-resolution and full density – you can open it here.

This weeks wag is with Shanbon Snowden, a guy I first met in Boston at GestaltIT’s Tech Field Day organized by Stephen Foskett. We reconnected at VMworld for one of my “miniwags”, so it was only a matter of time until I had Shannon on the full-fat show. It turns out we have 6-degees of seperation style link. I worked on the U2PV with Chris Huss when he was at NewAge Technologies – which just so happens to be the same place Shannon works at in Kentucky.

He runs a blog at http://virtualizationinformation.com/ and he’s also on twitter too http://twitter.com/#!/shannonsnowden

This is his brief bio:
I am the Delivery Services Manager at New Age Technologies and have been focused on delivery of virtualization solutions and training for as long as VMWare has had a certification program. I was one of the first 4 public students to get the VMWare Certified Professional designation delivered via a hand-written exam. They graded 3 classes of the hand written exams, so my official VCP number is 12. Since then, I’ve performed countless virtualization delivery engagements for Fortune 100 companies and have many technical certifications.

Shannon and I discussed – the main topic areas.

Q. SRM5 is now out which supports vSphere Replication – and there are folks like VirtualSharp and Zerto out there on the market. Are these products comparable? Do you have any thoughts to share on this subject generally?

Q. How much future is there left in bog-standard virtualization – Knowing your ESX/vCenter is there much value in that job wise? Do we need to go somewhere technically for job security sakes?

Q. P2V -  Can we bring it into the present – at one time there was healthy consultancy money to made with P2V, but those days have appear to have gone. Or have they? Was P2V always a slightly risky idea driven by management who just wanted get virtual in the shortest possible time?

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

[Clicking on Glenda's photo will take you to her twitter page!]

Few folks get to be on the chinwag more than once – there are so many interesting people to talk to. So this is chinwag history in the making (drumroll please) which sees the return of the ever entertaining and insightful Glenda Canfield. Make no mistakes as a typical Texan she doesn’t mince her words! That’s something it resonates well with folks like me from the North of England – who like to call it as they see it without as little flimflam as possible.

As ever we cover a wide spectrum of thoughts, ideas, opinons and concepts – here’s my list of QA and for Glenda.

Q1. You say Citrix needs to get out virtualising OSes – Why?

Q2. You say VMware needs to get out of the “broker” business – Why?

Q3. What single points of failure does VMware View have? What can be done about them? Is Citrix XenDesktop any better?

Q4. Where are we at with user profiles? Would like to return to Windows 95 where they were optional?

Q4. BYPC, Bring your own device… or PC – I hear your writing a research paper – what have found?

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link