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.

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…

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 vendorwag is with Nimble Storage – who have been on my radar for sometime – I seem to keep on bumping into the same folks at every VMUG I speak at in the US! I think this might start a theme because I’ve have been chatting to the guys from TinTri and Astute as well.

I spoke to Ajay Singh who is the VP Product Management at Nimble. Here’s his bio…

Ajay is responsible for product management and technical marketing at Nimble Storage. Ajay has over 15 years of experience in data storage spanning roles in product management, marketing and engineering. Prior to Nimble, Ajay led a team of Product Managers with a broad portfolio of products at NetApp. He also held product management and product marketing roles at Decru and Logitech. Earlier in his career Ajay worked on disk drive technologies at Quantum Corporation as well as the Data Storage Systems Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Ajay holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as well as M.S. and B.Tech. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and the Indian Institute of Technology respectively.

I spoke to the guys at Nimble, and came up with the following questions – but as ever the fluid nature of the vendorwag took us in other uncharted lands too!

Q. Can you outline briefly how Nimble Storage utilizes flash, how does it make it different from say NetApp and their PAM Cards???

Q. How easy do you think it would be for Nimbles competitors to duplicate your design?

Q. I understand Nimble Storage comes with specialist “templates” can you explain what they are, and what would the template for VMware do?

Q. Can you tell me more about Nimbles plans for integration with VMware – VAAI? VASA, SRM? vCenter Plug-ins, VDI Rapid Clones – all things VMware customers have come to expect from their storage partners, how about Nimble?

Q. What are Nimbles plans for the future – NFS as well as iSCSI?

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

I’ve been meaning to have vKernel on the vendorwag for sometime (well, months and months actually). Back in June I had chance to hear them present at the Boston TechField Day arranged by Stephen Foskett. So it was an opportunity to become reacquainted again. On top of watching them present at the TFD, I made a point of doing a private webex with Bryan as part of the prep for this weeks vendorwag. To be honest it has more of a chinwag feel – as we dispensed with the PowerPoint-Elevator-Pitch/Demo, and just launched in to the QA directly.

Firstly, a bit about Brian:
A 15+ year high-tech veteran, Bryan has spent the last 8 years working in server and storage companies focused on virtualization technologies. Semple comes to VKernel from NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) where he was the general manager of the storage virtualization business unit. Under his leadership, the group experienced record growth, expanded engineering operations to India, and built global awareness for NetApp’s industry leading storage virtualization solutions. Prior to NetApp, Bryan was VP of Marketing at Onaro where he established the company as a leader in storage management software and built the marketing processes that supported the company’s profitability and successful acquisition by NetApp in 2008. Before Onaro, Bryan was the VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at server blade virtualization pioneer Egenera. At Egenera, Bryan worked with early adopters of infrastructure and server virtualization technologies in the financial services industry as the company scaled from one to several hundred customers. Early career experience includes various sales and marketing management positions at FairMarket, Trellix and Sybase. Bryan holds a BS in Systems Engineering from the US Naval Academy and an MBA from Stanford University.

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.

Anyway, here’s my list of questions:

Q. At the techfield day you demo’d the “VM Reservation” feature – can you explain what it does, and how it came developed over time…

Q. Recently, whilst I was the San Deigo VMUG I had chat with a member there, about his over specified VMs from a P2V that was done some years ago. How does vkernel find wasted resources and recoup them so they can be used else where (Good chance to mention waste finding, zombie VMs, and abandoned VMs)

Q. What barriers are you seeing to the take up of chargeback?

Q. Some folks seem overwhelmed by the alarms and alerts in vCenter – what are you doing to help them…?

Q. How do you see what vKernel does in relation to the cloud – what sort of information do you think cloud consumers will want to see – should they even care?

Q. What’s your take on VMware vRAM licensing – I see you wrote an article all about it?

This weeks vendorwag has been in the making for sometime – so I was able to fit into my schedule despite my recent haitus. Despite which I didn’t want to keep the VirtualSharp guys hanging on waiting for me to get my virtual butt back in the saddle. I first came across VirtualSharp at the Leeds VMUG in the Spring – and was very intrigued by them. There product covers the world of DR automation for virtual machines – so I guess you can see why I was interested in them given my background with VMware SRM.

My wag was with Phil Maynard who is the Senior Director, Product Marketing. I asked Phil range of questions about their ReliableDR product including:

Q1. A lot of customers don’t think they need software to automate their DR recovery process for virtual infrastructure. They say they can do it all themselves via PowerCLI scripting – Why are they wrong?

Q2. One of the main USPs seems to me your service orientated approach. How do you detect my service have started correctly & are functioning.

Q3. Can your product keep a history of known-good tests, and roll-back a live environment by factors of hours, or days… How does that work?

Q4. What special requirements are needed at the Protected & Recovery Site?

Q5. Do you physical to virtual conversion – what software do I need to get this working…

Q6. You develop your own “Storage Adapters” to speak the array vendors. What advantages does this development model give you?

Q7. VirtualSharp can work within a single-site. What’s the usage case for doing this?

Q8. In v2.5 you released your own Host Based Replication. How does this differ from SAN Replication?

Q9. Do you automate failback? If not, why not – What future functionality to do think virtualsharp possessing.

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 vendorwag is with Alon Yaffe of InstallFree – and its part of theme of podcasts that I have been doing with Application Virtualization vendors. Some of these guys picked up on a recent TechTarget article I did about Microsoft’s stance on virtualizing IE6. But I’m interested in the general usage case of application virtualization. Alon is a seasoned Product Management and Marketing professional with extensive experience in systems management, software configuration management and client virtualization. As ever I worked with InstallFree to learn more about their technology, before us embarking on the Q&A session. Since the recording there has been some developments – and it looks as if InstallFree will have a new release out which add this functionality:

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.

Here’s my list of questions which I asked Alon to answer…

Q1. When you “encapsulate” you spin up your own “virtual environment” – it seems to me you have a particularly unique way of capturing software – could you explain how you do this, and why? A lot of application virtualization vendors recommend a clean machine every time you capture an application – is that the case with InstallFree? If your using application virtualization should it matter which OS it runs on.

Q2. You have this concept of “Shell Shadow” – can you explain what that is…?

Q3. How do you advertise the applications to users – and do you handle user rights and permissions? Do you have a big management system and backend to setup, configure and maintain…

Q4. Going forward some application virtualization vendors imagine a day when users might “self-provision” and “self-encapsulate” applications – what does that phrase mean to you?

This weeks vendorwag is a bit delayed, you might have noticed there was no chinwag or vendorwag last week. That’s because I was busy in Salt Lake City/Portland presenting and meeting with customers for mstates.com

Anyway, this week vendorwagggie continues a new theme which is all about application virtualization, and topic that received some traction after I aim a broadside at Microsoft’s policy on not-supporting the virtualization of IE6.

My vendorwaggie is Lee Murphy of Spoon (formerly Xenocode) – Lee Murphy is a Partner Integration Engineer at Spoon.  He helps organizations like Autodesk and the US Marine Corps migrate their software from traditional installed applications to cloud-based virtual applications. Spoon had recent new direction, where they continue to service their enterprize business – whilst at the same time becoming provider for applications that any user can subscribe to, and have common applications streamed to their desktop. Here’s a bit of blub:

Named by Virtualization Review as one of the top two companies to follow in 2011, Spoon is a pioneer in application virtualization and cloud computing technologies. Spoon enables users to launch desktop applications from the web with no install, so you can test and use applications instantly, wherever you are. Today Spoon.net has over a thousand apps available for launch from the cloud with a simple browser plugin. Imagine what’s coming next. Spoon technology helps enterprises centrally manage, update, and deploy applications. Spoon Server lets you host and manage cloud-based apps on your own networks and servers.  The easy-to-use Spoon Studio tool lets you convert existing applications into virtual applications that are never installed, but behave and interact like installed applications. Spoon virtualization runs applications in an isolated environment for conflict-free execution, and can be distributed on public and private clouds.

I spent sometime with the Spoon guys to learn more about their technology, and then we lined up the vendorwag for a recording. Here’s the questions I asked them:

Q. You recently had a company name change designed to make your more “consumer” friendly. Does that mean Spoon intends to focus on the mass-market more, than enterprise IT market?

Q. Would you say that “application virtualization” like say “replication” in the storage arena is no longer a product, but a commodity? With Spoon online isn’t the model changing to one of selling service than selling software…?

Q. It seems with most application virtualization – its up to the end user to do a lot of leg work to find out the best way to “capture” an application. What is Spoon doing to help?

Q. How does Spoon advertise/publish the final application to the users environment. Do you see this changing in the future.

Q. If we thinking about applications delivered from the web or cloud – it isn’t just about the application – its about data as well. Is Spoon investigating opportunities in this direction too?

Q. Many of the application virtualization vendor say you must ‘record’ an app on the OS you intend to run the virtualization application. Exactly how virtualized are virtual applications?

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 vendorwag is with company called Browsium, who have a product called “UniBrows” (if you listen closely I fluff my ‘lines’ and almost get these the wrong way round!) – and I will be speaking to Matt Heller who is the CEO & Founder. Unibrows has been in development for sometime – and today they formally released the product for general availability – so it’s a bit of scoop for me to have them on my site on the very same day!

This starts a new theme in the vendorwags which is all about application compatibility and application virtualization. Things seemed to get really fired up recently when I wrote an article about Microsoft’s policy towards using tools to run Internet Explorer 6 on the new Windows 7 platform. I must have touched a raw nerve because it generated a lot of traffic on twitter, and inspired a number of vendors to approach me to explain their technologies.

UniBrows focus is on IE6 “problem” and may offer an interest route out of the compatibility issue – without flouting Microsoft support statement. Of course, the companies plans don’t begin and end with IE6 – and future product functionality and plans are discussed towards the end.

Anyway, here’s a bit background on Matt Heller from Browsium’s website (that’s where I grabbed this picture too – which makes a change from the normal corporate photos!)

Matt  founded Browsium, Inc. after spending several years working with Microsoft customers on Internet Explorer. There he recognized the need for browser related tools and solutions to enable business customers to more effectively manage the browser environment. He started his work with Microsoft during the release of Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP2, and has gained extensive knowledge of Internet Explorer as well as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. Prior to Browsium, Matt founded Text’d, LLC a technical services firm building wireless search platform tools, as well as technical product management and marketing services.

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.

These are the questions I asked Matt

Q. It’s often been said that problem with making IE6 run on new OSes is because it was so tightly coupled to WinXP. Would you agree?
Q. Microsoft seems to be hostile to supporting IE6 as almost a matter of faith – why might that be?
Q. Can Unibrows deal with multiple website with multiple demands for different plug-ins
Q. …and does it support RDS on Windows 2008 for Terminal Services style users?
Q. What are the downsides of using conventional Application Virtualization (ThinApp, Spoon etc) to fix this IE6 problem?
Q. Unibrows seems quite a niche product, fixing a particular issue at this point time – what secures the long-term future of Browsium, Inc?