[symple_box color=”yellow” fade_in=”false” float=”center” text_align=”left” width=””] Disclaimer: As a Virtualization Field Day 4 delegate all of my flight, travel, accommodations, eats, and drinks are paid for. However I do not receive any compensation nor am I required to write anything in regards to the event or the sponsors. This is done at my own discretion.[/symple_box]
In a previous post I highlighted 4 of the 8 sponsors taking part in Virtualization Field Day 4 coming up January 14th through 16th in Austin, Texas. Now it’s time to move on to the final four! As mentioned in the previous post, the Tech Field Day events would certainly not be possible without the support of the sponsors so a big thanks goes out to all 8 who are participating this round. Without further ado, let’s get to it…
Simplivity
If we look at the hyper-convergence market today it would be somewhat of an understatement to say that it is “red hot”. Simplivity, along with their competitor Nutanix, and fellow VFD sponsor Scale Computing have really changed the way companies are deploying in house IT. Even VMware has jumped on board by providing oems a go to market strategy leveraging their EVO:Rail hyper-convergence reference architecture. It’s a fair statement to say that hyper convergence is here to stay and a big part of that is due to technology and material that Simplivity has produced. Their product, the OmniCube provides customer with a scaleable, building block type architecture while encapsulating the server compute, storage, network, switching into a single pool of resources. I’ve seen Simplivity’s solution in action many times during tradeshows and VMworld, but never “out in the wild.”. Honestly, I think they have a great solution and there are a lot of things I like about it – The global source side dedup is awesome, compression is great. I also like the overall way Simplivity goes to market, by allowing commodity x86 hardware to take their software, along with their custom built hardware accelerator PCIx card and essentially end up with a build your own adventure type deployment. The hyper convergence market is “the in thing” right now so I can’t wait to see what Simplivity has in store for VFD4. Simplivity has dabbled with some of the Tech Field Day happenings in previous years, such as the SDDC Symposium and the TFD Extra’s that are held during VMworld but this will be their first full go at a full Tech Field Day event.
SolarWinds
What more can we say about Tech Field Day and SolarWinds?!?! They have been a long time supporter of the event participating in (I’m using abbreviations since there are a lot of them) NFD1, NFD3, NFD5, NFD6, TFD4, TFD6, TFD7, and TFD9 – That’s quite a resume when it comes to sponsorship. As a company I really respect the way SolarWinds handles the community surrounding them. I had the chance a few months back to participate as a thwack ambassador and I can’t give this community enough praise! They are engaged, helpful and smart! Be sure to check out thwack if you get a chance! But, on to what matters – SolarWinds and their technology. This being a day about virtualization one can only assume that SolarWinds will speak to their management software, cleverly titled “Virtualization Manager” I’ve personally never used the product but have seen it in action many times during demos, webinars, etc.. and honestly if you are utilizing both VMware and Hyper-V in your environment and looking for a monitoring/management solution I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend that you at least check out SolarWinds. They have a ton of fully customizable alerts and reports to help customers track things like CPU ready, Memory balooning as well a complete section to help during capacity planning by finding under and over sized VMs within the environment. All this, integrating with other traditional SolarWinds products such as Server & Application Manager (SAM). If you have other SolarWinds products in your environment, Virtualization Manager may be a perfect fit. Whatever SolarWinds is presenting at VFD4 I will be all ears and for sure have the info posted here.
StorMagic
When it comes to StorMagic they are one of those companies that I’ve heard of before, but have never really looked too deeply at. Honestly, up until I began checking them out in more detail for this post I had assumed that they were “just another VSA vendor”. And in some ways, well, I’m right. But in a lot of ways, I’m wrong. StorMagics’ product, SvSAN is indeed a VSA, but not “just another VSA”. SvSAN seems to serve a distinct type of customer. A customer with a large centralized infrastructure and many remote/branch offices that it supports. In a perfect world these remote sites would have crazy awesome fibre connections back to the central office and all the applications, VMs and services would be driven from the central offices datacenter. In the real world we have crappy WAN links and “needy” applications – These needy applications require themselves to run inside of these branch offices in order to provide low latency and meet performance requirements. Perfect world, we have the budget and infrastructure to throw at this problem – SANs in every remote office. Real world, there’s no money! Back to the perfect world, we’d have IT staff in every office babysitting all of this stuff. Real world, we don’t, we have staff sitting in our central offices running rampant, having the person that answers the phone offsite reboot servers for them! SvSAN really helps bridge these perfect and real worlds. By utilizing the SvSAN VSA in the remote sites we are able to provide shared storage to our remote locations in an active-active fashion with as little as 2 nodes all managed centrally. Watch for more on StorMagic and SvSAN next week.
VMTurbo
I’m pretty pumped to see VMTurbo at VFD4 since I know that one of the presenters, Eric Wright (twitter/blog) will be representing. The thing is Eric, along with Angelo Luciani and myself are co-leaders of the Toronto VMUG – which means we have seen countless presentations and sessions sitting side by side – It will be definitely cool to see Eric on the other side of the fence and I’m sure he will knock it out of the park. As far as VMTurbo go, like many other players they participate in the operations/management end of things. You can truly see that they have put a lot of development, time, and efffort into their flagship product Operations Manager. OM, like others, is a monitoring solution – looking for performance issues and troublesome areas in your environment, and making recommendations on how to alleviate them. OM though takes a drastically different approach than most monitoring tools. VMTurbo takes your virtual data centre and transforms it into the what they call an “economic market”. Picture this, your resources, things like memory, cpu, etc – these are all in demand, and they all have a cost. The cost of these items go up and down depending on availability. Not much memory around, cost goes up – have an abundance of memory, well, things are going to be a bit cheaper. The VMs are the consumers running around buying up all this merchandise. And depending on the products recommendations, say a VM was looking to move from one host to another, it may or may not be a good idea. Things may cost more over on that other host, so in turn, althought it is experiencing issues, it simply may be more cost prohibitive to stay right where it is. VMTurbo has been around a while, and they are a big player when it comes to community participation. If you are looking for a good primer, check out the videos from VFD3. Again I’m excited to see Eric, excited to see VMTurbo, and excited to learn more about the interesting model they have.
See you in Texas!
So, there you have it. Between the above and this post we have a brief look into the 8 sponsors who will be participating in Virtualization Field Day 4 next week (Jan 14-16) in Austin, TX. Just simply reviewing old TFD youtube videos has really got me pumped and excited and I can barely wait to sit at those tables amongst all the brain power that is attending.
If you want to watch live, you can – just head to the VFD4 landing page during the event as all sessions are live streamed. Also, don’t forget to watch and participate via twitter using the #VFD4 hashtag.
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