And another installment of Friday Shorts – a spot for me to share some awesomeness I’ve found on the interwebs, upcoming events and info from some awesome blog sponsors, and just random thoughts around events and news that might not quite fit within the niche of this blog – basically a mashup of my brain!
First up – free passes to VMworld
VMworld is sneaking up faster than you think! Have you got your conference pass yet? If not why not help ease the pain on your company by letting VMTurbo pick up the conference pass for you? Along with ensuring performance and maximizing efficiency in your data center the folks at VMTurbo are doing their best put a full VMworld US conference pass in the hands of three people – you can sign up here and the drawings for the three passes take place on May 29th, June 19th, and July 10th! Good luck!
More freebies from Unitrends
So VMTurbo has you covered for the conference pass how’s about getting a little money to help cover the travel costs from Unitrends (trust me you will need it – the prices of hotels are crazy this year in San Fran). Just this week Unitrends released Unitrends Free – a completely free, full featured backup solution for up to 1TB of data – I reviewed it here if you missed it! Anyways, asides from putting a completely free backup product into your lab or data center Unitrends has a gig going right now where you can win a $1500 Visa Giftcard, just for downloading and registering FREE software. You have till the end of June on this one so best get signed up!
Upcoming Starwind webinar
Starwind Software, a long time mwpreston.net sponsor and creator of Starwind Virtual SAN have a webinar coming up on May 20 titled Snapshots vs Replication – chosing the right data protection strategy, presented by Chris Evans. If your interested I definitely recommend checking it out as making the choice between snapshots and replication and/or both are key in developing a fool proof data protection strategy! Also, if you haven’t checked out Starwind Virtual SAN I would take a look at it as well. I’ve used their free version in the lab numerous times for different projects!
EMC virtual VNX
Conference season is among us and with that comes a slew of releases and announcements. One that caught my attention coming out of EMCworld was the release of a community edition of the VNXe software. Shipped as an OVA you can simply load it into your environment and get the functionality and software stack of a VNXe, but without the dedicated storage hardware and controllers. I love messing around with all different types of storage and VSA’s in the lab so I’ll for sure be looking at this a little closer!
Au reviour les habitants
And last but not least, and certainly the saddest news of the week is the second round exit from the Stanley Cup playoffs for my beloved habs! Honestly the bleu, blanc, et rouge had a great season, picking up 110 points and finishing 2nd overall in the eastern conference. Their goalie, Carey Price had a career year – picking up nominations for both the Hart (League MVP) and Vezina (Best Goalie), and more than likely will take both these trophies home this summer. That said expectations around hockey in Montreal are high and a second round exit overshadows all the success that they had! Anyways we know Carey probably doesn’t care about those two trophies and is now out of the running for the only one he wanted. All that said the Habs have a great core, and they are young – so hopefully we see improvements for years to come – they will need to pick up another top 6 forward though if they want to go anywhere in the post season! At the end, they are now on the links and hopefully that means a little more time for me to work on this blog 🙂 Au revoir! Ole!
