Preston did a great job of talking about the difference between Outage vs Outrage. It usually comes down to one letter.
I like Time Machine, and I like the way Howard explains Apple concepts in his blog posts, so this article “How does Time Machine make a backup?” really hit the spot.
My friend Vincent has made it to 100,000 hits on his blog, and I really hope he gets a lot more. He’s a smart chap.
If you’ve ever had the chance to listen to Rebecca talk, you know she’s really smart. This article on setting the technical direction for a team made for great reading.
All the kids like to talk about storage over networks, not storage area networks. What about when old meets new? Chin-fah posted an excellent article on Fibre Channel protocol in a zero trust world.
Happy New Year (to those who celebrate). Let’s get random.
Those of you who know me well will know I’m a big fan of Debian. I find running manual apt commands on my various Raspberry Pis therapeutic, but an automated approach is probably better. This is a great article on how to configure automated security updates on Debian automatically.
I miss Tru64, and Solaris for that matter. I don’t miss HP-UX. And I definitely won’t miss AIX. Read about the death of Unix over at El Reg – Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
The I3.metal is going away very soon. Remember this is from a sales perspective, VMware is still supporting the I3.metal in the wild, and you’ll still have access to deploy on-demand if required (up to a point).
The November 2022 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 24th November at the Cube (QUT) from 5pm – 7pm. It’s sponsored by Pure Storage and promises to be a great afternoon. Register here.
Raise Your Kubernetes Infrastructure Status From Zero to Hero
If your developers or platform architects are asking you for storage features commonly found in your vSphere infrastructure but targeted towards Kubernetes, you are not alone – let Portworx help you go from “I don’t know” to “No problem”!
Locking yourself into a storage solution that is dependent on specific infrastructure is a sure way to reduce efficiency and flexibility for your developers and where their applications can run – Portworx elevates you to “Hero” status by:
Providing your team a consistent, cloud native storage layer you can utilise on ANY Kubernetes platform – whether on-premises or in the public cloud
Giving you the capability to provide Kubernetes native DR and business continuity not only for your persistent storage, but all of the Kubernetes objects associated with your applications (think SRM and vMSC for Kubernetes!)
Enabling you to provide Kubernetes-aware data protection, including ransomware protection and 3-2-1 backup compliance with RBAC roles that can fit the existing policies within your organisation
Delighting your developers that need access to modern databases such as Kafka, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and more by delivering self-service deployments with best practices “built-in”, which accelerate development cycles without a dinosaur DBA or learning complex Kubernetes operators
Come join us to see how we can create your “Better Together” story with Tanzu and give you the tools and knowledge to bring agility for your developers to your underlying infrastructure for modern applications running on Kubernetes!
Mike Carpendale
Mike joined Pure Storage in April 2021 as the APJ Regions Platform Architect. He has 20+ years experience in the industry, ranging from his expert level hands-on experience of designing and managing large scale on-prem as-a-service offerings underpinned by VMware, to his more recent work in the public cloud.
PIZZA AND NETWORKING BREAK!
This will be followed by:
VMware Session
Peter Hauck – Senior Solutions Engineer
VMware
And we will be finishing off with:
Preparing for VMware Certifications
With the increase of position requirements in the last few years, certifications help you demonstrate your skills and move you a step forward on getting better jobs. In this Community Ssession we will help you understand how to prepare for a VMware certification exam and some useful tips you can use during the exam.
We will talk about:
Different types of exams
How to schedule an exam
Where to get material to study
Lessons learned from the field per type of exam
Francisco Fernandez Cardarelli – Senior Consultant (4 x VCIX)
Soft drinks and vBeers will be available throughout the evening! We look forward to seeing you there! Doors open at 5pm. Please make your way to The Cube.
Welcome to Random Short Take #74. Let’s get random.
Chris Colotti put together a great article on VMware vSphere networking. It seems like a fairly fundamental issue, but one that I’ve seen plenty of times in the field.
Pure Storage recently had its annual shindig, resulting in a few announcements, including the FlashBlade//S. Chris M. Evans goes into more detail in this post.
My friend Vincent always does a great job of breaking down tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks. He’s also very good at explaining how to get things done in a succinct fashion. Here’s an article he wrote on using the NetApp Command Line to create a SVM with a CIFS/NFS share.
Whenever I read articles about home Internet connectivity, I generally chuckle in Australian and move on. But this article from Jeff Geerling on his experience with Starlink makes for interesting reading, if only for the somewhat salty comments people felt the need to leave after the article was published. He nonetheless brings up some great points about challenges with the service, and I think the endless fawning over Musk as some kind of tech saviour needs to stop.
In the “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” category is this article from William Lam, outlining how to create a VMFS datastore on a USB device. It’s unsupported, but it strikes me that this is just the kind of crazy thing that might be useful to folks trying to move around VMs at the edge.
Karen Lopez is a really smart person, and this article over at Gestalt IT is more than just the “data is the new oil” schtick we’ve been hearing for the past few years.
Speaking of Pure Storage, Kyndryl and Pure Storage have announced a global alliance. You can read more on that here.
Mike Preston wrote a brief explainer on S3 Object Lock here. I really enjoy Mike’s articles, as I find he has a knack for breaking down complex topics into very simple to digest and consume pieces.
Remember when the movies and TV shows you watched had consistent aspect ratios? This article from Tom Andry talks about how that’s changed quite a bit in the last few years.
I’m still pretty fresh in my role, but in the future I hope to be sharing more news and articles about VMware Cloud on AWS. In the meantime, check out this article from Greg Vinton, where he covers some of his favourite parts of what’s new in the platform.
In unrelated news, this is the last week to vote for the #ITBlogAwards. You can cast your vote here.
Speaking of cloud, I enjoyed this article from Chris M. Evans on the AWS “wobble” (as he puts it) in us-east-1 recently. Speaking of articles Chris has written recently, check out his coverage of the Pure Storage FlashArray//XL announcement.
Speaking of Pure Storage, my friend Jon wrote about his experience with ActiveCluster in the field recently. You can find that here. I always find these articles to be invaluable, if only because they demonstrate what’s happening out there in the real world.
Want some press releases? Here’s one from Datadobi announcing it has released new Starter Packs for DobiMigrate ranging from 1PB up to 7PB.
Data protection isn’t just something you do at the office – it’s a problem for home too. I’m always interested to hear how other people tackle the problem. This article from Jeff Geerling (and the associated documentation on Github) was great.
John Nicholson is a smart guy, so I think you should check out his articles on benchmarking (and what folks are getting wrong). At the moment this is a 2-part series, but I suspect that could be expanded. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. He makes a great point that benchmarking can be valuable, but benchmarking like it’s 1999 may not be the best thing to do (I’m paraphrasing).
Speaking of smart people, Tom Andry put together a great article recently on dispelling myths around subwoofers. If you or a loved one are getting worked up about subwoofers, check out this article.
I had people ask me if I was doing a predictions post this year. I’m not crazy enough to do that, but Mellor is. You can read his article here.
In some personal news (and it’s not LinkedIn official yet) I recently quit my job and will be taking up a new role in the new year. I’m not shutting the blog down, but you might see a bit of a change in the content. I can’t see myself stopping these articles, but it’s likely there’ll be less of the data protection howto articles being published. But we’ll see. In any case, wherever you are, stay safe, happy holidays, and see you on the line next year.
Oostveen describes Pure Storage as a “software company that sells storage arrays”. The focus at Pure has always been on giving the customer an exceptional experience, which invariably means controlling the stack from end-to-end. To that end, Pure as-a-Service could be described more as a feat of financial, rather than technical, engineering. You’re “billed on actual consumption, with minimum commitments starting at 50 TiB”. Also of note is the burst capability, allowing a level of comfort in understanding both the floor and the ceiling of the consumption levels you may decide to consume. You can choose what kind of storage you want – block, file, or object. You also get access to orchestration tools to manage everything. You also get access to Evergreen Storage, so your hardware stays up to date, and it’s available in four easy to understand tiers of storage.
Why Is It?
In this instance, I think the what isn’t as interesting as the why. Oostveen and I spoke about the need for a true utility model to enable companies to deliver on the promise of digital transformation. He noted that many of the big transactions that were occurring were CFO to CFO engagements, rather than the CTO deciding on the path forward for applications and infrastructure. In short, price is always a driver, and simplicity is also very important. Pure has worked to ensure that the offering delivers on both of those fronts.
Thoughts
IT is complicated nowadays. You’re dealing with cloud, SaaS, micro-SaaS, distributed, and personalised IT. You’re invariably trying to accommodate the role of data in your organisation, and you’re no doubt facing challenges with getting applications running not just in your core, but also in the cloud and the edge. We talk a lot about how infrastructure can be used to solve a number of the challenges facing organisations, but I have no doubt that if most business leaders never had to deal with infrastructure and the associated challenges it presents they’d be over the moon. Offerings like Pure as-a-Service go some of the way to elevating that conversation from speeds and feeds to something more aligned with business outcomes. It strikes me that these kinds of offerings will have great appeal to both the folks in charge of finance inside big enterprises and the potentially the technical folk trying to keep the lights on whilst a budget decrease gets lobbed at them every year.
I’ve written about Pure enthusiastically in the past because I think the company has a great grasp of some of the challenges that many organisations are facing nowadays. I think that the expansion into other parts of the cloud ecosystem, combined with a willingness to offer flexible consumption models for solutions that were traditionally offered as lease or buy is great. But I don’t think this makes sense without everything that Pure has done previously as a company, from the focus on getting the most out of All-Flash hardware, to a relentless drive for customer satisfaction, to the willingness to take a chance on solutions that are a little outside the traditional purview of a storage array company.
As I’ve said many times before, IT can be hard. There are a lot of things that you need to consider when evaluating the most suitable platform for your applications. Pure Storage isn’t the only game in town, but in terms of storage vendors offering flexible and powerful storage solutions across a variety of topologies, it seems to be a pretty compelling one, and definitely worth checking out.
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