Category Archives: VMworld

VMware – VMworld 2019 – HBI3487BUS – Rethink Data Protection & Management for VMware

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “HBI3487BUS – Rethink Data Protection & Management for VMware”, presented by Curt Hayes (Cloud and Data Center Engineer, Regeneron) and Mike Palmer (Chief Product Officer, Druva). You can grab a PDF copy of my notes from here.

 

The World is Changing

Cloud Storage Costs Continue To Decline

  • 67 price decreases in AWS storage with CAGR of (60%) – AWS
  • 68% (110+) of countries have Data protection and privacy legislation – United Nations
  • 40% of IT will be “Versatilists” by 2021 – Gartner
  • 54% of CIOs believe streamlining storage is best opportunity for cost optimisation – ESG
  • 80% of enterprises will migrate away and close their on-premises DCs by 2025 – Gartner
  • 256% of increase in demand for Data scientists in last 5 years – Indeed

Druva’s 4 Pillars of Value

  • Costs Decrease – storage designed to optimise performance and cost reduces per TB costs, leaving more money for innovation
  • Eliminate Effort – Capacity management, patching, upgrades, certification, training, professional services gone.
  • Retire HW/SW silos – Druva builds in data services: DR, Archive, eDiscovery and more
  • Put Data to work – eliminating silos allows global tagging. Searchability, access and governance.

The best work you can do is when you don’t have to do it.

Curt (customer) says “[d]ata is our greatest asset”.

Regeneron’s Drivers to Move to Cloud

Challenges

Opportunities

Ireland backup platform is nearing end-of-life

Regeneron has a perfect opportunity to consider cloud as an alternative solution for backup and DR

3 distinct tools for managing backups

Harmonize backup tool set

Expansion and upgrades are costly and time-consuming

Minimize operational overhead

Need to improve business continuity posture

Instantly enable offsite backups & disaster recovery requirement

Scientists have tough time accessing the data they need

Advanced search capabilities to offer greater value added data services

Regeneron’s TCO Analysis

Druva Enables Intelligent Tiering in the Cloud

Traditional, expensive, and inflexible on-premises storage

  • Limited and expensive to scale and store
  • Complex administration
  • Lack of visibility and data silos
  • Tradeoff between cost and visibility for Long Term Retention requirements

Modern, scalable and cost-effective multi-tier storage

  • Scalable, efficient cloud story
  • Intelligent progressive tiering of data for maximum cost effiency with minimum effort
  • Support cloud bursting, hot/cold data
  • Cost efficient storage on most innovative AWS tiers
  • Enable reporting / audit on historical data

Regeneron’s Adoption of Cloud Journey

  • DC modernisation / consolidation
  • Workload migration to the cloud – Amazon EC2
  • Simplify and streamline backup / recovery and DR
  • Longer-term retention for advanced data mining
  • Protecting cloud applications – Sharepoint, O365, etc
  • Future – do more with data

 

How Did Druva help?

Basics

  • Cheaper
  • Simpler
  • Faster
  • Unified protection

Future Proof

  • Scalable
  • Ease of integration
  • No training
  • Business continuity

Data Value

  • Search
  • Data Mining
  • Analytics

Looking Beyond Data Protection …

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I think the folks at Druva have been doing some cool stuff lately, and chances are quite high that I’ll be writing more about them in the future. There’s a good story with their cloud-native architecture, and it was nice to hear how a customer leveraged them to do things better than they had been doing previously.

Two things really stood out to me during this session. The first was the statement “[t]he best work you can do is when you don’t have to do it”. I’ve heard it said before that the best storage operation is one you don’t have to do, and I think we sometimes lose site of how this approach can help us get stuff done in a more efficient fashion, ultimately leading to focussing our constrained resources elsewhere.

The second was the idea of looking beyond data protection. The “secondary storage” market is riding something of a gravy train at the moment, with big investment from the VC funds in current and next-generation data protection (management?) solutions. There’s been some debate over how effective these solutions are at actually deriving value from that secondary data, but you’d have to think they’re in a prime position to succeed. I’m curious to see just what shape that value takes when we all start to agree on the basic premise.

Sponsored sessions aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I like hearing from customers about how it’s worked out well for them. And the cool thing about VMworld is that there’s a broader ecosystem supporting VMware across a number of different technology stacks. This makes for a diverse bunch of sessions, and I think it makes for an extremely interesting vendor conference. If you want to learn a bit more about what Druva have been up to, check out my post from Tech Field Day 19 here, and you can also find a useful overview of the product here. Good session. 3.5 stars.

VMware – VMworld 2019 – HBI3516BUS – Scaling Virtual Infrastructure for the Enterprise: Truths, Beliefs and the Real World

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

These are my rough notes from “HBI3516BUS – Scaling Virtual Infrastructure for the Enterprise: Truths, Beliefs and the Real World” was a sponsored panel session hosted by George Crump (of Storage Switzerland fame) and sponsored by Tintri by DDN. The panellists were:

JP: Hyper-V is not really for the enterprise. Configuration, and automation were a challenge. Tintri made it easier to deal with the hypervisor.

JD: You put a bunch of disks and connect it up to what you want to. It’s really simple to setup. “Why would you want to go complex if you didn’t have to?”

MB: When we had block storage, we were beholden to the storage team. We’ve never had problems with their [Tintri’s] smallest hybrid arrays.

AA: Back in the ESX 2.5 days – single LUN per VM. We would buy our arrays half-populated – ready to grow. We’re now running 33 – 34 devices. Tintri was great with QoS for VMs. It became a great troubleshooting tool for VMware.

GC: Reporting and analytics with Tintri has always been great.

MB: We use Tintri analytics to create reports for global infrastructure. Tintri will give you per-VM allocation by default. Performance like a Tivo – you can go back and look at analytics at a very granular level.

GC: How did the addition of new arrays go with Global Center?

MB: We manage our purchases based on capacity or projects. 80 – 85% we consider additional capacity. Global Center has a Pools function. It does a storage vMotion “like” feature to move data between arrays. There’s no impact.

JP: We used a UCS chassis, Tintri arrays, and Hyper-V hypervisor. We used a pod architecture. We knew how many users we wanted to host per pod. We have 44000 users globally. VDI is the only thing the bank uses.

AA: We’re more of a compute / core based environment, rather than users.  One of the biggest failings of Tintri is that it just works. When you’re not causing problems – people aren’t paying attention to it.

MB: HCI in general has a problem with very large VMs.

AA: We use a lot of scripting, particularly on the Red Hat (RHV) side of things. Tintri is fixing a lot of those at a different level.

GC: What would you change?

JP: I would run VMware.

MB: The one thing that can go wrong is the network. It was never a standardised network deployment. We had different network people in different regions doing different things.

JP: DR in the cloud. How do you do bank infrastructure in the cloud? Can we DR into the cloud? Tested Tintri replicating into Azure.

AA: We’re taking on different people. Moving “up” the stack.

Consistency in environments. It’s still a hard thing to do.

Wishlist?

  • Containers
  • A Virtual Appliance

 

Thoughts

Some folks get upset about these sponsored sessions at VMworld. I’ve heard it said before that they’re nothing more than glorified advertising for the company that sponsors the session. I’m not sure that it’s really any different to a vendor holding a four day conference devoted to themselves, but some people like to get ornery about stuff like that. One of my favourite things about working with technology is hearing from people out in the field about how they use that technology to do their jobs better / faster / more efficiently.

Sure, this session was a bit of a Tintri fan panel, but I think the praise is warranted. I’ve written enthusiastically in the past about how I thought Tintri has really done some cool stuff in terms of storage for virtualisation. I was sad when things went south for them as a company, but I have hopes that they’ll recover and continue to innovate under the control of DDN.

When everything I’ve been hearing from the keynote speakers at this conference revolved around cloud-native tools and digital transformation, it was interesting to come across a session where the main challenges still involved getting consistent, reliable and resilient performance from block storage to serve virtual desktop workloads to the enterprise. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be looking at what’s happening with Kubernetes, etc, but I think there’s still room to understand what’s making these bigger organisations tick in terms of successful storage infrastructure deployments.

Useful session. 4 stars.

VMware – VMworld 2019 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as an attendee at VMworld US 2019. Apologies if it’s a bit dry but I’m just trying to make it clear what I received during this event to ensure that we’re all on the same page as far as what I’m being influenced by. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week. Whilst every attendee’s situation is different, I was paid by my employer to be at this event.

 

Saturday

My wife kindly dropped me off at the airport. I flew Qantas economy class from BNE – SYD – SFO courtesy of my employer (Digital Sense). My taxi to the hotel was also covered by my employer. I stayed at The Fairmont on Nob Hill. This was also covered by my employer. On Saturday night we went out and fought valiantly against jet-lag.

 

Sunday

On Sunday I went to the conference venue and picked up my VMworld backpack (containing a notepad, pen, and water bottle). I was also given a VMworld-branded pop socket because I’d uploaded my photo for my badge to the portal earlier.

On Sunday afternoon I attended a VMware Cloud Provider Technical Advisory Board (TAB) Meeting. Lunch consisted of rice, chicken, fish, and salad. My manager saved the day by fetching real flat white coffees from Bluestone Lane. During the break I had some coffee and a choc-chip cookie. As we left we were all given a VMware cloud provider platform polo shirt and Keen wireless charging desk clock.

That night there was an attendee welcome reception in the Solutions Exchange. I had 2 Sapporo beers, some shrimp and some cheese. I also picked up:

I then headed over to the VMunderground party at Tabletop Tap House. I caught up with a few people and helped myself to 2 Coronas, 1 Firestone 805 and some bruschetta.

 

Monday

Before the general session I grabbed some coffee and a muffin from the Square. I also managed to grab a vExpert gift bag, consisting of one of those drawstring bags, a vExpert 2019 pin and sticker, and a Raspberry Pi 3. I then swung by the VMUG stand and picked up my VMUG leader gift – a nice leather notepad folio.

For lunch I had one of the boxed turkey sandwiches.

For dinner a group of use met at Osha Thai Restaurant. We convinced them to let us share plates from the set menu, and I had a bit of everything. For appetizers we had:

  • Kobe beef wasabi roll with carrot, celery and mint
  • Miang Kham Shrimp – lettuce wrapped with shrimp, ginger, lime, roasted coconut, peanut, fresh chilli, and coconut herb caramel.
  • Vegetarian crispy roll – silver noodle, shiitake mushroom, cabbage and carrot served with sweet and sour plum sauce
  • Tuna Tower – yellow fin tuna tartare with mango, avocado and sriracha sesame oil

There was also a really tasty Shrimp Tom-Kha coconut soup. And for the main course they served:

  • Volcanic Beef – wok-fried grilled premium USDA flank steak with Thai basil, bell pepper in lava sauce
  • Chu-chi salmon – pan-seared salmon fillet served with “Chu-Chi” fragrant and flavourful red curry
  • Pad Thai – Classic Pad Thai noodles, tamarind reduction, peanut with choice of chicken or tofu
  • Country chicken – stir-fried lightly battered chicken with cashew, onion, garlic and honey-ginger sauce

It was all really nice. These people put down their credit cards to pay for it:

Thanks to Keith Townsend for organising the evening. I also had 3 Singha beers. I took a ride-sharing service paid for by Stephen Foskett and walked from his hotel back to mine.

 

Tuesday

On Tuesday morning I was fortunate enough to be selected to attend a vExpert breakfast with Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron at Grill in the St Regis hotel. I had 2 cups of coffee, and the “Local Farm” egg sandwich, with a scramble of organic Petaluma farmed eggs, Hobbs smoked black pepper bacon, cheddar cheese, and sourdough bread. We were also given a Cohesity mug that surprisingly survived the flight home. Regular readers of the blog will know I’m a fan of Cohesity and this was a great opportunity to learn more about Mohit.

After the general session I did another whip around the Solutions Exchange and picked up:

I had the box lunch again, which consisted of a chilli rubbed beef torta sandwich with avocado, black been puree, grilled onions, roaster tomatoes and cotija cheese on teller bread, a lemon bar dessert, and an apple. Later in the afternoon I stopped by Super Duper as I knew I wouldn’t have much time for dinner in the evening. I had the Super Burger with cheese, and a Pilsner. My arteries did not thank me.

I then headed over to the Dell Technologies Cloud & VMware VeloCloud MeetUp at The Grid on 4th Street. I had 2 Holy Ghost Pilsner beers and Dell very kindly gave me a DJI Osmo Pocket camera and 32GB Sandisk microSD card. Big thanks to Konnie for having me along.

I then headed back to my hotel and Howard Marks swung by in a cab to take me to The Orpheum to see Hamilton. I now understand what all of the fuss is about. Big thanks to John White at Expedient for the tickets. I took a ride-sharing service back to the hotel – this was paid for by Becky Elliot.

 

Wednesday

On Wednesday morning I walked down to the venue with Becky. We stopped at Starbucks and I had an egg, bacon, and cheese sandwich – it was just what I needed. I attended two Tech Field Day Extra sessions in the morning, and had 2 coffees and some extremely tasty Baklava (provided by Al Rasheed). For lunch we had Mexican, consisting of corn tortillas, rice & beans, house made carnitas, cheese quesadillas, sour cream, guacamole, salsa, and house made churros.

After lunch I headed back to the Solutions Exchange for a final walk around and picked up:

  • A Druva shirt;
  • Some stickers, a cable organizer, and a glasses cleaner from Apstra;
  • Some more Gorilla Guides and stickers from ActualTech Media; and
  • A Faction T-shirt (one of my favourites).

I then attended a 3-hour VCPP APJ Roundtable event at the W Hotel. I helped myself to some bottled water while I was there.

For dinner I caught up with some of the Tech Field Day crew at Thirsty Bear. This is a taps-style place, and I had devilled eggs, pulled pork empanadas, buffalo chicken empanadas, bacon and corn flatbread, and bacon-wrapped shrimp. I also had 3 Kolsch beers. We then retreated across the road to the bar at the W Hotel where I had 1 Cal Lager. This was paid for by Stephen Foskett. I then took a ride-sharing service back to the hotel with Becky Elliot. This was paid for by Becky.

 

Thursday

On Thursday my colleagues and I attended a NetApp EBC in Santa Clara. NetApp paid for our transport to and from the city. We had breakfast there, consisting of coffee, potato gems, bacon, quiche and a muffin. We were also given a NetApp-branded notepad and socks. For lunch we had 6 cheese mac and cheese, beef short rib, grilled chicken, mashed potato, salad, and water.

I had 2 Stella Artois beers and some crumbed prawns during the happy hour. We then headed to Birk’s Restaurant for dinner. I had 3 Firestone Pivo beers, blackened ribeye and mashed potatoes, and a shrimp cocktail for dinner. This was paid for by NetApp.

When we returned to the hotel we checked out the Tonga Room. I had a Fog Lifter cocktail, which seemed to have a lot of rum and crushed ice in it. This was paid for by my colleague.

 

Friday

We went for breakfast at Lori’s Diner and I had the Blues Burger. The blue cheese worked pretty well I thought. We then headed over to Pier 39 to check out some of the tourist shops and ended up having lunch at the Barrel House Tavern in Sausalito. I had the Tartare Tacos consisting of four wonton tacos (2 ahi tuna and 2 salmon tartare) with avocado mousse, summer slaw, chili oil, soy lime vinaigrette, and chili aioli. It was really nice. I also had 3 Kolsch beers. Once we were back at the hotel I took a cab to SFO and flew home via LAX. Please now enjoy this photo of a baseball card with my likeness on it – thanks Rubrik!

VMware – VMworld 2019 – HBI2537PU – Cloud Provider CXO Panel with Cohesity, Cloudian and PhoenixNAP

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “HBI2537PU – Cloud Provider CXO Panel with Cohesity, Cloudian and PhoenixNAP”, a panel-type presentation with the following people:

You can grab a PDF copy of my notes from here.

Introductions are done.

YR: William, given your breadth of experience, what are some of the emerging trends you’ve been seeing?

WB: Companies are struggling to keep up with the pace of information generation. Understanding the data, storing and retaining it, and protecting it. Multi-cloud adds a lot of complexity. We’ve heard studies that say 22% of data generated is actually usable. It’s just sitting there. Public cloud is still hot, but it’s settling down a little.

YR: William comes from a massive cloud provider. What are you guys using?

WB: We’ve standardised on vCloud Director (vCD) and vSphere. We came from build our own but it wasn’t providing the value that we hoped it would. Customers want a seamless way to manage multiple cloud resources.

YR: Are you guys familiar with VCPP?

AP: VCPP is the crown jewel of our partner program at VMware. 4000+ providers, 120+ countries, 10+ million VMs, 10000+ DCs. We help you save money, make money (things are services ready). We’re continuing to invest in vCD. Kubernetes, GPUs, etc. Lots of R&D.

YR: William, you mentioned you standardised on the VMware platform. Talk to us about your experience. Why vCD?

WB: It’s been a checkered past for vCD. We were one of the first five on the vCloud Express program in 2010 / 11. We didn’t like vCD in its 1.0 version. We thought we can do this better. And we did. We launched the first on-demand, pay by the hour public cloud for enterprise in 2011. But it didn’t really work out. 2012 / 13 we started to see investments being made in vCD. 5.0 / 5.5 improved. Many people thought vCD was gong to die. We now see a modern, flexible portal that can be customised. And we can take our devs and have them customise vCD, rather than build a customised portal. That’s where we can put our time and effort. We’ve always done things differently. Always been doing other things. How do we bring our work in visual cloud into that cloud provider portal with vCD?

YR: You have an extensive career at VMware.

RR: I was one of the first people to take vCD out to the world. But Enterprise wasn’t mature enough. When we focused on SPs, it was the right thing to do. DIY portals needs a lot of investment. VMware allows a lot of extensibility now. For us, as Cohesity, we want to be able to plug in to that as well.

WB: At one point we had 45 devs working on a proprietary portal.

YR: We’ve been doing a lot on the extensibility side. What role are services playing in cloud providers?

AP: It takes away the complexities of deploying the stack.

JT: We’re specifically in object. A third of our customers are service providers. You guys know that object is built for scale, easy to manage, cost-effective. 20% of the data gets used. We hear that customers want to improve on that. People are moving away from tape. There’s a tremendous opportunity for services built on storage. Amazon has shown that. Data protection like Cohesity. Big data with Splunk. You can offer an industry standard, but differentiate based on other services.

YR: As we move towards a services-oriented world, William how do you see cloud management services evolving?

WB: It’s not good enough to provide some compute infrastructure any more. You have to do something more. We’re stubbornly focussed on different types of IaaS. We’re not doing generic x86 on top of vSphere. Backup, DR – those are in our wheelhouse. From a platform perspective, more and more customers want some kind of single pane of glass across their data. For some that’s on-premises, for some its public, for some it’s SaaS. You have to be able to provide value to the customer, or they will disappear. Object storage, backup with Cohesity. You need to keep pace with data movement. Any cloud, any data, any where.

AP: I’ve been at VMware long enough not to drink the Kool-Aid. Our whole cloud provider business is rooted in some humility. vCD can help other people doing better things to integrate. vCD has always been about reducing OPEX. Now we’re hitting the top line. Any cloud management platform today needs to open, extensible, not try to do anything.

YR: Is the crowd seeing pressure on pure IaaS?

Commentator: Coming from an SP to enterprise is different. Economics. Are you able to do a show back with vCD 9 and vROps?

WB: We’re putting that in the hands of customers. Looking at CloudHealth. There’s a benefit to being in the business management space. You have the opportunity to give customers a better service. That, and more flexible business models. Moving into flexible billing models – gives more freedom to the enterprise customer. Unless you’re the largest of the large – enterprises have difficulty acting as a service provider. Citibank are an exception to this. Honeywell do it too. If you’re Discount Tire – it’s hard. You’re the guy providing the service, and you’re costing them money. There’s animosity – and there’s no choice.

Commentator: Other people have pushed to public because chargeback is more effective than internal show back with private cloud.

WB: IT departments are poorly equipped to offer a breadth of services to their customers.

JT: People are moving workloads around. They want choice and flexibility. VMware with S3 compatible storage. A common underlying layer.

YR: Economics, chargeback. Is VMware (and VCPP) doing enough?

WB: The two guys to my right (RR and JT) have committed to building products that let me do that. I’ve been working on object storage use cases. I was talking to a customer. They’re using our IaaS and connected to Amazon S3. You’ve gone to Amazon. They didn’t know about it though. Experience and cost that can be the same or better. Egress in Amazon S3 is ridiculous. You don’t know what you don’t know. You can take that service and deliver it cost-effectively.

YR: RR talk to us about the evolution of data protection.

RR: Information has grown. Data is fragmented. Information placement is almost unmanageable. Services have now become available in a way that can be audited, secured, managed. At Cohesity, first thing we did was data protection, and I knew the rest was coming. Complexity’s a problem.

YR: JT. We know Cloudian’s a leader in object storage. Where do you see object going?

JT: It’s the underlying storage layer of the cloud. Brings down cost of your storage layer. It’s all about TCO. What’s going to help you build more revenue streams? Cloudian has been around since 2011. New solutions in backup, DR, etc, to help you build new revenue streams. S3 users on Amazon are looking for alternatives. Many of Cloudian’s customers are ex-Amazon customers. What are we doing? vCD integration. Search Cloudian and vCD on YouTube. Continuously working to drive down the cost of managing storage. 1.5PB in a 4RU box in collaboration with Seagate.

WB: Expanding service delivery, specifically around object storage, is important. You can do some really cool stuff – not just backup, it’s M&E, it’s analytics. Very few of our customers are using object just to store files and folders.

YR: We have a lot of providers in the room. JT can you talk more about these key use cases?

JT: It runs the gamut. You can break it down by verticals. M&E companies are offering editing suites via service providers. People are doing that for the legal profession. Accounting – storing financial records. Dental records and health care. The back end is the same thing – compute with S3 storage behind it. Cloudian provides multi-tenanted, scalable performance. Cost is driven down as you get larger.

YR: RR your key use cases?

RR: DRaaS is hot right now. When I was at VMware we did stuff with SRM. DR is hard. It’s so simple now. Now every SP can do it themselves. Use S3 to move data around from the same interface. And it’s very needed too. Everyone should have ubiquitous access to their data. We have that capability. We can now do vulnerability scans on the data we store on the platform. We can tell you if a VM is compromised. You can orchestrate the restoration of an environment – as a service.

YR: WB what are the other services you want us to deliver?

WB: We’re an odd duck. One of our major practices is information security. The idea that we have intelligent access to data residing in our infrastructure. Being able to detect vulnerabilities, taking action, sending an email to the customer, that’s the type of thing that cloud providers have. You might not be doing it yet – but you could.

YR: Security, threat protection. RR – do you see Cohesity as the driver to solve that problem?

RR: Cohesity will provide the platform. Data is insecure because it’s fragmented. Cohesity lets you run applications on the platform. Virus scanners, run books, all kinds of stuff you can offer as a service provider.

YR: William, where does the onus lie, how do you see it fitting together?

WB: The key for us is being open. Eg Cohesity integration into vCD. If I don’t want to – I don’t have to. Freedom of choice to pick and choose where we went to deliver our own IP to the customer. I don’t have to use Cohesity for everything.

JT: That’s exactly what we’re into. Choice of hardware, management. That’s the point. Standards-based top end.

YR: Security

*They had 2 minutes to go but I ran out of time and had to get to another meeting. Informative session. 4 stars.

VMware – VMworld 2019 – HCI2888BU – Site Recovery Manager 8.2: What’s New and Demo

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “HCI2888BU – Site Recovery Manager 8.2: What’s New and Demo”, presented by Cato Grace and Velina Krasteva (Senior PM for SRM and vSphere replication, VMware). You can grab a PDF copy of my notes from here.

 

SRM Product Overview

When you hear “disaster recovery” what do you think of? Natural disasters? DR is not just about natural disasters. It can also power, networking, people. Site Recovery Manager supports hypervisor-based and array-based replication. SRM about adding value to your replication.

Workflows?

Non-disruptive testing

  • Automated testing isolated network
  • Ensures predictability of RTO

Automated Failback

  • Re-protect using original recovery plan
  • Streamlines bi-directional migrations

Automated Failover

  • Runbook automation
  • Single-click initiation
  • Emphasises fastest possible recovery after outage

Planned Migration

  • Ensures zero data loss and app consistency
  • Enables disaster avoidance and DC maintenance or migration

*Demo

VMware Site Recovery (DRaaS) for VMware Cloud on AWS

DRaaS

  • Accelerate time to protection
  • Cloud economics with on-demand pricing
  • Integrated into VMware Cloud console
  • Post-failover cluster scaling with Elastic DRS
  • Inter-region protection

 

What’s New In 8.2?

Simplified deployment and operations with SRM as an appliance

  • Parity with Windows version
  • Simple OVF deployment
  • SRAs with the appliance setup as Docker containers
  • Greatly simplify SRM deployment, maintenance and upgrades.

Built on PhotonOS

Upgrading to the appliance – upgrade to 8.2 on Windows first, then migrate to the appliance. There’s a blog post on that here, and documentation here.

Improved ease of use with config import / export UI

  • Now entirely UI based
  • Export / backup and import / restore capabilities for entire SRM configuration
  • Includes entire SRM configuration (VMs, PGs, RPs, IP customisation, array managers, etc)
  • Enables simple DB migration

API and vRO workflow enhancements

  • Configure IP customisation
  • Add / remove datastores from array-based replication PGs
  • Remove post-power on tasks
  • Check status of VR replication
  • List replicated VMs
  • Get VR configuration
  • List replicated RDMs and Array Managers

New Workflows

New in SRM

  • Set IP settings
  • Update group datastore
  • Delete callouts

New in vSphere Replication

  • Check replication stats

Enhancements to SRM pack for vROps

  • Overcome DR monitoring challenges with global visibility into SRM environment
  • Mitigate risk associated with SRM component downtime
  • New views displaying
    • Recovery status
    • Count of VMs in recovery plans
    • Lots more
  • New arms for VMs that are in Protection Groups and not part of recovery plans

vSphere Replication Pack for vROps

Ability to monitor

  • RPO violations
  • Per VM metrics
  • Incoming replications
  • Outgoing replications
  • Replication status
  • Transferred bytes
  • Alerts
  • Replication Settings

UI Enhancements

  • Adjust colour schemes for optimal viewing
  • Capacity information available in the Protection Groups Datastores tab
  • Ability to provide in-product feedback – the smiley face icon

Support for NSX-T

  • Integration with NSX-T lets you use the network virtualisation to simplify the creation snd execution of recovery plans and accelerate recovery

Encrypted VMs Support

  • Full support for replicating, protecting, and recovering encrypted VMs

Encryption of replication traffic available per VM

Improved Logging Options with Syslog Support

  • Increased awareness of potential issues
  • Easier to troubleshoot issues
  • More opportunity for analysis

 

Tech Preview

We also went through a tech preview of what might be on the horizon with SRM. Note that this is all futures, and VMware may or may not end up delivering this as part of a future product.

  • SRM Support for vVols with Array-based Replication
  • Support protection and orchestrated recovery of VMs that are running on Virtual Volume datastore and are replicated by policy-based native array replication.
  • Automatic protection
  • Disk resting feature for vSphere Replication

 

Thoughts

I always enjoy these SRM sessions. Every time I make it along to VMworld US I try and get to Cato’s sessions. Even if you’re familiar with SRM, they’re a great summary of current, latest, and future product capability. SRM is a really cool solution for managing both migration and DR activities. And I don’t want to think about the number of times vSphere Replication has gotten us out of a spot doing cross-platform storage migrations. Cato and the team really know their stuff, so if you get a chance, do check out their other sessions this week.

VMware – VMworld 2019 – Monday General Session Notes

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from the Monday General Session at VMworld US 2019. You can grab a PDF of them here.

Pat Gelsinger takes the stage. Welcome to VMworld 2019 and thank you. Thrilled to be back in San Francisco, the hub of tech on the planet. Sorry to those Las Vegas lovers out there.

Tech in the age of any. There’s a natural tension between choice and complexity. We create that choice, but we have to make it work.  “Strength lies in differences, not similarities” (Stephen Covey).

At VMworld there are 100 countries represented, 5000 different organisations, 22% are learning Klingon (!). NuqneH!

[image courtesy of VMware]Welcome the Pivotal family to team VMware. Welcome Carbon Black to the family too. Read more about those acquisitions here.

In October it will be 4 decades in technology for Pat. Each of these areas are permeating our every day life

2009

  • 52 Million apps in the world
  • 5 million app developers

2019

  • 335 Million apps
  • 13.5 million developers

 

Technology for Good

Tech amplifies the good and the bad. But what does it mean to shape technology as a force for good? We, as technologists, need to participate in the shaping. For example, schools at Nairobi in Kenya. On Friday, Callum Eade swam the English channel to raise money for cancer research. Callum takes the stage.

PG: Why do it?

CE: It was an insurmountable goal. Something I wanted to do was “Make My Mark”. I’m also wearing a jacket from Tour de Cure. Specific cancer – children cancer. No one should have to bury a child. Program for a tumour called DIPG. Mortality rate unchanged – every diagnosed child dies within the first 12 months.

PG: My son battled Hodgkins-Lymphoma. It takes a team.

CE: It does. My wife, son, and daughter are here in the front row. The training was arduous. Pat, you stood up at our all hands meeting in APJ six months ago and reinforced the importance of career and family balance.

PG: Why the English Channel?

CE: 10 years ago it seemed like a really good idea. The distance is the same as from SFO to Palo Alto and it was really cold.

PG: What’s next?

CE: As far as the charity was concerned, a lot of people in this room contributed. The request from the pledge was $100K. We raised $130K. We’re going to go on holiday as a family, do something together.

CE leaves the stage.

PG: From floating hospitals to flying hospitals. Let’s hear from Angel MedFlight – Video.

Higher success bringing the patient to the organ.

But what about the law of unanticipated consequences. We’ve bought together communities online, and then created platforms for disinformation. End of privacy. Bitcoin is bad – it’s not okay. Apparently. VMware wants to “Do good engineering, and engineering for good”. 12 million non-profits in the world. 4.5% of global GDP is non-profit sector. Larger than the GDP of Germany. They do great work, but they’re technology sucks. Video – Working with Tech Soup enable all of those other missions out there. Grow the tech talent pool. Historically served the smallest organisations. Working with a million coders. 24% are women (not enough). Rebecca Masisak (CEO) is here. Working with them to scale their mission.

Who’s Doing It?

“There’s never been a more exciting time to be a technologist”. There’s also never been a more important time to be a technologist. Who will operationalise the powers of edge, AI, IoT in the world? You. No one is more qualified, more capable to do that. If you’re a VCP, you’re qualified. Shout out to VCIX folks, VMUG leaders, the VCDXs.

The VMware vision remains unchanged. Any cloud, any app, any device, with intrinsic security. Is this innovation helping us or harming us? Does it inspire us? Empower us?

Customers

  • Comcast – getting a handle on chaos. Built a modern private cloud with connection to the public cloud.
  • FedEx – leveraging VCF and Pivotal.
  • IHS Markit

 

Multi-Cloud Strategy

VMware have worked hard on multi-loud, and have built a preferred partnership with Amazon. They’re also working with IBM, Google, and Microsoft, enabling an “any-cloud” environment. They want you to be able to “Build, Run, Manage, Connect, Protect” your workloads. Kubernetes has emerged as ubiquitous infrastructure, joining developers and IT operators. Now Pat’s going to “get some help from a Kubernetes celebrity”. Joe Beda – the first committer to Kubernetes, this guy’s a rock star – and he’s now a Principal Engineer at VMware. Joe takes the stage. PG: “Can we take a selfie?”. Joe talks about “Goldilocks level between devs and IT ops”. Wanted it to span any infrastructure.

Complexity vs flexibility.

What enterprises need is a secured opinion through this journey, and VMware is well placed to do this, with Heptio acquired, Pivotal, and Bitnami. We’re excited to be bringing this to market – VMware Tanzu (Swahili for branch).

  • Build Modern Apps
  • Run Enterprise Kubernetes
  • Manage Kubernetes for developers AND IT

Pivotal and Kubernetes like peanut butter and jelly. What if we build it into vSphere? Announcing Project Pacific.

  • Uniting vSphere and Kubernetes
  • Extending vSphere for ALL modern apps
  • Enabling Dev and IT Ops collaboration
  • 30% faster than a traditional Linux VM, 8% faster than bare metal

VMware Tanzu Mission Control. How do get started right now? PKS is the answer.

Managing Multi-cloud

Talked about build, but what about run? The challenge is how we manage across a diverse environment. There’s a loss of efficiency, security. This is why VMware acquired CloudHealth and they’ve now announced “CloudHealth Hybrid”. But what’s the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud? The goal is to give you the tools to manage or have consistent ops in a multi-cloud world. What about hybrid cloud? You also want a consistent infrastructure experience. VMware Cloud Foundation is the platform for Hybrid cloud.

Migrate or modernise? Migrate and modernise?

Cost of migration is expensive

  • Native cloud – $1M to migrate 1000 VMs
  • Years to refactor apps

Migrate to VMware Cloud – it’s easy :)

Video – Jensen Huang.

Also working with MS Azure (announced at DTW earlier this year). Now globally available. US and Europe. Australia by the end of the year. Announced Project Dimension with Dell. Now available VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. DCaaS. Partnership with Equinix

Operate in a hybrid cloud world?

Taking vRealize hybrid

  • Automation
  • Operation
  • Network insight
  • Log insight

DRaaS and DPaaS – doing a lot with Dell EMC.

 

Edge and Telco

What’s the edge?

1. Where the physical and the digital worlds intersect

2. Distributed, low-latency infrastructure located close […]

Thin edge, Medium Edge, Thick Edge

5G

Massive capital scale out

Vertical hardware to horizontal software

Thrilled to acquire Uhana.

Video – Verizon – 5G will save the world

Started this journey a number of years ago. Started in the DC. Now connecting all the clouds together.

NSX-T supports all types of workloads

VeloCloud – #1 in SD-WAN marketshare, 150K+ sites

AVI Networks acquisition

vRealize Network Insight

It’s time to move all that hardware into software

  • 59% redaction in CAPEX
  • 55% reduction in OPEX

 

Customer Testimonials

Sanjay Poonen (COO) takes the stage. You fired up?

2 Customers

  • Rathi Murthy – CTO of GAP
  • Tim Snyder – Deputy CTO of Freddie Mac

RM: 80% of purchases still happen in store. We’re all getting more and more impatient by the day. Speed, responsiveness, scale is all becoming critical. 90% of our production workloads on VMware

TS: We have 600 apps. 5 or 10 SaaS. The others needed to move to cloud. Why not refactor? We’re a heavily regulated environment. We can’t take the risks to transform our apps. Sitting on 100 million lines of code. Moved all apps to VMC on AWS. Well, 95% +. We’re 2/3 through the journey.

SP: Do you migrate, modernise, do both?

RM: 1000 apps across the board. Critical to us to migrate what’s critical to the business without disruption. There hasn’t been a database we didn’t like. Being able to modernise without disrupting was a challenge. Pivotal played a critical role. 60 – 70% of apps modernised through PKS.

SP: We don’t call it lift and shift, we prefer migrate.

SP: Your migrate strategy is Azure. But in the middle is VMware. Yes.

SP: Tim, in the M and M world.

TS: Running 5% of apps in containers now. We wanted to push to migrate this year.

Why is consumer life so easy and enterprise so hard?

Consumer simple, enterprise secure. “Every employee in the world should be using Workspace ONE”. Dell unified workspace product.

Why invest in digital employee experience?

  • 23% more likely to be an industry leader
  • 60% more likely to be a growth company
  • 41% more likely to have a positive Employee Net Promotor Score (eNPS)

Video plays. SP: My latest favourite topic is security.

“Intrinsic security”

5 control points

  • Endpoint device
  • Endpoint workload
  • Network infrastructure
  • Apps
  • Data

Talked briefly about the Carbon Black acquisition.

Solid session. 3.5 stars. Watch the replay here. Read more about Project Pacific and Tanzu here. Scott Lowe’s coverage of the general session can be found here.

VMware – VMworld 2019 – See you in San Francisco

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This is a quick post to let my loyal readers know that I’ll be heading to VMware’s annual conference (VMworld) this year in San Francisco. This will be my fourth VMworld. I’m looking forward to catching up with some old friends and meeting some new ones. If you haven’t registered yet but feel like that’s something you might want to do – the registration page is here. To get a feel for what’s on offer, you can check out information about the VMworld 2019 sessions here. The Content Catalog [sic] is available now too, so if you’ve registered you can start filling up your schedule. You can also read the FAQ here.

Big thanks to Tej at VMware for organising the blogger pass. I’ll also be publicly thanking some other folks when I have some more logistics locked in. Keep an eye out for me at the conference and surrounding events and don’t be afraid to come and say hi (if you need a visual – I look like Wolverine would if he let himself go).

Dell EMC News From VMworld US 2018

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I’m not at VMworld US this year, but I had the opportunity to be briefed by Sam Grocott (Dell EMC Cloud Strategy) on some of Dell EMC‘s key announcements during the event, and thought I’d share some of my rough notes and links here. You can read the press release here.

TL;DR?

It is a multi-cloud world. Multi-cloud requires workload mobility. The market requires a consistent experience between on-premises and off-premises. Dell EMC are doing some more stuff around that.

 

Cloud Platforms

Dell EMC offer a number of engineered systems to run both IaaS and cloud native applications.

VxRail

Starting with vSphere 6.7, Dell EMC are saying they’re delivering “near” synchronous software releases between VMware and VxRail. In this case that translates to a less than 30 Day delta between releases. There’s also support for:

VxRack SDDC with VMware Cloud Foundation

  • Support for latest VCF releases – VCF 2.3.2, and future proof for next generation VMware cloud technologies
  • Alignment with VxRail hardware options – P, E, V series VxRail models, now including Storage Dense S-series
  • Configuration flexibility

 

Cloud-enabled Infrastructure

Focus is on the data

  • Cloud data mobility;
  • Cloud data protection;
  • Cloud data services; and
  • Cloud control.

Cloud Data Protection

  • DD Cloud DR – keep copies of VM data from on-premises DD to public cloud and orchestrate failover of workloads to the cloud
  • Data Protection Suite – use cloud storage for backup and retention
  • Cloud Snapshot Manager – Backup and recovery for public cloud workloads (Now MS Azure)
  • Data Domain virtual edition running in the cloud

DD VE 4.0 Enhancements

  • KVM support added for DD VE on-premises
  • In-cloud capacity expanded to 96TB (was 16TB)
  • Can run in AWS, Azure and VMware Cloud

Cloud Data Services

Dell EMC have already announced services such as:

And now you can get Dell EMC UnityVSA Cloud Edition.

UnityVSA Cloud Edition

[image courtesy of Dell EMC]

  • Up to 256TB file systems
  • VMware Cloud on AWS

CloudIQ

  • No cost, SaaS offering
  • Predictive analytics – intelligently project capacity and performance
  • Anomaly detection – leverage ML to pinpoint deviations
  • Proactive health – identify risks before they impact the environment

Enhancements include:

Data Domain Cloud Tier

There are some other Data Domain related enhancements, including new AWS support (meaning you can have a single vendor for Long Term Retention).

ECS

ECS enhancements have also been announced, with a 50%+ increase in storage capacity and compute.

 

Thoughts

As would be expected from a company with a large portfolio of products, there’s quite a bit happening on the product enhancement front. Dell EMC are starting to get that they need to be on-board with those pesky cloud types, and they’re also doing a decent job of ensuring their private cloud customers have something to play with as well.

I’m always a little surprised by vendors offering “Cloud Editions” of key products, as it feels a lot like they’re bolting on something to the public cloud when the focus could perhaps be on helping customers get to a cloud-native position sooner. That said, there are good economic reasons to take this approach. By that I mean that there’s always going to be someone who thinks they can just lift and shift their workload to the public cloud, rather than re-factoring their applications. Dell EMC are providing a number of ways to make this a fairly safe undertaking, and products like Unity Cloud Edition provide some nice features such as increased resilience that would be otherwise lacking if the enterprise customer simply dumped its VMs in AWS as-is. I still have hope that we’ll stop doing this as an industry in the near future and embrace some smarter ways of working. But while enterprises are happy enough to spend their money on doing things like they always have, I can’t criticise Dell EMC for wanting a piece of the pie.

VMware – VMworld 2017 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US.  My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

A quick post to provide some closing thoughts on VMworld 2017 and link to the posts I did during the event. Not in that order. I’ll add to this as I come across interesting posts from other people too.

 

Link-o-rama

Here’s my stuff.

 

Intro

VMware – VMworld 2017 – See you in Vegas

 

Session Notes

VMware – VMworld 2017 – Monday General Session Notes

VMware – VMworld 2017 – MGT3342BUS – Architecting Data Protection with Rubrik

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO1179BU – Understanding the Availability Features of vSAN

VMware – VMworld 2017 – LHC3371BUC – VMware Cloud on AWS – The Painless Path to Hybrid Cloud

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO2063BU – Architecting Site Recovery Manager to Meet Your Recovery Goals

VMware – VMworld 2017 – SER1166BU – Housekeeping Strategies for Platform Services Controller-Expert Talk

VMware – VMworld 2017 – PBO3334BUS – State of the Union: Everything multi-cloud, converged, hyper-converged and more!

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO3331BUS – Cohesity Hyperconverged Secondary Storage: Simple Data Protection for VMware and vSAN

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO3194BU – Protecting Virtual Machines in VMware Cloud on AWS

 

Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2017

Tech Field Day – I’ll Be At TFD Extra at VMworld US 2017

The Thing About NetApp HCI Is …

Druva Is Useful, And Modern

Kingston’s NVMe Line-up Is The Life Of The Party

 

Other Posts From Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2017

NetApp SolidFire HCI – Scale what you want, when you want

Highlights from My First VMworld

Tech Field Day Extra – Kingston Technologies

Netapp‘s SolidFire HCI Overview

NVMe to enable truly composable infrastructure?

Join me at VMworld with Tech Field Day Extra!

 

Disclosure

VMware – VMworld 2017 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

 

Video

And here’s my inaugural appearance on theCUBE.

 

VMware Press Releases

VMware made a number of announcements, and you can find them here:

VMware Delivers Industry-First Unified End User Experience, Management and Security Solution for All Endpoint Platforms

VMware and Pivotal Launch Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Collaborate with Google Cloud to Bring Kubernetes to Enterprise Customers

VMware and AWS Announce Initial Availability of VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Advances Software to Help Customers Modernize Data Centers

VMware and Dell EMC Partner to Deliver First Data Protection Solution for VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Helps Enterprises Succeed in the Multi-Cloud Era

 

Other Useful Sources

Here are a few event-related articles I found interesting. You should also get along to the newly launched Blog Beat for some great coverage by a range of bloggers.

 

You should also check out everything written by Chad, as well as these posts:

VMware Gets Its Mojo Back At VMworld 2017

VMworld2017’s forecast, cloudy with a high chance of containers

VMworld 2017 Thursday Keynote

 

Wrap-up

This was my third VMworld US event, and I had a lot of fun. I’d like to thank all the people who helped me out with getting there, the people who stopped and chatted to me at the event, and VMware for putting on a great show. I’m looking forward to (hopefully) getting along to it next year (August 26 – 30).

Kingston’s NVMe Line-up Is The Life Of The Party

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US.  My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

You can view the video of Kingston‘s presentation at Tech Field Day Extra VMworld US 2017 here, and download a PDF copy of my rough notes from here.

 

It’s A Protocol, Not Media

NVMe has been around for a few years now, and some people get it confused for a new kind of media that they plug into their servers. But it’s not really, it’s just a standard specification for accessing Flash media via the PCI Express bus. There’re a bunch of reasons why you might choose to use NVMe instead of SAS, including lower latency and less CPU overhead. My favourite thing about it though is the plethora of form factors available to use. Kingston touched on these in their presentation at Tech Field Day Extra recently. You can get them in half-height, half-length (HHHL) add-in cards (AIC), U.2 (2.5″) and M.2 sizes. To give you an idea of the use cases for each of these, Kingston suggested the following applications:

  • HHHL (AIC) card
    • Server / DC applications
    • High-end workstations
  • U.2 (2.5″)
    • Direct-attached, server backplane, just a bunch of flash (JBOF)
    • White box and OEM-branded
  • M.2
    • Client applications
    • Notebooks, desktops, workstations
    • Specialised systems

 

It’s Pretty Fast

NVMe has proven to be pretty fast, and a number of companies are starting to develop products that leverage the protocol in an extremely efficient manner. Coupled with the rise of NVMe/F solutions and you’ve got some pretty cool stuff coming to market. The price is also becoming a lot more reasonable, with Kingston telling us that their DCP1000 NVMe HHHL comes in at around “$0.85 – $0.90 per GB at the moment”. It’s obviously not as cheap as things that spin at 7200RPM but the speed is mighty fine. Kingston also noted that the 2.5″ form factor would be hanging around for some time yet, as customers appreciated the serviceability of the form factor.

 

[Kingston DCU1000 – Image courtesy of Kingston]

 

This Stuff’s Everywhere

Flash media has been slowly but surely taking over the world for a little while now. The cost per GB is reducing (slowly, but surely), and the range of form factors means there’s something for everyone’s needs. Protocol advancements such as NVMe make things even easier, particularly at the high end of town. It’s also been interesting to see these “high end” solutions trickle down to affordable form factors such as PCIe add-in cards. With the relative ubiquity of operating system driver support, NVMe has become super accessible. The interesting thing to watch now is how we effectively leverage these advancements in protocol technologies. Will we use them to make interesting advances in platforms and data access? Or will we keep using the same software architectures we fell in love with 15 years ago (albeit with dramatically improved performance specifications)?

 

Conclusion and Further Reading

I’ll admit it took me a little while to come up with something to write about after the Kingston presentation. Not because I don’t like them or didn’t find their content interesting. Rather, I felt like I was heading down the path of delivering another corporate backgrounder coupled with speeds and feeds and I know they have better qualified people to deliver that messaging to you (if that’s what you’re into). Kingston do a whole range of memory-related products across a variety of focus areas. That’s all well and good but you probably already knew that. Instead, I thought I could focus a little on the magic behind the magic. The Flash era of storage has been absolutely fascinating to witness, and I think it’s only going to get more interesting over the next few years. If you’re into this kind of thing but need a more comprehensive primer on NVMe, I recommend you check out J Metz’s article on the Cisco blog. It’s a cracking yarn and enlightening to boot. Data Centre Journal also provide a thorough overview here.