The Campus and Cloud-First

How does a cloud-first strategy impact your campus network design and operations?

I'm currently helping a client migrate their campus networks to a new platform. As a Saleforce.com solution provider, they are all in on the public cloud. All collaboration is SaaS-based, including telephone services. The project forces me to re-think all I know about traditional campus and wide-area networking. Couple that with Gelstalt IT hosting me at a Network Field Day Extra (NFDx) at 128-Technologies, and I come away with some new areas to ponder going into VMworld 2019.

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Don't Waste Time Learning Kubernetes

I’ve taken up the hobby of creating a video series on installing Kubernetes and OpenFaaS. From the experience, I learned why you never want to learn how to install and configure Kubernetes and OpenFaaS. The reasoning is beyond K8s as infrastructure and infrastructure bores. It’s about the breadth of knowledge an architect or CTO must have to meet the needs of digital experience.

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2019 - The Year it all Changed for VMware

2019 will go down as the year it all changed for VMware. Count me in the camp of people who weren’t impressed with their vSphere everywhere cloud strategy or 2016. Having vSphere in the major cloud providers wasn’t enough. Fast-forward to today and VMware is a significant player in cloud-native, storage, and networking.

VMware’s latest earnings show a 13% year-over-year growth. However, VMware can’t enter these spaces without developing new relationships within customers and growing the pool of full-stack engineers. What has the company done to further the soft conversation around talent?

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VMware Cloud on AWS: Business Outcomes

A competitor has started to win your customers by providing a better digital experience. They’ve built an SAP Fiori app that enables sales teams to check the account status of a customer before going into a big sales meeting. At the end of the sales call, the salesperson can not only ask for the sale but complete the transaction with a signature on the iPad. Your turnaround for the same operation still takes days.

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Google Cloud Anthos Migrate - The Future of Cloud Lift & Shift?

Will Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) provide an advantage that AWS and Azure can’t match for lift and shift? Both AWS and Azure have gone the route of offering some VMware staging area for legacy applications. AWS has VMC on AWS and Azure has a hosted VMware solution. The idea is to keep operational differences to a minimum between on-premises hosting and cloud. However, the price has been a consistent factor. Customers worry inertia will result in indefinite reliance on VMware vSphere software.

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Intel Answering SAP HANA's Tough Questions

Intel’s DC Persistent memory is revolutionary that will power the next innovation in business intelligence. Intel DC Persistent Memory is BIT addressable 3D-NAND (FLASH) memory. The last Intel product allows you to insert it into DIMM slots on a server. However, what does that mean for performance and business capability? I think SAP HANA is the best example of what’s possible.

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Hybrid isn't a Place - It's an Operating Model

The industry agrees - “Cloud is an operating model not a place.”

If you move all your virtual machines to AWS do you now have a cloud? Or is it something else? If the cloud is an operating model vs. a place, what model do you have in lift and shift? I submit that you have hybrid-infrastructure. If the cloud is an operating model, it must be equally valid that hybrid-infrastructure is an operating model.

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Are CIO's Missing the Metadata Bus?

AI/ML vendors at large present the magical view that you ask your data lakes a business question and out shoots an answer that drives a new business insight. I spoke with the Chief Data Officer (CDO) of a Fortune 500. The company struggled with normalizing over 100 different data sources. Data scientists spent up to 70% of their time normalizing the data before even applying algorithms. Will leveraging metadata decrease time to value for data analysis?

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Leveraging Backup to Advance Your Decision Making

That one time you weren’t able to recover the set of emails that were a request due to legal hold proved painful. You now take backup exceptionally seriously. So much so, you now have hundreds of TB’s of data sitting on archive media. Economic advisors call it the new oil. So much insight could be made available via that wealth of data; only if there were an easy button to ingest what’s an organic, unstructured data lake. Enter the new era of backup companies such as Cohesity.

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IT Reality Check

What’s the new reality of IT? You read the latest from cloud providers and management consultants and you walk away thinking every company from the corner baker to Fortune 100 enterprises has digitally transformed and moved to a cloud-native environment. You then get data from IT vendors showing 90% of the companies that run to the cloud, move back on-prem. We know the truth is somewhere in-between. So, what’s the deal?

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Hybrid IT Data Protection Maturity

I the last 24-hours over $760 million has been invested into two companies that on the surface are IT backup products. With Cloud computing is quickly becoming a center for enterprise data, one has to question the valuation of these companies. The CTO Advisor has held the position that this data protection space isn’t about backup. It’s about the ability to leverage data regardless of the location.

Cloud computing companies will continue to add capabilities such as ML/AI and even Quantum computing that will not easily deploy inside the four walls of traditional enterprises. CTO’s will be challenged to leverage these services against massive quantities of data. The need for low latency to these data sets may very well become the new arms race in enterprise data.

It’s why I believe the $3.3 Billion evaluation for a company like Rubrik is just a drop in the bucket of the total addressable market for what we call data protection today. I created this maturity scale as a tool to help identify where your data protection/management strategy resides on the hype curve. While I haven’t published it until today, it’s already a year old. I’ve moved on to a “Data Infrastructure” framework. Let me know if you’d be interested I a private walkthrough of the framework.

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Understanding Multi-Cloud for the non-IT Executive

Increased productivity powers economic growth. A recent replay of Planet Money discussed the power of well - power. The ability to do more with less increases efficiency of a system. Increased efficiency leads to gains in productivity. Thus increased economic activity. It’s a simple concept of economics.

Public cloud is another example. Small and large businesses alike take advantage of what appears infinite scale of services from AWS, Google Compute, and Microsoft Azure. The services are cheap and highly effective when used in chunks. However, organizations have discovered moving entirely to these services exclusively proves cost prohibitive.

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