Understanding Multi-Cloud for the non-IT Executive

October 18, 2018 by Keith Townsend

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.

Modern Data Protection Summary

July 22, 2018 by Keith Townsend

Data protection products have evolved from the backup category to a category that enables the protection and mobility of data. This report will examine the essential functions of modern-day data protection products and provide context to the relationship between data protection and data management.

The ever expanding scope of Infrastructure

July 20, 2018 by Keith Townsend

Consider some simple parallels with the transportation industry as you continue to examine how Public Cloud impacts your existing IT infrastructure. Ground transportation offers a tremendous mix of capabilities from rail, trucks, and light vehicles. Data center infrastructure provides the most flexibility, including legacy app support. There are some things you'd never transport by air as it makes little sense.

Why I chose to go work for VMware

July 07, 2018 by Keith Townsend

TLDR – I’m headed to VMware as a Solutions Architect for the Midwest region.

Is Nutanix a Cloud Company?

May 30, 2018 by Keith Townsend

One of the most popular videos on the portal describes how Nutanix isn't a cloud company. After hosting theCube for Nutanix .NEXT 2018, I thought it time to ask and answer the question again.

What value does Nutanix bring environments looking to adopt enterprise cloud technologies? What were the key announcements from .NEXT that point to a coherent cloud strategy and where are the gaps?
This Analyst Note discusses the big takeaways from the conference.

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Configuration Management - Four steps to getting it under control

April 17, 2018 by Keith Townsend

Configuration management is about controlling the state of all of the systems and applications in your environment. I call it the metadata of your IT operations. While data replication helps to protect from data loss, configuration management remains as essential as data replication.

Moving SAP and other legacy apps to the cloud

April 12, 2018 by Keith Townsend

Moving legacy application architectures to the public cloud bring with it many challenges. In many cases, it’s a question of finding a problem for the solution public cloud offers. On the surface, the architecture of legacy applications doesn’t appear complementary to public cloud design and consumption. However, there are use cases where legacy applications fit natively into the public cloud.

Rubrik - A metadata company in backup company's clothing

April 09, 2018 by Keith Townsend

I’ve poked and prodded the team at Rubrik since first briefed on their data protection product. The spokespeople remain careful in the description of the product suite. It is a data protection product with additional benefits powered by a powerful metadata engine. Make no mistake Rubrik’s product is a robust metadata driven foundation that has data protection features. The company marketing remains careful not to compete with primary storage companies directly or claim primary storage functionality.

Webinar - Disaster recovery in the era of Public Cloud

April 04, 2018 by Keith Townsend

Disaster recovery is hard enough. People and process are equally important as the technology. Our presenter, Keith Townsend led the effort for the disaster recovery design and operations for a Fortune 200's SAP implementation.

Keith will share learnings from that experience beyond SAP and how Public Cloud brings the similar technical capability to smaller organizations.

An update on Oracle's Cloud

March 13, 2018 by Keith Townsend

There's Oracle's CEO telling the world that they will compete with AWS for Public Cloud dominance. And then there are the engineers and product managers building a respectable cloud platform. It's the later I and 28 other influencers spent time discussing technology and use cases during Oracle Ravello Blogger Day 2 (RBD2). So, what's going on with Oracles cloud?

HCI/Not HCI - It doesn't matter

March 06, 2018 by Keith Townsend

In theory, streamlined IT operations follow the technology. If the technology packaging is simplified, then IT operations are simplified. If a storage administrator no longer needs to keep a spreadsheet that maps LUNS to virtual volumes and virtual volumes to datastores, then the role is collapsed into the virtualization administrator role.

The what, who and when of BlockChain - Webinar

December 20, 2017 by Keith Townsend

Bitcoin has taken both mobile payments and Fintech by storm. While it's garnered much of the attention, Bitcoin is powered by Blockchain. Blockchain is a distributed and immutable ledger. It enables multiple organizations to validate entries into a ledger. With a consortium, a Blockchain could enable new ways to do business and provide services.

Why are box sellers at AWS re:Invent with Cohesity

December 11, 2017 by Keith Townsend

The CTO Advisor was recently at AWS re:Invent. With 43,000 attendees, AWS is making the case that their event is the premier Cloud event of the year. KubeCon followed the very next week in Austin. While I was off getting braces, some of the 4,000 attendees were making the case that KubeCon is the future of cloud conferences.

Datrium Build Day & CTO Daily Dose

November 12, 2017 by Keith Townsend

Datrium recently published some crazy benchmarks on their open converged platform. The benchmark created an interesting news cycle along with questions. The first question? What is Open Converged? We know about converged and hyper-converged systems.

Backup is Dead! [Webinar]

November 10, 2017 by Keith Townsend

There are no longer any major backup software or storage hardware companies. Everyone one of these companies has repositioned their messaging to serving or protecting data assets. What does this mean for the enterprise? It's a reaction to the change of focus. Big Data is a buzzword.

Re-play of Severless Webinar

November 03, 2017 by Keith Townsend

So, you missed the webinar on serverless? Or you participated and you wanted to review the content. I created a 23-min version of the 45-min webinar.

Understanding Serverless Computing

October 24, 2017 by Keith Townsend

First off, there are servers in serverless computing. However, the construct of servers is a throwback to a time when the only way to develop distributed applications was to focus on the server as the base component of the infrastructure. In the server-centric model of distributed systems, developers needed to understand their CPU, Memory and OS requirements.

Current state of TLS encryption and data loss protection

October 23, 2017 by Keith Townsend

I’ve worked enterprise IT for far too long to fall into the “privacy at work is king” camp. If you use your organization's resources, then you may give up the right to privacy at work. I’ve implemented data loss protection (DLP) software for a 12,000-user U.S. Federal agency. Users don’t like it. It impacts system performance, and automatic encryption of removable devices makes data sharing more difficult. However, the worse scenario is having an Equifax like headline hit the news. Such breaches are why encryption breaking technology for snooping on employees remains interesting.

Inefficiencies of large systems

October 05, 2017 by Keith Townsend

is a business upon itself. The larger the team, the larger the effort to coordinate the efforts within and between organizational units. When an organization talks about flattening the org chart, it's a result of out of control overhead. Computers systems are not immune from this impact.

CTO Advisor 063: Can enterprise IT adapt? w/Kelsey Hightower

October 02, 2017 by Keith Townsend

Google's Kelsey Hightower joins the podcast for a reality check for enterprise IT. Keith and Mark ask the question, "Can enterprises adapt" to the quickly changing technology landscape? Do organizations have the budget and aptitude for navigating the disruption. Kelsey gives a pretty blunt assessment. Kelsey claims debates around issues such as CI/CD are now over. Kelsey shares his vision of the relation containers, the cloud, and business value.

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