IT and Business hopefully a little different way..

EMC today announced the their latest entry into the Software Defined Storage (SDS) market, VIPR. They’ve coined it the “World’s first Software Defined Storage Platform” (http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2013/20130506-03.htm). I have to say, I am a little put off by this initial push and need to be first when they are clearly not. I could list a few that have claimed to be a SDS platform first, DataCore, Nexenta, and when looking at some of the capabilities, I think IBM beat them out with the SVC Director.

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Those of you that got to make it out to the VMware Partner Exchange probably got to see the demo in the Nexenta Booth.

Alot of the common social media geeks around virtualization got to swing by.  Chris Wahl from WahlNetworks included.  This was not an overly complex demo, but I wanted something fun to show off VDI sessions.  Using the real time performance metrics that are shown in NexentaVSA for View, we can actually see the systems running.

The install was rather easy, with one caveat.  VMware View does not recognize the Retro USB Nintendo controller that we picked up from Amazon.

The great part is on the Lenovo Thinkpad I was using as a client I can make just a quick registry change and View will recognize.  This process is detailed here, very similar to restricting access, this allows you to add unknown USB devices to share to your View session.

The hardware was not very intense for the servers.  A couple Dell 1950 running ESX5.1 and using a Supermicro server with Nexenta installed as shared storage presenting 1 TB of NFS storage.  For the VDI hosts I put in 2 Cisco UCS C200 M2.  By adding in a single STEC ZeusIOP and a single spinning disk to house the desktops, and 96 GB of RAM we are able to build a rather robust VDI setup.  Allowing for about 100 desktops all being deployed with NexentaVSA for View..

By adding in the JNes Nintendo Emulator to the Windows 7 base images and VMware View Linked Clones, we have our own mini arcade.

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a side project with one of the Nexenta partners to prepare for the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco this week. The partner Cirracore based in Atlanta works with Equinix and Telx pretty heavily and offers a few managed private and public cloud solutions. One of these solutions is based on the Intel Modular Server Chassis(IMS). If you have not checked out this chassis, it is probably one of the most engineered but least publicized piece of hardware I have seen in years. First to give you an Idea of what the chassis is made of, then two solutions we release this week, vCloud in a Box and VDI/SMB in a Box. Read more

Deploying VDI should be an easy task, and with a proof of concept or trial it normally is.  The problems start to show up when you move from a small deployment to an enterprise rollout.  Problems like disk IO, throughput, management, and performance monitoring start to have a significant impact.  Nexenta has released their second product after working with VMware as just a way to ease that transition.  NexentaVSA for View(NV4V) is first an orchestration engine, followed by a performance tool.

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Today marks my last day as a solutions architect for a reseller.  I have been working on and off for resellers since college and very infrequently have I seen a technology that I thought could be a true game changer.  The last one I can think of was VMware, and as many of you are aware that has played out well for me over the past few years.  While I have learned so much working for both Convergence Technology (@convergencetech) and Clearpath Solutions (@clearpathsg) in the reseller world, I got an offer too good to turn down.  Make sure to go follow them both as they have alot of smart guys (and girls).  So after much thought it was time to trust my gut again.

Starting on Monday I will be the Federal / Mid-Atlantic Solutions Architect/Sales Engineer for Nexenta(@nexenta).  For those of you not familiar with Nexenta, they have been listed as the fastest growing storage startup ever.  The interesting thing on that is that they are actually a software company.  Nexenta was started in 2004 and came out of stealth in 2008.  As a small and growing company that focuses on the virtualization, big data, and storage space, I felt they were a great fit.  NexentaStor is the flagship product built on the ZFS filesystem.   allows SMB to Enterprises to use commodity hardware with NexentaStor layered on top as fully functional enterprise class SAN and NAS units.  The feature set is actually much larger than I would want to put in this one post so expect more to come as I get more and more ramped up.

The great part is I will also still be able to be heavily involved with VMware.  I will also be joining as the third member of Nexenta’s Virtualization sniper team (I just made the name up but I like it).  I will be joining Theron Conrey (@theronconrey) and Tom Howarth (@tom_howarth) to help Nexenta continue to grow the relationship and integration with virtualization products.

I am really excited and looking forward to this next step and my first with a manufacturer.  Thank you to all that have supported me to here and heres to a great new adventure.