Vendors I plan to check out at #VMworld 2018

It’s here. VMworld 2018 is underway. I’ve just spent a great week in Nashville, a place I have wanted to visit for the longest time. Now it’s almost time to head to the airport and catch my flight to Las Vegas. As is usual at this time of year, there are a lot of announcements and briefing requests. In this post, I am going to share some of the announcements/briefings that I have been privy to, and share some of the things (mostly in the storage space) that I plan to learn more about over the next few days.

Cohesity

I’ve written about Cohesity a number of times on this site, ever since I first met them at VMworld 2015. As their platform matures, new features are being added all the time. Cohesity announced Helios just last week. It is a SaaS based secondary data and application management solution. What that means (as far as I can tell) is that you have a single point of management for all of your secondary data, be it on-prem or in the cloud. Helios collects data from, and analyzes all of your Cohesity clusters to provide insights and recommendations to admins. I have to admit that I am a little out of the loop with Cohesity these days, so I do plan to sync up with them this VMworld. Cohesity are at booth 1420.

JetStream Software

These are the original guys from FlashSoft, who were spun out from Western Digital and have relaunched as JetStream Software. The FlashSoft part for accelerating I/O via IO Filters (VAIO) is now JetStream Accelerate and it is supported with vSphere 6.7. During some brief communication with the guys, they mentioned that there is also a migration solution, JetStream Migrate, which uses IO Filters to facilitate live VM migration. Also, they have the ability to do continuous data replication to the cloud using IO Filters. I’m going to try to find some time to speak with them at this year’s event. JetStream can be found at booth 1074-J.

Rubrik

Rubrik are another company that I have written about a number of times on this site, and we continue to keep in touch. Rubrik invited me to a briefing on their new Polaris Radar but I was unable to make it, and I have not received the materials at the time of writing. Looking at the official launch page, it seems to be an anomaly detection system, which allows them to quickly detect the files which are impacted by a breach, and to very easily recover those impacted files to a known good state. In a nutshell, it is geared towards recovering from Ransomware type attacks. Like I said, I only know this from what I have read, but I will try to get some time to talk about this in greater detail with Chris Wahl and the gang during this week. Rubrik are located at booth 1334.

Runecast

Before heading on vacation last week, Duncan Epping and I had a briefing from Stan over at Runecast. These guys continue to build out the product with another bunch of cool new features in Runecast 2.0. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Runecast, here is a post that I did on them last year. In a nutshell, Runecast monitor your VMware environment, and using best practice documents, KB articles and other literature, can alert you when something is not in line. What is cool is that they not only look at your Sphere environment, but they can also look at products such as vSAN and NSX. While there have been a bunch of improvements in the 2.0 release, the big one for me is the historical aspect. You can now go back through your environment history to see ‘when’ something became an issue. Cool stuff for sure. Runecast are at booth 2835.

VMware Virtual Volumes

Some really awesome news is that VMware has decided to add Site Recovery Manager support for Virtual Volumes. Duncan does a great write-up about it here. I can tell that some of our most vocal VVol partners are delighted by this news, so if you get a chance, try to talk to Cody Hosterman and his team at the Pure Storage booth about this, or Eric Siebert and his team over at the HP booth. Both of these guys are staunch supporters of VVols, and have been advocating it for some years now (Eric in particular). Support for SRM has been probably the #1 ask from our customers, so this is definitely great to see. Find Pure Storage over at booth 1120 and HP over at booth 2412.

Obviously there are a lot more things going on again this year, but these are a few of the vendors that I’ll be hoping to hook up with at this year’s VMworld.