EMC XtremIO revisited – a chat with Vinay Gaonkar

On a recent trip to VMware in Palo Alto, I found some time to visit with a good pal of mine, Vinay Gaonkar, who is now the Product Manager for XtremIO over at EMC. Vinay used to be a storage PM at VMware (he worked on the initial phases of VVols), and we worked together on a number of storage items in various vSphere releases. It’s been almost 2 years since I last spoke to the XtremIO folks (VMworld 2012 in fact, when the product still had not become generally available), so I thought that this would be a good…

Pure Storage revisited – a chat with Vaughn Stewart

Pure Storage are all over the news at the moment. They just secured another round of funding (225 million to be precise), and are now valued at over 3 billion. You can read more about that here. However, even before this announcement, I had already arranged to have a catch up chat with Pure’s primary evangelist (and a good pal of mine), Vaughn Stewart. I was surprised to see that it had been 18 months since I last did a piece on Pure so I really did want to see what changes they had made in the meantime as there…

VSAN & VDP Interop

In this post I though it might be useful to share some information about VSAN interoperability with VMware’s flagship backup and restore product, vSphere Data Protection also known as VDP. First a note about versions –  that you will need to use the March 2014 release of VDP (version 5.5.6), not just to backup VMs running on VSAN, but to back up VMs running on vSphere 5.5U1. Here is a comment taken from the release notes for ESXi 5.5 U1: vSphere Data Protection. vSphere Data Protection 5.1 is not compatible with vSphere 5.5 because of a change in the way…

A closer look at Tegile

Another storage vendor that I finally managed to catch up with at this year’s VMware Partner Exchange was Tegile. I was curious about the name, and I learnt that Tegile was a merging of  the terms Technology and Agility. Tegile is another vendor that I have seen at various events, but have not had an opportunity to catch up with them in person and learn about their products. This time, I got an opportunity to catch up with Rob Commins (VP of Marketing) and Mike Recker of Tegile, and put a few questions to them.