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.

A closer look at Rubrik Cloud Data Management v3.1

When I started to write this post, I looked back over my notes from previous conversations with the team at Rubrik and realized that my first conversation with them was almost 2 years ago. How time flies! I still remember meeting Rubrik at one of our VMware Partner Exchanges (PEX) in 2015, and getting a demo from Bipul Sinha (Rubrik CEO) and Julia Lee (Product Marketing). I also remember when Chris Wahl moved to Rubrik (almost 18 months ago now), thinking what a great move that was for both Chris and Rubrik. Well, when I caught up with Chris last…

Rubrik and VSAN webinar recording now available

If you missed our joint Rubrik and Virtual SAN webinar earlier this week, you can now view it online. In this webinar, the indefatigable Chris Wahl, Chief Technology Evangelist from Rubrik, and myself discuss the merits of policy driven architecture, with particular focus on VSAN and of course Rubrik. The primary goal is to demonstrate the simplicity of a policy-driven approach. We hope you like it. By the way, a joint VSAN+Rubrik white paper is still available if you would like to learn more details about both products, as well as their respective synergies. Kudos to the Rubrik team (especially…

Upcoming Rubrik and VSAN webinar – October 11th

A number of months back, myself and Chris Wahl of Rubrik put together a comprehensive white paper discussing the role of storage policies in both Virtual SAN and Rubrik. Next week we are going to hold a joint webinar where we will once again discuss the role of policy driven storage. I’ll speak about the role of policies from a VMware/VSAN perspective while Chris will discuss the use of policies in the Rubrik environment. In essence we want to highlight how the use of policy based architecture can abstract away complexity when managing data. The event will take place on…

Some highlights from VMworld 2016

With Virtual SAN gaining huge momentum, I had a pretty busy VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, and I didn’t have too much free time this year to immerse myself in the Solutions Exchange. However there were a few folks that I did want to catch up with as I had heard that they have some cool new features added to their product sets. So I made a bee-line to check them out. Let me know if you found anything else interesting. I might have a little more time in VMworld Barcelona to check out the solutions exchange and see what…

Joint Virtual SAN/Rubrik White Paper

I’m delighted to announce the availability of a joint Rubrik and VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) white paper. Both Rubrik and Virtual SAN epitomize many of the features and characteristics of Software Defined Storage, in particular simplifying storage and backup/restore for vSphere Administrators. Other features include abstracting the underlying storage into one large pool, and consuming/utilizing that underlying storage through policies, whether these are for virtual machine deployment or backup. If you are completely new to VSAN and/or Rubrik, this paper gives a good explanation of both technologies. The paper also explains how Rubrik and VSAN work seamlessly together to back…

Rubrik 2.0 is out, with a new model and a new service

Rubrik, who exited stealth only a few months ago, and launched their r300 series of converged data management appliance, have just announced version 2.0. You can read up of the Rubrik launch here. The 2.0 version has a new service called “Unlimited Replication” and a new appliance to the r300 series, the r348 “Hybrid Cloud Appliance”. Rubrik co-founder and CEO, Bipul Sinha, stated in the press release that Rubrik continues to transform “how companies approach data protection and recovery at scale”.