SoftNAS is a classic NAS company with a twist. They use old-school technology, like ZFS and classic file-based protocols to solve data inertia problems while moving to the cloud. And sure, I get it. There’s a lot one could say about SoftNAS: they’re a legacy technology company trying to catch up. They are not cloud-native. It could even be argued that SoftNAS sees the cloud as yet another datacenter. They’re certainly not DevOps. The hipster developers …
Zerto gets into the long-term game at #vRetreat
I had forgotten about Zerto for a while. I’ve always like their innovative edge in DR back in the day, but DR became so commodity that the whole field lost their edge a little. Today I was refreshed on the topic at #vRetreat, a independent community blogger event organized by Patrick Redknap. IT Ops is struggling As I’ve recently transitioned to the customer side of IT, I look at things a little differently. Specifically, I …
@jpiscaer will speak at Spiceworks All Access Amsterdam
I’ll be speaking at SpiceWorks’ All Access conference in Amsterdam on June 28th! About SpiceWorks and All Access SpiceWorks is a big online community for IT Pros and provides technical forums for advice, learning, product reviews and tools for inventory, monitor and troubleshooting. All Access is a single day unconference with community speakers, technical content and lots of networking over a pint. If you want to attend, you can register here. Check the entire agenda. About …
Accelerite salvages good tech from bad execution: A CloudPlatform story
The title says it all, right? This week, as part of Cloud Field Day 2, I visited Accelerite. Accelerite is a wholly owned business of Persistent Systems, and they do a bunch of stuff. It’s hard to pinpoint what their core product is, nor do the products align or integrate tightly. In other words, it’s a portfolio company. One with an interesting strategy, though. More on that a little later. But first, let’s see what …
Selectively route traffic over ProtonVPN
I’ve started using ProtonVPN on my home Internet connection. With the ever increasing pressure on ISPs to share customer information to government agencies and copyright trolls, I felt more and more uncomfortable having this metadata accessible, and I figured it was now time to go the VPN route to at least shield my metadata from the ISP. I didn’t do this to obscure browsing metadata from websites or hide which country I’m in, though. I’m …
Nirmata is the cross-cloud orchestrator of orchestrators
You might know I am a fan of removing complexity at the infrastructure layer so IT folks can focus on higher levels in the stack, preferably applications, data and information. An example I usually refer to is Platform9, who made OpenStack stupidly simple. I wrote about Platform9 and the underlying concepts here: Can Platform9 solve fundamental OpenStack challenges? Can Platform9 simplify OpenStack by making it invisible? A Platform9 architecture deep dive: is it still ‘simple’ …
Fixing issues with your RDMs after upgrading ESXi to 6.5.0d
I run a Supermicro Xeon-D based for home lab purposes. One of the VMs on the Lab is my fileserver, which has four physical 3TB disks passed through as RDMs. You can read more on my (pretty awesome) home lab, since it’s physically small, but very powerful and incredibly versatile: Running a virtual gaming rig using a Xeon D server, a GFX 750Ti, PCI passthrough and a Windows 10 VM Build a Xeon D-1500 (Open) Home Lab …
How Docker’s secure software supply chain is key for moving away from the VMware datacenter
At DockerCon this week, I sat in on a Tech Field Day Extra (TFDx) event and we talked about how to move existing applications into the Docker ecosystem. As a CTO for a company that does a lot of legacy enterprise stuff and End-User Support, I deal with legacy applications on a daily basis. To put this into context: these are, in 99% of the cases, commodity applications provided by a commercial ISV in an …
NLVMUG UserCon 2017
Op 16 maart 2017 vindt de jaarlijkse UserCon van de NLVMUG weer plaats. Dit is het grote evenement van de Nederlandse VMware User Group, en staat als vanouds barstensvol goede sessies, keynotes, workshops en een beursvloer. Samen met Dennis en Arjan ben ik hard aan het sleutelen aan de agenda. Keynotes De technische keynote wordt dit jaar verzorgd door niemand minder dan Frank Denneman en gaat praten over ‘VMware vCloud on AWS’: VMware vSphere is het …
Running a virtual gaming rig using a Xeon D server, a GFX 750Ti, PCI passthrough and a Windows 10 VM
My home lab is a beasty Xeon D-based server with 128GB of RAM, chock-full of storage (fast NVMe and SSD as well as four 3.5″ 3 TiB disks), a quad-core Xeon D-1521 and two 10-gig ethernet interfaces. More than adequate as a server, and it comes in a small and silent package. The goal was to have just a single machine in the house to fulfil all the different scenarios: A home lab server, running ESXi and …