Rick Gouin

Author: Rick Gouin

Dell EMC Takes Aim at Low End Storage

· Rick Gouin

I’ve been involved in solutions for a few customers recently where they opted to not buy part of the solution, instead choosing to go with a less expensive storage option for data that they perceived to not merit the cost of higher end storage solutions.  QNAP, Synology, and similar providers have been quietly meeting this low end storage need for some time now, while larger providers like Dell EMC only had some aged offerings in their portfolio.  The PowerEdge ME4 is designed to meet this need by bringing some pretty high end features down market at a low price point. […]

Game Changers at Nutanix .NEXT 2018

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix .NEXT 2018 was held the 2nd week of May in New Orleans this year.  I have to say that I greatly appreciate attending a conference somewhere other than Las Vegas.  Keep it up as long as you can Nutanix! There were a number of announcements, and quite a bit of talk about some of the features that came out recently with AOS 5.6.  Here is a quick summary of some of the biggest new things to come from Nutanix, featured at .NEXT 2018: Beam. This is a governance tool at its core.  It is provided as a “Software as […]

New Dell Poweredge MX Series

· Rick Gouin

  Dell Technologies World this year was a combination of the former Dell World and EMC World events that has come about from the joined companies.  This year, I think one of the most important and exciting announcements to come out of the show was a sneak preview of the new blade chassis, the Poweredge MX 7000. Fast forward about 4 months and that blade chassis is now officially released. This new blade enclosure is the replacement for the aging M1000e chassis, which has served well for a long time.  Its not aimed at the FX2 or VRTX markets, so […]

The three snazziest announcements from Dell Technologies World

· Rick Gouin

Dell Technologies World is in full swing in Las Vegas this week.  There are so many new products and features being announced that it can be hard to keep track of them all.  I’ve sifted through all this stuff and come up with a few of the biggest things to come out at this years show.   PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000 This refresh to the VMAX product line represents the next generation of the enterprise class storage array, complete with all new names for things to keep you on your toes.  We are calling the running code “PowerMax OS” […]

5 Fun Things in Nutanix AOS 5.6

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix released AOS 5.6 on 4/16.  In addition to a bunch of cool features we will highlight below, this also marks a change to a new release schedule.  The new release schedule sounds a bit like what you might find from Ubuntu Linux.  There will be long term support releases, as well as periodic (quarterly?) feature releases. Nutanix API v3 now GA and available in the API Explorer! When I built out the Enterprise Cloud tool, I had to use API v1, because that was all that was available at the time.  The v1 API didn’t have a lot of […]

Hybrid Architectures: Let’s Talk Availability

· Rick Gouin

Hybrid architectures are popular.  As I look across the organizations that I consult with, I am hard pressed to point out many that aren’t working in some flavor of hybrid environment, even if they don’t realize it.  One of the things that can become confusing is the overall availability of a solution when parts of it reside on-premise and parts of it reside in a public cloud.  Fully understanding the implications as it relates to your overall availability is going to affect how you architect these systems.  We are going to get our arms around availability here, and maybe do […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: Rollup

· Rick Gouin

Coming out of .NEXT 2017, we saw 3 major strategic announcements from Nutanix, as well as a number of smaller updates.  Some of these had been previously announced, and some were all new.  In this article, I’d like to give a quick overview on some of those smaller announcements or changes that didn’t get the press they may have deserved. First, lets review the big 3: Calm Xi Xtract These 3 updates are the ones you’ll find all over the trade papers if you search on Nutanix.  They are stealing the spotlight, but there are some other noteworthy things that […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: Xtract

· Rick Gouin

The 3rd annual Nutanix .NEXT held in Washington DC at the end of June 2017 brought 3 major strategic announcements to light.  I talk about the first one, Calm, here.  The 2nd one is a hybrid cloud enabler called Xi, which I talk about here. One of the thematic elements I took away from this conference was that Nutanix is betting on hybrid cloud.  They see the 800lb gorilla that is AWS, and know they aren’t positioned to take away that business yet.  They’ve focused on enabling the best hybrid cloud experience possible, all built on Nutanix technology.  Very cool. […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: XI and GCP

· Rick Gouin

In this article, I talked about the first of 3 major strategic announcements to come out of .NEXT 2017.  That article goes over how the calm.io acquisition has been put to use by Nutanix in their Enterprise Cloud Platform.  Now, lets talk about the 2nd major announcement, which is Xi and the partnership with Google Cloud Platform. One of the things I enjoy about being a Nutanix partner is the pace of innovation.  They consistently come out with new ideas that I didn’t even know I needed.  When I think back to the announcements from 2 years ago that they […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: CALM

· Rick Gouin

Today marks the end of the 3rd US Nutanix .NEXT conference.  When I think back to the first .NEXT that I attended in 2015 in Miami, everything starts to click.  At that very first .NEXT conference, there was lots of hinting towards integrations with cloud providers.  At the time, all the talk was about AWS and Azure, but we all saw a vision of the future where Nutanix enabled customers to easily deploy hybrid cloud solutions.  That future is now! There were 3 strategic announcements coming out of Nutanix .NEXT 2017, as I see it.  In this article, I’m going […]