Rick Gouin

Author: Rick Gouin

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 […]

Dell Releases New SC5020

· Rick Gouin

I previously blogged about the release of the SC7020, which is part of the “odd number refresh” that has now added the SC5020.  By this, I mean that it appears the even numbered SC platforms (SCv2000, SC4020, SC8000) will be refreshed via odd numbered platforms, of which we now have details on 3 of them: SC5020, SC7020, and SC9000. At Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas this week, Dell announced the availability of the SC5020.  Its available for quoting any day now, and will start shipping in June 2017. What are the promises? Up to 45 percent more IOPS, […]

Nutanix AOS 5.1 Available!

· Rick Gouin

Just a quick note about Nutanix AOS 5.1 that was just released on 5/1/17.  There are a few things in this update that I’ve been waiting for, so I thought I’d outline a couple of the more interesting changes here.   User Defined Alerts.  This is really cool.  As a long time Compellent user and employee, I really like the “threshold alerting” that the product has had built in for years.  This is very similar to that.  You can define criteria that triggers alerts.  For example, trigger an alert if a certain guest VM exceeds 99% CPU utilization.   Support […]