So we are now living in the new house.  It has been pretty intense, my wife is a great project manager, and has gotten us moved in, done a majority of the unpacking during the day while I work which has been huge.  She is heading back to work after summer break, so it was awesome to have the house mostly put together.

This years VMworld has been an interesting one.  If you weren’t here, you might think that VMware is in a downward spiral just based of twitter, and some of the buzz on the internet.  With rumors of various mergers and buyouts abounding, it is getting difficult to sort fact from fiction.

For many infrastructure teams, the groups who normally attend VMworld and other industry events, I overheard a number of complaints about the Devops Hackathon, the number of developer sessions, and the focus on hybrid and cloud native applications.  There were a number of complaints on the keynote as well, it was more focused on applications, and less on some shiny new toy, far less wow factor than previous years.

There is an interesting phenomenon in the technology industry.  I have written previously about the challanges of big storage companies, and their lack of innovation which is leading to the success of many startups.  At dinner last night I was speaking with an IT Manager from one of my larger healthcare customers.  We were talking about cool technology toys, and comparing notes on some of our crazy home technology ideas.  In the course of conversation, he made the statement, “We got into technology because we love and believe in the technology, not to approve expense reports”.  Think about that for a moment.

In his book “Who moved my cheese”, Spencer Johnson made the statement, “The sooner you let go of old cheese, the sooner you find new cheese”.  Like many in the field, I started out in infrastructure support.  I loved the blinking lights, and tangible systems I could point to.  I was proud of my infrastructure.  Yesterday, Massimo Re Ferre’ tweeted, “I feel all those people that are leaving the keynote during @kitcolbert ‘s session may be without a job in 5 yrs. #vmworld #fact”

There isn’t much more to say.  As infrstructure specalists, we have to grow.  Change is inevitable, and VMware has a strategy.  If you don’t like our strategy, go find another, but the future is software defined, and applications > infrastructure for the consumer.  The choice is yours.

This year I volunteered, and was fortunate to be selected, to work in the VMware Hands On Labs.  As I write this I am watching the keynote in the labs, preparing for what will be a massive influx of customers and partners.  I wanted to share a bit of how exciting it is to see things from this side.

I am a huge fan of VMware’s Hands On Labs, as a partner at other manufacturers I have held this up as a model that should be emulated.  Giving customers a sandbox where they can work on your products, learn about them.  I firmly believe the best sales person is a happy and motivated customer.  Make incredibly cool products that people understand and want to use, and customers will come to you.  For years I have pitched this to customers as a way to understand what we do.

Working behind the scenes, the magic is not gone.  Watching some of the smartest people at VMware, and our partners, putting together self paced labs, and even expert led labs, where we can showcase how amazing the products are, and then send the customer back to design this in their environment is incredible.  The best part though is the interaction.  I have been able to meet so many customers, so many fellow VMware employees from around the world.  I am always excited to meet the people who actually use our software in production.  Having come from the customer side, and implemented VMware for a number of customers, it is exciting to hear the new and innovative ways virtualization is changing the face of businesses around the world.

I am going to be working in the Hands On Labs all week, supporting all of you.  So come by and check out what we are doing, take a lab, say hi, find an expert and get your questions answered.  It is a great time to learn, challenge yourself, and meet the team.  For those who aren’t at VMworld, we do have many labs available online for no charge at http://labs.hol.vmware.com/.  I encourage you to take advantage of this, get some hands on time and grow your career by gaining a better understanding of how things work.  I am at the concierge desk today, and will be running around the next couple days, so come say hi, and let me help connect you.

As the move gets closer, I am getting more excited about home automation.  We should have keys in a few days, so I will be going through the house the day before we move in to do some planning on where to place the TVs, the Media server, and most importantly the wireless, but that is a topic for another time.

In Part 1 I talked a bit about the TP Link switches I purchased.  Those have since come in, and are now installed.  I was less than impressed with the user interface, as it turns out it is a java based interface that only works on windows thus far.  I worked on getting the discovery running on my MacBook, but gave up and just ran it in a Windows 7 VM which is never ideal.  The configuration was pretty simple, I toyed with VLAN configurations to isolate my media systems, but that caused to many challenges around DHCP, DNS, and Airplay which is surprisingly important in my house suddenly.  I ended up leaving them on a single flat network for now, but I was able to add several devices back onto the network such as our 6 year old XBOX 360 which I refuse to buy a wifi adapter for or replace with an XBOX One.

I have been doing a ton of research on smart thermostats, I was really leaning toward Nest, but a little research on systems integration led me to Ecobee.  We are an apple house for better or worse.  I tried to change to Android once, and my wife convinced me it was not a good idea.  After talking it through with her, it occurred to me that the reason she likes Apple products is they work.  The iPhone, the iPad, the Apple TV, they are all intuitive.  She doesn’t want to fight with the technology she just wants it to work.  This is a critical lesson, I love tinkering, but I love my wife more.  Since I travel for work, it is important that things at home not need to be rebooted, or fixed, similar to an enterprise user.  Looking at Apple’s homekit, it seems like they are going to make things far more user friendly.

I am spending more time recently on audio.  My wife seems very interested in a wireless audio system.  I looked into Sonos as I mentioned before, but I am not thrilled about the lack of airplay support.  I think I have settled on bluetooth as the technology for wireless audio, so I am researching more options in that area.  I prefer to have something that is standards based and free from specific app requirements.  The only exception is apple specific protocols since they are a standard, albeit a closed one.  More to come on this as I continue to narrow down the technologies, I suspect in the long run Bose will win out due to quality for it’s size, but this is also another excuse to go to Bestbuy and research.

More to come, I am still debating home networking, a new television, and a number of other crazy ideas.

As a vExpert, I am lucky enough to get early access to new products, and spend some time with some of the best minds in our industry.  I am always humbled by the individuals who are willing to give us a peak into their world, and interested to see, so please don’t take this as a slam on anyone, this is more of an observation on the storage industry.

I was sitting on a webinar with, wait for it, yup, another storage startup.  Every time I think I have a handle on them, a new one comes out of stealth.  I love storage, around 10 years or so ago I moved over from servers to become a storage engineer at the company I was working out, and I still love the absolute simplicity of storage.  It is all based on specific rules, and it is very logical and generally predictable.  It was an easy transition for me coming from a database and app dev background during college.  As I was sitting listening to the product manager explain why the product was different it occurred to me, this was just a pretty simple variation on a theme.  Nothing they were doing was truly unique, cool, but not unique.

Looking at the landscape, it becomes clear that we are at a cross roads with storage technology.  Looking back at the past decade or so, we have seen a huge shift in servers.  Contrary to what we are reading from Cisco and HP, servers are a commodity.  Outside of pure technologists who love a particular technology for religious reasons, most people at this point aren’t too concerned about what brand of servers they are using, provided it works, it is basically just there.  When we look across the server market, there are maybe 5-6 players that are somewhat relevant, and in reality, we could cut that number in half and no one would care much other than the price.  Apply that same logic to storage.  The biggest differentiator between one storage array and another now, other than religious differences, is the software, and maybe a few capabilities.  Certainly one may be faster than another, but at the end of the day, the only thing that is truly unique is their software.  Certainly there is nothing wrong with that, but it is interesting to the debates on who is better and what features mean more than another.

Looking at storage startups, it is only a matter of time before the market collapses, and who will be left standing?  As I have discussed in the past, even if we look at the larger storage companies, they are failing to differentiate themselves much.  Most of the innovation is through acquisition, and at the end of the day, they all do pretty much the same thing.  Companies who fail to innovate in this space become obsolete, just look at Netapp.  Even from the perspective of the server admin, there is far less differentiation between the various storage vendors.  As software continues to increase in power, and as we move to a more software defined storage environments, it becomes a serious question, Where has all the innovation gone, and how different are the various storage vendors in reality?

As usual, a conversation with my internal team generates a new post.  Standard disclaimer applies here, and always interested in feedback.

With my wife and I buying a new house, she has been excited about furniture, busily determining where everything will go, and managing packing and the move amazingly well.  I on the other hand have been more concerned with figuring out how to wire my house for every conceivable scenario.  This has led to some interesting research on home networking and automation.

Since we have cut the cord for the most part with our cable, relying on Netflix and Plex, I have struggled with to ensure solid WiFi signal to all areas where we have a TV with a Roku or Apple TV.  We solved this in the current house by hijacking an existing ethernet port, and moving to a Linksys wrt1900ac router, but as we prepare to move, I am looking at several cable runs to provide a better long term, stable network with a future IP based security camera system.  After listening to a few home automation podcasts, and doing some research, it looks like smurf tube makes future cable runs much simpler.  I have settled on CAT 6 in an attempt to future proof the network as long as I can.

For reliable switching, I would love to use 10GbE, but unfortunately all of my home media gear won’t support it, so I found a pretty decent 8 port Gigabit switch at Bestbuy online from TP Link, http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/cat-41_TL-SG108E.html.  For the price it will do what I need, and provide a simple interface for managing the network.  I originally chose it for VLAN support, but then it occurred to me that unless I want to stand up a separate DHCP server from my wireless router, so that idea died quickly.

I have done a little research on audio networks, and I am very interested to research Sonos and others, but for now, after several hours of work to make my raspberry pi an AirPlay receiver, it occurs to me that I can use an old Airport Express with speakers plugged into it as a temporary solution.  Not great but it gets me by while I design the larger project.  I am still reading up on various solutions, so I am interested in feedback if anyone has opinions on any products in this area.

So that is where I am for now, lots more to do, but I hope to share my adventures with IP cameras, home automation, and general home networking.  I am not at all sure how this will all end up but it should be fascinating, and expand my home media experience.

It has been interesting the past several years to watch the storage startups.  When I left HP, we were predicting that a majority of the flash startups would simply go away due to market saturation.  We expected a few acquisitions, a few consolidations, and most of them to go bankrupt.  What we have seen is quite the oposite.  Certainly there is still significant noise in the marketplace around who does what better, and of course the larger vendors are continuing to try to defend their turf, but there is palpable fear, and in many cases blood in the water.

Customer intimacy

Smaller companies, by design, need to get their message out.  They are hungry and if they are to be successful there is no concept of “it’s not my job”.  Every sale matters and every customer has to be a reference customer.  Too many bad PR events and the company is unlikely to recover.  They tend to focus on a smaller, often single product set making them very good at one thing.  Larger companies have to make decisions to support scale and make sure they can meet growth plans.  They often have investors to answer to, as well as large workforces with expectations.

In the storage market this becomes particularly true if you look at how the larger storage and tech companies treat their customers.  This is certainly not an indictment of larger companies, just an observation.  When is the last time one of the larger storage companies took a change request from a smaller customer?  How many customers can get the CEO, or the Engineering Manager on the phone?  A majority of this is a function of scale, but it is a big difference, especially in smaller companies where it is tougher for  the large vendors to compete on this front.

Faster innovation

Where do most of the innovations come from?  Think about the last time innovation came from a large company.  EMC acquired Xtreme IO to give them a leg up in the storage market.  They could have built a product, but it was likely faster and cheaper to buy.  HP aquired 3Par to replace their aging EVA line which was well overdue for retirement.  The same story over and over, large storage companies acquire innovative startups to bring in new blood and new technology.

When Nimble emerged from stealth mode with a product it was incredibly different from what the big storage companies were doing.  Now if you look at who built the company, it is pretty obvious it was just act 2 of Datadomain, but it was innovative.  Pure, the same thing, their performance and utilization numbers were mind-blowing.  Solidfire took QOS to a level that we never imagined, and did it on a scale out array versus a scale up array.

It isn’t that larger storage vendors haven’t innovated, but the speed at which they innovate, and their ability to be cutting edge is hampered by their size.  The amount of interoperability testing is astronomical, whereas smaller storage vendors can just say, “we don’t support that”, or can simply focus on what they do and keep innovating in a single area, making it difficult for the larger vendors to make a move.

A different workforce

In a majority of larger storage vendors there is still the feeling of “this is how we do it”.  Customer satisfaction is often resolved as a function of discount, or additional hardware.  Sales people feel entitled, and in many cases customers feel that if a large vendor is calling on them they are either important, or want the free lunch.  The mentality is different though, the sales teams are typically tenured, and have deep product knowledge, but only in a specific area.  Many of them have come up through the ranks, or have made the rounds stopping at each large storage vendor for several years.  The employees are often very good and very intelligent, but not very passionate, they are tied to the company, not so much the tech.

Storage startups on the other hand, by design are much more focused on cool new tech.  Most of us in the industry have either been recruited by or worked for at least a couple of the flash startups.  They go after people who are active, passionate, and able to bring a personal brand to their product.  Look at who the storage startups have hired recently, their main common thread is a passion for technology and an ability to communicate that passion.

As always this is just my thoughts on the storage industry.  I chose to leave HP storage because I think hardware vendors are in a tough position, and working for a big storage company is not a safe bet in my book.  Certainly there is money to be made, but market shares are being eroded as customers become less loyal to one vendor over another.  Time will tell, but the more commoditized storage becomes, the tougher it becomes for big storage vendors, and the easier it is for the startups to erode the business.  It is anyone’s game, but my money is on further erosion, and more large hardware vendors going the way of IBM and moving toward services, or EMC, and looking for a federated approach.

Recently I swapped out my Apple Airport Express routers for a Linksys WRT1900AC router.  I wanted better coverage, and I was having issues with streaming media to multiple devices.  I tried the Apple Airport Extreme, but it had issues dropping connections often, and wouldn’t hold my firewall configuration.

Everything worked great with the new router except it kept having issues with my wireless printer, and airplay to the apple TV’s.  I was getting ready to take it back to the store, but I decided to do a little research.  Nothing specifically came up on google, but a few stray forum posts got me thinking.  I had originally setup the 2.4ghz and 5ghz SSID’s to be the same.  When I changed one of them, I found it resolved the issue.  This leads me to believe the devices were on separate networks when I was having problems.  Apple broadcasts on both bands simultaneously and seems to handle the handoff seamlessly.

Because I wanted to force everything to use the AC wireless for performance reasons, I disabled the 2.4ghz network.  I do still have a printer issue, my printer only supports the older standard.  Luckily I still have 2 Apple Airport Express routers so one of those is now joined to the network and connected to the printer via USB effectively creating a wireless print server.  Performance is up significantly, and Airplay works great.  When I shop for a new printer I will have to make sure it works with the newer wireless technology.

Nothing groundbreaking, but worth sharing.  Hopefully it helps others avoid frustration.

UPDATE:  So this is a bit embarrassing, it occurred to me last night while I was falling asleep I had overthought this problem.  The premise is still valid, but I realized that if I simply give the 2.4 ghz wireless a different SSID I can run the printer and older devices on that network.  Since it is the same Layer 2 network, everything works, just different ways of getting there.