It always surprises me when the largest IT vendors offer up less-than-compelling stories about their latest product offerings – you’d think they’d have the most creative storytellers on staff, after all! – but more often than not, I’ve found myself drifting a bit while listening to their sessions and waiting for the prized “Oh – one more thing” moment. In my previous blog post I discussed four much smaller vendors that presented their stories at Tech Field Day #25 that struck me as driving real value in the current multi-cloud marketplace, but it would be unfair to the “big guns” that also attended our conference to ignore what they brought to that space.
VMWare: Migrating Apps to the Cloud Ain’t Beanbag
I’ve been using VMWare technology for at least 15 years. I used their robust VMs to build out one of the first working models of Oracle RAC database technology when I was teaching courses for Oracle University that we used to teach over 2000 students from 2005 – 2009.
VMWare’s vRealize family of products offer DevOps teams, SREs, and PMs the ability to search for applications that an IT organization wants to move from a typical on-premises / in-house environment and migrate them to a multi-cloud environment. They presented several examples of how their tools facilitate the various phases of complex migration strategies, including even identifying which applications might be hiding “under the covers” but still need migration to the cloud, based on network activity and other metrics.
The final presenters from VMWare had the unfortunate task of talking about a stultifyingly boring topic – making intelligent sense of application activity logs – and actually made it (slightly) less boring. Their vRealize Log Insight Cloud product offers DevOps teams some interesting tools to take a closer look at how applications are performing in real time based on application logs and help focus DevOps activity towards meaningful interventions – say, moving an app to different cloud network endpoints to shorten user response times.
MinIO: SDS Is Where It’s At, Because Cloud Demands It
OK, so VMWare had the virtualized cloud side covered pretty well, especially from the network, CPU and memory perspective. MinIO discussed their software-defined storage (SDS) that’s currently compatible with all of the Big 3 public cloud providers, with some key customers using it for multi-PB-sized deployments.
The bottom line from the MinIO folks? We’re absolutely headed towards a multi-cloud future, and so that means IT organizations’ storage needs are best handled through software-defined storage instead of traditional spinning rust / SSD combinations housed internally as well. The big advantage their approach touts is that is therefore possible to keep storage demands completely separate from demand for compute resources.
Intel: Optane Increases Everything’s Octane
Intel talked about their latest innovations regarding their Optane family of products, which includes CPU, persistent memory (PMEM), and SSD storage technologies.
They also talked at length about their Compute Express Link (CXL) technology that allows their Intel-based CPU, memory, and storage devices to more effectively share resources for data exchange to overcome I/O bound workloads while also lowering the overall complexity of the software stack.
And finally it was nice to see some mention of the technology near and dear to my heart: Oracle Databases, Machine Learning, and Analytics! The X8M release of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine actually incorporates Intel’s PMEM technology into its storage cells and leverages that as an extended cache for columnar storage for database operations; Oracle DBs based on Exadata – including Oracle’s Autonomous Database available in its public cloud – thus absolutely scream performance-wise as compared to non-columnar databases.
Conclusions
In today’s tech news, Broadcom announced their proposed acquisition of VMWare by mid-week (umm … whaa?). In recent discussions with my delegate colleagues, even Oracle Corporation has been bounced around as a suggestion for a buyout parent … but quite honestly, it seems to me an Intel-VMWare pairing might make a lot more sense. The robust tools that VMWare has built for cloud migration would team nicely with Intel’s continual improvements to the CPUs, memory, and storage that underpin a majority of the hardware stack hosting many of the “Big 3” public cloud infrastructure.
Oh, and one other thing: These “big guns” should probably consider taking up our GestaltIT hosts to pre-review their presentations before we delegates actually get our first look. There are some serious benefits from professional overlook of their sessions before we ever get to see them, especially if it lets us focus on the benefits of each offering instead of having to suffer through a dozen or so slides filled with shameless self-promotion marketing pitches.
