Silicon Valley Tour

As mentioned in our previous post, we had have the opportunity to visit a couple of very interesting companies located in silicon valley prior to VMworld US.

Rubrik

We started off on Thursday at Rubrik. Chris Wahl, John Koo and Arvind Nithrakashyap (aka Nitro 🙂 ) were kind enough to welcome us at Rubrik HQ. We also had the pleasure to shake hands with Rubrik’s CEO Bipul Sinha!

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We had a preview on Chris his upcoming VMworld presentation and discussed the vision and strategy of Rubrik as we went along. Some very interesting statements there about converged data management. As far as we can tell, Rubrik is bringing simplicity and infinite scaling into backup and recovery. The ease of deployment and their idea to create SLA domains to protect your data is really something that impressed us.

Cloud based storage (S3 compliant ‘clouds’ supported) is leveraged for tier3 backup, previously provided by tape. Rubrik has made it very easy to extend your on-premises backup repository with public cloud storage.

Screw tape, it’s horrible

Platform9

Next up was Platform9. Located in Sunnyvale we were invited to an Indian restaurant for a very good lunch while discussing the world of Openstack and how Platform9 helps businesses to create their own cloud within (literately) minutes.

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Sirish Raghuram, Madhura Maskasky and Roopak Parikh took us through their visions about automation, DevOps and what not. Really good stuff! We were baffled by a demo in which a fully operational cloud environment, using a couple of KVM hosts, was deployed! With the recently released Platform9 version, VMware vSphere is also supported!! A virtual appliance connected to your vCenter environment makes it possible for Platform9 to interact with your VMware environment.

Platform9 is an easy way for organizations of any size to implement an OpenStack-based, agile, self-service Private Cloud.

Nutanix

After a good night sleep and a killer breakfast we headed down to San Jose to visit Steven Poitras, Timothy Isaacs at Nutanix HQ. We didn’t keep track of time. That resulted in an almost 2,5 conversation about Nutanix as a company, Acropolis, erasure coding and much more.

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Openness is key at Nutanix!

That’s what Steven told us and that’s how we experienced our conversation with these guys. Interesting points were definitely the growth of Nutanix as a company in a relative short period of time. Acropolis was discussed thoroughly and proved to be a very interesting step in the direction of adding value in the layer above the commodity hypervisor layer.

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We bumped into Lukas Lundell on our way out. He joined us for a quick chat and a group pic of course 😉  Awesome stuff.

PernixData

We crossed the streets to meet up with the one and only Frank Denneman for a visit to PernixData HQ. We originally planned to make a guest appearance in the latest Pernix video (https://youtu.be/J272Z1JCVPw) but our flight got delayed so we weren’t able to make it. Bummer. But, we got a tour around the office which was pretty awesome. Lots of clever minds at work there!

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We took a closer look at PernixData Architect and what it will bring to current storage deployments and the storage market in general. Exiting times ahead! During the ongoing discussion, a question about block sizes was raised. We were then schooled by Murali Vilayannur (the VMFS5 inventor!) on block sizes within VMFS. Really cool!!

PernixData CTO Satyam Vaghani made a short appearance as he was rushing in between meetings. What better place to further catch up with him than the PernixData #DCAwakens Cantina Party?! Tech talks and drinks! Won’t get any better than that! 😀

 


Needless to say; we had a blast the last few days!! We will definitely have a closer look to all the solutions we’ve discussed at the tech companies mentioned above. Big thanks to Frank for making this happen!! What a mega valuable experience!

I’m writing this post from our SFO apartment. We should have some time this weekend to explore the city. After that, it’s VMworld US time.  Can’t wait! See you there!!

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