The CTO Advisor

Patrick Hubbard (@FerventGeek), Thomas LaRock (@sqlRockstar) and, Kong L Yang (@KongYang) all join The CTO Adviosr's Keith Townsend (@ctoadvisor) for a wrap of AWS re:Invent 2017. The panel discusses the differences in VMworld and AWS re:Invent and what it means for enterprise IT ranging from the single person shop to the large enterprise.

Microsoft announced support for bare metal vSphere on Azure. This is exactly what we all expected when VMware announced VMware Cloud on AWS, right? Well not exactly. VMware Clooud on AWS is a partnership between VMware and AWS. Microsoft didn't partner with VMware in engineering a solution specifically for Azure. Little is known about the offering outside of the blog post. We called on cloud expert Timmy Carr to help provide some context around vSphere inside of hyperscale cloud providers.

I'm joined by Scott Lowe of AcutalTech Media, Justin Warren from PivotNine and Ray Lucchesi from Silverton Consulting. We are on the show floor of CommVault Go. That's right I said, CommVault Go. First off I got the amazing opportunity to meet Captain Sullenberger who famously landing a jetliner on the Hudson River. So, it was a cool event despite being a backup conference. 

Secondarily, don't call it backup. Data protection and data management has become an hot area of investment. Look no further than our show sponsor Durva Inc. CommVault is looking to catch some of the magic from Rubrik and Cohesity eating into Data Domain sells. This all-star team of analysts holds nothing back in questioning if CommVault's new flagship product, Hyperscale, adds value.

We are currently in the grace period for GDPR. Should you be worried? With a potential fine of 4% of your organization's revenue for each penalty, the regulation has teeth. GDPR is a case where size doesn't matter. I sat down with PivotNine's Justin Warren and CommVault's Nigel Tazor to discuss the impact and considerations.

A continued trend we've been addressing is a market we've called data protection to this point. However, data protection is only a starting use case. Keith and Mark sit down with Prasenjit Sarkar, CTO of Datos. Datos makes the claim that their de-duplication is 10X more efficient than their competitors. But, what does that mean in practical terms. 

1:40 - How has application development changed? 

5:50 - How has the changes to application development impacted data protection? 

8:20 - Compute is as heavy as data 

13:00 - How is Datos any different than their competitors? 

18:20 - Real world example of how Datos is different than other solutions

20:00 - 10X de-duplication efficiency 

21:40 - Recovering to any cloud

Keith and Mark are joined by to senior level enterprise architects in the VMware community. While recorded at a VMware User Group UserCon, the focus is on the practice of enterprise architecture.  The content is relatable across IT functional areas. Keith and Mark explore what value enterprise architects bring, what makes a good enterprise architect and what's good enterprise architecture.

A long guest list. Keith and Mark talk to several members of the VMware User Group community. The podcast addresses the who, what, when, where, how and most importantly why of a user group.

Google's Kelsey Hightower joins the podcast for a reality check for enterprise IT. Keith and Mark ask the question, "Can enterprises adapt" to the quickly changing technology landscape? Do organizations have the budget and aptitude for navigating the disruption. Kelsey gives a pretty blunt assessment. Kelsey claims debates around issues such as CI/CD are now over. Kelsey shares his vision of the relation containers, the cloud, and business value.

Data protection startup Druva is coming fresh off a $90M investment. Another data protection startup won Best of VMworld. What is it about this market that has investors and judges excited. What's more to data protection than backing data up to some tapless media. Hasn't products such as Datadomain provided all the innovation needed in this space?

Is lift and shift a less expensive model than on-premises datacenter? What about sunk cost around licensing, hardware and facilities? Greg once said that only poor companies go to the cloud. Does that opinion still hold true? What about VMware Cloud on AWS?