HP Helion Is out of the Public Cloud Game

A few years ago, I told HP’s product manager for public cloud that I thought all public cloud providers would run out of money and get out of the business. I was mostly being controversial to spark conversation. But HP has recently ceased selling its Helion public cloud. While this did prove me right in that case, I’m …

Software-Defined… Backup?

There are three pillars to the software-defined data centre (SDDC): software-defined compute, software-defined storage, and software-defined networking. Without any one of these three, the whole edifice of the data centre falls down. We build all three to be resilient, “designed for failure,” and robust. Each can be built and rebuilt from scripts that are stored in distributed …

Support in the 21st Century. What Works? What Doesn’t?

Support in the 21st Century. What Works? What Doesn’t? In my last post, I laid out what I, in my humble opinion, would be the basic expectations or baseline expectations of just about most companies support model and structure would be like. In the past twenty years or so, these have been my observations and expectations any time that I started any new assignment in a new company. There was a certain level of comfort, which comes from experience, when starting a new position in a new company to at least have a basic understanding of what to expect. There is always a technical “learning curve” that comes with anything new, but makes the transition easier having a basic understanding of how thing will be supported. That concept has served me well over the years, but just like how virtualization and cloud computing has changed the datacenter landscape, I think the change in the support structure is just now really well on its way and now would be a good time to have a look at what works and what doesn’t.