Alastair Cooke is an independent analyst and consultant working with virtualization and datacenter technologies. Alastair spent eight years delivering training for HP and VMware as well as providing implementation services for their technologies. Alastair is able to create a storied communication that helps partners and customers understand complex technologies. Alastair is known in the VMware community for contributions to the vBrownBag podcast and for the AutoLab, which automates the deployment of a nested vSphere training lab.
How did the development of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) come about? Did someone decide that storage networking and storage arrays were too complex? Did a server vendor look at SANs and decide to do things differently? As far as I’m aware, it didn’t happen either way. Future HCI vendors looked at the challenges of running a virtualized data …
Continue reading “Hyperconverged Isn’t the End Game: Simplification Is”
I spent the last couple of weeks preparing for the Amazon Web Services Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam. Coming from a long history of on-premises data centers, I find the messaging and training from AWS to be totally different. In VMware training, we spent a lot of time looking at designing and setting up networking and …
How much is your data worth? How much does it cost to store your data? I doubt that you have numbers for either of these things. But maybe it is time to start thinking carefully about both of these numbers. If the cost of storing your data exceeds its value, then you probably shouldn’t be …
Last month, I suggested that VMware could help itself and its customers by opening up. How about if it transformed completely? Could VMware survive if vSphere were free and it only charged for support? What if VMware embraced the idea that hypervisors are a commodity and focused on revenue from management and automation products? What if vSphere didn’t …
Continue reading “Make vSphere Free. Can VMware Sell Only Support?”
I live in a small city in a small country. As a result, there are a lot of small businesses all around me. Law firms with three partners, shipping companies with a couple of dozen trucks, and building companies with under a hundred staff. Almost all of the businesses where I live are small. Take …
I spent a week in April at the OpenStack Summit in Austin. This was my fifth OpenStack Summit, so it was not an entirely new experience. I attend the summit to organize the vBrownBag TechTalks, so I see the event quite differently from many of the attendees. One of the things I learned early on is …
