In the midst of whatever all of 2020 will continue to bring, I’m pleased to be able to report some good news. I’m employed again — much faster than I was during my either of my last two rounds of job searching. In all, one month passed from the day I was informed that my position had been re-organized out of existence to my first day at the new job.

Before I get into details on that, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to thank everyone who reached out to me on social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other way to offer help and support. I had eight separate solid job leads within 24 hours of sending my tweet that I was back on the market. This is truly a case of “I couldn’t have done this without you”.

So, last week I started as the Product Marketing Manager at HubStor. I know they’re not the data center or cloud equivalent of a household name, but I believe they have the potential to become that.

HubStor is a small, fast, and agile startup founded in 2015. They are that rare tech startup that got started, and has become profitable, without taking investments from venture capitalists. This means HubStor has the freedom to do what’s in the best interests of HubStor and their customers, rather than what will earn investors higher returns.

As Product Marketing Manager, I’ll be creating a lot of content, as well as leading the company into new ways to reach customers, make our differentiation clear, and handle the competition.

HubStor offers a cloud data management platform that provides unified backup and archiving as a service. They’re able to help organizations with their regulatory compliance needs. HubStor also does content indexing that enables very fast smart searches.

I could go on, but I have no doubt that you’ll be hearing a LOT more about HubStor and their offerings from me in the days ahead.

Again, I’d want to thank everyone for the job search help and the moral support. I appreciate it, both professionally and personally.

Not all of 2019 was bad, but — for me at least — it was a hard year as can be evidenced by the frighteningly low number of new posts I made during the year. Everything is starting into an upswing now, so this post is part of just putting the year behind me and moving on into 2020.

So, with that in mind, I give you a list of my ten most-read posts during 2019. The list includes the years the post was originally published (because I was surprised be the continued popularity of some older posts) and the number of views it received according to WordPress. Google analytics gives me different numbers generally — but not always — higher so I actually have no idea which one is more accurate.

1. 2,560 – What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.5  (2016)
2. 1,511 – Use Your Windows Laptop as an Isilon Console Terminal (2013)
   1,504 – Home page
3. 409 – What’s New in Isilon OneFS 8.0 (2016)
4. 313 – Time to Retire the #HireDaveNow Hashtag (2019)
5. 303 – Magic Balloon: A Whiteboarding Creativity Game/Exercise (2013)
6. 216 – EMC Announces Next-Generation VMAX Storage Array (2014)
7. 169 – Cisco Enters Hyperconverged Market with HyperFlex (2016)
   144 – Mind Maps page
8. 142 – EMC Announces Next-Generation VNX – Takes it Full Multicore (2013)
9. 125 – Pure Storage Announces NVMe DirectFlash and New FlashArray Model (2017)
10. 113 – EMC Announces Updates to BRS Line (Data Domain, Avamar, NetWorker), Part One (2013)

I left the two pages in the list, but didn’t give them a spot in the ranking.

GeekFluent’s Thoughts

• Wow. I really need to be posting more often.
• I’m kinda curious as to why folks were so interested in reading about what was new in older versions of products.
• A well-written — or simply useful — “how to” stays relevant (even more so if the one you put together is clearer and easier to understand than the one the vendor put together…).
• Magic Balloon is still pretty cool, fun, and relevant — and likely to remain so when we migrate to whatever digital thing replaces whiteboards. I was first introduced to Magic Balloon in 1985 and folks still find it interesting today.
• I should update the Mind Maps page with some of the stuff I’ve been doing with maps more recently.
• I really want to put in more effort to be posting more often.
• People still seem to want to read posts related to product announcements.
• I really need to finish the prep work so I can go live with the Side Project.
• I should do some more “How To” posts.

Welcome to 2020. No matter how well your 2019 went, I hope 2020 is better for you.

By the time you’re reading this, I will have already started my new job as a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Acronis. I’ll be way over at the technical end of the marketing spectrum, helping folks understand how Acronis solutions work and helping people understand the business value of technical features.

As part of my interview process, I provided URLs to what I consider to be my best works reachable on the public web. Not only did the folks read the examples I sent, they also read through pretty much everything I’d written that they could find. Admittedly, since I had pointed them to a few posts on this site, they didn’t need to go on a difficult search. They also called my references starting maybe 10 or 15 minutes after I sent their contact info.

Since all job interviews really should be two-way, I did at least as much investigation into Acronis as they did into me.

Most of the folks who are familiar with Acronis likely think of them as a developer of backup software for personal use and use by small or medium businesses, but they’ve got a lot more than that going on.

Back in the day, when the term “data protection” was first being used (prior to that we just called it “backup”, or — for the advanced folks in the crowd — “backup and recovery”), most people hearing the term for the first time thought it was security-related. Of course, data protection (whose meaning quickly expanded to include keeping a copy of data off-site) only protects data against accidental and unintentional loss. Typical data protection solutions do nothing to prevent unauthorized people from copying or intentionally destroying the data. So, over time, we all learned that “protection” and “security” were two completely different things.

Acronis believes that security should be built into data protection. Since the term data protection was already used for non-secure solutions, Acronis moved into the cyber protection marketspace. As a part of beefing up their data protection solutions to be cyber protection solutions, they improved upon it a lot, expanding its ability to scale, and now Acronis cyber protection solutions are also a good fit for large enterprises.

However, (here’s where things get exciting for me), there’s a whole bunch more to Acronis than cyber protection. Other solutions they offer include:

• Scalable software-defined infrastructure (SDI)
• Hybrid cloud solutions
• Use of blockchain to ensure the authenticity of documents while providing non-repudiation
• Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to security, data classification, and automating operations
• All products have APIs, and some even have software developer kits (SDKs)

So, yeah, I’m excited about getting my hands on and digging into all this stuff.

If you’re curious about any of the solutions mentioned above, don’t worry — I expect to be talking and writing about them a lot in the very near future.

Thanks and Appreciation

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how much of my job search really felt like a group effort. To all the folks out there who helped me out along the way, thank you so much. It could have been being a reference, or arranging an introduction. It might have been forwarding a job posting to me, or suggesting a company or direction I hadn’t looked at yet. It might have been giving me much-needed encouragement when things were looking dark.

Whatever it was, know that I appreciate your efforts (regardless of whether or not they panned out), both professionally and personally, more than I know how to put into words. Thank you.

No, I haven’t won the World Series (although, if I had it would certainly be worth bragging about considering that I’m not a member of any professional baseball team). I’ll be attending the Nth Generation Symposium as a guest of HPE and as a Tech Field Day delegate.

This is the 19th annual Nth Generation Symposium. The Symposium focuses on technological innovation. HPE is the Grand Sponsor of this year’s event.

And – yes – it is being held at Disneyland! Well, one of the Disney resort hotels, but that still counts as being on the grounds of Disneyland in Anaheim, CA, so just roll with it.

This will be the sixth Tech Field Day I’ve been invited to attend and the second “Exclusive” one. It’s always great to get an invitation to these events.

This will be both my first Nth Generation Symposium as well as my first HPE event. I’m looking forward to getting to see what this event will be like.

Naturally, I’m also looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and the Tech Field Day delegates I haven’t met yet.

As always, the Tech Field Day event will be livestreamed and recorded. You can get more information about Tech Field Day coverage of this event here. When the event is closer, I’ll post info on how you can follow along even if you’re not attending.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it feels like Kevin Hart is everywhere lately. He’s doing TV shows, movies, guest appearances, commercials, etc. To that, I say, “Good for you Kevin. Cash in on it while you can.”

But then, I saw a particularly disturbing commercial for Mountain Dew Kickstart.

Mountain Dew has been trying different things over the past couple years to keep their brand relevant. One of these things has been the introduction of a line of drinks that’s trying to fill the alleged gap between soft drinks and energy drinks. They call this line Kickstart.

I was intrigued when they first came out, and bought one. Given how much I love my caffeinated drinks, I’m sure that my saying that I’ve never bought another since should tell you everything you need to know about my opinion of it.

Recently, they’ve announced more flavors through a series of commercials starring Kevin Hart. Most are clearly intended to be outrageously comedic — which is exactly what we’d expect from Kevin.

One in particular, however, feels to me as though it’s likely to have the opposite of the intended effect. Personally, after watching Kevin smack himself on the ass (literally) over and over again, I definitely wanted a drink, but something far stronger than Kickstart…

Think I’m overreacting? Check it out for yourself below. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

To make it easier, I’ve summarized the big announcements below.

Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery as a Service

The first (and possibly biggest) announcement is the availability of a new delivery model for Commvault’s backup and recovery capabilities. Folks have been used to running Commvault on on-site servers, but now they’ll be able to do it using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Specifically, this announcement is about the creation of three specific new cloud-based services:

• Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery as a Service (B&RaaS)
• Commvault Complete B&RaaS for Virtual Machines
• Commvault Complete B&RaaS for Native Cloud Applications

Last year, in November, Commvault announced Commvault Endpoint Data Protection as a Service. It’s been successful enough for them to expand upon that subscription-based as-a-Service model.

Commvault Complete B&RaaS is run from a Commvault-managed cloud. Commvault Complete B&RaaS for Virtual Machines supports VMs on Awmazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Commvault Complete B&RaaS for Native Cloud Applications supports Microsoft Offic 365 and Salesforce.

Commvault Complete B&RaaS will be available for subscription on Commvault Marketplace, AWS Marketplace, and Microsoft Azure Marketplace by December 2018.

New Commvault Hardware Appliances

Commvault has had the Commvault HyperScale Appliance, Model 1300 (scaling up to 170TB raw capacity) for a while now. They’ve announced the addition of two new models to their appliance family, a larger-scale model and a smaller model designed for the remote and branch office use case.

Also known as the Commvault Remote Office Appliance, the new Model RO1100 is designed to be a turnkey solution for extending Commvault Backup and Recovery functionality to smaller branch offices. The 1RU appliance comes with 24TB of raw capacity, which Commvault says will yield either 4.5 or 14.5TB of usable capacity depending upon the licensing options selected.

[NOTE: The Commvault press release claims 5 or 15TB of usable capacity. The 4.5 or 14.5TB numbers come directly from Commvault’s own technical specifications for the appliance.]

The new 1RU Commvault HyperScale Appliance,  Model HS3300, can be configured with 16, 24, 32, or 40TB raw capacity per appliance, and can scale-up to a total of three appliances (giving 48, 72, 96, or 120TB total raw capacity). Commvault refers to a cluster of three nodes as a “block”.

According to the press release, a maximum-capacity block will give up to 262TB of usable capacity. (The technical specifications do not mention usable capacity at all.)

The Model RO1100 is available now. The Model HS3300 will be available in December 2018.

Commvault Activate

Two of the messages I’ve heard at Commvault GO are: “Enterprises can’t manage what they don’t know they have” and “the most vexing problem facing CIOs today is understanding what data they actually have”. Commvault’s answer to these issues is Commvault Activate.

Activate uses a powerful open and dynamic index that employs AI learning methods to allow customers to gain knowledge and context around all of their data, where it’s stored, and how it is (or isn’t) being used.

Activate allows customers to:

• Identify duplicate data that is unnecessarily increasing the burden of their backup and recovery plans.
• Access real data usage trends to identify which data is accessed less frequently and thus can be safely moved to less expensive storage without harming workflows.
• Identify critical and/or sensitive data (such as personal information, intellectual property, trade secrets, contract info, etc.) so they can enact the right handling of that data to meet their compliance requirements.
• Identify patterns of data duplication to determine potential changes to data workflows to reduce or avoid that duplication in the future.

The additional context Activate can provide customers about their data can inform their data protection, disaster recovery, and data security planning.

Partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Commvault announced full integration between Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery software and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) StorOnce systems, including HPE StorOnce Catalyst software.

This integration will allow customers to manage and configure StorOnce Catalyst using the Commvault user interface. In fact, future StorOnce Catalyst updates will be included in Commvault service packs, meaning customers won’t have to manage update cycles separately.

Customers using this combined Commvault and HPE solution will be able to move their backup data to cloud storage. This capability will be supported by HPE Cloud Bank Storage — a feature that is scheduled to be supported in an upcoming HPE software release in November 2018.

Partnership with NetApp

Commvault annocunced an expanded partnership with NetApp, allowing customers to purchase Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery software directly from NetApp and NetApp channel partners. This will simplify purchasing, maintenance, and support for customers who use NetApp storage solutions.

NetApp says that Commvault’s approach to data protection aligns well with their own Data Fabric approach and builds upon existing integration between Commvault software and NetApp arrays.

GeekFluent’s Thoughts

My thoughts on the Commvault announcements are below. They are in no particular order, and they’re easily worth at least twice what you’ve paid for them.

• Commvault is changing. They’ve recognized that they’ve often been viewed has having great products, but also as highly-complicated. Anyone who’s quoted a Commvault solution in the past, or read a Commvault quote, will attest to this. By reorganazing and repackaging their portfolio of solutions they’ve greatly simplified their quoting process. This is something that will be attractive to their usual enterprise customers, and make them much more attractive to mid-market customers who had often shied away from the complexity in the past.
• Commvault isn’t changing just their portfolio packaging, they’re changing their go to market strategy. In the past Commvault sales have been 2/3 direct and 1/3 partner-led. Commvault is looking to flip that ratio and is working to do more to enable their channel partners. One of the Commvault executives I spoke with said that right now it’s a lot easier for them to get approval for funds for partner enablement than it is to get funds for hiring new Commvault sales people, meaning this change is being supported at the highest levels of the company. With Commvault looking to get a greater presence in the mid-market, they’ll need that stronger partner support. This could be a great win-win for Commvault and their partners.
• The changes are going further. Commvault is currently looking into possibly changing — or at least adding to — their executive leadership team in order to help them not only continue to modernize, but also to stay on top of future trends and changes. (And, yes, I’ve worked to make sure they’re aware that I’m currently job hunting, but, no, as of this writing I do not have any interviews for C-level positions with Commvault scheduled. (Call me!) )
• The as-a-Service model is a great move. Organizations are now fluent in the entire as-a-Service concept and in many cases it’s becoming a preferred purchasing model. Many customers love the idea of getting the benefits of the software without having the burden of managing the infrastructure that the software runs on. I think Commvault will see this take off, with first adoption among net-new Commvault customers. It will likely take existing customers a while to consider changing over, or a compelling reason to do so. Which is fine — giving customers options can only help.
• The additional appliances are also a great idea. Commvault isn’t seen as a “turnkey” solution, and it hasn’t been seen as a small or remote office solution. Giving themselves an easy entry point into this use case can only benefit both Commvault and their customers. Likewise, adding the larger appliances gives customers more options. Let’s face it — no one’s data is shrinking. It’s always growing and always being kept longer. Larger capacity options will pretty much always be needed.
• Commvault Activate may be a hard sell in its infancy. I agree that those most in need of it will recognize the need for its capabilities, but the problems it can address can be so complex that it feels like any solution would be complex as well. As it’s been presented so far, Activate only identifies possible problems or areas that could benefit from improvement, but it doesn’t seem to do anything about those issues. While identifying issues is always the first step to fixing them, in and of itself it’s not enough. I think Activate will be far more likely to really take off once Commvault can integrate it with other solution software — even their own products. If Activate could not only locate and identify data that isn’t being backed up, but also offer the customer the option to add a new policy to Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery to start protecting that data, that’s when the true value of Activate will become crystal clear to customers. If I were in charge (and again, I am looking for my next position…), I’d also be looking into integrating Activate with other vendors’ Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solutions. Consolidated reporting on GRC across the entire enterprise, with the inclusion of the level of detail it sounds like Activate can offer would be a huge win-win.
• The deeper partnerships with HPE and NetApp can only benefit Commvault. Customers are buying storage solutions from HPE and NetApp, not from Commvault. Making it easier to include Commvault’s data protection in the initial sale of a new storage solution directly benefits Commvault and the customer, while helping to differentiate the storage vendor. Yes, that is a win-win-win.

Overall, my thoughts on what I’m seeing here are very positive. There is, however, one negative I see in the overall messaging. One that shifts the tone in an underlying way that might hurt the overall message. (I have some thoughts on improving it, and again, I do also happen to be looking for my next opportunity. Just saying.)

• The attempt to summarize the “new” Commvault messaging is well-intentioned — and I get where it’s coming from — but it misses the mark and sounds far less enthusiastic than it’s meant to.The idea behind the new message is clear. “Look at everything we can do for customers. Look at how simple we’ve made purchasing our solutions. Look at how simple and automated we’ve made things. And here — look at how competitively-priced we can be compared to other vendors’ solutions. Once you see all this, why WOULDN’T you select Commvault as your clear vendor of choice?”There’s nothing wrong with this at all. It’s a great approach to selling the solutions. The only problem is that what I’ve written above isn’t a short catchy slogan. The catchy slogan that Commvault is using to summarize the above ideas?Why NOT CommvaultYeah. It just lacks the enthusiasm of the larger message. In fact, if you heard it without the context of the larger message it could sound like a complaint or even sound confrontational.

  It makes me think of the old Avis Rent-a-Car slogan: “We Try Harder”. At the time Avis started using that slogan, they were ranked as the #2 car rental company in the US. The problem with the slogan? Customers don’t care if you’re “trying”, they want to work with folks who are succeeding, not trying to succeed.

  Think I’m off-base on how this can have a subliminal and unconscious affect on customers? As I mentioned Avis was ranked #2, when they adopted their slogan. Today, according to Statista, they’re ranked #4, at just under half the index score of the #1 ranked company. Maybe the slogan didn’t hurt them, but it sure did nothing to help them.

With all of the Goodness^TM that Commvault can bring customers, they deserve a better slogan. “Why not?” is not a reason why any enterprise ever selects a solution.

Next week, I’m heading down to Nashville for the Commvault GO 2018 conference. I’ll be there as part of the Tech Field Day contingent. I’ll be attending as an independent analyst, which means that in addition to the general sessions and access to the exhibition floor, I’ll also get to attend the analyst briefings. I’m looking forward to having some good stuff to write about from this.

Since, until very recently, I’ve been working for a vendor, I haven’t been able to take on this sort of opportunity for the past 18 months or so. I’m excited to be getting back into it.

In addition to the conference itself, I’m really looking forward to seeing the other members of the Tech Field Day group. Can’t wait to see the other eight folks I already know and have come to respect, and I’m looking forward to getting the chance to meet the other five folks I haven’t had the chance to meet yet.

These Tech Field Day events have been a great experience for me. I’ve learned so much from them and made so many lasting connections. If you ever get the opportunity to attend as a delegate and are able to have the timing work, my advice is to dive right in and go for it. You will not regret it.

While waiting for it, someone suggested that this would be a great candidate for an unboxing video. I’ve done one unboxing on this site before, on a very special episode of the GeekFluent MiniCast. Since that was an audio-only unboxing it went over about as well as you might expect it to.

This time, there’s video. I’ll be following up with video of the device in use, but, for now, here’s the Tap Unboxing Video.

What are Cisco Champions exactly? you might ask.

It’s a fair question, I’ll admit. Started in 2014, the Cisco Champion program is a way for Cisco to recognize those members of the IT community — who are not Cisco employees — who are going above and beyond their job descriptions to find ways to contribute to and share knowledge with that IT community.

To quote from Cisco’s website:

Cisco Champions are passionate experts who share their perspectives with the community.

In my experience, that’s exactly who they are. Sometimes I feel like there are people out there who are only interested in joining community programs like this one in order to grab some free swag, but I’ve never gotten that vibe from any of the Cisco Champions I’ve met in person or interacted with online. In general, I find them to be very enthusiastic about the technology we all use and very eager to learn — and help others learn, too. I find that I get energized when I spend time with this community.

Cisco recognizes Champions in the following interest areas:

• Data Center
• Collaboration
• Enterprise Networks
• Internet of Things
• Security

With that said, I’m both proud, humbled, and a little nervous to have been named a Cisco Champion for Data Center for my 5th year. Proud because, well, it’s a honor to be selected. Humbled because when I look at the other folks who’ve been selected, I see several folks who I’ve looked up to for a while, and someone has decided that I belong in the same grouping as them. And a little nervous because someone has decided that I belong in the same grouping as these folks — a little concerned about not living up to expectations.

Anyway, thank you Cisco, and congratulations to all the other Cisco Champions, both new and returning!

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been a big fan of the Avere platform. In my reseller days, I was involved in a few deals on solutions and designs involving Avere filers.

If you’re not familiar with Avere, you can read these quick overviews of their cloud gateway capabilities, their virtual filer, and their complete onsite storage solution.

Avere Systems customers include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Hopkins University, and Sony Corporation’s entertainment division. (I’m fairly familiar with how two of those three customers are employing their Avere filers.)

If I were to sum up what the Avere filers provide for customers, it would be that they provide the performance of local (onsite) storage for data that’s stored remotely (offsite). Clients access the Avere systems front-end using either the NFS or SMB protocols. The back-end can connect to multiple storage sources using either NFS, SMB, S3, or some combination. The Avere filers present clients with a single global namespace, meaning the client has no knowledge of where the data’s source actually is. Data can be migrated between sources on the Avere’s back-end with no interruption of service to clients connecting to the front-end.

With the virtual filers, Avere can also allow offsite compute clients in the cloud to access data in a customer’s private onsite data center…

In all, it’s not difficult to see why Microsoft might want to acquire them — especially since they’ve announced their intent to move it into their Azure division. What’s surprising, really, is that no other cloud provider saw Avere as an acquisition target earlier.

If Microsoft is able to incorporate that ability to have cloud computing resources accessing data from private onsite data centers into Azure, it will be a big differentiator for them as no other cloud providers currently offer a similar capability.

At this time, there’s been no news regarding the purchase price. Estimates and specualtion range from $300 Million to $500 Million. If true, compared to the potential Avere’s intellectual property has to add to a cloud service provider, this could turn out to have been quite the bargain for Microsoft.

Today, Avere Systems supports Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Obviously we should expect closer integration with Azure in the future, but Microsoft says they’ll continue to support AWS and Google, which I’m sure is welcome news to existing Avere Customers.

Resources

• Microsoft blog post on the acquisition
• Avere Systems blog post on the acquisition
• The Register article
• Silicon Angle blog post