
Brian Knudtson17













































Anyone have an opinion on the #HCI market at VMworld?

Brian Knudtson
No, okay?

Julian Wood
.@bknudtson HCI is hot everywhere but tough to hear it all at VMworld as you guys/Nutanix etc. are competition

Trevor Pott
Anyone who doesn't compete with VMware. There is no competition. Speak not of witches lest ye be burned.

David Davis
#HCI offers great opportunity to make the storage silo more efficient

Stuart Miniman
Cisco #HCI has been a hot topic lately - @TheJasonNash nailed it - they often are heavily against something until customers beat them up enough, then give in (or acquire). Comment from SimpliVity?

Brian Knudtson
@cakeis_not_alie Coopetition FTW?

Stuart Miniman
@davidmdavis don't we want to bust that silo?

Trevor Pott
Everything is a fad until VMware can "invent" it in-house. And then it was their idea.

Brian Knudtson
@davidmdavis Or to completely eliminate the storage silos. We have large customers who have eliminated that as a separate team.

David Davis
HCI is a critical piece of building a more modern datacenter

Brian Knudtson
@stu Yeah, customer demand definitely drives things. We've had partnerships emerge due to customer demand.

Trevor Pott
@stu Silos are great! And any customer who doesn't think so is "irrelevant". Until it's VMware that's busting a silo. Then silos are bad.

David Davis
VMware has VSAN but there are a so many good options to do #HCI

Brian Knudtson
@stu Customers need to stand up and demand what they want. Good things tend to happen. Vendors who listen and react flourish.

Trevor Pott
@davidmdavis Not if you're VMware.

Trevor Pott
Three words: Not Invented Here.

Matt Baltz
@davidmdavis VSAN is SDS not HCI

Steve Kaplan
@davidmdavis True, but HCI is only table stakes.

Brian Knudtson
@mlbaltz Very true. It's a building block that can be use. Of course, we could spend the next 30 minutes just debating the definition of HCI (or cloud for that matter)

Josh Atwell - 60% Productivity
HCI = /yawn/

Trevor Pott
When customers stand up and demand what they want they get told they're irrelevant, get ostracized and then get shafted.

David Davis
@mlbaltz True VSAN is SDS, partners offer their SDS as HCI

David Davis
@Josh_Atwell What gets you excited in tech these days Josh?

Josh Atwell - 60% Productivity
@davidmdavis do you REALLY think that? I can't see why anyone would re-platform with HCI.

Trevor Pott
The higher you stick your head above the parapet, the quicker some jerk on Twitter will lob it off.

Trevor Pott
@Josh_Atwell Hey, Josh, how much does it cost to refuel that Saturn V you commute to work on?

Julian Wood
@Josh_Atwell I can and do, simple integrated turnkey appliance for VMs.

David Davis
@ROIdude Great point Steve - HCI is table stakes - I get excited about all the other cool stuff around it

Brian Knudtson
@davidmdavis @ROIdude I also agree. HCI is not an ends, it's simply a means to an end.

Gabriel Chapman
HCI's natural transition is to being a software stack that runs on validated commodity hardware for a fairly specific set of customers who value low sophistication

Gabriel Chapman
lets also not make HCI into something its not, and thats a full sweep of the traditional datacenter floor

Julian Wood
@Bacon_Is_King low sophistication doesn't have to mean low performance though.

Gabriel Chapman
@julian_wood no, indeed it doesnt, but lets be honest, the majority of VMW hosted workloads in the HCI market are not pushing greater than 5-10k IOPS and thats great for HCI customers

Brian Knudtson
@julian_wood @Bacon_Is_King low sophistication also shouldn't be viewed as negative thing. Simplification should be a goal.

Brian Knudtson
@Bacon_Is_King ALL FLASH! ALL FLASH!

Gabriel Chapman
HCI value prop diminishes significantly when you get into that 12-24 node and greater implementation unless its single silo workloads like VDI and even then, HCI is expensive

Gabriel Chapman
it can be, but there is a big world out there where VM's are not the default

⚔️⚔️⚔️ kyaaS⚔️⚔️⚔️
@Bacon_Is_King agreed. Low barrier of consumption is a great value that HCI brings to the battle.

Gabriel Chapman
that broad swath of VMW customers, and I'm saying the ones with sub 10 hosts, are a great target market for HCI. For everything else, I'll say that its going to be a YMMV

Trevor Pott
@Bacon_Is_King Yes, Gabe. You don't use a Falcon 9 to go the moon. But you don't need a Saturn V to piss around in LEO or GEO either. And most people don't need or want to go to the moon.

Gabriel Chapman
@cakeis_not_alie mars is the mission :)

Trevor Pott
@Bacon_Is_King Ah yes, the "anything bigger than a cube sat should really use our Saturn V" argument. Ignore the part where people are deploying 4 satellites off a Falcon 9, BUY OUR SATURN V, DAMN IT!

Julian Wood
@Bacon_Is_King profits are currently in the software, hopefully competition when you have "enough" features brings it down

Brian Knudtson
@cakeis_not_alie Totally agree with you. Even _I_ don't think HCI will fit all usecase, no matter how much tech/flash we throw under it.

Trevor Pott
@Bacon_Is_King But how does a rocket designed to fly to Mars help you when all you need is to sling a few comns sats into GEO?

Paolo Vecchi
You may have situations where a single virt server or HA is more than enough but isn't HCI the same as your virt infrastructure just neatly contained in commodity boxes?