vmworld

No, okay?

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

Everyone has an #HCI opinion /cc @sakacc @roidude @bacon_is_king @leecaswell @bknudtson

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

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

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?

@cakeis_not_alie Coopetition FTW?

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

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

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

HCI is a critical piece of building a more modern datacenter

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

@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.

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

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

@davidmdavis Not if you're VMware.

Three words: Not Invented Here.

@davidmdavis VSAN is SDS not HCI

@mlbaltz Uh hunh. And I'm not fat, I'm just big boned. #puhlease

@davidmdavis True, but HCI is only table stakes.

@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)

HCI = /yawn/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@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

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

@Bacon_Is_King ALL FLASH! ALL FLASH!

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

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

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

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

@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.

@cakeis_not_alie mars is the mission :)

@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!

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

@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.

@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?

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?

Many, many LOLs.

There's a certain amount of truth there for sure.

But yes. That seems to be the most innovative area in the ecosystem. Could be that is a broken area of the infrastructure puzzle?

it could be the last storage world after the acquisition closes

@bknudtson I think that storage is the broken silo at most companies today

in '07 it was I/O blender issue in '11 it was VMware integration in '16 what is it? Storage is invisible?

@gofarley Last storage world standing wins?

@dvellante Storageless? /cc @stu @gofarley

Storage world: an rusting industrial sector next to a modern shipping complex that can't store the goods it is trying to ship.

Storagemageddon?

@davidmdavis I think it's more like mismatched than broken.

@bknudtson @stu storageless is the right vector

@gofarley As much as I hate serverless and storageless as terms, I do agree with the intent. Make them self managing and nearly zero management.

nobody commented about containers - what about #cloudnative @docker and VMware?

Personally I plan to spend some time with the vSphere Integrated Containers (vIC) tools - looks interesting

https://vmware.githu...

The "cloud native apps" term still doesn't mean a lot to me - it's kinda fuzzy

they're doing a lot of work but don't have mind share IMO, @Docker speeding ahead, already doing networking and clustering

lolz VMW is legacy