Monday, August 23, 2010

VMworld 2010 - August 30 - Sept 2nd

Another VMworld is around the corner, just a week away now - it is again in San Francisco at Moscone Center and should be an interesting event as always. Cisco, EMC and NetApp will all have big presence at the show for sure and it is nice to see what they have in terms of product lines and what they are doing in the virtualization space. What makes me want to attend the expo every year though is the small niche companies that have interesting products or way of solving problems that the big boys haven't figured out or haven't thought about.

Often it is the case that these folks get purchased and integrated into one of the bigger players so part of the fun is getting to see them while they are still small, still agile and still interesting plus getting their swag while they still have their own logos and tag lines and such.

I expect to see some announcements associated with the show regarding partnerships, new product launches and perhaps some heated debate too. It looks like Microsoft will once again be relegated to a regular small booth which is a shame considering the majority of deployments of VMware's products are to support Microsoft platforms. I think VMware is making a mistake not allowing Microsoft to have a bigger presence at the event and simply asking them to live within some guidelines regardings Hyper-V.
- Ed

Friday, August 06, 2010

Splunk User Conference - August 9-11, 2010

One of the tools I use to help me wade through the mass of data that networking devices spit out is Splunk. Splunk is easily one of the most useful apps to run if you have to try and figure out what is going on with regards to firewalls, ids, network logging and anything else that will output to syslog.

If you happen to live in the San Francisco Bay Area you are in luck too, next week is the first annual Splunk User Conference and you can still sign up. I wish I could make it myself, especially since I live local to the event.

Splunk has really expanded the capabilities of the product but to be honest, the simple search and filtering to help me write better access control lists for firewalls is a huge time saver, just being able to do that quickly and efficiently makes it worth it's weight in gold.
- Ed