As you may know, next week is the very first vBrownBag Build Day. I will be heading to HPE’s offices in Houston and spend some time in one of their labs. The purpose of the Build Day is to show you the experience of deploying the HC380 platform into an existing customer. Once it is installed we will actually use the new platform to deliver some workloads. To show the real experience we will be live-streaming the build day on Thursday, April 6th starting at 9am Pacific time. You can watch the live stream on our live stream page here on vBrownBag.com or you can watch on our Facebook page. Either way, we want to hear from you. If you have questions during the live stream then talk to us via Facebook or Twitter. The more we hear from you about what you want to see, the better the event will be for everyone.I am expecting to learn a heap about the platform next week. We will be spending a lot of time with the HPE product technical experts and a little bit of time with the product managers. Right now, I only know that it uses HP DL380 servers and StoreVirtual at the center of the hyperconverged solution. The DL380 was a favorite of mine back when I was building solutions for customers. 2U, dual CPU, with space for lots of disks and plenty of expansion cards. I have
I am expecting to learn a heap about the platform next week. We will be spending a lot of time with the HPE product technical experts and a little bit of time with the product managers. Right now, I only know that it uses HP DL380 servers and StoreVirtual at the center of the hyperconverged solution. The DL380 was a favorite of mine back when I was building solutions for customers. 2U, dual CPU, with space for lots of disks and plenty of expansion cards. I have a long history with DL380s that goes all the way back to the Compaq brand and the first release when it would only hold six disks because they were 3.5”. I also have a fair bit of history with StoreVirtual, although my history is from when it was called LeftHand. I can still see the racks full of DL380s running LeftHand that were running a major consulting firm here in New Zealand. Since this was before HCI, the compute was a rack full of DL360s. Back then the LeftHand platform didn’t include a lot of the cool features. Now StoreVirtual has compression and dedupe, which makes an all-flash configuration more appealing. I imagine that there are a heap more features that I don’t realize that I don’t know. Probably time I started reading.
Naturally, I am being a real implementation engineer. I have downloaded a heap of documentation about the product, but have been too busy to actually read it. This is why vendors create readiness training programs and demand that partners complete the training. But what fun would it be if I didn’t approach replicating the end-user deployment experience by replicating the behavior? I will try to get some documentation read before I get to Houston. I am also behind on my own documentation, I haven’t finished writing up the customer’s vSphere environment that I am bringing with me. Since it needs to go in the suitcase with my video gear it will be a tiny start, the HC380 will be way more capacity than they currently have.
I hope you will all join me for the build day, it will be a lot more valuable if you join us and take part.