Last month Login VSI presented the results of their State of the VDI and SBC union world-wide survey. Together with the help of Ruben Spruijt (CTO Atlantis computing) and ControlUp they published a thorough 59-page document holding all kinds of interesting VDI and SBC related statistics. The survey was completed by 580 people in total. I went through the report and picked out a couple of subjects which are currently of most interest for me personally, for multiple reasons.
HP Moonshot revisited. Well… by me anyway
During the last year or so I have had my eye on the HP Moonshot platform. I followed what other community members had to say about it, how HP marketed the product and of course the announced partnership between HP and Citrix, introducing the Workspace Pod series at Summit not that long ago. I was rather skeptic, and I guess I still am. On the other hand, I also acknowledge that times are changing and that, if the use case fits, HP Moonshot might be a valuable solution, it just depends.
LoginVSI advanced performance & scalability testing. What’s new with version 4.1?!
If you recall, and I think you do, last week I published an article / guide, named: The ultimate IOPS cheat sheet, which, I’m glad to report, was an instant success! For those of you who might have missed it you’ll find it here. Throughout the article / guide I talk about what IOPS are, how and why they impact overall performance, how they can be measured and (a lot) more. However, as you’re probable well aware, there is more to it then ‘just’ IOPS and the underlying disk subsystem when it comes to measuring or validating (benchmarking) overall performance with regards to our VDI and or HSD orientated architectures. Although they (IOPS) do make up a large piece of the puzzle, we also have to deal with CPU, memory, networking and more.
Citrix Certification, revisited, again! Solution-based certifications.
As you might recall, last year Citrix introduced a few new certification programs which also offered various upgrade paths, existing CCIAs and CCEEs could update to the new equivalent level by passing only one exam. The same applied to current CCA’s and CCAA’s. Eligibility to update required a, at that time, unexpired valid credential and the upgrade paths were available till the first versions of the CCE-AD, CCP-AD and CCA-AD exams were retired. During that time they also announced some ‘still to come’ networking and mobility orientated certification tracks. Just recently they’ve launched their new ‘solution-based’ certification tracks which now also include both mobility and networking, let’s see what they’re about.
Last week Nutanix opened their Dutch HQ and I was there, here are my thoughts.
Last week, Wednesday the 19th of February 2014 to be exact, I was invited for the ‘grand’ opening of the new Dutch Nutanix headquarters in Hoofddorp, near Amsterdam. Before the partner reception took off and everybody arrived we had a private get together which lasted around an hour and a half or so. Of course I wasn’t alone, a group of 10 to 12 technicians, bloggers and pre-sales engineers (Nutanix employees excluded) gathered to hear what Dheeraj Pandey (founder and CEO), Howard Ting (Vice President of product and marketing) and Mark Fisher (senior director, demand generation marketing) had to say. It turned out to be a very interesting and informative conversation.