Silicon Valley Road Trip – Day 2

Today we had the pleasure to visit to other companies in Sillicon Valley, Nutanix and Pernixdata. Although these 2 companies cannot called an startup anymore they had quite some interesting stuff to show us.

At Nutanix we had a 1 hour meeting with @stevenpoitrais (who wrote the Nutanix Bible). If you ever worked with Nutanix you probably visits his web page. If not, you should!

Nutanix and there solution is new for me. So what I really liked is that Steven didn’t presented a slide deck but just asked what we would like to talk about. Before we knew it, we here in a discussion about the position of Nutanix and there new Acropolix Hypervisor and the impact on existing VMware, KVM and Openstack customers. Although sometimes the filter kicked in about what Steven can and cannot say I really like the discussion. After 1,5 hour Steven noticed that I was time to lunch. And with a few slices of pizza the discussion continued. Steven told us that most of there Acropolix customers (Hypervisor based on KVM) are in Asian and that we only see the top of the iceberg (and than the filter kicked in again 🙂 ).
After more than 2,5 hours we had to go, but where not finished!

Next was Pernixdata with @Frankdenneman. After a tour through there building (including the nice transformed pictures of Starwars characters with the faces of @SatyamVaghani and Frank Denneman) we where offered a beer (it was after 12AM) and went to the boardroom.
Here Frank showed us there latest product FVP Architect. FVP Architect comes with a VIB module in the VMware Hypervisor and is gathering all storage metadata and send this to database where it’s crunched. This gives VMware and Storage administrators realtime and historical overview how there environment is performing and what can be improved. It also gives a in-dept view about what type of storage workload and which virtual machine is generating this workload. Giving you the option to adjust this VM instead of just buying more IOPS for your storage.
After a while we had a discusion about when a virtual machine writes a block of data and how this is handled by the VMware kernel to storage . I had a mis conception that the VMware Kernel alway’s writes in 8Kb block to VMFS (8Kb is used for sub-allocation). So Frank pulled in one of the VMFS inventors @mnv104, and where taught a lesson in how the VMkernel kernel sends data to the storage layer. Woh!

I know Frank has tolled me a lot of times  that most people who where working on the cool stuff in the VMkernel now work at Pernixdata, but now I experienced it!
After a quick visit from Satyam I was time to leave. This was really a cool visit!