VMware’s Senior Architect Technical Marketing; Frank Denneman leaves VMware to join PernixData, a start-up founded by another ex-VMware employee Satyam Vaghani. Satyam, who’s one of the co-founders and CTO of PernixData, has spoken at TechfieldDay earlier this week, where he presented their new storage technology. A recorded video can be found here. I’ve conducted an interview with Frank this weekend about his jump to PernixData. Eric: Hi Frank, at VMware you’re working for one of the most prestigious companies in a dream role. Why do you quit at VMware and leave your comfortable position for a relatively unknown future at a start-up?
Frank: Hi Eric, leaving such a great company was a very tough decision and especially when you consider the role I had. Working in technical marketing you are exposed to both sides of the story, meaning that you talk to both the customers and the engineers. Bringing those worlds together is a great experience. Discussing future product directions with a great group of engineers and working alongside with some of the brightest minds in the virtualization community made my job absolutely awesome.
Frank: When I attended a technical preview of the Flash Virtualization Platform at Pernixdata I got excited. I think just as excited as when I saw my first vMotion. Not only am I thrilled about the current benefits the platform offers, but also the strategic value the platform provides. It decouples the performance element from the capacity element of the storage architecture, allowing them to be separately managed. By turning the storage stack into a modular model it essentially changes the way virtualization infrastructures will be designed. And think about the potential of such a platform inside the hypervisor layer. I think addressing latency of storage I/O to accelerate the application is only a fraction of the possibilities of FVP. As you notice I really get excited when discussing the solution, and this by itself made me realize that I wanted to become a part of this success story.
Eric: That sounds very exciting indeed, talking about great minds. You will be working with Satyam Vaghani who is the inventor of techniques like VMFS, VAAI and vVols. Those techniques are really the big game changers in the IT industry. Do you think storage optimization will still be the next big thing? And why not networking, VMware is also about to launch NSX. If you look at a regular datacenter, what takes the most floor space after computing?
Frank: I think storage optimisation can exists next to the initiative of network virtualization. Both are game changers in the datacenter that helps to abstract, pool and automate resources. NSX on the network layer, FVP on the storage layer. Both solutions break the traditional datacenter design and both are necessary to move the datacenter forward into the 21st century. With storage optimalisation we do not remove the need of centralized storage but it contributes to keep the datacenter footprint as small as possible. Typically a lot of spindles are necessary to offer the performance required by the application. Spindles equals footprint. By decoupling the performance capacity from the storage capacity you can return to a design model where the storage array is primarily focusing on providing storage capacity. This can slow down the need for more datacenter floorspace. By solving the storage performance and scaling problems on an infrastructure level at the server side it changes the resource demand to your existing storage arrays. This can delay your next storage acquisition and implementation project and avoid the typical changes to datacenter configuration and offered data services.
Eric: Awesome, so in your previous role, you've written and contributed to some amazing technical white papers. I'm also a big fan of your website. Can we continue to enjoy your contributions to the community in the future and what is going to be your daily work in your new role at PernixData?
Frank: I think storage optimisation can exists next to the initiative of network virtualization. Both are game changers in the datacenter that helps to abstract, pool and automate resources. NSX on the network layer, FVP on the storage layer. Both solutions break the traditional datacenter design and both are necessary to move the datacenter forward into the 21st century. With storage optimalisation we do not remove the need of centralized storage but it contributes to keep the datacenter footprint as small as possible. Typically a lot of spindles are necessary to offer the performance required by the application. Spindles equals footprint. By decoupling the performance capacity from the storage capacity you can return to a design model where the storage array is primarily focusing on providing storage capacity. This can slow down the need for more datacenter floorspace. By solving the storage performance and scaling problems on an infrastructure level at the server side it changes the resource demand to your existing storage arrays. This can delay your next storage acquisition and implementation project and avoid the typical changes to datacenter configuration and offered data services.
Eric: Awesome, so in your previous role, you've written and contributed to some amazing technical white papers. I'm also a big fan of your website. Can we continue to enjoy your contributions to the community in the future and what is going to be your daily work in your new role at PernixData?
Frank: Thanks for the compliment Eric, always great to hear people appreciate your output. As the soon to be Tech Evangelist for PernixData I will be responsible for helping the virtualization community to understand FVP and any other subsequent offerings. Although you will see an increase of articles about FVP it does not take away my love for producing articles covering compute and storage resource management in virtual infrastructures. Besides by Tech Evangelist role I will be responsible for building out the EMEA organization.
Eric: Great Frank, many thanks for the interview. Good luck with your new job at PernixData.
Frank can be reached on twitter at @FrankDenneman. The address of his blog site is: FrankDenneman.nl
Embarking on a new adventure – Joining PernixData as Tech Evangelist
Frank can be reached on twitter at @FrankDenneman. The address of his blog site is: FrankDenneman.nl
Embarking on a new adventure – Joining PernixData as Tech Evangelist
