Sponsor #1 : Cloud Physics
In reviewing the sponsors and their products ahead of #VFD3, I admit Cloud Physics didn’t get me very excited. They offered something about operations and monitoring. In the cloud.
Insert screenshot of dashboards, tachometers, and single pane of glass here. Yawn.
But I was totally wrong. The Cloud Physics CEO put his firm into some great context for me. Cloud Physics, he told us, is about building what our industry has built for every other industry in the world but hasn’t achieved for our own datacenters: aggregate data portals that help businesses make efficiency gains by looking at inputs, measuring outputs, and comparing it all on a huge scale.
Not clear yet? Ok, think of Nimble Storage’s Infosight, something I heart in my own stack. Nimble takes anonymous performance data from every one of their arrays in the field, they smash all that data together, apply some logic, heuristics, and intelligence to it, and produce a pretty compelling & interesting picture of how their customers are using their arrays. With that data, Nimble can proactively recommend configurations for your array, alert customers ahead of time before a particular bug strikes their productions, and produce a storage picture so interesting, some argue it should be open sourced for the good of humanity storage jockeys.
Cloud Physics is like that, but for your VMware stack. And soon, Hyper-V.
Only CloudPhysics is highly customizable, RESTful and easily queried. What’s more, the guys who built CloudPhysics were bigshots at VMware, giving CloudPhysics important bona fides to my virtualization colleagues who run their VMs inside datastores & NFS shares.
For the lone Hyper-V guy in the room (me), it was a pretty cool vision, like System Center Operations Manager only, better and actually usable and on a huge, macro scale.
And CloudPhysics isn’t just for your on-prem stuff either. They can apply their tech to AWS workloads (to some extent), and I think they have Azure in their sites. They get the problem (it’s tough to pull meaning and actionable intel out of syslogs of a hundred different hosts) and I think have an interesting product.
CloudPhysics Summary:
Ping them if: You know the pain of trying to sort out why your datastore is so slow and which VM is to blame and you think it’s always the storage’s fault
Set Outlook reminder for when: They can apply the same stuff to Hyper-V, Azure, or your OpenStacks and KVM and Xens
Send to /Dev/null if: You enjoy ignorance
Wilson.tech 
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