I was excited to hear on the In Tech We Trust podcast this week that the godfather of all the hyperconverged things -Nutanix- may release a community edition of their infrastructure software this year.
That. Would. Be. Amazing.
I’ve crossed paths with Nutanix a few times in my career, but they’ve always remained just a bit out of reach in my various infrastructure projects. Getting some hands-on experience with the Google-inspired infrastructure system in my lab at home would be most excellent, not just for me, but for them, as I like to recommend product stacks I’ve touched above ones I haven’t.
Take Nexenta as an example. As Hans D. pointed out on the show, aside from downloading & running Oracle Solaris 12, Nexenta’s just about the only way one can experience a mature & enterprise-focused implementation of ZFS. I had a blast testing Nexenta out in my lab in 2014 and though I can’t say my posts on ZFS helped them move copies of NexentaStore, it surely didn’t hurt in my view.
VEEAM is also big in the community space, and though I’ve not tested their various products, I have used their awesome stencil collection.
Lest you think storage & hyperconvergence vendors are the only ones thinking ‘community, today my favorite yellow load balancer Kemp announced in effect a community edition of their L4/L7 Loadmaster vAppliance. Kemp holds a special place in the hearts of Hyper-V guys; as long as I can remember, yes even back in the dark days of 2008 R2, they’ve always released a Loadmaster that’s just about on-par with what they offer to VMware shops. In 2015 that support is paying off I think; Kemp’s best-in-class for Microsoft shops running Hyper-V or building out Azure, and with the announcement you can now stress a Kemp at home in your lab or in Azure with your MSDN sub. Excellent.
Speaking of Microsoft, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Visual Studio 2013, which got a community edition last fall.
I’d love to see more community editions, namely:
- Nimble Storage: I’ve had a lot of success in the last 18 months racking/stacking Nimble arrays in environments with older, riskier storage. I must not be the only one; the company recently celebrated its 5,000th customer. Yet, Nimble’s rapid evolution from storage startup with potential to serious storage player is somewhat bittersweet for me as I no longer work at the places I’ve installed Nimble arrays and can’t tinker with their rapidly-evolving features & support. Come on guys, just give me the CASL caching system in download form and let me evaluate your Fiber Channel support and test out your support for System Center
- NetApp: A community release of Clustered Data OnTAP 8.2x would accomplish something few NetApp products have accomplished in the last few years: create some genuine excitement about the big blocky blue N. I’m certain they’ve got a software-only release in-house as they’ve already got an appliance for vSphere and I heard rumors about this from channel sources for years. So what are you waiting for NetApp? Let us build-out, support, and get excited about cDOT community-style since it’s been too hard to see past the 7-mode–>clustered mode transition pain in production.
On his Graybeards on Storage podcast, Howard Marks once reminisced about his time testing real enterprise technology products in a magazine’s tech lab. His observations became a column, printed on paper in an old-school pulp magazine which was shipped to readers. This was beneficial relationship for all.
Those days may be gone but thanks to scalable software infrastructure systems, the agnostic properties of x86, bloggers & community edition software, perhaps they’re back!
Wilson.tech 