ThinkVirt

2011 was a great year in the world of virtualization and technology in general.  For me there were a few companies that really stood out as leaders and innovators in 2011. These companies, from my experience, have all been fantastic to work with from both the partner and the end-customer perspective.  All of these companies have exhibited fantastic customer support, and all of them made an impact for me in 2011. 

The first company I came across about while researching the Citrix Startup Accelerator Program.  I was researching this program for other reasons and came across a company providing Mobile Access Management.  Impossible, I thought, as us in the VMware community have been waiting for Project Horizon for many quarters.  I signed up for the free account which allowed me to deliver store-based and homegrown iOS or Android apps to the devices in my organization.  The Nukona AppStore also allows me to define and manage device-centric and app-centric corporate policies.  The real beauty, in my opinion, is the ability of the Nukona engine to wrap my corporate policies around my homegrown and web applications.  I used iPhones, iPads, and my Asus Transformer to perform a series of tests and was really impressed with how easy it was to set up the solution.  I wrote about my experience with the Nukona appstore here.

I was also impressed with how easy it was to have my own full customized and personal AppStore in less than an hour (now a matter of minutes once I’ve got the settings down). 

The deal-clincher for me? The few times I received an error when using the appstore (normally user error), Nukona support would proactively reach out to me.  “Hey, saw you were having some trouble…”

I continue to be impressed with not only the product but the people behind Nukona.  It will be very interesting to see how Project Horizon matches up against Nukona later this year.

The second company I’ve known about for over a decade.  I came to learn about EVGA back when I had time for gaming and would build rigs for online simracing.  I had a very active year of VDI sales, projects, and solution building, and came to learn about EVGA’s entrance into the PCoIP zero client market through the good folks at Carahsoft.  I wrote about my fondness of the EVGA PD02 in this article, where I also wrote about my dislike for Wyse.  In my opinion, Wyse, who is the name in thin clients, which they parlayed into the de facto name in zero clients, has done nothing to advance the PCoIP end device community.  They sell a zero client that looks like the same reference device that 10Zig and a few other companies sell.  Yawn.  The device also isn’t cheap. 

EVGA released the PD02, not quite as sexy as a Pano but it uses PCoIP which Pano does not.  It’s also significantly cheaper than anything else on the market. 

In addition, EVGA released a PD05 which can do both copper and fiber at the end device.  This is huge in the Federal and highly-secured space and again, they are significantly cheaper than their competitors. 

I had the pleasure of being involved in a record-setting solution with EVGA this year and it’s no secret that I continue to strongly recommend their zero clients over all competitors.  Again, EVGA has been a pleasure to work with from all perspectives and is the second company that had a standout year.

Finally, the third company, I saw first at VMWorld 2011 and then reviewed again after their Best of VMWorld 2011 Award.  Like a few of the more popular companies showcasing at VMWorld last year, it was standing room only whenever I swung by their booth.  In delivering virtualization consulting for the last 6+ years it has occurred to me that building the underlying hardware platform is hard. 

An organization’s mission is to deliver a service, a value-add, or a market differentiator to their own organization, the customers, or the community.  Enter the building-block approach, which I covered back in 2009 in this article for Virtualization.Info.  Having served on the VAR side of the market for the last 4+ years, I’ve pitched, sold, and delivered solutions on a multitude of platforms, from Dell PowerEdge Servers, to EMC storage, to HP virtual systems, to Cisco UCS, to IBM blades.  While marketing literature may say otherwise, they all work relatively the same to me, from an architectural perspective.  I’ve been looking for the right platform to build solutions on top of, whether it’s VMware View, Citrix XenApp, vCloud Director, email, GIS, who cares. 

An organization’s mission is the service, value-add, or differentiator that lives on top of the hardware.  So then, we need an easier way of putting together the underlying hardware for a virtual datacenter.  Enter Nutanix.

“The Nutanix Complete Cluster merges enterprise class storage with x86 servers into one hardware tier to deliver a single high performance building block for enterprise virtualization.”  I won’t use this article as an extended commercial for Nutanix – I simply encourage you to check out a few of their videos:

Nutanix in 90 Seconds

Explore Your Cluster

See the Console in Action

Google's No SAN Datacenter

I’ve been keeping an eye on the startup market for years waiting for the right fit.  The technology behind Nutanix won me over after a technical deep dive session.  After meeting the Nutanix team in person I knew that the culture was also a great fit.  I am very honored to be announcing that I have joined Nutanix as a Senior Territory Account Manager responsible for Federal and Mid-Atlantic.  I thank the many people I leaned on for candid guidance last year and I’m looking forward to working with many of you.  If you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out.