I recently had the honour of hosting and moderating a two part HPE Evolve pilot series of live-stream events with the amazing team at HPE Asia Pacific ( HPEAPAC ) – this is the second in the series, “Empowering Infrastructure and Operations to Manage Kubernetes”.

Tune in now and “push play” to discover how your business can adopt the right solutions to run at start-up speeds.

Overview

New application development environments are complex, which results in additional time, effort, and specialised skills being required of teams that could otherwise be spent achieving business goals.

The leading disruptive technology easing these concerns is containers powered by Kubernetes. Globally, enterprises are driving towards container adoption for the promise of:

+ Faster application development
+ Easier revisions and updates
+ Less system overhead
+ More platform independence
+ Broader scalability.

Managing Kubernetes to Empowering Infrastructure & Operations

Unfortunately, managing Kubernetes powered container environments can cause as many challenges as it solves. As a solution, HPE Pointnext Services and VMware are partnering to help organisations modernise their hybrid infrastructure with the introduction of enterprise ready Kubernetes alongside other technology platforms.

Now, you can unleash the full potential of your teams by leveraging combined expertise and services that enable rapid deployment, efficient and secure operations of Kubernetes infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and optimised containers across public and private cloud.

Thank you to the amazing team for making this possible, in particular:

+ David Brown – Head of Cloud Technology Partners, HPE APAC
+ Dez Blanchfield – Founder CEO, Sociaall Inc
+ Michael Draper – Director, Technical Cloud Solutions, HPE
+ Suganthi Krishnavathi – Platform Architect, VMware Tanzu
+ Andrew Farmer – Presales Lead, HPE APAC
+ Sam Speakman – Technical PreSales, HPE APAC

This video was made in partnership with HPE APAC.

For more information on on containers visit:

Why containers will drive transformations in the 2020s:
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/why-containers-will-drive-transformations-in-the-2020s-2002.html

How containers and open source Kubernetes accelerate innovation:
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-cloud-is-an-experience-not-a-destination-2002.html

9 tips for moving code to microservices:
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/9-tips-for-moving-code-to-microservices-1904.html

Containers as an enabler of AI:
http://hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/containers-as-an-enabler-of-ai-2005.html?ite=59462&ito=2628&itq=2ac32db1-dd38-4bff-934a-b9302d2de8a3&itx%5Bidio%5D=20086092

Why DevSecOps approach is key to mainstream container use:
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/why-devsecops-approach-is-key-to-mainstream-container-use–2003.html

Why cloud-native open source Kubernetes matters:
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/why-cloud-native-open-source-kubernetes-matters-2002.html

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Have you ever wondered what would happen if two people who believe big compute is the real centre of the universe were to meet in the same room? Well, wonder no more.

In this podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bill Giard, CTO of Digital Transformation and Scale Solutions at Intel. As we’re experiencing a massive growth phase, I was keen to get Bill’s thoughts on how to maintain performance and security hence discussing various questions related to cyber security.

As a result of his long career working at Intel, Bill has a unique perspective on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and enterprise customers, from the chip to switches, routers, and servers. The best part is that he got transferred to Intel’s Data Platform Group (DCPG) during the beginning of the digital transformation.

As part of the DCPG team, Bill helped shape Intel’s cloud strategy, technologies, and architectures. In this podcast conversation, Bill explains the sheer breadth, depth and strategic complexity of Intel’s services and markets; you might now visualise Bill as someone with significant personal experience and resulting knowledge base.

After covering what the year 2019 entailed for him and his team, Bill went on to highlight trends he thought would continue to thrive in coming years, such as Hybrid and multi-cloud computing, Security Analytics & AI.

There can be little doubt that security needs to be one of our first concerns, so much soven Bill affirms that security is not just to be handled by security officers, but needs to now be a mainstream focus area for CIOs as well, in addition to security roles including CISOs.

There are various attack vectors and several risk profiles that we can’t just approach, thinking we can simply create a moat and a firewall in the older, angular Celtic castle model – as all too often we find that threats come from inside, that old design pattern simply doesn’t work anymore. Cybersecurity must be all-inclusive from language, behaviour, and culture to the chip level.

You need to “top your game”, as Bill puts it, which requires constant learning, and a platform approach to security. Intel has a fantastic legacy of baking security into the DNA of original silicon wafer levels of their technology, which I have always felt was a key driver of their success in this space. It allows them an enormous advantage point, as security is quite literally built-in, all the way up through the technology stack.

Bill even mentioned in this post-Snowden era that everyone needs to have an attack strategy and consider how to address insider threats, and those become even more vital as computing continues outside traditional data centres.

Bill stated, “We’ve done great security work in the public cloud, but at the edge, the security controls are just not there.”

He went on to say “Building security at the server and platform level is the only way you’re going to address security on the edge in distributed computing client globally. The landscape changes but the one truth exists, you have to bake security and performance in at the very early design phases.”

Everything appears to be unique, yet we’re actually managing a significant volume of similar things, often in entirely different and unique ways, resulting in duplication of effort and reduced value from investments.

From phishing to network engineers, human interactions are at every place, in each layer. It needs continuous attention. Be careful around continued education and execute advanced controls.

“Shrink the attack surface.” says Bill, “Hardware security helps us mitigate the breadth and reach those breaches achieve. We can bring that firewalling down into the socket with advanced silicon technologies and software around the core cache and memory to isolate that.”

Bill and I additionally discussed many of the really significant changes and challenges in the cloud this last year, be it the shift from data centre aisles of racks and administration programming to a defined framework through to the shift to new DevOps organisation models with Docker and Kubernetes. Here is a shift in thinking and approach to technical problem solving that is needed for IT, which never existed before, and it’s triggering huge cultural and behavioural changes. You’ll discover all of this and more like Bill, and I get to the cybersecurity questions in this podcast.

Bill states that he believes the key to solving today’s bigger business and technology challenges is to break the work down into small sections, stay flexible, and follow what people are excited about – that’s the opener to inspiring cultural transformations.

So as we prepare for what the year 2020 may bring, security needs get even more apparent and strong, but so does the cloud ecosystem. Both choices and competition are in abundance. People are not only involved in multi-cloud strategies; they are getting better at requiring full system-wide integration. It is about realising the complete “API economy”

Due to the type of service, or price point, we can now pick workloads in several places; the question now is, do we need to make better choices about where we put those workloads, whether internal private cloud with cloud design models or deploying into public cloud leveraging the likes of container solutions such as Docker and Kubernetes?

Bill and I also discuss cloud decision-making going away from price and even from agility. Determining workload location needs to be more about what’s the proper foundation for the workload, based on below four characteristics:

• The volume of the data: how you are using it, where you’re exhibiting it (as in production), and if you have to transfer it.
• Performance characteristics – do you require low latency, and who are you seeking to reach; a global salesforce could need a distributed infrastructure across the globe.
• Security cybersecurity questions
• Integration level with systems.

Bill stated that “Workload placement is really still at the forefront of what most organisations are doing, and then, what’s the right infrastructure to support where the application and data needs to be?”

I’m genuinely passionate about Intel’s one API” focus and the potential to drive common, consistent API models into numerous private, public, or hybrid clouds. I like the idea that I don’t need to consider the foundation at the CSP level; I just need to look at the relevant APIs and receive that service.

Bill admits that we will notice more uniform compatibility. The big providers encourage that while still allowing differentiation within their own stack. The business outcome report will take some time, but it’s occurring; it’s turning into a more significant factor in the decision-making.

I won’t reveal the ultimate crystal ball answer at the conclusion of the podcast; I’ll just note that it has to do with the genuine impact of distributed edge computing in a multi-cloud environment with quantum computing capabilities. Bill speaks about preparing for it, and his advice is to begin now and don’t wait to potentially have competitors beat you to it.

I am grateful to Bill and the Intel team for making this podcast possible. Here are a few reference links you can go through about the topics and top cyber security questions Bill and I discussed. Check out:

• Intel Cloud Computing
• Intel Cloud Management Technology
• Intel Xeon Scalable Processors 
• Intel OneAPI fact sheet

You instantly know the Chief Marketing Officer at Commvault is an interesting fellow when you learn he has been thinking about how to drive global awareness for the carbon footprint of data centres and at the same time actually took part in a trek to the South Pole.

I mean seriously, how many brands would come up with that? But once you’ve listened to my discussion with Chris Powell, Chief Marketing Officer at Commvault, you’ll have no trouble at all envisioning how it came to be. 

How what came to be, you ask? Well, his trip to the South Pole, of course. Here’s the back story, and be sure to push “play” on that podcast to enjoy the rest of our amazing conversation.

My guest, Chris Powell, had the opportunity to meet Robert Swan, who as you may already know, in 1986 became the first person to replicate the original 1912 Scott Expedition by walking to the South Pole (this time, without perishing).

He’s an incredible human, Robert Swan is, and as Chris says, he’s a climate change warrior. He’s terrified at the scale and pace of change he sees in Antarctica and on top of that the uncertainty of what will happen in 2041 when the international treaty that protects Antarctica expires. 

Commvault Data Management Company

Swan is doing everything he can to raise awareness for Antarctica (read in to his 2041 movement here) and Chris had the vision to connect Commvault, a data management company, to it. Commvault signed on as a sponsor of Swan’s 2018 trek to the South Pole.

“What initially started as a data story with regard to protecting and managing the scientific data for the expedition evolved into the concept of the carbon footprint of data,” Chris explains. “As an enterprise, Commvault has over 20 exabytes of data managed by our software, and in many cases, it’s supported by data centres that are still using fossil fuels.” 

Data Management in the Cloud

Chris and Swan realised that moving data management to the cloud not only makes data more efficient, it reduces carbon footprint. And that became a Ted Talk by Chris Powell (a must watch by the way!).

So already we have a South Pole data management sponsorship that turns into carbon awareness Ted Talks – that’s quite an accomplishment, I’d say. But then it got better. He got to JOIN the expedition. Part of me is soooo envious I can hardly stand it, but the rest of me had an amazing time hearing first-hand from Chris what it was like being there (hint – listen to the podcast). 

I will share one of his main takeaways, having been through what sounds like a pretty gruelling experience. It’s “What are we going to do differently as individuals? As citizens? And with the companies we work for?” It sounds pithy but then you look at Commvault and what they put in to action and you realise, this vision has actually massively impacted the entire organisation. 

The excitement is unbelievable at Commvault, and we’re talking about #datastorage and #datamanagement! Here’s this tried and true company who for years has been ultra reliable, the best in the biz at #dataprotection, growing steadily, partnering away (it’s the full list of who’s who) and now they are the very definition of innovation. It’s culture and vision, I tell you. This is one of those fantastic organisations to be a part of where having a personal vision is welcomed. I mean, look at their #PlasticFreeJuly campaign. It makes sense that Chris is the CMO and Sanjay Mirchandani is CEO, you can feel how invigorating their enthusiasm is for the entire organisation. 

Commvault has had quite the run these last couple of months, culminating with acquiring Hedvig Inc. in early September. In our GDPR and security-tense times, it’s not only about managing and protecting your data. It’s about controlling it so that you can use it. 

That’s where Hedvig comes in. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform is a modern storage solution for any enterprise compute environment running at any scale. With infinite scalability, complete protocol consolidation, and the ability to span multiple sites and clouds.

With the Hedvig acquisition, Commvault has laid hands on a platform and tool which can categorise, monitor and present data, really make it usable. I call that fantastic.

So how do we think about Commvault now? They’re bigger than the “backup company” that we’ve had them slotted as for so long. Don’t get me wrong, they are absolutely the “greatest backup and recovery solution and technology in the market today” as Chris says. But, as he also says, and as Sanjay says, that’s the foundation that they’re building on. 

There’s More to it. They are becoming a data software provider. And with the #multicloud world, they have to become software defined. It’s exactly the right move. 

I don’t even think “data software” is all that obtuse of a concept. In Chris’ language you ask: “What’s the foundation you need to set so that you’re ready with your data? And then, can you protect it, are you managing it against your policies and regulations, are you getting business value out of it, are you controlling where it resides.”

With this acquisition of Hedvig, Commvault have indeed future-proofed themselves and their clients. They are one of the few well-positioned to ride out the coming mass-disruption of #5G, they’re already #multicloud, they’re well on top of #integration, the masters of it really, and it just keeps getting better. 

It was also incredible to see this and many more exciting new innovations announced at #CommvaultGO in Denver this year, their annual event. I had the privilege of being there, and if you weren’t able to make it to the event, I invite you to tune in the event virtually via the recordings of the various keynotes and presentations / announcements.

I could share SO much more about my conversation with Chris, but for now I urge you to tune in to the podcast. My thanks to Chris and the rest of the incredible team at Commvault for making it happen. 

Here’s more information about some of the topics Chris and I discuss:

• Robert Swan 2041 foundation
• Hedvig acquisition
• Chris Powells’ South Pole blog & Ted Talk
• This episode of the Conversations with Dez featuring Chris Powell