DataCentric

Lenovo's data center group, under the leadership of Kirk Skaugen, is on fire, outgrowing the market. The company is exhibiting stellar growth in server, top-tier peformanance in HPC, disrupting the capacity-on-demand market, innovating in client, and is targeting edge computing. Join hosts Matt and Steve as they recap Lenovo Accelerate, the company's premier event for its enterprise customers, today talking about what they learned at the kick-off, and what they hope to learn over their next three days in Orlando.

Nutanix .NEXT hosted nearly 7,000 IT professionals -- Matt & Steve managed to get one to talk about his experiences deploying Nutanix HCI in an enterprise environment. Join hosts Matt Kimball, Steve McDowell as they talk to special guest Drew Harris, who is Vice President of IT Operations at the Cosmopolitan Casino in Las Vegas to hear about the reality of modern IT colliding with HCI. It's an interesting chat about the complexities of HCI in the real world, with a few interesting digressions along the way. We'd like to thank Drew for helping us out, and Nutanix for being such a great host during the event. Special Guest: Drew Harris.

Nutanix .NEXT 2019 kicks off in Anaheim CA, where nearly 7,000 IT professionals gather to hear Nutanix's vision of software-defined multi-cloud world. Included in that 7,000 are hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, analysts with Moor Insights & Strategy. Nutanix has become the dominant challenger in the software-defined datacenter world. That's not lost on Steve & Matt, who offer up their overall impressions of the event so far, the great energy surrounding .NEXT, and the ambitious vision that Nutanix is setting forth for IT. All in this very special Nutanix .NEXT recap edition of the DataCentric Podcast.

Dell Tech World day 3 was a day of closure, better coffee, and smuggled bacon. Hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell talk about their key takeaways in this short recap of what was a great event. Storage. Servers. Edge. VMWare. HCI/CI. And much, much more.

Dell EMC released a flurry of product announcements targeted at the enterprise. New Midrange Storage. New PowerMax storage. Dell joins the Storage-on-Demand world with offerings that span on- and off-prem. Add to that new Dell Latitude laptops, networking branding, VMware cloud management tools... the list goes on and on. Moor Insights & Strategy data center analysts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell give you their quick take on it all on this special recap edition of the DataCentric Podcast.

Day one of Dell Technologies World 2019 has just concluded, and Matt & Steve from Moor Insights & Strategy provide a quick recap of the day's events, from serving humanity to VMWare everywhere. The first day of Dell Tech World usually lays out the major themes that we should expect to hear through the four days of the conference, before the more product-focused announcements kick in on Tuesday. This year it's all about Dell Technologies being a global leader, and taking that leadership seriously. There were panels on diversity, and consistent messages about providing the technology that makes the world a better place. That's not to say there wasn't news: Microsoft CEO stood on a stage with Pat Gelsinger and sang the praises of VMWare and Azure working better together as he described a new Microsoft offering (who would have ever imagined that one?). VMWare takes their dominance very seriously, and is making moves to protect that. Dell EMC has embraced VMWare, and is telling a "better together" story that we're not sure we've heard before. And that Michael Dell -- he was everywhere. He continues to be one of the most accessible (and least scripted) technology CEOs in the industry. Spend 15 minutes with Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, hear all about it.

In this episode of the DataCentric podcast, hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell (both from Moor Insights & Strategy) go deep on Intel's DataCentric Innovation Day, where Intel formally launches its new Cascade Lake Xeons, while also opening the kimono on Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. Optane promises to be disruptive to storage and how the industry thinks about in-memory compute. The OEMs community has been waiting for all of this, and there are a bunch of new products on the way. What's all of this Intel news mean to AMD? Matt & Steve talk about it, along with some other recent news items from the storage world. More critically, Matt contemplates trading in his Windows laptop for a Macbook, while Steve wonders if it's really OK to hope that his kid's team loses early in this weekend's tournamont (don't judge). 02:10 Intel’s DataCentric Innovation Day — Cascade Lake & Optane 09:25 Intel’s DataCentric Innovation Day — Optane Persistent Memory 24:20 Where Does AMD Fit in the New Cascade Lake/Optane World? 31:00 Excelero & Lenovo Data Systems 34:22 Pure Storage Acquires CompuVerde 36:00 Shoud Matt buy a Mac? 42:46 Twenty Years since Network Engines 46:17 IDC Converged Infrastructure Numbers are Out 48:42 Is it ok to root for you kid’s ball team to lose?

This week Matt & Steve talk through some of what they learned at recent industry events, including the moves that NVIDIA is making into the data center, some discussion of containers in the enterprise, a brief wrap-up from Nutanix's investor conference in New York, some light-thinking following Matt's first missed Open Compute Summit in a decade, and a bit of non-political discussion on Huawei. If you follow Data Center technology, as well as the players behind the what's happening, you'll be in good company with Matt KImball and Steve McDowell from Moor Insights & Strategy and the DataCentric Podcast. Timeline 00:30 - 08:00 NVIDIA GTC Wrap-Up: NVIDIA heads into the Enterprise 08:00 - 11:00 Impact of Containers on Data Center management frameworks 11:00 - 21:20 Nutanix Investor Day Wrap-Up: NTNX takes aim 21:20 - 30:00 Open Compute Summit: Why it still matters. 30:00 - 42:30 Huawei: A Serious Player, despite all the geopolitical noise around the company 42:30 - 44:44 Senseless Banter

The latest server and storage market numbers are out, and there are some big winners. And some big losers. Matt & Steve go all "inside-baseball" and talk about what it all means. They also touch on recent news around NVIDIA's Mellanox acquisition, Intel's CXL consortium, and the momentum of the Chinese technology providers. 01:30 IDC Releases 4Q2018 Server Market Numbers 06:08 What's it mean for the HyperScalers? 10:10 What's happening with Huawei? 11:55 Lenovo Data Center team is on fire 14:14 Is there a real slow-down in the server market? Or are we waiting on new parts? 17:50 IDC Releases 4Q2018 Storage Market Numbers 21:30 Hitachi and Storage 23:30 Can you pick the storage market winner from Hardware sales numbers? 24:50 Where's Pure Storage? 26:20 How does Capacity-on-Demand factor into how we count storage & servers? 28:40 Units vs Revenue in the Storage Market 31:30 News: Intel CXL Consortium 35:00 News: NVIDIA buys Mellanox 37:40 Wrapping Up: Where are Steve & Matt spending the next few weeks?

Steve McDowell and Matt Kimball, senior datacenter analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, leave their impressions from IBM's recent Think event, where IBM demonstrated impressive infrastructure while delivering a message focused on enterprise class problems. IBM has long been a trendsetter and early promoter of new architectures such as cloud, capacity on-demand, and solution deliver. They haven't stopped. Lenovo announced earnings, where the company delivered double-digit growth in its enteprise business, with a surprising confession that it might have hit triple digits in North America. At the same time, Hewlett Packard Enterprise's earnings showed that (for HPE) the future is all about converged infrastructure, where its HCI business grew a whopping 70%. What's it all mean? Matt & Steve puzzle that out. There's also news of ARM Holdings delivering a new enterprise-class server and edge core. Does that mean that Linus is wrong, and ARM has a future in server? All that, plus the fellows inadvertantly learn that if you record outside on an unseasonably warm day in March, even with a directional microphone, that the birds will have their say.