Exclusive Networks’ Seminar –  Data Centre Transformation and Cybersecurity Trends

By Buddy Davies

Last week saw me attend the Exclusively NZ Data Centre disruption event hosted by Alex Teh and his team at Exclusive Networks. I received an extended invitation by Alex to be part of a discussion panel covering topics around Data Centre transformation in the form of Hyper-Converged Hardware technologies.

For those of you that may be reading this who don’t know what Hyper-Converged hardware is, I will summarise it in a nutshell. Hyper convergence basically allows us to fit more hardware in less space. Our own example of this saw us reduce our Data Centre footprint by up to 50%, but more importantly, allowed us to provide more performance, resiliency and scale for the future.

The panel I was part of included a very interesting representative from Nutanix, Jeff Smith and then a consumer of Nutanix solutions, Tim Lloyd of Ballance Agri-Nutrients. I got to discuss the adoption of hyper-converged technologies with Jeff in particular, right from the solutions we leverage and our partners to how Nutanix was started and their rise to becoming somewhat of a leader in that particular sector.

After our panel discussion was over we had the privilege of having a New Zealand All Blacks hero in the form of Buck Shelford share some stories of Rugby World cup tours back in the ’80’s and his time in the United Kingdom playing alongside and guiding the young disruptive talent in the national league teams and how over time the approach to the game has changed. As he rounded up his story, he felt it would be good to get a room full of Kiwis (me and a few others being the exceptions) to do the Haka. Now, I have an excuse, I am from England and wouldn’t have a clue how to do it. However, as I said, most of the room was filled with people from these native lands and so you would expect them to know it right? Wrong! Buck was embarrassed, he gave up halfway because we were all useless!

Anyway, now that the event had wrapped up, it was off to the Lions vs Blues game at Eden park. That game doesn’t warrant a blog post so I won’t go into it! In summary though, the event was a success, I had a few conversations with people who approached me after the panel to discuss the technologies we use here at Lucidity, my experience in deploying them, managing them and how we have benefitted from Hyper-Converged technologies within the Data Centres.

Thanks have to go out to Alex at Exclusive Networks for the opportunity to share my thoughts and network with vendors and colleagues within the industry.

See Channel Life article: Photo gallery: Data centres, cloud, security and a haka at Exclusively NZ

See Reseller News article: Voice of the customer to the channel: “I don’t really trust any of you here”

Lucy