One thing I really love about working in the field of technology is the rapid amount of change. This term covers a wide canvas – changes in how businesses consume technology, the solutions that vendors and manufacturers bring to market, and the skills needed to drive an organization forward. There’s never a dull moment and opportunity abounds. Interestingly enough, this also includes how people learn, share, and consume knowledge about the technology landscape.

Instructor led training (ILT), paperback books, and in-person knowledge sharing has advanced considerably into virtual classrooms, electronic books, videos published immediately after tech conferences, and social sharing applications like Slack and Twitter. Additionally, many traditional media formats have evolved into blogs (weblogs), podcasts, and email based news letters.

Yup, lots of change.

A while back, Duncan Epping gave me a heads up about a company named Rubrik and their focus to solve many of the data protection challenges I have to tackle as a solutions architect for large enterprises. I read through Duncan’s introduction and funding post on Rubrik, along with those published by Chris Gurley (and his update), Marc Farley, Chris Mellor, Scott Lowe, Cormac Hogan, Arjan Timmerman, Frank Denneman, and Mike Preston. There’s also a great customer perspective post from Matthew Day and an engineering post from Arvind Jain (Google Distinguished Engineer) on building an infinitely scalable time machine.

They all sound jazzed up about converged data protection – and when was the last time you could say that with a straight face? It didn’t take long for me to get hooked into the excitement and energy, meet with the Rubrik team to tickle their noodles, and think hard about building a solution with such monumental potential.

It’s time for another change: I’m proud to announce that I am joining Rubrik as their Technical Evangelist. You can catch their session on Virtualization Field Day 5 (#VFD5) as this is posting, or review their recordings once they are published.

While my focus and energy towards this blog will definitely shift, I still prefer crafting a positive, educational, and constructive message versus negative media. After all, SpongeBob is still my spirit animal. Matt Oswalt puts it best:

Learn More at VMworld

Let’s catch up at VMworld 2015! In addition to my other sessions and panels, I’ll be presenting with Arvind “Nitro” Nithrakashyap, Co-Founder and CTO of Rubrik. He started his career at Oracle where he worked as a Principal Engineer in the areas of Caching, Recovery and Real Application Clusters. While at Oracle, he co-founded the Exadata storage platform. Intrigued? Here’s the saucy details:

STO6287: Instant Application Recovery and DevOps Infrastructure for VMware Environments – A Technical Deep Dive on Wednesday, September 2nd @ 10:00 AM.

Are you tired of managing complex backup workflows? Are you confident in providing a successful recovery in the event of a failure? Is your backup infrastructure a black hole for housing dark data? Attend this session and learn how Rubrik’s next-generation, scale-out fabric can help you eliminate backup software and the associated data management hassles, recovery uncertainty, and scalability limits.

• Introduction to Rubrik: Transform a multi-tiered backup and recovery environment into a single, feature-rich and scale-out fabric.
• Benefits for VMware Users: 15-minute setup vs. 3-month deployments, ease of use with automated workflows for protecting/managing VMs, cost savings by using public cloud for long-term data retention, and cradle-to-grave data management that transforms your backup data from an insurance policy into a powerful business asset that can accelerate DevOps.
• Technical Deep Dive: Brand new distributed file system for managing and storing versioned data, agentless architecture, scale-out deduplication across flash and hard disk in a single resource pool, REST API-driven interface, and more.