The second Nutanix User Group for Ireland took place yesterday the 25th September in the WeWork building on North Wall Key, although a little tricky to find initially. When there it is a fantastic setting to host the user group. It’s located in the heart of the new docklands developments nicknamed silicon docks due to the vast area of tech companies in the area. Taking a nod from the master Angelo Luciani blog series Meeting Logistics I think this could become the NUG Ireland’s base location for many meetings to come.

Looking at some of the topics in the Agenda we tried to give a mix of product updates, a deep dive into trouble shooting and a overview of some of the newer products in the ecosystem.

A special thanks to the local SE team who along with myself had a topic each which helped the afternoon to run smoothly, with lots of participation from everyone in the room, leading to some questions for the presenters.

First up we had Karl Dyas (SE) who ran through the latest AOS 5.11 features highlighting DR and Leap features, API integrations with Terrafrom new policies in Flow, higher capacity nodes of up to 120 TB is on the way and much more. New features like QOS, with Network Segmentation 2.0 being released.

Then I ran through the different options when upgrading, best practices and also some troubleshooting techniques used to find the root cause of any upgrade issues you may come across.  I think some of it got a little too deep for some in the room but I know a couple of existing customers were very interested and had some interesting questions for me during coffee break. I guess some of the best advice is to call support if in doubt before poking around.  There some of the best in the business after all.

We then had Paul from Arcserve who gave a overview of the backup software and the direction of the company. He then went into some details on the new partnership with Nutanix and the interactions with the upcoming Mime release.

After a very nice barista made coffee and some wonderful cookies we continued on with the next presentation on Nutanix Files & Analytics.

Mick Kehoe (SE) took us through the new features of Nutanix files and was able to relate it back to lots of real world use cases due to his extensive NetApp experience. He was then brave enough to take us trough a live demo of various options in the files & analytics product.

To bring proceedings to a close we had Sheamus Nulty (SE)  to add on where Mick had left off with files and completing Nutanix storage capabilities with S3 and object storage. The main thing I took from this is to be very careful when your setting worm storage because if you set it to keep the data for 3 years that’s it your cluster has to own that data, even if you destroy the cluster the data remains on the disks, effectively making them unusable.  Its great that Nutanix has now completed out it’s portfolio for all the different storage use cases.

After a bit of a Q & A it was almost time to retire to the to the main lounge area in WeWork where they have beer on tap, we also had some nice nibbles arranged to round the afternoon.

We did have a draw for some Nutanix online store vouchers, so two lucky attendees can go get some swag.

 

We are hoping to hold one more meeting before the end of the year follow RonnieDOTie & @nugireland for updates.

A link to the presentation will follow when I have them all collected.