Summary: Jason Collier (@bocanuts) is a true geek who loves technology. His company, Scale Computing develops and sells HCI solutions to small and medium-sized companies and in the last couple years he has taken a shine to the efforts of a startup called WorkSpot that has a management model similar to Meraki’s, but for creating virtual desktops and managing/orchestrating the infrastructure that they run on. It sounds like incredible stuff.
Transcript:
MF: Hi, this is a technology ridecast, I’m Marc Farley and our special guest this morning is Jason Collier.
JC: Whoo hoo!
MF: Whoo hoo! Hey Now! How’re doing Jason?
JC: I’m doing great, how’re you doing Marc?
MF: I’m doing great, well we’re here in Vegas for VMware, how can we not be great?
JC: It’s awesome.
MF: Yeah so what do you think of the show so far?
JC: A lot of good companies here, a lot of good companies, a lot of good people.
MF: It’s a great community
JC: It’s a great community
MF:What are some of the interesting new technologies that you’ve seen or what’s an example of one new technology that you really like?
JC: There have always been a lot of areas where hyper converged shined. One of those areas was a VDI, just the way that hyper converged scales out, VDI was kind of one of those natural good fits. A company called WorkSpot, umm…
MF: I’ve never … I don’t know WorkSpot.
JC: Yeah, well you need to look them up, Google ’em – WorkSpot.com. What they claim is VDI 2.0 and when you look at the way that they do things, it feels a lot like the way Meraki did kind of a revolution in the way that switches are managed – right? You know, the individual switches talk to the cloud and that’s how they get their configuration, right? Workspot is the same thing right, so you go to this cloud portal, you configure out your stuff, but everything is then on prem. There’s basically this instance of their local management piece running on a hyper converged cluster that then talks out to the cloud. You go into this cloud portal you basically manage what you want to have happen, to then go out and create those, you know, basically the virtual machine instances you need. You go to the WorkSpot UI and everything is completely transparent. You go into the WorkSpot UI, you don’t even have to deal with Scale UI at all, right? You know, you don’t touch it all.
MF: Really?
JC: Yeah
MF: Not at all?
JC: At all.
MF: So you can install HC3 clusters and basically then turn on WorkSpot?
JC: Yeah,
MF: Wow. Wow, that’s pretty cool
JC: Yeah go here, I click here, I click here, I do this then , I do this and it’s up. One of the coolest things about this technology is it will actually … utilize multiple clusters. If you’ve got remote office, branch office stuff, you can have basically a cluster of Scale gear sitting at these remote locations. You know, it’s like a central control plane that can then go down and manage those remote systems all like it’s one. So it’s kind of like that single-pane of glass management for VDI. And, you know, it works it works really well. We’ve got that covered, right?
MF: We do. Yeah. We’ll do will do a restaurant review some other time.
JC: Oh, that’s a great idea.
MF: Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it.
JC: Glad to be here.
