#vRetreat February 2022 Overview

calendar Feb 24, 2022 · 3 min read · cohesity vretreat progress-software  ·
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February 2022 saw the 6th vRetreat virtual event happening online with sponsors Cohesity and Progress Software in attendance.

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The brainchild of Patrick Redknap, vRetreat brings together a selection of vendors with a panel of virtualisation and technology professionals. This time round we had sessions with Cohesity and Progress Software.

I’m planning future posts here to cover the content of these sessions in more detail, but here’s a summary of the day.

Progress

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Progress Software was a name not that known to me, or so I thought. My pre-event research however showed that they weren’t such an unknown. For example I’d encountered the Kemp load-balancer solution ( acquired in 2021) through the VMware vExpert programme, and the Progress OpenEdge platform underpins some Clinical Trial software I have worked with in the past.

Today’s presentation covered the integration between that Kemp Loadmaster and the Flowmon network telemetry solution (Flowmon Networks were themselves acquired by Kemp in 2020).

We saw how the two solutions are being integrated together, taking traffic data from the load balancer and presenting it into dashboards in Flowmon. The dashboards are accompanied by alerting functionality and the ability to dive deeper into the underlying data when a widget on the dashboard shows something is wrong.

Cohesity

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I’ve blogged about Cohesity here several times - including previous vRetreat events. The presentation today focussed on Ransomware attacks - how to address modern-day data breaches in organisations.

The presentation covered the evolution of Ransomware from encryption of primary data, through attacks on the backup targets, and into data exfiltration. They refer to this as “Ransomware 3.0”. Cohesity are working to evolve their response to this changing attack landscape- adding tools such as immutable backup, Quorum (where no single person can remove data), and making data security and data governance work together to stop data leaking.

Data Security and Data Governance MUST Converge

Social Networking

The day was finished with a round of VR golf on the Meta Oculus. Great fun, and I placed second behind our host. Thanks to Patrick for organising the vRetreat today and showing us where some of those lost golf balls had got to.

On the 18th Green

Online Event

I’ve commented before about how virtual conferences just aren’t the same as those in-person. Having said that, #vRetreat with it’s panel of delegates bucks that trend. Because the in-person format of this event generally involved the delegates round a table in a meeting room, I see much of the inter-attendee discussion and presenter questioning replicated in the online setting. The post-event social also works well with the audience size. On this occasion we had 6 attendees (plus our host and presenters) and this worked well via Zoom.

This style of event isn’t faced with the challenge of trying to replicate those corridor chats, random conversations, sprawling vendor booths, or mass socials that make the large in-person conferences valuable. vRetreat online is a focussed insight into a couple of vendors which retains the interaction between both delegate and sponsor, and delegate and delegate, this sets it apart from just watching a webinar. Having said that, I still look forward to the time when we can get back to exciting venues for these events, perhaps followed by some real-world crazy golf one day?

Please read my standard Declaration/Disclaimer and before rushing out to buy anything bear in mind that this article is based on a discussion at a analyst session rather than a POC or production installation. I wasn’t paid to write this article or offered any payment, although delegates at this event did receive a VR headset package.