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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> he found the IT department using two hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, and ... VMware. The CTO felt two hypervisors was one too many and considered a consolidation

Good move, and plenty more like this will happen.

But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. And companies like Broadcom are fine with that because market segmentation is a thing.

(Also I hate hate HATE The Register's tone - so happy I'm not a PMM who has to wine and dine them at RSA or Re:Inforce.

The moment RSA and these holdover 90s blog cartels like Register and DarkReading die, discourse in the space can become so much better.

Practitioner lead conferences like Bsides and practitioner blogs are superior to these kinds of rags that are written in conjunction with vendors)

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To be fair, the tone is supposed to be that way. It was designed as a UK-tabloid style IT news source, which have informal and opinionated tones (I don't know if it was originally done in jest or not).

The fact that it publishes in a low-brow, combative style in an industry that is (historically, anyways) mostly educated is part of the "joke", especially has most other tech press at the time it was created in the 1990s had conflict of interest relationships with tech companies (mostly relying on the same companies for advertising) - which is why the tagline is "biting the hand that feeds IT". It's easy to forget that most tech news sources were overwhelmingly uncritical to even bad tech. For those of us who had to actually deal with it, it was refreshing to know other people hated <insert vender product here>. For a good while in the 1990s (before it could stand on its own) it was a site written by people who actually worked with products from the tech companies (with their sales people) and could comment if they were going downhill or got screwed by pricing changes.

Is it possibly outdated and tiring now? Sure (it stopped being a daily news source for me around 2010), but it helps to understand the history and why it is or was popular.

The issue is these old school blogs aren't some random dudes eating ramen who love technology for the sake of technology anymore.

They are now owned by press wire publishers and corporate conference owners, and as companies have increasingly moved away from both these options, the tone has become increasingly uneven.

Look at how much RSA flamed Palo Alto Networks for deciding to quit RSA and how Register never uses snark in the articles it writes with CEOs, leadership, or companies who invite Register to their conferences.

It's basically an attempt at extortion, not the truth. The practitioners who are technical don't write for these rags. And most of the Register's (and at all their parent companies publications) are non-technical journalists for whom this is a dayjob which they'll inevitably leave to become a Comm Marketer at a Vendor like the dozens I've worked with.

> especially has most other tech press at the time it was created in the 1990s had conflict of interest relationships with tech companies

So does The Register. I've literally wined and dined their writers at RSA years ago.

You might be right, but at least it is SOME skeptical source to fight back against the unending gusher of marketing bullshit.

The fact they may preferentially apply the snark based on "extortion" isn't great, but at least they are SOME voice, and like comedy some snarky sarcasm is often much more incisive that (shockingly) fluff.

And considering the gushing amound of shadow-sponsored fluff in other magazines, aka the flip side of your alleged "extortion". If anything, the non-snark is an honest signal to an informed reader.

> is SOME skeptical source to fight back against the unending gusher of marketing bullshit.

They aren't though. They are also marketing bs. If you work at a vendor, go slack your content marketing team for a coffee chat to understand how it works.

This is the managing company for The Register [0]. We'd work with AMs at Situation Publishing to be looped to the right magazine (Register, Next Platform, Blocks and Files, etc) and could complain to them if we gave enough business to them.

[0] - https://situationpublishing.com/

You're complaining about the news/publishing industry in general, though.

As I mentioned earlier, the register isn't on my radar anymore and obviously sold out. In your original post, you had a hate-on with their tone, but it was their tone that (originally) made them refreshing. The discourse without it would be have reporting on corporate release announcements and various reviews by people who don't use the products day-to-day in their actual job.

Snarky tones about Larry Ellison needing yacht money or referencing whether a good or useful IBM product was worth having to deal with their aggressive sales people was the indications that the writers (again at one time) got or understood the industry.

Of course, that's not sustainable as a business model...

Anyways, my main point is that it's not the tone that's the issue, it's the publication industry for reasons that you stated.

> Also I hate hate HATE The Register's tone

I find the snark refreshing compared to all the corporate drones using their carefully worded lawsuit-proof, passive-voice, non-committal, lawyer-vetted style.

You must work in a very, very sane environment - for most of us this is literally a breath of fresh air.

As I mentioned below:

They are not snarky and they very gladly work with corporates as well. They are just writing in some weird pissy tone.

Look at all the sponsored content they have from ZTE, as well as all the Nutanix specific articles because of Nutanix .NEXT

Snark is fine if you are evenhanded by being snarky about everyone, but it ain't great if you're clearly picking and choosing and deciding to take money from vendors.

I'd like snark, but I'd rather hear that from an actual practitioner, not one of the several tech "journalists" we'd wine and dine when I was still working for vendors.

Hate to burst your bubble, but even the super tight-laced "serious" journalism, especially in tech, all works the same way too. Going super hardcore on "professionalism" makes it easier to sell objectivity whereas in the background you are also clearly picking and choosing to decide to take money from vendors.

It's just one aesthetic over another. The corporate-style is made to win over those naive to think their slick editing and wordsmithing means that they're objective about their reporting ("so professional! Real journalists!"). The snarky/edgy style is made to win over those naive enough to think that because they're "rebels" then they must be objective unlike those corporate stuck-up types.

It's Windows vs Mac for journalism, thats all.

> Hate to burst your bubble, but even the super tight-laced "serious" journalism, especially in tech, all works the same

You ain't bursting my bubble. I've wined and dined DarkReading, SDxCentral, etc.

At least they aren't being mean while selling access.

This is why I said read practioners personal blogs and stuff, not these kinds of corporate journals.

> But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox.

It can be all of the above though. I work in higher education and Proxmox is the only option we are seriously considering right now.

Fair point. I was thinking solely from a Upper Market perspective.

Higher Ed is in a weird place where budgets are small but the personnel are fairly adept, so depending on the size you guys could actually be a good fit for deploying and managing a FOSS offering like Proxmox.

You're right on the money. The magic of VMWare before is that it did enough for a low enough cost that it made sense for all sorts of orgs, even those that were quite cost sensitive.

But higher ed is weird for the reasons you mention.

To elaborate a bit: before commercialization, universities were a huge part of the early internet, and they invested heavily in datacenters and connectivity at a time when "the cloud" didn't exist.

They also have weird cost models and paying for power/cooling is sometimes done in a way that IT doesn't even account for that burden at all.

So to a large degree, shutting down on-prem stuff to move to "the cloud" has never made financial sense for unis, and they've always had to adapt to whatever datacenter tech has been required over the long decades.

That means they're staffed with people who never forgot how to run workloads directly on the metal, and aren't afraid to build it themselves rather than just move to a vendor. When it comes to the VMWare / Broadcom situation, "once bitten, twice shy" is going to be in the back of their minds - they know they'll be around for decades to come, and nobody wants to have to migrate early due to another rug pull.

You hate they're speaking as (very snarky) humans?

Corporate speak is better?

They are not snarky and they very gladly work with corporates as well.

Look at all the sponsored content they have from ZTE, as well as all the Nutanix specific articles because of Nutanix .NEXT

Snark is fine if you are evenhanded by being snarky about everyone, but it ain't great if you're clearly picking and choosing and deciding to take money from vendors.

They lost the fun snark and just went pissy and needlessly edgelordy 10 years ago.

It’s not the great site it was in the 90s anymore when it was fair, balanced and fun, along with having accurate news.

Yep. They're not a must read like they were then, and like Computer Weekly were in the 90s, but I'm still glad they're around to provide slight balance to all the regurgitated press releases.

Mike McGee was a legend.

Mind that i said 'corporate speak' as referring to the tone of the articles. Not referring to who they do or don't take money from...

Non-snarky humans are better than both.

> Good move, and plenty more like this will happen.

What is a good move? Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future. This consolidation just increases their dependence on Nutanix, does it not?

Consolidation is a good move, because it minimizes your overhead from a team management and procurement management basis.

Infra is a cost center at the end of the day.

> I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future

Can you justify spending 2x your hypervisor budget when that same pot of money could be used to hire more engineers who make the product the company is selling?

You are absolutely right that consolidation minimizes overhead. I work in an IT department who relies on VMware and I certainly do not look forward to the prospect of updating all our tooling to work with multiple hypervisors. It works quite well as it is.

And it certainly makes sense in the short term to spend the money on the product instead of on infrastructre. I just wonder about the long term in the context of how we do business. Because on the one hand you have management pushing topics like "risk management" where I have to take responsibility for the most trivial of things in day-to-day operations. And then there is the hypervisor issue where "risk management" goes out of the window and we happily rely on a single hypervisor that could (from one day to the next, more or less) upend all our business.

Yep. It is a conundrum, and why a lot of my peers in F500s lead hybrid cloud or a multi-cloud migrations. This way you can auto-scale if needed within your cloud providers (which are easier to migrate from than on-prem due to better DevEx) or return back to on-prem if needed from a cost saving or infra standpoint.

That said, these are questions that are very organization dependent.

Why does risk management go out the window? Don't you highlight a single vendor in your BCP plan? Raise the risk, do some quick analysis on how to mitigate that risk and let someone sign off on it.

Accepting the risk doesn't mean 'going out the window'.

However, would it be sensible to keep a small team on a different tech (in this case move everything to N but keep a small V team) so that when shit happens in the other side you have an immediate team to migrate everything to this side?

(I'm thinking about MSFT who maintained a small Windows team when the majority effort went to OS/2 back in the 80s)

The MSFT case was R&D spend, but Infra falls under the Finance&IT bucket, where the available capital is much less.

I see. I guess the multi-cloud example you mentioned earlier makes more sense then.

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