Some people collect titles. Mike McGhee, Senior Vice President at eplus, collects relationships — and after four decades in the technology channel, the return on that investment speaks for itself.

In this episode, Van sits down with one of the people who helped shape his own career in technology, a Richmond, Virginia native who has been attending the same church since 1971, still golfs with his high school crew from Freeman, and will tell you without hesitation that faith, family, and friends come before everything else — including the job.

But don't let the warmth fool you. This is a guy who helped build Slate Technology into a powerhouse Mid-Atlantic VAR, navigated a Cisco layoff on the eve of 9/11 from a hotel room in San Diego, guided the acquisition of Slate by eplus, and is now overseeing multiple regions — from Southern Virginia deep into Texas — with the same philosophy he's carried his whole career: surround yourself with people smarter than you, never burn a bridge, and always leave it better than you found it.

Mike and Van go deep on what it actually means to build a career on relationships rather than resumes, why "who you know" gets you the seat at the table to show "what you know," and how the lesson of a father's dinner bell echoing across a Richmond neighborhood still shapes how Mike thinks about presence, accountability, and showing up.

They also get into where AI is really landing with customers right now — and why the honest answer is "all over the map" — before wrapping with the story of a first date involving stuffed grape leaves that Mike's wife has apparently never forgiven him for.

If you work in technology sales, if you're early in your career and trying to figure out how the game is actually played, or if you just want to spend 45 minutes with someone who has genuinely lived what he preaches, this one is for you.

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Welcome to Is That How It Happened? -- the podcast where we dig into the real architecture behind the technology headlines. I'm your host, The Vanimal, and today we're talking about one of the most expensive and least-discussed problems in AI infrastructure: the storage wall.

As AI models push into the trillions of parameters, the bottleneck isn't compute anymore -- it's data delivery. Traditional TCP/IP networks are choking your pipelines, exhausting your CPUs, and leaving your H100 clusters idle while they wait on checkpoints and training data to load. That is not a networking inconvenience. That is a structural failure at scale.

In this episode, we break down how Remote Direct Memory Access -- RDMA -- tears that wall down entirely. We're talking zero-copy data movement, direct paths from storage to GPU memory with the CPU completely out of the loop, and real-world throughput numbers that will reframe how you think about AI infrastructure design.

We cover the TCP/IP bottleneck, the RoCEv2 versus InfiniBand debate, NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage, and how DeepSeek's 3FS architecture is hitting 6.6 terabytes per second of aggregate read bandwidth across 180 storage nodes.

If you're building, buying, or advising on AI infrastructure, this is not optional listening.

Let's get into it.

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Laini isn't just a survivor — she's a warrior. Diagnosed with sarcoma, one of the rarest and most challenging forms of cancer, Laini faced something most of us can't imagine and came out the other side with a story that deserves to be heard. Sarcoma accounts for less than 1% of all adult cancers, which means many patients face this battle with little awareness, limited resources, and far too few people who truly understand what they're going through.

But Laini? She turned her experience into something powerful. Today, she's here to share her journey — the diagnosis, the fight, the recovery, and what life looks like on the other side of something that could have taken everything from her.

This is one of those conversations that reminds you what strength really looks like. So sit back, listen closely, and get ready to be inspired.

As we will discuss in this episode, here are some links to help you navigate your decisions, and conversations should you or someone you love becomes a member of the "C" Club.

Massey Cancer Center: https://www.uvahealth.com/specialties/cancer

American Cancer Society: https://www.cancer.org/

Sarcoma Foundation of America: https://curesarcoma.org/

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