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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In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Colt Knight, Agricultural Extension Agent and Full Professor at the University of Maine, to explore the fascinating intersection of science, craftsmanship, and education behind proper beef and pork butchering.

We dig into what it really takes to perform this age-old process safely and skillfully — from understanding muscle structure and meat quality, to mastering hygiene, temperature control, and carcass breakdown. Dr. Knight shares his perspective on how universities and agricultural programs are training the next generation of butchers, why proper technique matters for both food safety and quality, and how education continues to evolve with new research in meat science.

Whether you’re a farmer, chef, or simply curious about where your food comes from, this conversation offers a deep look into the science and respect behind one of humanity’s oldest skills.

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Welcome back to Is that how it happened? I'm your host, The Vanimal, and today we are diving deep into a game-changing approach to enterprise data security: Immutable Veeam Backups on Cloudian Hyperstore.

If you are an IT manager, you know that ransomware attacks and rising storage costs are two of the biggest threats to your critical assets. That's why we're exploring how the integration of Veeam Backup & Replication v12 with Cloudian Hyperstore is revolutionizing data protection.

In this episode, we will unpack the Direct-to-Object storage workflow. We'll explain how this new architecture allows you to write your backup data directly to Cloudian's S3-compatible on-premises object storage in a single step, completely eliminating the need for a costly intermediate primary backup tier. This streamlined approach not only saves time but can also reduce your storage costs by up to 70% compared to traditional enterprise storage or public cloud solutions.

Most importantly, we'll discuss the ultimate defense against hackers: S3 Object Lock. We'll detail how this feature creates bullet-proof, immutable backups that make your data 100% tamper-proof. Because this data is made unchangeable for a set period of time, cybercriminals and malware cannot encrypt, alter, or delete it. We will break down how this ensures you always have a clean data copy for a rapid, reliable recovery—without ever paying a ransom.

Stay tuned as we explore how to simplify your backup workflow, slash your infrastructure costs, and lock ransomware out for good!

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In this episode of Is That How It Happened?, The Vanimal sits down with Jim O’Brien, Senior Business Development Manager at TalentCraft, where he helps high-growth companies at the intersection of cloud data, AI, and deep tech find the people who actually make transformation happen. We get into how AI infrastructure teams really scale, why great recruiting is more about human signal than hype, and what Jim is seeing on the front lines of hiring in AI, quantum, and next‑gen tech.

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Everyone sees the magic of AI on the surface, but who is talking about the brutal infrastructure actually keeping it alive?

Here is a sneak peek into our latest episode:

Mr Quiz: "Everyone sees the magic on the surface—like ChatGPT hitting 800 million weekly active users and handling billions of requests a day. But today, we're talking about the invisible superhero doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes." Miss Answer: "Exactly. We're talking about Kubernetes. We are exploring the massive shift toward 'Edge AI,' where models are pushed directly to retail aisles and factory floors to achieve ultra-low latency, stronger data privacy, and offline reliability. Plus, we dig into how advanced scheduling systems like Kant and NVIDIA's Run:ai eliminate GPU fragmentation and allow fractional GPU sharing, letting enterprises squeeze every ounce of power out of their hardware."

Running AI across thousands of distributed edge sites or on massive centralized clusters with tens of thousands of heterogeneous GPUs creates an operational nightmare. If you want to know how the industry is fighting back and turning Kubernetes into the unified control plane making it all possible, this episode is for you.

Grab your headphones and listen to the full Audio Deep Dive now!

#AI #Kubernetes #MLOps #EdgeAI #NVIDIA #GPU #TechPodcast #DeepDive

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If your cloud bill feels more like a mortgage payment than an operating expense, you’re not alone. Over the last decade, enterprises rushed into the public cloud for speed and flexibility—only to wake up with a serious cloud hangover: spiraling storage costs, egress fees on every experiment, and compliance teams asking hard questions about where data actually lives.

In today’s episode, we’re unpacking the rise of data repatriation—the move to bring data, applications, and AI workloads back from public cloud into on‑prem and private environments. We’ll look at why AI data gravity makes location a first‑class design decision, why metered, remote object storage is such a bad fit for high‑reuse training datasets, and how on‑prem S3 platforms like Cloudian HyperStore turn “backing out of the cloud” from a painful rollback into a long‑term AI strategy.

So if you’re trying to feed GPUs without paying a gravity tax on every byte, or you’re wondering which workloads truly belong in the cloud versus at home, stay tuned—we’re going to break down the economics, the architecture, and the playbook for bringing your data back where it works best.

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