It’s that time of year again. The time of year where I thank vendors for sucking slightly less than their competitors over the previous 12 months. Some do this through product excellence, some through excellence in customer service. As a rule, I find vendors trying, and so I take an almost absurd amount of pleasure in reminiscing on those that, in one form or another, make the grade.  To this end, I will start the year’s festivities with a joke about how to define how “ready” a product is for general consumption. Google ready: 4 years, 3 PhDs and an army of undergrads later it runs in 30 datacenters on 5 continents, but only two people know how. Hyperscale ready: with a trained $1M/yr specialist and a support team of 5 it will support 50,000 clients at 99.95% uptime. Enterprise ready: with a team of 20 certified technicians, 4 middle managers and a vendor engineer it will integrate with our mainframe. SMB ready: one of the two burnt out husks that were people remembers enough about how it works to restart it. Trevor Pott ready: issues reduced to one 4:00am phone call per annum. So without further delay, here is my totally biased list of 2016’s kickass vendors that have made my own personal life easier: Scale Computing Scale Computing make hyperconverged appliances. Servers (3 or more) with built-in storage that work together to allow virtualized workloads to achieve high availability without needing a SAN. Scale’s solution is built on top of KVM and uses their own custom software for monitoring, self-healing, management and a user interface. Scale doesn’t expose nearly as many of the hypervisor’s features to the user as rivals like VMware. From one perspective, this means that Scale is nowhere near...