Built specifically for existing customers and partners operating in high-assurance environments, this event focused on providing practical answers. The format combined a deep technical session, market outlook updates from key vendors, and time for peer-to-peer networking.
This led to candid conversations about virtualization strategy, hardware availability, and where the industry is headed.
Between sessions, customers, engineers, purchasing teams, and vendor representatives interacted directly. Conversations were active and practical. Attendees were not passive listeners. They were comparing notes, validating assumptions, and asking pointed questions.
With over two decades of experience across Linux, virtualization, storage, and networking, Wendell has built infrastructure in government, regulated, and high-assurance environments. His work centers on translating emerging technologies into architectures that can be deployed, operated, and repeated. Wendell's full slide deck from the session is available here.
Wendell opened not with a product comparison but with a harder question: what happens when a vendor breaks your trust?
For many organizations, VMware represented more than a technology choice. It was a social contract: you committed your infrastructure to a vendor, and in return you received a stable, predictable platform. When Broadcom's acquisition fundamentally changed that relationship, it did not just alter pricing. It broke the agreement teams had built their planning around.
That framing resonated throughout the room. The frustration stemmed from this broken social contract rather than the technology itself. Understanding it that way helps teams move past frustration and into clearer thinking about what to do next: evaluate the underlying technology on its own merits, and then ask who can break that contract again.
To avoid getting locked into another monolithic product, Wendell proposed a shift from "product thinking" to "primitives thinking."
He described the contrast in simple terms:
Rather than building an unmanaged DIY setup, this approach requires understanding the individual building blocks of your environment and choosing where to place your trust boundary.
Proxmox was presented as a practical example of this model in action. While Proxmox as a company is relatively young, its underlying components are mature Linux-based technologies that have existed for decades. The control plane may be newer, but the primitives beneath it are not.
This reframes the conversation from "Is this product new?" to "Are the underlying technologies stable and observable?" And because every component is open source, the worst-case scenario is fundamentally different. A company could stop supporting the project, but the code and community persist. No single entity can execute another rug pull.
Wendell also addressed why the open source foundation is more durable than it may appear. Major "FANG" technology companies (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc.) invest heavily in software development at scale, and much of that work flows into the open source community. This community directly benefits from being downstream of some of the largest engineering investments in the world.
That dynamic, combined with growing investment from European governments looking to build technology independence, creates a strong and durable foundation for open source infrastructure tools.
Wendell emphasized a design principle that hit home with many in the room: infrastructure should be boring, observable, and recoverable.
Key points included:
The discussion extended into performance considerations, GPU virtualization, and architectural tradeoffs. Rather than promoting a single path, the session focused on how to evaluate options based on workload type, risk tolerance, and long-term support strategy.
Having vendor representatives in the room allowed customer purchasing and subcontracting teams to ask detailed questions about availability and lifecycle realities directly.
Advantech shared updates on upcoming board designs and highlighted an increasing focus on assembly within the United States. For customers operating in regulated or government environments, these assembled-in-America initiatives directly influence procurement decisions, platform stability, and risk management.
Several themes emerged from the Lunch & Learn:
Conversations extended beyond presentations into practical discussions about real deployments and near-term planning.
Our inaugural Lunch & Learn also reinforced something core to Radeus Labs’ identity. We are an engineering-first organization. Beyond just shipping hardware, we collaborate on architecture decisions, help customers think through failure modes, and surface tradeoffs early.
We plan to continue hosting focused sessions in the coming months. At the same time, we are carrying that same engineering-led format into the industry events where many of our customers and partners already gather.
SATShow 2026 runs March 23–26 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. During the event, We will host hands-on 8200 ACS training sessions at our Booth #2736.
Sessions take place Tuesday, March 24 and Wednesday, March 25 at 11:00 AM. Space is limited to keep the format practical and interactive. Register in advance to secure a seat.
Please register for the session HERE.