August 6, 2025 • 9 mins
Back AGAIN by popular demand! Here's episode 4 of Tim Flower's brand new IT mystery series, Parallel.
Stay up to date with ALL new episodes of Parallel, as they're released, right here (https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/parallel--6616391)
The team at Zentech has been hard at work investigating a murder. This time it's actually time that's the victim, and everyone is a suspect - especially the VDI team. "The Foundation" makes another appearance, and the team gets closer to uncovering the source of many of their recurring IT issues, with the help of an AI assistant and a very persistent DEX team.
Join us for episode 4, The Virtual Murder.
Starring the Reality Bytes crew: Tim Flower, Tom McGrath, Meghan Brake, Oriana Ott, Sean Malvey, and Kathryn Shea.
Stay up to date with ALL new episodes of Parallel, as they're released, right here (https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/parallel--6616391)
The team at Zentech has been hard at work investigating a murder. This time it's actually time that's the victim, and everyone is a suspect - especially the VDI team. "The Foundation" makes another appearance, and the team gets closer to uncovering the source of many of their recurring IT issues, with the help of an AI assistant and a very persistent DEX team.
Join us for episode 4, The Virtual Murder.
Starring the Reality Bytes crew: Tim Flower, Tom McGrath, Meghan Brake, Oriana Ott, Sean Malvey, and Kathryn Shea.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Time is money, at least that's the saying. But in
the world of virtual desktops, time isn't just money. It's
a victim, and the crime scene is a murder. It's
real messy, and the suspects, it seems, it's always the
VDI team. Last week, on parallel, the dex team at
Zentech uncovered a troubling pattern employees so accustomed to frustration
(00:48):
that they stopped rebooting their systems altogether. It was a
tale of quiet despair, of complacency breeding chaos. And while
reboots aren't really an issue in VDI since they can
be centrally managed, the team at Zenech found a population
even more frustrated than the no reboot crowd. With the
help of their decks AI assistant, they decided to run
(01:09):
an analysis of VDI performance problems that went deeper than reboots,
and the team at zen Tech found something even more troubling,
a ghost in the machine. It seemed to be wreaking
havoc everywhere, slow log ons, frozen applications, and an entire
department blocked out for no clear reason. Employees helplessly wait
(01:31):
while it scrambles, but the scramble isn't to fix the problem,
it's to prove that they aren't the source of it.
The network team blames the storage team, the storage team
blames the server team, the server team blames the application team,
and the VDI team. They take all the blame. Stuck
in the middle, trying to catch a shadow that no
(01:52):
one seems to be and all of this chaos is
eating away at employee productivity and it budgets Today. In
episode four, The Virtual Murder, we ask what is foundation
and who or what brought it into Zentec's VDI ecosystem.
Pam is on the VDI support team and she's working
(02:15):
with a remote employee who has become completely fed up
with their slow session. She's been chasing a slowdown in
Terrence's virtual desktop for over a week, and every time
she thinks she's found the issue, it slips through her fingers.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
It's been six minutes just waiting for outlook to open.
Now I see why people are so frustrated with their systems.
I mean, if I hear it must be a network
problem one more time.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
In the background, I can hear Terrence on the.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Speakerphone saying I told you, and it's not just out
look and things are to slow down. I can't get
anything done.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
I can't figure it out. He clicks the icon and
nothing happens, or it does, but it's like ten seconds later,
and he says the keys they feel like sponges as
he types. I can see the screen delay behind every letter.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
But this isn't isolated. The storage team claims their appliances
are operating within their limits. The server team blames latency
on a vendor update, and the application team swears it's
a corrupted VDI profile, and the network team proves it's
not their fault. Several times a day. I happened to
step into the noisy data center and found the team
(03:29):
debating the issue.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
We checked the VDI farm and the servers all seem fine.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I keep telling you it's not a network problem.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
We've upgraded every circuit involved, but we can't see anything
in the last mind packet lost.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
Could it be a routing issue. Let's do what next?
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Thing says, Yep, it's time we look at this over
in dexops.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It had been a few days since I talked with
the team, and if you can't tell, they are now
in full blown crisis mode. They're all in the decks
Ops command center now, and Jessica is focused on her
monitor and the analysis that the AI assistant is showing her.
That's when she sees it. A log file referencing the Foundation.
Speaker 5 (04:10):
Hey, what's this update that ran last week? Does anyone
know what Foundation is? It's all over these VDI logs.
It looks like it's running processes during peak hours.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
There it was again, the Foundation, a name the team
keeps hearing, but no one seems to know what it
is or who deployed it. Then the storage team had
an interesting question. Foundation. Isn't that the old vendor tool
they put on the shelf last year?
Speaker 5 (04:39):
I thought that too, But clearly it is not shelved.
It's everywhere and it's running a process called Cascade. Whatever
it is, it's eating resources like crazy.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Pam, with the help of assist, kept digging. The deeper
she goes, the more she finds. Foundation isn't just running
non VDI. It's integrated into application servers, storage appliances, and
network routers. It's been hiding in plane sight. It's everywhere,
but there's no documentation, no support tickets, no fingerprints, and
(05:14):
the engineer who owned the platform left the company six
months ago. Then I overheard the application team lead make
an interesting comment.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
You said, Cascade. Wasn't that the new load balancing platform
that never really worked? I thought it got shut down
last year. Why is it still running?
Speaker 5 (05:32):
I don't know, but it's definitely not balancing loads, it's
creating them.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
It was strange that the application and VDI team leads
weren't aware, and as PAM closed in on the source
of the slowdown, the foundation kept turning up. But now
it's not just a name, it's a pattern. Scripts running
when they shouldn't. Code embedded in places it doesn't belong,
a process called Cascade that seems to be manipulating data
(05:59):
flows across the entire system. And if you remember Fred,
he runs the DEX team, So I talked with him
to see how they were tackling this problem.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Now, we probably should have done this sooner, but moving
the SWAT team over to the dexsop center it made
all the difference. When we took that wider look, including
both physical and virtual machines, and used all the correlated data,
we had a view of the whole enterprise. We found
that many of our VDI users were actually losing twenty
(06:32):
percent of their workday to slow sessions, and it wasn't
just one person. We stopped the blame game. Instead of
bouncing a ticket from team to team, we brought every
IT discipline into the DEXSOPS command center. So I'm talking VDI, network, service, storage,
EUC applications, even security. They all shared a single set
(06:55):
of data from the DEX platform, So no more conflicting reports,
no more siloed investigations, and no more defensive troubleshooting. We
found systems communicating and causing delays that should have never
been there in the first place, and that no one saw.
Certainly it couldn't have correlated them with each other. We
(07:17):
found all the hidden components of the Foundation, and we
shut it down and our delays disappeared. The VDI team
was right all along. It wasn't their full.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So they were able to shut down the controlling session
named the Foundation, and found all of the components of
Cascade processes across VDI and elsewhere that were installed, returning
performance and usability to the users. But I've seen it
before and I'm sure I'll see it again. Every day
businesses are losing money to issues in VDI and a
(07:52):
lack of holistic visibility to find the true culprit quickly
delays caused it costs to spiral and VD teams to
defend their platform, and meanwhile remote employees suffer in silence.
But here's the thing. The case can be solved. The
clues are there, you just have to know where to
look and have a little help from an AI assistant.
(08:15):
And what about the origins of the Foundation and Cascade.
The team made some interesting discoveries about that old system
that was never fully dismantled, but it intersects with another issue.
They uncovered another silent killer of productivity. While Zentech is
making slow systems, bad service and technology failures a thing
of the past, technology is changing so much and so frequently,
(08:39):
their employees just can't keep up. They've been trained, but
can't retain half of what they've learned. Next week, we'll
look at a theory that seems to have been the
true demise of the Foundation, a failed transformation that continues
to cost the company time and money. But what's worse
is the employee knowledge gap that's also also losing paying customers.
(09:03):
Join us next time on Parallel for episode five, The
Forgotten
Speaker 2 (09:08):
M M. M.
Time is money, at least that's the saying. But in
the world of virtual desktops, time isn't just money. It's
a victim, and the crime scene is a murder. It's
real messy, and the suspects, it seems, it's always the
VDI team. Last week, on parallel, the dex team at
Zentech uncovered a troubling pattern employees so accustomed to frustration
(00:48):
that they stopped rebooting their systems altogether. It was a
tale of quiet despair, of complacency breeding chaos. And while
reboots aren't really an issue in VDI since they can
be centrally managed, the team at Zenech found a population
even more frustrated than the no reboot crowd. With the
help of their decks AI assistant, they decided to run
(01:09):
an analysis of VDI performance problems that went deeper than reboots,
and the team at zen Tech found something even more troubling,
a ghost in the machine. It seemed to be wreaking
havoc everywhere, slow log ons, frozen applications, and an entire
department blocked out for no clear reason. Employees helplessly wait
(01:31):
while it scrambles, but the scramble isn't to fix the problem,
it's to prove that they aren't the source of it.
The network team blames the storage team, the storage team
blames the server team, the server team blames the application team,
and the VDI team. They take all the blame. Stuck
in the middle, trying to catch a shadow that no
(01:52):
one seems to be and all of this chaos is
eating away at employee productivity and it budgets Today. In
episode four, The Virtual Murder, we ask what is foundation
and who or what brought it into Zentec's VDI ecosystem.
Pam is on the VDI support team and she's working
(02:15):
with a remote employee who has become completely fed up
with their slow session. She's been chasing a slowdown in
Terrence's virtual desktop for over a week, and every time
she thinks she's found the issue, it slips through her fingers.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
It's been six minutes just waiting for outlook to open.
Now I see why people are so frustrated with their systems.
I mean, if I hear it must be a network
problem one more time.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
In the background, I can hear Terrence on the.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Speakerphone saying I told you, and it's not just out
look and things are to slow down. I can't get
anything done.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
I can't figure it out. He clicks the icon and
nothing happens, or it does, but it's like ten seconds later,
and he says the keys they feel like sponges as
he types. I can see the screen delay behind every letter.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
But this isn't isolated. The storage team claims their appliances
are operating within their limits. The server team blames latency
on a vendor update, and the application team swears it's
a corrupted VDI profile, and the network team proves it's
not their fault. Several times a day. I happened to
step into the noisy data center and found the team
(03:29):
debating the issue.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
We checked the VDI farm and the servers all seem fine.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I keep telling you it's not a network problem.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
We've upgraded every circuit involved, but we can't see anything
in the last mind packet lost.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
Could it be a routing issue. Let's do what next?
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Thing says, Yep, it's time we look at this over
in dexops.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It had been a few days since I talked with
the team, and if you can't tell, they are now
in full blown crisis mode. They're all in the decks
Ops command center now, and Jessica is focused on her
monitor and the analysis that the AI assistant is showing her.
That's when she sees it. A log file referencing the Foundation.
Speaker 5 (04:10):
Hey, what's this update that ran last week? Does anyone
know what Foundation is? It's all over these VDI logs.
It looks like it's running processes during peak hours.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
There it was again, the Foundation, a name the team
keeps hearing, but no one seems to know what it
is or who deployed it. Then the storage team had
an interesting question. Foundation. Isn't that the old vendor tool
they put on the shelf last year?
Speaker 5 (04:39):
I thought that too, But clearly it is not shelved.
It's everywhere and it's running a process called Cascade. Whatever
it is, it's eating resources like crazy.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Pam, with the help of assist, kept digging. The deeper
she goes, the more she finds. Foundation isn't just running
non VDI. It's integrated into application servers, storage appliances, and
network routers. It's been hiding in plane sight. It's everywhere,
but there's no documentation, no support tickets, no fingerprints, and
(05:14):
the engineer who owned the platform left the company six
months ago. Then I overheard the application team lead make
an interesting comment.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
You said, Cascade. Wasn't that the new load balancing platform
that never really worked? I thought it got shut down
last year. Why is it still running?
Speaker 5 (05:32):
I don't know, but it's definitely not balancing loads, it's
creating them.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
It was strange that the application and VDI team leads
weren't aware, and as PAM closed in on the source
of the slowdown, the foundation kept turning up. But now
it's not just a name, it's a pattern. Scripts running
when they shouldn't. Code embedded in places it doesn't belong,
a process called Cascade that seems to be manipulating data
(05:59):
flows across the entire system. And if you remember Fred,
he runs the DEX team, So I talked with him
to see how they were tackling this problem.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Now, we probably should have done this sooner, but moving
the SWAT team over to the dexsop center it made
all the difference. When we took that wider look, including
both physical and virtual machines, and used all the correlated data,
we had a view of the whole enterprise. We found
that many of our VDI users were actually losing twenty
(06:32):
percent of their workday to slow sessions, and it wasn't
just one person. We stopped the blame game. Instead of
bouncing a ticket from team to team, we brought every
IT discipline into the DEXSOPS command center. So I'm talking VDI, network, service, storage,
EUC applications, even security. They all shared a single set
(06:55):
of data from the DEX platform, So no more conflicting reports,
no more siloed investigations, and no more defensive troubleshooting. We
found systems communicating and causing delays that should have never
been there in the first place, and that no one saw.
Certainly it couldn't have correlated them with each other. We
(07:17):
found all the hidden components of the Foundation, and we
shut it down and our delays disappeared. The VDI team
was right all along. It wasn't their full.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So they were able to shut down the controlling session
named the Foundation, and found all of the components of
Cascade processes across VDI and elsewhere that were installed, returning
performance and usability to the users. But I've seen it
before and I'm sure I'll see it again. Every day
businesses are losing money to issues in VDI and a
(07:52):
lack of holistic visibility to find the true culprit quickly
delays caused it costs to spiral and VD teams to
defend their platform, and meanwhile remote employees suffer in silence.
But here's the thing. The case can be solved. The
clues are there, you just have to know where to
look and have a little help from an AI assistant.
(08:15):
And what about the origins of the Foundation and Cascade.
The team made some interesting discoveries about that old system
that was never fully dismantled, but it intersects with another issue.
They uncovered another silent killer of productivity. While Zentech is
making slow systems, bad service and technology failures a thing
of the past, technology is changing so much and so frequently,
(08:39):
their employees just can't keep up. They've been trained, but
can't retain half of what they've learned. Next week, we'll
look at a theory that seems to have been the
true demise of the Foundation, a failed transformation that continues
to cost the company time and money. But what's worse
is the employee knowledge gap that's also also losing paying customers.
(09:03):
Join us next time on Parallel for episode five, The
Forgotten
Speaker 2 (09:08):
M M. M.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.