Minio at SFD23

MinIO presented on object storage at this past Storage Field Day, where Erik Ableson attended as a delegate. Erik discusses his thoughts and experience with MinIO, check out what he has to say!


Data Protection in 2020

Erik Ableson was a delegate at Tech Field Day in March. As a delegate, he saw the presentations from Zerto on their vision and new product features. Erik writes that Zerto helped clarify his thoughts on different approaches to data protection and he thinks that Zerto is one of the industry leaders in Disaster Recovery solutions. Check out Erik’s blog post as well as the Zerto Tech Field Day presentations on our website!


Vast Data at Storage Field Day 18

In this post, Erik Ableson looks at what VAST Data presented at Storage Field Day earlier this year. The company came fully out of stealth at the event, and showed off their approach to Disaggregated Shared Everything storage. Built on a foundation of persistent high speed memory and modern networking, Erik looks at whether VAST can fulfill their goal of eliminating spinning disks entirely.


SFD18-Western Digital

Western Digital offered something different at Storage Field Day, being a provider of the storage that most other presenters use in their products. Highlights include details about 96-layer 3D NAND production, and HDD advancements including Helium, and using technologies like MAMR, HAMR and SMR to push density,


Oracle Cloud

As Oracle continues to expand into the public cloud market, they have to change a lot of minds along the way. At Tech Field Day, it seems like they got their message heard by Erik Ableson, who described the session as a “wake up call.” For Erik, what struck him is how Oracle Cloud is positioned to work well with existing enterprise workloads and cloud-native ones. While there are elements that are a managed service, their cloud offerings stand apart and should be of interest to anyone in the market.


Hammerspace at Tech Field Day 17

It’s always exciting when a company comes out of stealth at a Tech Field Day event. That’s what Erik Ableson got to see at Tech Field Day last month, when Hammerspace went live to the world. The presented their data-as-a-service solution in an interesting way, defining the most important part of a file system as the metadata expression of the files that exist in a particular context. Hammerspace separates the shared file metadata from the file access path, allowing them to provide a single namespace regardless of where the data actually is. Erik sees them as having the potential to move unstructured data managed out of the world of scripting and into advanced policy management.


Nasuni – scaling unstructured data

Erik Ableson got to hear from Nasuni at Storage Field Day in June. He found the update well worth it, with the company showing maturing and real world use cases. Overall, their unstructured data solution is an interesting hydrid, offering a SaaS-like experience, but also includes remote edge servers. But this approach is worth it, as it allows for a true end-to-end solution, from access, to backup and DR.


vMax to the Max

Dell EMC went into a technical deep dive on VMAX during their presentation at Storage Field Day earlier this year. Erik Ableson looks at their recently released all-flash VMAX, and considers the current state of “big iron” and how something like VMAX fits into the world of the modern storage admin.


Storage Field Day 14 coming up

Storage Field Day is coming up later this week, and Erik Ableson has a full preview. He’ll be attending Commvault Go before the event, hearing about their latest data management solutions. Then at Storage Field Day, he’ll get updates from Dell EMC across their vast portfolio, E8 Storage, and Scality. It should be a busy week, with many fascinating solutions on tap.


Erik Ableson

An IT generalist with over 20 years of experience spanning multiple technology generations at different layers in the IT organisation.