Tech Field Day Coverage
Our delegate panel includes independent writers and thought leaders, and we collect their coverage of the event, Tech Field Day presentations, and sponsoring companies here.
SFD19: DellEMC Does DevOps
Dell EMC was one of the presenters at a busy Storage Field Day event. In this post, Becky Elliott writes up her thoughts on the presentation, one that was dominated by Dell EMC’s approach to DevOps. The company hit on the increasing imperative of automation in the enterprise and how IT silos are breaking down. Dell EMC also discussed their Ansible Playbooks for platforms like Isilon and PowerMax to help unify configuration, deployment, and orchestration. For Becky, this kind of practical focus of the presentation proved to be the most valuable.
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Autonomous SD-WAN by CloudGenix- My Analysis
Faisal Khan attended his first Networking Field Day event in four years, and got up to date with CloudGenix’s autonomous SD-WAN solution. There’s no dearth of companies competing in the SD-WAN market, so Faisal was curious how they would differentiate. What caught his eye was their application-centric paradigm using a single edge appliance. This offers real-time analytics without the need for cloud-based controllers or a cloud analytics engine. Overall Faisal sees CloudGenix appealing to service providers or customers needing an efficient solution on the edge.
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Autonomous SD-WAN by CloudGenix- My Analysis
Can Infrascale Compete in the Enterprise Backup Market?
Chris Evans is no stranger to the storage industry, so it’s always exciting to talk to a new company. At Storage Field Day, he got to hear from Infrascale, a company that has over two decades of experience in endpoint and enterprise data protection, but one that Chris hadn’t spoken to before. They offer solutions for cloud backup, SaaS protection, and disaster recovery, the last of which was demoed at the event. Chris was impressed that without a lot of flashing funding rounds, Infrascale offers a remarkable mature feature set. But with the shift in data protection models from applications to data, companies like Infrascale need to keep evolving to stay relevant with the times.
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Can Infrascale Compete in the Enterprise Backup Market?
IoT Calls for Security!
During Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020, David Penaloza Seijas heard a session with Tim Szigeti and the Cisco IoT folks, showing their Innovations in Cyber Security and Edge Data, addressing the concerns of the operational technology and enterprise spaces. IoT offers a lot of opportunity to enterprises, and usually offer a fairly low floor of investment to get started. But as David points out in this piece, the true costs and challenges of IoT from a security standpoint are often unknown until they are out in the wild. During their presentation, Cisco showed how they can offer security, isolation, endpoint analysis, and network readiness in a single platform.
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Paradigm Shift of Dev to Storage Ops
Chin-Fah Heoh considers how the advent of containers and Kubernetes have moved storage and DevOps closer than ever. In his mind, the Container Storage Interface commonly used in the industry cannot scale nearly as well in the cloud like object storage, which is clearly where container storage needs to go in the future. At Storage Field Day, he heard how MinIO is looking to bridge the divide between Dev and Ops with their Kubernetes friendly high performance object storage platform. He then looks at how VMware is adapting to the times with Project Pacific, which includes Cloud Native Storage and has chosen MinIO as the resident object storage provider. It’s a key integration for a high performance scalable storage solution.
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Paradigm shift of Dev to Storage Ops
Mist a Refreshing Experience When You Need a Support Case
Haydn Andrews got his hands on a Mist AP43 during Mobility Field Day last summer, and just found time to run it through its wireless paces. In his initial testing, Haydn found the setup process to be incredibly easy. When he did run into some issues and questions while trying to do some advanced configuration, he was even more impressed by the support system at Mist Systems. Instead of having to send all sorts of log and license information over to the support team, they got him answers to his questions within a few minutes. It was a refreshing change of pace for what is considered standard in much of the industry.
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Mist a refreshing experience when you need a support case
Storage Field Day 19 MinIO
One of the companies that really stood out to Joey D’Antoni at Storage Field Day was MinIO. If you’re still getting up to speed on the modern world of object storage, Joey does a good job of quickly summarizing what differentiates it from traditional block storage. Object storage is all about solving the problems of scale. For Joey, MinIO’s open source storage management software excels in that regard, offering extremely fast performance with full S3 compatibility. He lays out some potential use cases, and really wants to see where MinIO takes the solution from here.
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The Wisdom of the (Storage) Crowd
In this post, Chris Evans considers the how storage providers will continue to use storage telemetry in the future. As Chris points out, lots of storage companies have been innovating in this space. Still the scale of it can be staggering, with Pure Storage saying at a 2015 Storage Field Day event that they collect over 1 trillion data points per day. Chris would like to see the industry standardize on a way to deliver consistent anonymized data to a central location, and points to the Open Source storage community to drive this initiative.
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The Wisdom of the (Storage) Crowd
Moving Past the Edge With Aruba SD-Branch
How is SD-Branch different than SD-WAN? What features do you get that would make you want to implement one over the other? Tom Hollingsworth heard from Aruba recently at Networking Field Day looks at their implementation of SD-Branch and how it’s enabling IT teams to be more powerful past the edge. For Tom, we’re already living in the post-WAN world. The kind of holistic approach that Aruba takes with SD-Branch is what organizations need to get end-to-end control of their infrastructure.
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Moving Past The Edge with Aruba SD-Branch
CLEUR and Other Updates!
David Peñaloza Seijas was one of the new delegate faces around the table at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. We’re glad he was excited to join the delegate ranks, and add a new wrinkle to an event like Cisco Live. Tech Field Day Extra adds in unique technical presentations that help to flesh out many of the major announcements from the show. As part of the experience, he was interviewed by Gestalt IT, so be sure to check that out to get to know David better!
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Cisco HyperFlex Interview – Differentiators and Customer Benefits
If you missed Cisco’s presentation videos from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020, you should definitely check out their deep dive into Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform and Intersight innovations. Aniket Patankar, the Principal Product Manager for Cisco’s HyperFlex platform, led the discussion, and he recently sat down with Max Mortillaro for a TECHunplugged interview. They dig into how Cisco HyperFlex differentiates from other HCI solutions and the benefits the platform has for customers.
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Cisco HyperFlex Interview - Differentiators and Customer Benefits
What Is Cisco HyperFlex Data Platform? Interview With Aniket Patankar
Max Mortillaro got to sit down with Aniket Patankar, the Principal Product Manager for Cisco’s HyperFlex platform, in a recent interview for TECHunplugged. They discussed if Cisco is jumping into the bandwagon of Enterprise-targeted Kubernetes platforms and what exactly is Cisco HyperFlex Data Platform? Be sure to check out all of Cisco’s presentation videos from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 for all the technical details.
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What is Cisco HyperFlex Data Platform? Interview with Aniket Patankar
DriveNets
For Jeff Fry, one of the appeals of Networking Field Day is that he gets to hear from companies that he might not otherwise come across in his day to day work. DriveNets was a perfect example at a recent event. They largely address the tier 1 ISP market, and work to offer a network cloud approach by disaggregating the traditional router into building blocks consisting of Routing Engine, Fabric, and Packet Forwarders. This provides easier scale for service provides, providing a single box that scales out, rather than large quantities of managed devices at each layer. Combined with a fixed software license model, Jeff thinks they offer a really compelling package to ISPs.
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DellEMC Project Nautilus Re-Imagine Storage for Streams
Chin-Fah Heoh got to hear about Dell EMC’s Project Nautilus at Storage Field Day. This is their composite software platform for both streaming real-time data and historical batch data. A key component of this is Pravega, an open source storage framework for streaming data. This allows for storage streams to be treated as a new class of storage primitives, which can use protocols like Fibre Channel, SMB or NFS. Data streams can then further be fed into analytics frameworks like Flink and Apache Spark. With the increasing importance of edge computing, Chin-Fah sees Project Nautilus as an very timely framework.
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DellEMC Project Nautilus Re-imagine Storage for Streams
Project Nautilus Emerged as Dell’s Streaming Data Platform
At Storage Field Day, Gina Rosenthal got to hear from Dell EMC’s Project Nautilus, which uses open source tools to offer real time and historical analytics and storage. This essentially serves as a framework for those tool, with ingested data streams being tiered to long term storage, connected to analytics tools like Spark and Flink, then joined by Project Nautilus’ engine to provide for scale. This is all part of Dell EMC’s larger efforts to help blunt the impact of unstructured data growth. The open source streaming data platform with Project Nautilus is definitely a key addition to that toolkit.
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Project Nautilus emerged as Dell's Streaming Data Platform
Taming Unstructured Data With Dell EMC Isilon
Dell EMC presented an update on Isilon at Storage Field Day. Gina Rosenthal was a delegate at the event and wrote up what they showed about how Isilon is helping organizations solve the growing problem of unstructured data. It’s hard to follow any IT analysis these days without hearing a terrifying statement about how the rapid growth of unstructured data is going to eat through existing storage options. This Emmy award winning scale-out NAS has a long history and runs Dell’s OneFS. One interesting thing they showed during Storage Field Day was the ability to run OneFS with its full policy support in the cloud. This allows organizations to put data close to their cloud compute using the tools their familiar with, something critical with Isilon’s long time customers. Gina thought this kind of extension shows how traditional storage teams can augment cloud offerings.
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Taming Unstructured Data with Dell EMC Isilon
WekaIO and a Fresh Approach
WekaIO is no stranger to presenting at Storage Field Day, and Dan Frith was definitely interested in hearing their latest updates at our most recent event. They presented their storage solution as something that bridges the compromises between performance and sharable, claiming to support exabyte scale across a single namespace, with networked storage performance faster than local storage. They offer this with a simple management interface and an expected enterprise feature set, including end-to-end data encryption. While its easy to get caught up in hype from a single presentation, Dan has heard from WeakIO several times now, and remains impressed with the technology and implementation.
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Storage Field Day 19 – Wrap-Up and Link-O-Rama
It’s always a pleasure to have Dan Frith as a delegate at a Storage Field Day event. Making the trip over from Australia isn’t easy, but lending his keen intellect and unique perspective to the proceedings is always appreciated. In this post, Dan shares links to other posts from the event from his fellow delegates. It’s this sense of greater community that makes Field Day events stand out.
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Storage Field Day 19 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama
What Is Closed-Loop Automation?
Tom Hollingsworth noticed that the term “closed-loop automation” was used a lot during a recent Networking Field Day event. This was presented as the desired end state for a lot of network automation efforts. In this post, Tom breaks down what is actually meant by the term. He contrasts this with open-loop systems, and lays out why closed-loop automation holds such allure. Overall Tom is excited at the prospect, but warns that running such an autonomous network means keeping on top of control systems to keep things running smoothly.
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What Is Closed-Loop Automation?
A Recap of DriveNets at Networking Field Day
DriveNet’s Martin Perlin wrote up a great summery of what the company showed the delegates at Networking Field Day. It’s great to hear that the event stands out as unique from their side. We really enjoy combining deep technical sessions with meaningful conversations around the delegate table. It helps foster the larger community and really cross-pollinates ideas. The showed how they are innovating with Communications Service Provider networks to allow them to operate even as the scale incredibly quickly. This is built using their container based DriveNets Network Operating System, helping service provider disaggregate their infrastructure.
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