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.
vSphere Kubernetes Hot Take
Keith Townsend got to hear from VMware at Tech Field Day, where they packed a lot of information into a four hour session. Part of the presentation that surprised him was the Kubernetes integration into vSphere. This didn’t take the approach that Keith had thought when it was originally announced. Instead it comes as an extension of VMware Cloud Foundation, providing the ability to run a SDDC reference design across any environment. His biggest question with this is using VSAN as the management platform for Kubernetes. It’s an intriguing breakdown of the presentation, and Keith can’t wait to get some more focused deep dive sessions from VMware soon.
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Aruba Bridges 5G and Wi-Fi 6 With New Air Pass Feature
Aruba recently announced a new offering called Air Pass, which Drew Conry-Murray looks at in this post. Air Pass bridges 5G cellular networks with in-building WLANs to enable seamless hand-off between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 networks. This effectively allows carriers and enterprises to build seamless handoffs from cellular to WLAN for voice and data on devices. A key technical compontent of this handoff is Passpoint, a Wi-Fi Alliance developed standard to provide automatic authentication between the carrier and WLAN. Be sure to check out Aruba’s presentation from Mobility Field Day last year, where they dug into the specifics of Passpoint and how it operates in their devices and software.
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Aruba Bridges 5G And Wi-Fi 6 With New Air Pass Feature
Building a Software Defined Cloud Network With CloudGenix
In this case, Phil Gervasi makes the case that while a lot of SD-WAN conversations still position the solution as an emerging technology, that’s no longer the case. He argues that with clear uses cases having emerged, it is now a maturing technology, and that the differentiator for a lot of providers comes down to cloud connectivity. SD-WAN is less about cost saving and load balancing, and more about connecting to cloud resources and SaaaS apps easier, more secure, and with a better user experience. At Networking Field Day, he heard from CloudGenix, which offers an SD-WAN solution that’s almost completely cloud focused, based on software running on commodity equipment. Rather than an appliance-in-a-box approach, they do this to offer a SD-WAN fabric with hooks into a wide array of cloud-based SaaS and IaaS solutions.
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Building a Software Defined Cloud Network with CloudGenix
NetApp Fabric Orchestrator and Hybrid Cloud
NetApp discussing its Data Fabric strategy for a few years now. In this post, Chris Evans looks at one of the key components of it, Fabric Orchestrator. He sees it as a natural evolution from their Cloud Orchestrator, and reflects a lot of the IP the company acquired with Greenqloud and StackPointCloud. Fabric Orchestrator introduces workflow to manage how to apply policies to data sets, independent of how they are attached to applications. This allows for data to be tiered to either less expensive on-premises storage or into the cloud. Chris thinks NetApp is developing an approach to data mobility in a way that aligns with their existing market, evolving their products as their business needs change.
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NetApp Fabric Orchestrator and Hybrid Cloud
StorageGRID Gets Gritty
Object storage has a reputation for being “cheap and deep”, offering scalable, affordable storage without much in the way of performance considerations. At Storage Field Day, Chin-Fah Heoh liked that NetApp challenged that narrative with their StorageGRID Webscale (SGWS) solution. With all-flash solutions available, SGWS is not a new platform, but offers new performance capabilities with a very mature software backend. While Chin-Fah wonder what might have been if NetApp had pivoted the platform to performance a little earlier, he sees the company properly positioning the solution for the general purpose object storage market.
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Day Two Cloud 038: Making the Case for Third-Party Cloud Storage
Tech Field Day founder Stephen Foskett was recently a guest on the Day Two Cloud podcast. On the episode, he and Ned Bellavance discuss third-party cloud storage, and how it fits into a market with so many native options readily available. In the episode they discuss common enterprise use cases, and examines key issues including performance, data management, and operations.
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Day Two Cloud 038: Making The Case For Third-Party Cloud Storage
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 35: A Conversation With Krishna Subramanian of Komprise
On a recent episode of Voices in Data Storage, Enrico Signoretti spoke with Komprise’s co-founder and COO Krishna Subramanian. Krishna has a extensive history working in IT, from being VP Marketing for Cloud Platforms at Citrix, to leading cloud computing strategy at Sun, and co-founding Kovair. Enrico was recently a delegate at Storage Field Day, where Komprise made a return as a presenter. Be sure to check out their full video to get up to date on their latest solutions.
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Voices in Data Storage – Episode 35: A Conversation with Krishna Subramanian of Komprise
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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