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.
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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A Recap of DriveNets at Networking Field Day
Dell EMC PowerOne – Not V(x)block 2.0
Dell EMC is a familiar face at Storage Field Day. As an iconic company in the storage industry, it’s always good to get an update on their latest and greatest. Dan Frith got to hear from them with an update on PowerOne, its converged “all-in-one autonomous infrastructure.” Converged infrastructure isn’t the newest idea on the block, but Dan thinks that PowerOne offers a substantially different experience than solutions of the past. In this post, Dan outlines a lot of the important automation features that help it stand out, which takes away the need to constantly consult documentation and other support documents to get the system up and running. While a lot of enterprise interest is taken by HCI solutions, Dan makes the case that Dell EMC is truly innovating with converged infrastructure to meet real enterprise need and keep it relevant.
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Dell EMC PowerOne – Not V(x)block 2.0
Komprise – Non-Disruptive Data Management
Data management has been one of the fastest growing sectors of IT, with new startups popping up and older companies pivoting to address it. Komprise showed off their robust data management solution at Storage Field Day, and Dan Frith wrote up his thoughts about it in this post. He found they offered a way to intelligently access and store your unstructured data, something increasingly important when so much unstructured data is generated on a daily basis, with no signs of slowing down. What really made Komprise stand out to Dan though is their emphasis on making this management transparent to the administrator, something often overlooked in competing solutions. Be sure to check out his post for a feature deep dive, then watch their full presentation.
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Komprise – Non-Disruptive Data Management
Scale Computing on the Edge With HE150
Chris Evans has been following Scale Computing since they presented at Storage Field Day all the way back in 2014. At their recent Tech Field Day presentation, they went into detail about their HE150 edge solution, which packs all the power of an HCI node into a single Intel NUC. While diminutive in size, Chris found them to offer an incredibly compelling value package. These are low cost, low power, low footprint solutions that are perfect for a number of edge deployments. But just as key is the software and networking to keep everything running smoothly, something that Scale’s HC3 software makes easy through their GUI or APIs. At $5,000 for a 3-node solution, Chris sees this as a perfect option to meet any any non-data center requirement.
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Scale Computing on the Edge with HE150
NetApp and the StorageGRID Evolution
Dan Frith is no stranger with Storage Field Day and the storage industry at large. It’s that kind of deep expertise that lends itself to excellent analysis of each presenter. In this post, Dan breaks down the updates he heard from NetApp on their object storage platform, StorageGRID. For Dan, the update really shows how the workloads people are using for object storage have changed, and how NetApp is working to stay on top of this to offer a compelling product to customers. They also showed off new hardware in the form of the SG1000 compute appliance, the dense SG6060 with a 2PB per node capacity, and the all-flash SGF6024. With Dan’s background with service providers, he really appreciates the flexible deployment models NetApp offers, with multi-tenancy built into the solution from the ground up.
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NetApp And The StorageGRID Evolution
My Time at Networking Field Day 22
The delegates to Field Day events often say that the experience is like drinking from the IT firehose. Over the course of three days, the dozen delegates get to hear intense technical session and engage in conversations with a number of diverse companies, and it can test the mental elasticity of even the most seasoned veteran. Evan Mintzer was recently in Silicon Valley for Networking Field Day and writes about the overall experiences in this post. The best part about the format is that it doesn’t allow for immediate hot takes, instead rewarding introspection and mental digestion about everything they heard. We can’t wait to hear Evan’s thoughts on all the presenters from the event as he works through all the information.
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My time at Networking Field Day 22
The Power of Communities – An Interview With David Penaloza Seijas
Your community defines who you are. But for some, the community is defined by who they are as well. In this video, Tom Hollingsworth interviews David Peneloza Seijas and discusses his role in Cisco Live, Cisco Champions, and Tech Field Day. The passion that David has for this community shines through the entire interview, and Tom really found him to be a beacon for new members to latch on to. David is definitely a champion that Tom wants to try to emulate with his own work in the Tech Field Day community.
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The Power of Communities - An Interview with David Penaloza Seijas
My View on Riverbed’s SD-WAN Solution
Evan Mintzer was definitely familiar with Riverbed prior to visiting the company as part of Networking Field Day. But it had been over a year since he worked with their solutions every day, so he was interested to hear their latest updates. One of the things that caught his eye during the event was a section by Chief Architect Vincent Berk. He detailed a new capability in Riverbed’s SD-WAN portfolio, that provides visibility into the network including when problems occur. This kind of continuous network monitoring is a vital addition to the Riverbed tool belt for Evan.
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My view on Riverbed’s SD-WAN Solution
It’s Time for YOU to Get Wise About CBRS
Lee Badman breaks down the latest in mobility, doing a deep dive on the importance of Citizens Broadband Radio Service. Lee first heard about the potential of unlicensed spectrum back in 2015 at Wireless Field Day, in a session led by Dave Wright, now the President of the CBRS Alliance. The FCC recently announced that 150MHz in the 3.5 GHz spectrum was open for applications to use. This opens the door to a whole new avenue for mobility, including the possibility of private LTE networks. While Wi-Fi 6 and 5G get a lot of marketing hype, CBRS might be just as important.
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It’s Time for YOU to Get Wise About CBRS
Fast Friday – Networking Field Day 22 Thoughts
Tom Hollinsworth is a traveling man, organizing Networking Field Day and then heading out to RSA Conference in the same month. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t updating his blog. In this post, he shares a few short takes on networking, including how startups have the flexibility to not be tied to technical debt, the difficulties of product integration, why we haven’t solved the Wi-Fi registration problem, and why looking at CLI through the lens of nostalgia covers up the reality of modern network complexity. If you’re not subscribed to Tom’s blog, you’re missing out!
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Fast Friday – Networking Field Day 22 Thoughts
Networking Field Day
It was great to have VMware present at our most recent Networking Field Day. At the event, they provided updates on a number of vital networking solutions within their portfolio. This included updates to NSX to provide improved networking and security for containers, which at scale can be challenging to manage otherwise. Check out their video demo of NSX container networking for Red Hat OpenShift 4.3 for more specifics. They also dived into NSX Advanced Load Balancer which is based on tech acquired with Avi Networks, and did several sessions on NSX analytical and intelligence capabilities. Much like NSX itself, their presentation covered a lot of ground, so be sure to watch the videos to get caught up on their latest.
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Expect Radical Change to Traditionally Conservative Telco Industry Over Next Three Years, Finds Heavy Reading Survey
DriveNets presented for the first time at our recent Networking Field Day event, and was a great additional to the Field Day family of presenters. In this press release, they share the result of a recent survey looking into the future of service provider networking. The survey found that typical vendor lock-in is on the decline, with service providers increasingly pursuing a disaggregated approach to build networks, similar to how hyperscalers operate. Be sure to check out their recent Networking Field Day presentation videos to learn about their offerings in this increasingly important space.
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Veritas Resilency Platform (VRP)
Mariusz Kaczorek used Veritas’ presentation at Cloud Field Day to provide some background for this post, looking into Veritas Resiliency Platform. This solution helps to maintain business uptime across private, public, and hybrid clouds, with support for VMware and Hyper-V and recovery of VMs to Azure, AWS or vCloud Director. In the post, Mariusz provides an architectural overview, reviews the interface for VRB, and looks at who it’s targeted at. Be sure to check out the post then dive into the full presentation video.
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Veritas Resilency Platform (VRP)
097: GreyBeards Talk Open Source S3 Object Store With AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO
Keith Townsend and Ray Lucchesi published an interview with MinIO CEO Anand Babu Periasamy. Ray got to hear from him and the rest of the MinIO team recently at Storage Field Day. MinIO offers a fully open source AWS S3 compatible object store that you can run anywhere, something particularly timely as more organizations turn to them. This allows customers to turn away from costly cloud object stores, and deploy in their own data centers for better economics at scale. They discuss how the company is developing features to match Amazon S3, and dig into the tech in the interview.
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097: GreyBeards talk open source S3 object store with AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO