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.
VMware to Acquire Nyansa for WAN Network Analytics
VMware recently announced it intends to buy Nyansa for an undisclosed sum. We’ve had both companies present at Field Day events, and we can’t wait to see what they can create together post-acquisition. In this post, Seeking Alpha’s Donovan Jones looks at the financial impact of the deal, and how the move is part of VMware’s strategy to provide enterprises with an end-to-end solution as they demand integrated and simplified capabilities in an increasingly complex environment. Be sure to check out our video coverage of both companies to get up to speed on the tech so you can judge for yourself.
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VMware To Acquire Nyansa For WAN Network Analytics
Western Digital, Composable Infrastructure, Hyperscalers, and You
Western Digital had an impressive presentation at Storage Field Day, showing the breadth of offerings from the iconic storage media company. At the event, their Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing Scott Hamilton dived into how NVMe over Fabrics solves a lot of the storage problems required to operate at the very largest scale, and enables interesting new models like composable infrastructure. For Dan Frith, composable infrastructure right now seems eager to cater to the needs of hyperscalers. But far from making Western Digital’s presentation uninteresting, their continued investment and refinement of the approach means that when enterprises want to move to that approach, the storage ecosystem will be ready for them.
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Western Digital, Composable Infrastructure, Hyperscalers, And You
Why a Change of Mindset in the IoT Space Is Needed
Dominik Pickhardt thinks that the mentality around IoT security needs to change. He’s seen conversations more concerned about the concept of safety, rather than security conversations, with an all too common site of all IoT devices on one flat L2 networking. At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020, Dominik and the other delegates got to hear from the Cisco IoT Group and what they are doing to address the challenges. They showed how their new Cyber Vision solution is adding critical visibility to the IoT security picture. Cyber Vision understands protocols used in industrial settings and automatically builds an inventory of devices that includes running software versions. This creates a topography of what devices are talking to each other in an easy to understand interface.
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Why a change of mindset in the IoT space is needed
Does SPB Mean “Secure Path Bridging”?
The spanning tree protocol, or SPB, never really went away. But the landscape it was built to work in changed radically. Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at where SPB is now and discusses how the new steward, Extreme Networks, is positioning SPB to secure IoT and more in the data center and campus. He got to hear a deep dive on this during Networking Field Day. Get the background from Tom’s post, then be sure to dig into all of their video coverage from the event.
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Does SPB Mean "Secure Path Bridging"?
CloudGenix to Share Best Practices for Creating Modern, Cloud-Delivered Branch Office Infrastructure at Networking Field Day 22 on Feb. 12
We really enjoyed having CloudGenix present at Networking Field Day at our most recent event. They discussed their approach to deploying SD-WAN with the delegates. Their customers have often tried SD-WAN deployments in the past, but CloudGenix discussed how they are able to offer true cloud-scale without being encumbered by legacy networking approaches. If you missed the live stream of their presentation, you can always catch it later on our YouTube channel. We keep a full catalog of all our presenters available to watch on-demand.
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Storage Field Day 19–Western Digital
At their recent Storage Field Day presentation, Western Digital led with a startling estimate. They project that by 2023, 103 zetabytes worth of IoT data will be produced. This is to say nothing of the ever increasing video and other data constantly being generated. Much of their presentation was how Western Digital was working to provide ever increasing storage densities across all mediums. It was not lost on Joey D’Antoni during the event that a lot of this work seemed to be driven by demand from hyperscalers, who will increasingly carry the growth of stored data. Developments with multi-actuator drives and zoned storage were shown to be key in how Western Digital will provide for the industries storage needs in the future.
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Storage Field Day 19–Western Digital
Stellus Is Doing Something With All That Machine Data
It’s always great when events like Storage Field Day can help bring new companies to light and assist with their launch. Stellus Technologies recently came out of stealth at Storage Field Day, and definitely made an impression on our delegates. They built a solution to answer what they saw as the problem of exponential growth of unstructured data, combined with the massively increased size of data sources themselves. Quite simply, file systems developed for the age of spinning disk weren’t meeting current needs. Their Stellus Data Platform was designed to provide native parallelism, scale, and consistency, while letting organizations scale performance and capacity independently. They do this with a Key-Value-over-NVMe Fabrics architecture, that Dan thinks has major implications as organization adopt ever increasing drive capacities. We can’t wait to hear more from this exciting startup!
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Stellus Is Doing Something With All That Machine Data
Answers at Your Fingertips With Forward Networks
After hearing again from Forward Networks at Networking Field Day, Tom Hollingsworth considers the implications of their Network Query Engine in this post. This effectively provides a way to ask the network for the answers by looking into the database of network configuration. This is vitally needed to provide reliability for critical cloud services, rather they relying on the old model of each networking standing as an island of configuration settings just waiting to cause unforeseen interactions. As network’s grow more complex at ever increasing rates, Forward Network approach lets admins find meaningful answers and solve this configuration conundrum.
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Answers at Your Fingertips with Forward Networks
Stellus Delivers Scale-Out Storage With NVMe & KV Tech
Chris Evans got to hear from Stellus Technologies at Storage Field Day. It’s always great to hear from new and exciting companies at Field Day events, and Stellus was no exception. They showed off their Stellus Data Platform, which offers a scale-out architecture of multiple Data Manager nodes and Key-value Store nodes, connected through a shared network fabric. Chris sees value in their approach as the key-value nodes take care of any specific tasks that need to be performed in managing physical media, meaning that in the future new media can be dropped in without further consideration from IT, as long as Stellus knows how to use it efficiently.
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Stellus delivers scale-out storage with NVMe & KV tech
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro are covering a lot of the announcements and presentations from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in their video series with TECHunplugged. In this video, they dig into Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. This is an impressive new addition to the management interface used for HyperFlex and UCS. Both of them thought it was a really interesting announcement. This lets an admin hook almost everything in a data center into Intersight, that can be used for monitoring and capacity tool for the entire environment.
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TECHunplugged Videocast - Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With a Chance of Scale Out
Dell EMC’s Isilon storage solution has been in the industry for a while, providing capacity and performance scaling to meet the needs of petabyte scale organizations. In this piece, Dan Frith digs into the platforms latest updates, which he heard at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In the post, he looks at how Isilon’s OneFS file system is designed to provide non-disruptive scaling for organizations, and can run either in your data center or directly on a public cloud. The latter is a key new addition for Dan, who sees this having major implications for organizations looking to shift workloads to the cloud, providing features those customers depend on that aren’t available natively on public cloud platforms. Isilon is particularly popular for media and entertainment workloads, which often aren’t optimized for the cloud. This capability opens up whole new possibilities without having to abandon existing workflows and tools.
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Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With A Chance Of Scale Out
TechUnplugged VideoCast: CiscoLive Barcelona HyperFlex Application Platform
The TECHunplugged crew was about in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 and got to hear about HyperFlex Application Platform. In this video, Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro discuss the evolution of HyperFlex as Cisco’s HCI solution, something Max has been following for a number of years. HXAP is a standalone add-on running on top of HyperFlex which gives the ability to run containers. This complete new cluster builds on top of a Linux KVM environment with a Kubernetes environment. They dig into how this fits into the overall container landscape and the implications for organizations in the video.
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TechUnplugged VideoCast: CiscoLive Barcelona HyperFlex Application Platform
Meraki Is Almost an Enterprise Solution
In the past, Tom Hollingsworth has not thought that Meraki was an appropriate wireless solution for the enterprise. But that perception seems to be shifting after hearing an update from them at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. They showed off how they are now adding in easier scaling with things like integrating rule groups into their firewall platform, something that’s critical for enterprise scale deployments. They are also testing native IPv6 support, which is a key signal to Tom they are serious about the enterprise. It’s a feature SMB’s generally don’t generally care about, but has been supported on Cisco’s IOS for years. Tom has been following the company for years, and thinks this signals they are almost ready to be a true enterprise-class solution.
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Meraki Is Almost An Enterprise Solution
Cisco Live Europe 2020 – Introduction and Expectations
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro from the TECHunplugged crew were delegates at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. They recorded a slate of videos breaking down their favorite announcements and most important parts of the event. They break down Cisco UCS and HyperFlex updates, innovation around Industrial IoT, as well as overall Data Center and Security announcements. Be sure to watch them all, then dive into the full video coverage we have on our YouTube page.
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Cisco Live Europe 2020 – Introduction and Expectations
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Threat Response
At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020, Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro got to hear from the Cisco Threat Response team. They enjoyed seeing Cisco ability to dive into threats to your networking environment as they are being monitored, and how this is integrated into a further online knowledge base to better educate about emerging threats. With security teams traditionally understaffed, Cisco Threat Response is vital to gather together all the threats facing your organization in a manageable interface and provide further context for how this will continue to impact your organization. It’s not a traditional metrics-based dashboard, but an excellent way to get a security overview.
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TECHunplugged Videocast - Cisco Threat Response
Dell Technologies PowerOne – Dell’s Private Cloud?
In this sponsored episode of the CTO Advisor podcast, host Keith Townsend talks with Dell EMC’s Conor Duffy, David Iovino, and Justin Jones. In the episode, they discuss the company’s PowerOne converged infrastructure, which was announced late last year. The company recently went into detail on this at Storage Field Day. They discuss where CI approaches fit in an IT landscape dominated by cloud and HCI, and Dell lays out how their investments in automation make PowerOne stand out. Keith wasn’t at the event, but got caught up on it with our comprehensive video coverage. After you listen to the episode, be sure to check out the video for yourself.
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Dell Technologies PowerOne - Dell's Private Cloud?
MinIO – Not Your Father’s Object Storage Platform
Dan Frith definitely was intrigued by what he heard from MinIO at Storage Field Day. They showed off their private cloud focused high performance, software-defined, distributed object storage server infrastructure. They made the distinction the private and public cloud have very different needs, and designed their solution with peta-scale. The solution is entirely written in Go and open-sourced, allowing organizations to avoid having a license key as the ultimate vendor leverage. Storage folks may have a set of expectations when it comes to object storage, but Dan makes the case that this is very different from the typical object storage stack. Dan does have some questions about how they will monetize the approach, but allowing storage admins to dig into the code and selling support subscriptions has worked well for some open source companies.
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MinIO – Not Your Father’s Object Storage Platform
Gaming Is Driving Storage Innovation at WDC
Western Digital has long been a stalwart in the storage industry, designing storage media and innovating in that space for decades. At Storage Field Day, the provided updates on how a lot of their designs are catering toward hyperscale companies, or how the emergence of 5G will ramp up the need for faster performance with streaming video. But for Ray Lucchesi, what stood out in the session was how gaming was increasingly driving innovation with Western Digital. As a result of high performance needs, both of gamers to play games and for services that host them, WD detailed innovations with their WD Black line, which includes HDD, but is increasingly featuring SSDs. The showed how they are catering these drives to the unique requirements and environment found in gaming PCs.
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Gaming is driving storage innovation at WDC
Rebooting Infrascale
While Infrascale might have been a newer face to some of the Storage Field Day delegates, for Dan Frith, he was familiar with them since 2016 after researching the BC and DR landscape. For Dan, the company represents a welcome option in the DR-as-a-Service market, something he’s found underserved, especially in Asia. The company approached their Storage Field Day presentation as a way to reboot both their offerings and perception within the market. He’s excited to see the company taking this approach and can’t wait to hear more from them in the future as the continue to build off this rebooted image.
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Dell EMC PowerOne Is Next-Gen Converged Infrastructure
Enrico Signoretti saw two sessions from Dell EMC at Storage Field Day that really piqued his interest, touching on DevOps and infrastructure automation. Enrico was really surprised by their presentation on PowerOne, a next-generation converged infrastructure. He’s admittedly not a fan on converged infrastructure in general, but in Dell EMC’s PowerOne Controller, Enrico sees something that could be an automation hub for automating all the storage infrastructure, simplifying the configuration management of large scale infrastructures. This kind of potential really stood out during the presentation.
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