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.
Meet Field Day Delegate – Faisal Khan
Faisal Khan isn’t a new delegate to the Field Day community, but it’s been a hot minute since he last attended. He’s joining us for his first Networking Field Day since 2016, so we’re excited to hear from him around the table again. Since it’s been a while, Gestalt IT caught up with him for an interview. They dig into his background with tech, where he sees the industry going in the future, what was his first computer, and more. Be sure to check out the full interview!
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Meet Field Day Delegate - Faisal Khan
SFD19: No Komprise on Knowing Thy Data
For Beck Elliott, Komprise stood at as one of her favorite presenters during Storage Field Day. While not her first introduction to the company, she appreciates their storage-agnostic approach and integration into file-based protocols, making it easy to use the solution with your existing storage infrastructure. The architecture for their analytics-driven data management platform is built around three pillars: dynamic data analytics, transparent data movement, and direct data access. There’s a lot to unpack from their presentation, so be sure to check out their full video coverage as well.
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SFD19: No Komprise on Knowing Thy Data
Meet Field Day Delegate – Mary Fasang
Mary Fasang is joining us as a first time delegate at Networking Field Day. We’re always excited to add new voices and perspectives to the delegate community. It keeps the conversations around the table fresh, and allows for the presenting companies to really hear from the wider IT community. In this interview with Gestalt IT, Mary talks about how she got introduced to technology through her father’s semiconductor patent submission process, what she’s looking forward to seeing at the event, where she sees IT going in the near future, and what keeps her inspired. Be sure to check it out before you watch the event!
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Meet Field Day Delegate - Mary Fasang
Komprise Is a Winner
Chin-Fah Heoh was not exactly oozing with excitement for Komprise’s presentation when he saw them on the Storage Field Day schedule. He’s seen and implemented more than his fair share of “file lifecycle and data management” software solutions, and expected to hear a familiar story. But after the presentation, he think it stood out as the best of the event. Their Observer VM grid-like architecture offered scalability often lacking in their competition, thanks to it being both agentless and “database-less”, meaning it can reach petabyte scale and beyond. Chin-Fah also loved their Transparent Move Technology, which creates a dynamic symlink once a file is moved. This symlink is associated with the Komprise Access Address and persists for the life of the file. He thought they offer a solid competitive offering in the market, and is excited how their analytics play could add additional value as well.
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TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Live Barcelona – No Love for Single Panes of Glass
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro were in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. In this video, they dig into why the single pane of glass seems to be the goal of many companies in IT, but why it can actually add to complexity for actual IT operators. They saw some companies presenting multiple panes of glass, each with specific functions, but ultimately adding to sprawl. With organizations that use solutions across a number of vendors, a single pane of glass tied to one company still requires moving to different tools. They discuss how to possibly create an “ideal” single pane of glass that taps into the API driven enterprise, and what they heard from Cisco Workload Optimizer in moving closer to that future.
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TECHunplugged Videocast - Cisco Live Barcelona - No Love for Single Panes of Glass
Is Storage Still Relevant?
Gina Rosenthal asks the question, is storage still relevant? After hearing from Western Digital at Storage Field Day, the answer would seem to be yes. The presentation left Gina with a reminder that software innovation can only occur with hardware innovation. To feed into this positive feedback loop, Western Digital is investing in storage technology for emerging workloads with some exciting results. They spent a portion of their presentation showing how the advent of NVMe over Fabric allows for emerging new technological deployments, like composable infrastructure. By disaggregating the resources in a data center, and allowing them to be assembled on demand, organizations can optimize for demanding new workloads. This only touched on one of the many topics presented by Western Digital at the event, so be sure to check out their full video coverage.
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The Hard Disk Is Dead! (But Only in Your Datacenter)
It’s almost de rigueur these days to declare the spinning disk dead. In an age of plentiful cheap flash, the performance limitations and mechanical complexity of a traditional hard drive can make it seemingly hard to justify. But as Enrico Signoretti points out, it’s not that the disk will die. Rather after seeing Western Digital lay out their roadmap at Storage Field Day, the disk will increasingly not be for small enterprises anymore. Instead, much like what happened with tape, disk will serve a valuable need in storing the ever increasing amounts of data for hyperscalers. As a random access medium, dense disk storage is ideal for cold, but not frozen, data, where things like retrieval time still matter. Because of this, far from the death of the disk ,Enrico sees a long life ahead.
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The Hard Disk is Dead! (But Only in Your Datacenter)
Western Digital Presents at SFD19
Keiran Shelden remembers a time that’s probably familiar to many in IT. When he was building his first computer in the early aughts, 80GB seemed like more capacity than he could ever use. Like the rest of us, Keiran quickly found a use for the space. Analysts now say that by 2023, the world will use 103 Zettabytes of storage. As the creator of a lot of storage used in the world, Western Digital is a key provider of storage, resulting in a lot of interest from Keiran and the other delegates at Storage Field Day. They showed off their roadmap of how they plan to meet the ever increasing density and reliability needs of the enterprise and hyperscalers. Be sure to check out the full post, then dig into our video coverage of the presentation.
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Western Digital Presents at SFD19
Storage Field Day 19–Current State of the Storage Industry
Joey D’Antoni has attended his second Storage Field Day event, and combined with his extensive experience in IT, it gave him a chance to take stock of the current state of the storage industry. He sees the industry separating among those who need or create ultra fast storage like NVMe, and those that cater to higher density storage required by hyperscalers. What he heard from companies like Western Digital at Storage Field Day was that far from being an endangered species, the spinning hard drive is here to stay, with disk manufacturers working to provide ever increasing density and reliability. This is being done with innovative new writing technologies on disk, and by adding multiple actuators on a drive. Doing this provides the advances in density needed to continue to make spinning disks relevant across the industry.
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Storage Field Day 19–Current State of the Storage Industry
Come to MAMR! Western Digital Unfurls HDD Tech Roadmap
Western Digital is an iconic name in the storage industry, having a long history creating the disks behind the arrays that power the enterprise. At Storage Field Day, they went into detail about their hard drive road map for the future. This includes a near term move to energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording, which should allow for increasing density and reliability on drives. The delegates got a look at the 18TB HC550 drive, which will use the new recording tech and arrive on the market later in 2020. Western Digital also laid out their eventual transition plans to MAMR, as well as plans to bring triple stage micro actuators to the market soon. Chris Mellor broke down all the details and implications in this post.
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Come to MAMR! Western Digital unfurls HDD tech roadmap
NetApp NKS and Hybrid Cloud
If you’ve been following IT at all in the past few years, you’ll have seen Kubernetes gaining popularity as a standard for running containerized applications across multiple platforms either in public or private cloud. But Kubernetes is not the easiest solution to deploy and maintain, hence the emergence of different service offerings around it. In this post, Chris Evans digs into NetApp Kubernetes Service, which the company went into detail about at Cloud Field Day last year. This offering came out of NetApp’s acquisition of StackPointCloud in 2018. For Chris, the question of “why NetApp” for a Kubernetes service is answered by the company’s embrace of the public cloud in their strategy, with NKS an enabler of their overall Data Fabric concept.
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Preview Storage Field Day 19 – Day 1
Arjan Timmerman put together a series of videos previewing what he expected to see at Storage Field Day. This video sets out some background on Tiger Technology, NetApp and Western Digital. These represent an interesting selection of experience with the event. Tiger Technology is new to the Field Day family, but has been a force in the media and entertainment space since 2004. NetApp has a long history both in enterprise storage and presenting at Storage Field Day. And Western Digital is an iconic provider of storage who is quickly becoming a familiar sight at the event. Arjan was excited to hear from each company at the event, and we can’t wait to hear more of his thoughts on the presentations going forward.
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Preview Storage Field Day 19 - Day 1
TECHunplugged VideoCast SFD19 Part 1
It’s always great to have TECHunplugged’s Arjan Timmerman as a delegate at an event, and we were thrilled to have him attend Storage Field Day. This was Arjan’s fourteenth time around the table to get caught up on the latest in enterprise storage, and his enthusiasm for the experience is infectious. In this video, he previews what he expected from each of the presenters. The event had a fantastic array of presenting companies, with the latest from Dell EMC, Infrascale, Komprise, MinIO, NetApp, Tiger Technology, WekaIO, and Western Digital. Be sure to check out the preview before diving into our comprehensive video coverage.
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TECHunplugged VideoCast SFD19 Part 1
Tiger Technology Is Bridging the Gap
Even though they’ve been around since 2004, Tiger Technology made their debut presentation at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In this post Dan Frith digs into some of the solutions they presented at the event. This includes their Tiger Bridge, a filter driver that offers capacity management, cloud integration, and hierarchical storage management across storage platforms by a global namespace. From what Dan saw at the event, Tiger Technology did a good job of ensuring that the bridge between on-prem storage and multiple cloud storage options is reliable. This should allow organizations to more easily navigate between optimizing architecture for how their users want to work and storage companies that deliver solutions to those customers.
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Tiger Technology Is Bridging The Gap
Tiers, Tiers, and More Storage Tiers
Enrico Signoretti is no stranger to Storage Field Day events. This gives him some helpful long term context to identify larger industry trends he sees playing out among otherwise unrelated presentations. At the most recent Storage Field Day, the importance of tiering across the storage industry came across loud and clear. From Tiger Technology demoing their simple, seamless and smart filter driver for Windows servers, to Komprise analyzing an organizations entire data domain to optimize data placement, to WekaIO using object storage in the back-end of their file system to store unused blocks, Enrico saw many examples of tiering being used to provide performance, capacity, and scalability at a reasonable price.
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Tiers, Tiers, and More Storage Tiers
Storage Announcements at Western Digital’s Storage Field Day
Western Digital recently shook up a lot of their strategy in the enterprise, so it’s no surprise that a lot of people were eager to hear what they had to say at Storage Field Day. While not a delegate at the event, Tom Coughlin at Forbes watched the presentation to get caught up on all the news. The storage stalwart gave updates on their latest storage technology, like how they are using helium-filed drives utilizing shingled magnetic recording to provide media for companies approaching zettabyte scale. They also presented their Zoned Storage technology, which provides a unified approach to manage naturally serialized data at scale, important when you need predictable performance at cloud-scale. Be sure to read the rest of Tom’s post for his thoughts, then dig into the videos for all the details.
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Storage Announcements At Western Digital’s Storage Field Day
Tiger Bridge Extending NTFS to the Cloud
For Chin-Fah Heoh, just seeing the name of Tiger Technology on the presenter list for Storage Field Day was enough to get him excited. Then he realized that he was familiar with the company in the media and entertainment space. At the event, the showed their Tiger Bridge solution, which effectively lets you extend NTFS into the cloud. While NTFS is a venerable file system, for Chin-Fah, it’s also the most reliable and go-to file system in Windows. They showed how their hierarchical storage management tiering tech is capable of replication and disaster recovery, while at the same time reducing those dreaded cloud egress charges. It was an great debut presentation for the company at Storage Field Day, be sure to check out their full video.
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Tiger Bridge extending NTFS to the cloud
Voices in Data Storage- Episode 32: A Conversation With Veeam
In this episode of Voices in Data Storage, Enrico Signoretti speaks to two Senior Global Technologist from Veeam, Anthony Spiteri and Michael Cade about data protection across physical and virtual data storage in the age of ransomware. They also dig into some of their presentation from Tech Field Day last year, which dealt with data integration APIs. This was designed to be agnostic for their customers, without dictating what particular piece of software or hardware their customers must use. For Veeam, it’s always about flexibility of choice. Be sure to listen to the entire conversation in their podcast feed and check out Veeam’s Tech Field Day presentation video.
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Voices in Data Storage- Episode 32: A Conversation with Veeam
Scale Computing’s Edge-To-Enterprise HCI
The engineers at Scale Computing have been optimizing KVM into smaller and smaller footprints since 2010. Still, their recent presentation at Tech Field Day caused quite a stir, showing off their HC3 hyperconverged solution running on an Intel NUC. Steve McDowell took notice of all the buzz from the storage industry in his Twitter feed. He finds the HC3 fits in well with Scale’s overall focus on HCI. While other competitors in the space have scaled to other use cases, Scale keeps delivering easily managed and deployed solutions whose intrinsic simplicity works to reduce IT OpEx. For Steve, this makes Scale ideally suited to offer compelling edge computing solutions just as the enterprise need is exploding.
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Scale Computing’s Edge-to-Enterprise HCI
Storage Field Day 19 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
We are always supremely grateful to our delegates for carving out some time to attend Field Day events. This is especially true for our international delegates, who often brave double-digit flights across an ocean to attend. Dan Frith made such a trip to attend Storage Field Day. We’re very glad he endured some not inconsiderable jet lag to drink from the storage fire hose at the event. Be sure to check out all of his blog coverage from the event, and dig into the comprehensive video archive of all the presentations on our YouTube channel.
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