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.
TECHunplugged at Cisco Live Barcelona 2020 – Introduction
In this video Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman talk about Cisco Live in Barcelona 2020. They talk about Tech Field Day Extra, Cisco in general, HyperFlex, UCS and IoT. They discuss why the appreciate the unique access events like Tech Field Day Extra provide. During busy industry shows like Cisco Live, it’s one thing to hear all the announcements live. But Tech Field Day Extra provides access to experts on the announcements, and often hosts sessions going into technical deep dives on the latest technology.
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TECHunplugged at Cisco Live Barcelona 2020 - Introduction
Open Source and Open Standards Open the Future
Chin-Fah Heoh has heard from Western Digital at back to back Storage Field Day events, and appreciates that the company dives right into their informative sessions. During their presentation, they shared a few open source initiatives to address present inefficiencies. This included Zoned Storage to increase the efficiencies of shingled magnetic recording. They also reviewed their involvement with the RISC-V organization, the CHIPS Alliance, and Google OpenTitan project. Chin-Fah really appreciated their commitment to open source, and found it vital for the company to meet the ever increasing scaling needs of data storage.
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Open Source and Open Standards open the Future
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco UCS Updates at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in Barcelona
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro of the TECHunplugged crew cover what they saw from Cisco UCS at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. This x86 server infrastructure has been around for a decade, and at the event, Cisco announced updates to the latest Intel processors, as well as adding in support for the AMD Rome platform, providing up to 64 cores on a processor. This processor competition coming to Cisco UCS can only spell good things for customers down the road. UCS Gen 5 also adds new support for NVMe, adds novel blade designs, and still providing GPU dense options. In the words of Arjan, Cisco is “doing something special with UCS.”
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TECHunplugged Videocast - Cisco UCS Updates at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in Barcelona
Meet Field Day Delegate – Tony Efantis
Tony Efantis may be a new face to Networking Field Day, but not to networking. As a CCIE and Cisco Champion, we can’t wait to have his expertise around the delegate table. In this interview with Gestalt IT, he shares his origin story with both technology in general and his IT career specifically. Besides his networking background, he gets into his musical and skateboarding past in the piece, and talks about where he sees IT going in the coming years. We’re thrilled to have Tony join the delegate ranks and can’t wait to hear his thoughts on the experience.
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Meet Field Day Delegate - Tony Efantis
Meet Field Day Delegate – Kim Pedersen
Kim Pedersen is joining us for his first full Networking Field Day experience. He previously got a taste of the experience at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe last year, but this time he’ll be hearing from ten different networking companies over the course of three days. We can’t wait to hear what he thinks of drinking from the networking fire hose. If you haven’t check out the event coverage yet, be sure to check out this interview Kim did with Gestalt IT. They dig into how he got involved with tech, where he sees the industry going in the near future, and what are some of his biggest professional challenges.
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Meet Field Day Delegate - Kim Pedersen
Storage Management and DevOps
At a recent Storage Field Day event, Chris Evans got to hear from Audrius Stripeikis of Dell EMC discussing findings from their latest research on storage management automation. Their findings saw that organizations with ten or more platforms depended upon automation for service delivery. This meant dealing with three challenges, consistency, scale, and automating self-service. Dell EMC showed how their API framework is designed to meet those challenges , giving developers access to APIs to directly provision resources. Resources aren’t infinite, so Dell EMC built in additional systems to keep things manageable, but this approach simplified a lot of traditional bottlenecks in the pipeline.
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Meet Field Day Delegate – Robb Boyd
Robb Boyd recently left the vendor side of IT to start his own media and education company, so Networking Field Day is his first appearance around the delegate table. With decades of experience in IT, Gestalt IT decided to interview Robb. Before you hear him on the event video coverage, be sure to check out the post. He talks about how he got into tech, where he sees the industry going, and how he manages work-life balance. We’re excited to have Robb at the event and can’t wait to hear his thoughts on the presentations!
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Meet Field Day Delegate - Robb Boyd
Tiger Technology Brings the Cloud to You
Gina Rosenthal got to hear from Tiger Technology at Storage Field Day, a company that while new to the event, has been a force in the media and entertainment data management space since 2004. During the event, the company went into detail about the development of Tiger Bridge, their cloud tiering solution for Windows. This hierarchical storage management was designed to meet the video needs of airport surveillance, which needed to handle data from thousands of 4K cameras and retain it for six months. Tiger Bridge allows customers with similar needs to keep data on-site, while seamlessly taking advantage of the scale and economics of cloud object storage. Gina was definitely impressed with the solution, be sure to read her post for more details.
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Tiger Technology Brings the Cloud to You
Infrascale Protects Your Infrastructure at Scale
Dan Frith frequently crosses an ocean to join us for Field Day events, including the most recent Storage Field Day. As someone particularly interested in data protection overall, he was really interested to hear from Infrascale. The company was new to Dan prior to the presentation, but judging from this post, Dan is very glad to have seen their in-depth technical presentation. He found the company distinguished themselves by offering hardware as a core part of the offering, rather than building a solution based on one of the major data protection vendors. Be sure to watch their presentation and let us know what you think!
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Infrascale Protects Your Infrastructure At Scale
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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