California, Rescue Me… Storage Field Day 19

In this post, Keiran Shelden looks forward to heading out to Storage Field Day. It’s our first event of 2020 and Keiran’s third, it’s always good to have a seasoned veteran delegate returning. The event promises to be packed with quality content. Even with experience under his belt, drinking from the storage fire hose can be an intense experience. Luckily, we provide full videos that you can watch at your leisure soon after the event. We can’t wait to hear what Keiran thinks of the event and to see his breakdowns of the presenters!

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California, Rescue me… Storage Field Day 19

Pure Storage Announces New DirectMemory (SCM), FlashArray//C, & Other Enhancements at //Accelerate

At Pure Accelerate, Pure Storage announced the DirectMemory was coming to FlashArray//X, as well as the general availability of Cloud Block Store. In this post, Ray Lucchesi breaks down the details and the importance of these two announcements.

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Pure Storage announces new DirectMemory (SCM), FlashArray//C, & other enhancements at //Accelerate

Are ARM Processors Ready for Data Centre Primetime?

ARM processors have been around for over three decades, in the last decade seeing massive popularity thanks to the ubiquity of modern smartphones. From their resource efficient roots, the processor designs have grown increasingly capable of a wide range of use cases. In this piece, Chris Evans looks at some of the companies trying to bring ARM into the datacenter. He saw Liqid demo their composable infrastructure tech at Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World, and thinks that kind of deployment could make ARM in the enterprise an intriguing proposition.

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Are ARM Processors Ready for Data Centre Primetime?

Assuring Your Service Level With Ixia IxProbe

Are you getting what you’re paying for? If it’s a car wash or a movie it’s easy to figure out. But what if it’s your ISP connection? Do you even know where to find that answer? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at the new IxProbe from Ixia that they showed off at Networking Field Day. This post examines how it can help you figure out if you’re getting your money’s worth out of your SLA.

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Assuring Your Service Level with Ixia IxProbe

Kubernetes and Traffic Lights

It’s no secret that Keith Townsend is skeptical of the IT hype machine that is Kubernetes. In this post, he compares it to upgrading traffic light orchestration systems to help ease congestion. The drivers only care that it helps congestion, not what system is running. That’s why he’s impressed with what he saw from Solo IO at Cloud Field Day. They embrace namespaces in their solution, allowing you to consume infrastructure without worrying about the orchestrator. Read the full piece for all the details.

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Kubernetes and Traffic Lights

Journey to Fully Cloud Based Data Protection With Druva

Yusuf Emre Ozensoy got to hear from Druva at Tech Field Day in 2019, and was excited to learn more after initially hearing from the company at VMworld. He was impressed by their cloud-native approach to data protection, that simplifies management and eliminates traditional hardware silos.

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Journey to Fully Cloud Based Data Protection with Druva

Container-Based WAN Monitoring

Container-based WAN monitoring might just sounds like some IT marketing buzzword BINGO, but Pete Welcher makes the argument that it’s a vital part of a networking toolkit. Rather than traditional monitoring tools that look at metrics that indicate what a user actually excperiences on the network, companies like ThousandEyes and Netbeez user container-based monitoring to actually probe the network from the client side without needing additional hardware, able to run in contianers on a Catalyst 9000 switch, for example.

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Container-Based WAN Monitoring

Worth Reading: Understanding Scale Computing HC3 Edge Fabric

Ivan Pepelnjak shares a great piece looking at Scale Computing HC3 Edge Fabric, something the company talked about during their recent Tech Field Day presentation. While Ivan doesn’t think its a once size fits all solution, he thinks it makes perfect sense in small environments.

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Worth Reading: Understanding Scale Computing HC3 Edge Fabric

2019 Year in Review – Al Rasheed

Al Rasheed takes a look back at a busy 2019 in this post. It was truly a year of accomplishments, with new certifications and getting involved with more tech community groups. We were lucky enough to have Al as a delegate at several Field Day events throughout the year. We can’t wait to see him at more in 2020.

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2019 Year in Review – Al Rasheed

Cohesity at Tech Field Day in 2019

Alastair Cooke is getting ready for Storage Field Day, and is particularly excited to hear from Cohesity. He’s familiar with the company, but has never seen them live at a Field Day event yet. If you need to do your homework to get up to speed on their solutions, be sure to check out this post from Alastair, which organizes all of our video coverage of their past presentations.

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Cohesity at Tech Field Day in 2019

Is General Purpose Object Storage Disenfranchised?

It’s hard to image a Storage Field Day without the sharp insight and experience of Chin-Fah Heoh around the delegate table. In this post, he writes how general purpose object storage experienced a unique race to the bottom in Malaysia, with hosting companies chasing the lowest price per TB. This created a set of assumptions about object storage that aren’t strickly true. That’s why he’s excited to hear from MinIO at Storage Field Day, who break free from the classic cheap, slow, and cloud-locked assumptions.

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Is General Purpose Object Storage disenfranchised?

Heavy Networking 491: Real-Life Segment Routing & PCE

Back in 2016, Nick Buraglio participated in our Segment Routing Field Day Roundtable, discussing the impact the tech would have on carrier networks. On this episode of Packet Pusher’s Heavy Networking, Nick and Ethan Banks go deep into similar topics like SR-MPLS, SRv6, and PCE, as well as traffic engineering.

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Heavy Networking 491: Real-Life Segment Routing & PCE

Vendor Briefing: Scale Computing Edge Solution

Alastair Cooke has been watching Scale Computing in the industry for a number of years now, and has seen an impressive evolution in the company. They have been gradually moving from solutions aimed at budget-conscious small businesses to a scalable solution for distributed enterprises. This change has been built on innovative multi-cluster management and scaling down the required minimums for deploying at a site. Their most recent announced was the HC150,, a HCI appliance built on an Intel NUC. Be sure to check out all their Tech Field Day presentation videos for a technical deep dive on all their innovations.

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Vendor Briefing: Scale Computing Edge Solution

Storage Field Day – I’ll Be at Storage Field Day 19

Dan Frith is no stranger to Storage Field Day, so we’re thrilled to have his familiar face returning to the event. It’ll be the first Field Day event of 2020, so be sure to mark your calendar. The event is packed with a lot of the storage industry giants, emerging companies, and intriguing startups, so be sure to watch the live stream to stay up to date.

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Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 19

Over the Ramparts, Metageek Watched

Your snapshots are just points in time. They need to tell a story to make sure you’re using them effectively. Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at Metageek’s new Rampart cloud service and how it can help those pictures of your wireless network proudly gleam as you work with your team to troubleshoot issues. Check out their recent presentation videos from Mobility Field Day for more!

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Over the Ramparts, Metageek Watched

Liqid’s PCIe Fabric Is the Key to Composable Infrastructure

Liqid showed off their novel approach to Composable Infrastructure at Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World 2019. In this post, Chris Evans looks at how they use a PCIe Fabric to enable their disaggregated approach to pooling resources across a variety of servers.

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Liqid's PCIe Fabric is the Key to Composable Infrastructure

Scale Computing Makes Big Announcement About Small HE150

Scale Computing recently made some big news with some very small edge services. Their HE150 offers a full hyper-converged infrastructure appliance in an Intel NUC package. Dan Frith digs into how they are able to fit so much into a small package in this post. Be sure to check out their full archive of Field Day presentation videos for even more deep dives.

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Scale Computing Makes Big Announcement About Small HE150

NetApp Goes to the Cloud

NetApp highlighted many of their cloud offerings at Tech Field Day late last year. Gina Rosenthal was a delegate at the event, and thinks that they have the right team and attitude to make multi-cloud a reality for their customers. The key focus for NetApp was making it easy to get customers to the cloud, which fits with their approach of shepherding traditional operations teams into the new cloud native era.

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NetApp Goes to the Cloud

Tech Field Day From the Other Side

Gina Rosenthal has long enjoyed Tech Field Day events, but previously only from the vendor perspective. This past Tech Field Day event saw Gina join us as an independent delegate for the first time, something she found much more challenging! Read all about her experience in this post.

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Tech Field Day from the Other Side

Stopping vMotion Roulette With Virtana

Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at what Virtana presented at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2019 and how they stop the roulette wheel of vMotion movement. He found they offered a solution to be smarter about making decisions to move your VMs.

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Stopping vMotion Roulette with Virtana