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 on AWS VPC Route Table Example
At Cloud Field Day this month, Alex Neihaus got a deep dive into VMware’s AWS integration. When this was first announced in 2016, he saw it as two walled gardens put next to each other. After the event, he’s beginning to see some portholes getting put in to see to the other side. Alex saw the presentation as confirming that VMware fundamentally perceives AWS as a hardware platform for its hypervisor, rather than a virtualization platform. He has a lot of interesting takeaways, so be sure to read the whole piece.
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VMware on AWS VPC route table example
NGINX Post F5 Acquisition
Nathaniel Avery got to hear from NGINX at Cloud Field Day earlier this month. This was made an even more interesting presentation in light of the company’s recent acquisition by F5 Networks. For now, it appears that NGINX is operating business as usual, and isn’t changing the company’s model of building a commercial product on top of their open source web server. Nathaniel was pleased to see that the acquisition has not made the NGINX GitHub page any less lively.
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What Are Your IoT Devices Up To? Nyansa’s Voyance IoT Has Answers
Nyansa has offered a pure play high velocity streaming analytics platform with impressive comparative capabilities for a while. At Networking Field Day, the company showed a new solution, Voyance IoT, which brings that analytic capability to fingerprint these connected devices, monitor performance, and alert admins of anomalous behavior. In this piece, Drew Conry-Murray gives the platform a complete overview.
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What Are Your IoT Devices Up To? Nyansa’s Voyance IoT Has Answers
Vast Data at Storage Field Day 18
In this post, Erik Ableson looks at what VAST Data presented at Storage Field Day earlier this year. The company came fully out of stealth at the event, and showed off their approach to Disaggregated Shared Everything storage. Built on a foundation of persistent high speed memory and modern networking, Erik looks at whether VAST can fulfill their goal of eliminating spinning disks entirely.
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Vast Data at Storage Field Day 18
Keeping the Network OS Contained With SnapRoute
The monolithic network operating system isn’t the most exciting. For Tom Hollingsworth, the category had a “been there, done that” feel to it. That’s why what SnapRoute presented at Networking Field Day was so exciting. They showed a rethought approach to the NOS. Instead of making everything a process running on the kernel, they break things up into a Kubernetes container. Tom reviews the performance and monitoring implication in this piece.
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Keeping the Network OS Contained with SnapRoute
Cloud Field Day 5 – Recap and Videos
Veeam is no stranger to presenting at Field Day, and did an excellent job earlier this month at Cloud Field Day. Anthony Spiteri was one of the presenters, giving the delegates an overview of Veeam’s Cloud Tier including an excellent DR and resiliency demo. In this post he shares some of his impressions from the event, and shares the full video coverage.
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Cloud Field Day 5 - Recap and Videos
Servers Running Too Slow, Just Add All the Cores!
Denny Cherry was a delegate at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day, where he got to see a lot of major announcements from the company. One that stood out was the updates to the Scalable Xeon line, which now offer up to 56 cores. Throw in support for hyperthreading and up to 8 CPUs on a single motherboard, and you can throw around some serious core counts. Denny sees these as new CPUs as excellent solutions for public cloud providers, who can now easily add compute density in a manageable power envelope.
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Servers running too slow, just add all the cores!
The Fast WekaIO File System Saves You Money!
Jon Klaus takes a look at what he saw from WekaIO at Storage Field Day. They claim to offer “the fastest and most scalable parallel file system for AI and technical compute workloads.” That’s an impressive claim, but at the event, Jon got to see an equally impressive demo, showing stunning performance for single client random read and random writes, which wasn’t disrupted by failing nodes. Overall Jon found WekaIO’s file system to be a solid offering with excellent performance, wrapped in a modern and intuitive GUI.
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The fast WekaIO file system saves you money!
Intel’s New DL Boost for DL AI Inferencing
As a delegate attending the Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day, Ray Lucchesi heard a lot of major announcements from Intel. In this post, he’s focusing on one announcement that didn’t get the most press after the event: DL Boost. This provides a new 8-bit integer instruction that accelerate DL inferencing. This is a major step to stay relevant in the data center, because Intel estimates that more than 50% of AI workloads will involve inferencing before too long. Ray breaks down the technical implementation and where it may run into some potential issues. It’s a great overview.
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Intel's new DL Boost for DL AI inferencing
NSX-T Is Transformative for the Future of VMware
At their recent Networking Field Day presentation, VMware went into detail about their recent NSX 2.4 release. For Tom Hollingsworth, the release adds a lot of notable features and signals where the company is going in the future. Going forward, all NSX development will be on NSX-T for modern infrastructure, rather than the traditional NSX-V. Tom notes this effectively marks the end of the vSphere-centric data center. Don’t let the version number fool you, this is VMware being aggressive to remain vital to modern IT.
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NSX-T Is Transformative For The Future of VMware
Western Digital : Innovation in 3D NAND and Low Latency Flash NAND
Western Digital has been a long time mainstay of the storage industry. Max Mortillaro heard from them at Storage Field Day earlier this year, and it fit into his larger considerations of the state of the solid state memory industry. In this post, he looks at how Western Digital has remained relevant as the industry transition from disk to flash. The company faces a similar transition as storage is starting to close the gap between DRAM and flash. Max looks at Western Digitals announcements around Low Latency Flash NAND and Storage Class Memory.
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Western Digital : Innovation in 3D NAND and Low Latency Flash NAND
How Intel’s Newest Product Enhancements Could Redefine the Future of Infrastructure Design
Enrico Signoretti takes a look at the announcements from Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day, which he attended as part of the Tech Field Day Exclusive happening at the event. The debut of Intel’s Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMM has major implications many workloads in IT. Enrico gives some background how exactly Intel is implementing this and how he sees it shaping the industry going forward.
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How Intel’s Newest Product Enhancements Could Redefine the Future of Infrastructure Design
Veeam @ Cloud Field Day – April 2019
Michael Cade attended his first Cloud Field Day last week. Most of the time when we share posts about that, it comes from a delegate. But Michael shares his experience on the presenting company side. He presented with Veeam, showing how they offer simplicity, reliability, and flexibility to workload protection. Be sure to check out their full presentation for a lot of great content.
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Veeam @ Cloud Field Day – April 2019
Sysdig for Cloud-Native Monitoring
At Cloud Field Day, Alex Neihaus saw Sysdig present on a fascinating system for monitoring and trouble-shooting cloud-native applications and the containers running them. They did this using their network-style approach to monitoring in the cloud, enabling them to get almost the same level of capture data a network capture would. Since capturing the packets lets you know everything about the applications, Alex found it an older approach but applied to the cutting edge of applications.
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Sysdig for cloud-native monitoring
Optane – the Coolest Thing Since Sliced Bread
Intel Optane finally came into its own when Intel introduced it in a memory DIMM format at their Data-Centric Innovation Day. Matt Leib was there as a delegate for Tech Field Day Exclusive at the event. The idea of putting 4.5Tb of NVRam per memory socket into a server opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the industry. Matt is really excited for the implications as this tech makes its way into the data center.
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Optane – The coolest thing since sliced bread
Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day 2019
Brian Gleason joined us for the Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel’s Data Centric Innovation Day. It was a packed day of announcements for the company. Brian highlights Optane DC Persistent Memory and the new 800-series 100GbE cards as standouts. For him, IT that goes unnoticed is generally the one that works best. Intel’s announcements shows a lot of things that will let him stay in the shadows.
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Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day 2019
Datrium to Present at Gestalt IT’s Cloud Field Day 5 on How to Build Consistent Data Services Across Hybrid Clouds
Datrium’s presentation at Cloud Field Day focused on the challenges and importance of providing a uniform experience across clouds and how Datrium’s solution enables consistent data services across private and public clouds. It also featured a deep dive into their software-defined converged infrastructure approach, which simplifies primary and backup storage, data security and DR orchestration. Be sure to check out the full video of their presentation to see if for yourself.
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Fortinet Launches New SD-WAN and Firewall Appliance, Rebrands an ASIC
Drew Conry-Murray recently got a deep dive into Fortinet’s SD-WAN technology at Networking Field Day. One aspect that fascinated Drew in that presentation was how the company combined security and SD-WAN capabilities into a single device. The company recently debutted a Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), the FortiGate 100F, which provides the hardware foundation for that technology.
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Fortinet Launches New SD-WAN And Firewall Appliance, Rebrands An ASIC
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 12: A Conversation With Bill Borsari
Enrico Signoretty recently published a new episode of the Voices in Data Storage podcast, talking to Datera’s Bill Borsari. They dig into a little background on the company, and how they bridge a gap between the traditional infrastructure requirements and the modern infrastructure requirements. It’s a great conversation with a fascinating approach to storage technology.
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Voices in Data Storage – Episode 12: A Conversation with Bill Borsari
Netrounds Brings Testing to Network Infrastucture
Ken Nalbone give Netrounds’ presentation from Networking Field Day a closer look in this piece. They showed off their testing solutions that make it easier for IT to get visibility into application and network performance, and ultimately enable organizations to meet their SLAs. While the goal in the software-defined data center is to abstract infrastructure, that doesn’t eliminate it as a potential source of issues. That’s why for Ken, testing like Netrounds provides is essential
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