96-Layer NAND in Perspective: WDC Video

After a briefing with Western Digital, Jim Handy gives some perspective on the significance of 96-layer NAND flash. By providing a scale model of the new NAND, it showed the terrific complexity and precision needed to operate at this level of density. For more of a technical deep dive into Western Digital’s 3D NAND, be sure to check out their recent presentation from Storage Field Day.

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96-Layer NAND in Perspective: WDC Video

How Cohesity Expands Data Protection Capabilities in the Cloud

Cohesity returned to Cloud Field Day earlier this year with an excellent presentation, and on the company blog, Jon Hildebrand wrote about what the company presented in this post. They reviewed their approach to offering a single cloud-native solution for backup and recovery workloads to span the public cloud and the data center. Be sure to check out the full edited video of their presentation.

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How Cohesity Expands Data Protection Capabilities in the Cloud

Voices in Data Storage – Episode 13: A Conversation With Liran Zvibel

In this episode of Voice in Data Storage, host Enrico Signoretti spoke with WekaIO CEO Liran Zvibel. They discussed the company’s high performance parallel file system as demoed at Storage Field Day this year, as well as Liran’s background working on IBM’s XIV Storage System.

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Voices in Data Storage – Episode 13: A Conversation with Liran Zvibel

All of the Data, All of the Clouds

Paul Stringfellow really liked what he saw from Veeam during their Cloud Field Day presentation earlier this year. They showed off their cloud strategy, which Paul found still kept Veeam’s signature focus on simplicity and flexibility. This focused on not just backup and recovery, but cloud mobility, which Paul thinks is the key to any enterprise’s data strategy. Be sure to check out all of Paul’s thoughts in this piece.

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All of the data, all of the clouds

Dell Technologies World 2019

Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World should be a packed event this week. We’re really glad to have Andrea Mauro along as one of the delegates. There will be presentations from Big Switch, Kemp, and Liqid, so be sure to tune into the live stream or check out the full video coverage after the event.

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Dell Technologies World 2019

I’ll Be Attending Dell Technologies World 2019

Enrico Signoretti is heading out to the desert to join us as a delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World. While Enrico will be keeping a close eye on any storage announcements, he’s also looking forward to some deep dives on cloud, infrastructure composability, and data management. Plus he’ll be seeing presentation from Big Switch, Kemp, and Liqid. As always, it’ll be a packed event, we can’t wait to see what Enrico’s takeaways are from it.

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I'll be attending Dell Technologies World 2019

EP21 – Discovering Weka.io, the World’s Fastest Filesystem With Barbara Murphy

On this latest episode of the Tech Unplugged Podcast, Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman spoke with Barbara Murphy, VP of Marketing at Weka.io. Max saw the company present at Storage Field Day earlier this year. The two host have a conversation digging into the company’s claim of having the fastest, most scalable parallel file system.

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EP21 – Discovering Weka.io, the world’s fastest filesystem with Barbara Murphy

California’s Latest Gold Rush – Google and Intel Dig in to Tap the AI Business Market Seam

Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day had no dearth of prominent announcements. So much so that some with the biggest impact might have gotten lost in the media narrative. Kurt Marko thinks one of the major announcements was Intel integrating AI-optimizations into their new Scalable Xeons with DL Boost. This allows Intel to use their x86 data center dominance into AI inferencing engines. For a deeper dive into this, be sure to check out the full video from our Tech Field Day Exclusive at the event.

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California's latest gold rush - Google and Intel dig in to tap the AI business market seam

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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NGINX Post F5 Acquisition

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