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.
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus – More Than Meets the Eye
Dan Frith attended Storage Field Day in February and got an update on IBM’s Spectrum Protect Plus software. After learning about it at Storage Field Day 15, Dan recognized the importance of their approach to data protection. With this update, he sees that the company is working to enable their customers to modernize data protection with new use cases and analytics.
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IBM Spectrum Protect Plus – More Than Meets The Eye
Western Digital Are Keeping Composed
Although they presented a broad set of technology and products at Storage Field Day in February, Dan Frith focused on Western Digital’s composable infrastructure offerings. He likes their story and sees composability as a technology to “free the average enterprise IT shop from the shackles of resource management ineptitude”. It’s not magic, but it’s certainly cool!
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Western Digital Are Keeping Composed
NetApp, Cloudier Than Ever
While attending Storage Field Day in February, Enrico Signoretti learned more about NetApp’s NDAS data protection software. It takes advantage of NetApp’s snapshot and mirroring technology to convert file data to objects stored in the cloud. He sees great potential for this approach, disrupting their own status quo.
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Weka.IO and My First Official Briefing
Before hearing WekaIO’s presentation at Storage Field Day last month, Matt Leib was well aware of the company. After hearing them on numerous podcasts and researching them independently, he’d been impressed. Parallel file systems can be perilous, but Matt found that WekaIO offers the resiliency, scalability, and ease of deployment that so many ersatz competitors lack. After seeing an architectural deep dive and demo at the event, Matt is now even more convinced about their solution.
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Weka.IO and my first official briefing
Making Way for the New With Cisco
Planning to maintain code can be tricky. Tom Hollingsworth points out in this piece, sometimes code is quickly made irrelevant with bygone platforms while others, like COBOL, seemingly stick around forever. Maintaining your own code is challenging enough, but companies like Cisco have to deal with code from numerous acquisitions over time. After maintaining AireOS code for some time, Cisco is now finding ways to migrate to a more modern approach with modular IOS WLC code. Tom is impressed with this approach and think its a model of dealing with similar issues in the future.
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Making Way For The New With Cisco
Cisco HyperFlex: Designing an NVMe-based HCI Architecture With Reliability, Availability and Serviceability in Mind
Max Mortillaro attended Cisco Live Europe this year, and attended Tech Field Day Extra presentations at the event. There Cisco presented on their HyperFlex HCI solution, something that Max has written about already. After talking to the Cisco product team, Max digs into more architectural detail about the technology here.
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NetApp Active IQ Adds Machine Learning to Autosupport
Talking about Machine Learning at a Field Day event and there probably will be some calls of buzzword BINGO. But when a use of the technology actually stands out and impresses the delegates, it’s worth paying attention. That’s what Justin Warren is talking about in this piece about NetApp’s presentation. He breaks down what NetApp is doing with Active IQ. This essentially takes the 400 terabytes of telemetry data collected by the company, and applies sophisticated analysis to better help storage administrators. It might not offer the grandiose claims of other ML and AI technology, but for Justin, being a little humble means NetApp’s approach probably works a lot better.
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NetApp Active IQ Adds Machine Learning to Autosupport
WekaIO Controls Their Performance Destiny
Chin-Fah Heoh first heard from WekaIO last year at Storage Field Day and has been following the company ever since. After seeing them again at Storage Field Day last month, it proved to be an exclamation point on an already momentous 2018. Chin-Fah finds their architectural approach of complete control of the I/O subsystem and the NVMe devices and drivers provides them with incredible scale. They combine excellent throughput performance with very low latency using this approach. The piece further breaks down what makes WekaIO stand out, but Chin-Fah thinks this approach will lead to many more years of impressive growth ahead for the company.
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WekaIO controls their performance destiny
#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review
In this episode of the Storage Unpacked podcast, Chris Evans and Martin Glassborow discuss what happened at Storage Field Day last month. The companies pretty cleanly divided between scale-out primary storage and data protection solutions. They touch on all the presenters, and where listeners can learn more about the event. Be sure to give it a listen as a preview before watching all of the event presentation video on our site.
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#91 - Storage Field Day 18 in Review
Kentik and the Negative Roadmap
Tom Hollingsworth is the organizer of Networking Field Day, but he’s always a delegate at heart. In this post, he digs into what Kentik presented at the event last month. He was impressed with what Kentik had planned on their roadmap. But even more impressive was the company explicitly stating what they were not going to be getting into. This helps alleviate some of the concerns of feature creep that seem to happen with any solution over time. For Tom, this open perspective into their thought process can only spell good things going forward for Kentik.
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Kentik and The Negative Roadmap
Cloud Field Day – NGINX
Ned Bellavance will grace Cloud Field Day with a return appearance this year. Ahead of the event, Ned is previewing what to expect from some of the companies, focusing on NGINX in this post. Aside from technical questions about their product portfolio, Ned is definitely interested to hear how the company will work as it is acquired by F5 Networks. Tune into the live stream to catch it all for yourself!
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Meet the #ATM19 Influencers: Scott Lester
We’re thrilled to have Scott Lester coming to Mobility Field Day Exclusive at Aruba Atmosphere 2019 next week. Aruba must be pretty excited too, because they interviewed Scott for their “Meet the #ATM19 Influencers” series. They talk about how he got into tech, what motivates him, the best parts about coming to events in Vegas, and the weirdest things that happened on a client site.
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Meet the #ATM19 Influencers: Scott Lester
Mid-March – Where Did That Come From?
Ahh tempus fugit, the old passage of time. No matter how many times we hear about it, it somehow still sneaks up on all of us. Jason Benedicic certainly relates in this post, when after a hectic 2018, he finds himself almost through March in 2019. Luckily he’ll have a few days of technical deep dives at Cloud Field Day in April to slow things down a bit. We can’t wait to hear what he thinks about all the presentation at the event.
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Mid-March - Where did that come from?
Validation Des Services Réseaux Avec Netrounds
At all Field Day events, we try to gather perspectives from across the data center and the world. That’s why we love this post in French from Mario Gingras about what he saw from Netrounds at Networking Field Day last month. Their agent-based network monitoring offers full programmability, while giving admins a look at the performance and immediate availability of key services. He digs into the architecture in the post. He found it an impressively complete solution, but one that’s relatively simple to configure.
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Validation des services réseaux avec Netrounds
Level Up Your NetOps With Apstra
Phil Gervasi found Apstra’s presentation at Networking Field Day late last year to be interesting. The company broke down what it means by Intent-Based Networking, defining four distinct levels. Apstra claimed that most IBN companies are offering just basic automation or perhaps a single source of truth. But the company outlined how they want to move beyond that and get to a truly self-operating network.
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Level Up Your NetOps with Apstra
Western Digital Develops Low-Latency Flash to Compete With Intel Optane
Anton Shilov of Anandtech wrote about what Western Digital presented at Storage Field Day last month. The company showed off their Low Latency Flash NAND. This potential Optane competitor would offer speeds and access latencies between current 3D NAND and DRAM. While stopping short of calling LLF NAND Storage Class Memory, Western Digital sees it having a similar role in the data center.
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Western Digital Develops Low-Latency Flash to Compete with Intel Optane
WD Keeps Fast Flash Optane Substitute in the Wings
Chris Mellor was not a delegate at Storage Field Day last month, but he covered Western Digital for Blocks and Files. The company presented on their new low-latency flash, offering microsecond access times pitched squarely between current 3D NAND and DRAM, with a price to match. For Chris, this puts in squarely in competition with Intel’s Optane SCM.
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WD keeps fast flash Optane substitute in the wings
Bridges to the Clouds and More – NetApp NDAS
NetApp presented on their NetApp Data Availability Services at Storage Field Day. Chin-Fah Heoh thinks this generalist IT solution is interesting, enabling ONTAP primary systems to be backed up to an AWS bucket in as little as five clicks. He’s looking forward to seeing support for more public cloud storage providers, but thinks this is the right step for NetApp to start providing more value to customers for secondary storage.
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Bridges to the clouds and more – NetApp NDAS
VAST Data Launches With New Scale-Out Storage Platform
As one of the delegates at Storage Field Day, Chris Evans got to see VAST Data come out of stealth at the event. The company offers a new storage platform built on a disaggregated shared-everything architecture. Using a combination of QLC NAND flash and storage-class memory in an enclosure, linked across an NVMe fabric, any storage controller can talk to any NVMe device on the fabric. The result is a scalable architecture with no inherent pinch points, that could scale to thousands of storage nodes and tens of thousands of controllers.
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VAST Data launches with new scale-out storage platform
EP17 – Storpool: Being the Best in Block Based Storage – With Boyan Ivanov
In this episode of the Tech Unplugged podcast, Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman spoke with StorPool CEO Boyan Ivanov. They discussed a lot of what StorPool presented at Storage Field Day including the company’s product offering, how the product has evolved, and what to expect in the future.
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EP17 – Storpool: Being the best in Block Based storage – with Boyan Ivanov