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.
VAST Data – No More Tiers Means No More Tears?
Dan Frith is shedding no tears for tiers after seeing VAST Data come out of stealth at Storage Field Day last month. Leveraging a greenfield architecture built around NVMe over fabric and Storage Class Memory, they claim to offer Tier 1 performance at scale without the actual cost of Tier 1 storage. Dan was definitely impressed by the ambition of their approach, and thinks their disaggregated share-everything approach to storage is impressive.
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VAST Data – No More Tiers Means No More Tears?
Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day
Matt Leib is looking forward to hearing from Intel at their Data-Centric Innovation Day. Although the content will be a surprise, he expects that it will be quite interesting!
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Tech Field Day exclusive at Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day
Dell and the Power of Influencing Influencers
Chin-Fah, HEOH is very impressed by how Dell is handling influencer relations, and discusses his reaction to being invited to Dell Technologies World at the end of April. Chin-Fah has been a Field Day delegate as well and says their work with influencers reminds him of how we do things here at Gestalt IT. Thanks!
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Dell and the Power of Influencing Influencers
Meet Field Day Delegate – Chris Arceneaux
We’re getting to know our new Field Day delegates! Mel Zura of Gestalt IT asked Chris Arceneaux about how he got into IT, what the future holds, and more. You’ll see Chris at Cloud Field Day 5 in April.
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Meet Field Day Delegate - Chris Arceneaux
How To: Clone Windows 10 From SATA SSD to M.2 SSD (& Fix Inaccessible Boot Device)
Jon Klaus received a Western Digital Black SN750 M.2 SSD for testing at Storage Field Day. Naturally, he wanted to use this fast little NVMe drive as his Windows Boot disk. What he thought was going to be a simply clone and swap from an older SSD turned into anything but. If you’re considering swapping out a drive on an old Windows install, it’s a good idea to read Jon’s post to understand the UEFI vs BIOS when it comes to setting up boot drives. Who knew it could get so complicated?
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How To: Clone Windows 10 from SATA SSD to M.2 SSD (& fix inaccessible boot device)
Can the WekaIO Matrix File System Be Faster Than DAS?
Direct Attached Storage (DAS), offers a lot of advantages in terms of speed and latency, but comes with a suite of problems. If nothing else, it forces applications to deal with data integrity and resiliency issues instead of having it as part of SAN. Chris Evans looks at how WekaIO addresses the shortcomings of DAS while keeping the high-performance and low latency. At Storage Field Day last month, they showed how their scale-out parallel file system can provide exceptional performance that’s only limited by the bandwidth of the network card. By rewritting at the file system layer and lower, WekaIO is able to offer distributed storage built to take full advantage of modern storage media.
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Can the WekaIO Matrix file system be faster than DAS?
Drive Your Own Demo With Riverbed
As the organizer of Networking Field Day, and a former delegate himself, Tom Hollingsworth has seen his fair share of demos at our events. At last month’s event, Riverbed really stood out with how they presented their demo section. They opted for a “hands-on” demo, discussing with the delegates as they interacted with the product in real time. For Tom, it can be a risk proposition, but he thinks the benefits of seeing how people learn and build muscle memory in the application far out weights the potential pitfalls.
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Drive Your Own Demo with Riverbed
The Full Force of Western Digital
Chin-Fah Heoh saw Western Digital present at Storage Field Day over three weeks ago, and he’s still wrapping his head around everything he saw. That’s because the company offers an incredible breadth of solutions, being one of the rare “silicon to system” companies in IT. From updates to NAND flash to storage subsystems, what stood out was the shift in Western Digital from a company that just provides drives and storage, to one that’s thinking about how to solve customer’s big data and fast data problems.
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The full force of Western Digital
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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