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.
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
StorPool – Block Storage Managed Well
Chin-Fah Heoh summarizes what StorPool offers pretty succinctly, they offer scale-out block storage technology, capable of delivering 1 million+ IOPS with sub-milliseconds response times. That’s a lot of lofty claims in one sentence. But Chin-Fah and the rest of the Storage Field Day delegates saw a demo at the event that left them believers. Just as impressive as their technology was their market focus. The company really sees themselves as a storage solution for cloud service providers, and Chin-Fah thinks that’s a perfect fit.
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StorPool – Block storage managed well
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 10: A Conversation With Boyan Ivanov
Enrico Signoretti put out a new episode of the Voices in Data Storage podcast. This time around, he spoke with StorPool CEO Boyan Ivanov. They discussed how he got started in IT, his history before founding StorPool, and what he thinks about object storage, serverless, and more. Both were at Storage Field Day, be sure to check out the full video of StorPool’s presentation.
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Voices in Data Storage – Episode 10: A Conversation with Boyan Ivanov
How IBM Is Rethinking Its Data Protection Line-Up
IBM made a return to Storage Field Day last month, updating the delegates on their data protection portfolio. Enrico Signoretti wrote up his thoughts. While IBM has rebranded some existing data protection solutions, their IBM Data Protection Plus is built from the ground up for modern solutions. A lack of feature parity with competitors is somewhat made up for by an aggressive development team and roadmap. For existing IBM customers, it should be a great way to modernize data protection using an existing vendor relationship.
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How IBM is rethinking its data protection line-up
Democratizing Data Management
Enrico Signoretti wrote up an excellent piece on how Cohesity and NetApp are approaching the data management market. He shared it on his blog, as well as the Gigaom link here.
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Cohesity – The Gold Standard in Data Management
Max Mortillaro heard an update from Cohesity at Storage Field Day last month. This post, Max puts what he saw in the context of what data management and secondary storage mean to both business and IT use cases. In either case, he finds Cohesity to offer a gold standard, one that should continue to expand with their newly announced developer portal to easily add 3rd party programs on their Cohesity DataPlatform.
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Cohesity - The Gold Standard in Data Management
StorPool, Fast Storage for Fast Times
Ray Lucchesi wasn’t sure what to make of StorPool when they started their presentation at Storage Field Day. But as they went on, Ray saw the light after a particularly impressive demo. The company was trying to match a Windows Server 2019 Hyper V benchmark which hit 13.8 M IOPS, which they were able to do without 1.5TB of Optane memory, 25Gbps RDMA Ethernet, and without having the VMs and its storage running on same nodes. To say Ray was impressed would be an understatement.
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StorPool, fast storage for fast times
Off the Cuff – NFD20 Wrap Up
From a rainy recording in Silicon Valley, Jordan Martin gathered together some fellow delegates from Networking Field Day to discuss what they heard at the event. They run down each presenter and discuss what stood out and struck their interest. Guests include Mario Gingras, Nick Shoemaker, Richard McIntosh, Brian Gleason, and Drew Conry-Murray.
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StorPool and the Death of Hardware-Defined Storage
Dan Frith got to hear from StorPool at Storage Field Day last week. The company has been in the software-defined storage game for a while, and offers a solution that lets you pool attached disk and SSD storage on servers into single shared block storage pool. Dan was impressed they include a robust set of data management features on top. He sees this as particularly appealing to service providers. While “hardware-defined” storage isn’t going away tomorrow, for Dan, solutions like StorPool show that SDS can definitely deliver compelling solutions without being locked into hardware.
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StorPool And The Death of Hardware-Defined Storage
Juniper Buries the Headline at NFD20
Brian Gleason thought Juniper Networks had one of the best presentations at Networking Field Day last month. Instead of focusing on routing and switching, the company took the time to highlight their free educational tools. NRE Labs particularly impressed Brian. Instead of being a lead-gen bait and switch, NRE Labs is a GitHub-hosted set of learning resources for network engineers not yet comfortable with automation and programming. It has lessons for beginners, but is also designed to help move beyond the basics. It’s a refreshingly helpful set of resources from Juniper.
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Juniper Buries The Headline at NFD20
Clever Cohesity
It’s not often that the delegates at Storage Field Day found enlightenment during a presentation. But that’s exactly what happened during Cohesity’s presentation for Chin-Fah Heoh. They demoed the Cohesity App Marketplace at the event. This made Chin-Fah rethink the company, not as a universal data services platform for secondary data. Rather, as CEO Mohit Aron stated, “data protection is just an app.” The marketplace shows him that the company is now focused on bringing the best possible value of the data to the business.
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BLOG – NFD20 – VMware – SDWAN
Rodrigo Rovere was a delegate at Networking Field Day last month, and got to hear the latest from VMware. The company focused on their SD-WAN portfolio, focusing on Velocloud. They showed how this can offer organizations not just easier networking across sites, but more security on top of it. This coordinated with NSX makes for a potent combination.
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Dual Actuator Drives: An Interesting Trend
Matt Leib had written off spinning disks as a storage media that didn’t have much of a future. That changed after seeing Western Digital present at Storage Field Day last month. They previewed a tech demo for a dual-actuator drive, which would offer double the read IOPS in a single drive. This could provide a new way to increase performance in a space that had previously only had more density to offer. Matt found it a really exciting possibility.
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