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.
Western Digital to Demo Dual-Actuator HDDs Next Week: Double the Actuators for Double the Perf
AnandTech’s Anton Shilov was excited to hear that Western Digital announced they would be demoing dual-actuator drives at OCP Summit. This came during the company’s Storage Field Day presentation, where they made the case why the drive design makes sense. While drive capacity has increased over time, performance has remained roughly the same, meaning that performance per TB has decreased over time. This is problematic for service providers who need to meet SLAs based on this metric. Adding in dual-actuator, effectively putting two drives in one enclosure, would reduce the combined power usage and increase read IOPS.
Read More:
Western Digital to Demo Dual-Actuator HDDs Next Week: Double the Actuators for Double the Perf
Netrounds Marries Active Testing and Monitoring to Validate Network Performance and Availability
Drew Conry-Murray is no stranger to networking, but he hadn’t heard about Netrounds until they presented at Networking Field Day last month. They offer a pretty straightforward solution for service providers and large enterprises: Active verification that services are up and performing acceptably. They do this by running a wide array of test agents to get a client-side perspective on these services. Drew also liked the automation features available, with APIs available for third-party integrations.
Read More:
Netrounds Marries Active Testing And Monitoring To Validate Network Performance And Availability
Cisco Live – Network Building Blocks for IoT
Jasper Bongertz attended Cisco Live Europe this year, and also got to attend some Tech Field Day Extra presentations at the event. Cisco focused some of their time on introducing the delegates to their IoT switches and routers. These are ruggedized to survive a life on the edge, run the IOS operating system, and can be controlled centrally from Cisco DNA center. This last point was key to Jasper, as these devices will likely be put in insecure locations, where locking down who can interact with the device is key.
Read More:
Cisco Live – Network Building Blocks for IoT
NetApp and the Space in Between
For Dan Frith, NetApp’s presentation at Storage Field Day was a little extra special, as they got to hear from co-founder Dave Hitz on his last day. He outlined the current state of NetApp’s cloud strategy, something that Dan thinks is underrated in IT. They’ve had some missteps along the way, but Dave outlined why some workloads don’t move to the cloud, why most will, and how NetApp is creating cloud storage solutions aimed to bridge the gap.
Read More:
NetApp And The Space In Between
StorPool Presents at Storage Field Day 18
StorPool was one of the presenters at Storage Field Day last month, and shared a blog post about their experience with the delegates. The company offers scale-out block storage software that offers high performance with low latency. Their presentation definitely left an impression with the delegates. Be sure to watch their full presentation video available on our YouTube channel.
Read More:
StorPool Presents at Storage Field Day 18
Democratizing Data Management
At Storage Field Day last month, Enrico Signoretti got to hear a few different takes on what data management will look like in the future. He think Cohesity has had the right idea on the subject for a while, with the addition of an application marketplace making things even easier for customers. But NetApp really impressed by showing how SnapMirror replication to make copies of data in the cloud, making data easily accessible to lots of people in an organization. While NetApp’s product isn’t quite as mature as their vision, Enrico think both companies are doing a superb job with their data management strategies.
Read More:
Faster and Bigger SSDs Enable Us to Talk About Something Else Than IOps
For Jon Klaus, one of the major themes at Storage Field Day this week was the state of NVMe in the enterprise. Some companies like VAST Data were bullish enough to declare the death of the spinning disk, while other presenters like Western Digital were more optimistic about the long term viability of older media alongside NVMe. For Jon, what was significant was moving beyond just a speed and feed conversation around NVMe. Instead presenters focused on why geography of data and latency matters more across the entire IT stack.
Read More:
Faster and bigger SSDs enable us to talk about something else than IOps
Exploiting Secondary Data With NDAS From NetApp
Chris Evans got to hear about NetApp Data Availability Services at Storage Field Day last month. While the service is being pitched as a tool of IT generalists, Chris sees longer term value for it as a secondary option for data search and analytics. If this is a broader data management play, the company will need to expand beyond structured data, but Chris was impressed by what he saw.
Read More:
Exploiting secondary data with NDAS from NetApp
#SFD18 Introduces Us to VAST Data
Matt Leib digs into the public launch of VAST Data, which happened during their Storage Field Day presentation last month. The developed their Universal File System based on the belief that all data across storage tiers can be handled by their single architectural environment. Part of this is done by aggressively using Intel Optane as a write cache for metadata, complimented by JBOF NVMe connected by ethernet or Infiniband to server environments. By disaggregating storage from compute, the company also adds scale beyond the rack to the equation as well. For Matt, it was an impressive debut.
Read More:
#SFD18 introduces us to VAST Data
SFD18-Western Digital
Western Digital offered something different at Storage Field Day, being a provider of the storage that most other presenters use in their products. Highlights include details about 96-layer 3D NAND production, and HDD advancements including Helium, and using technologies like MAMR, HAMR and SMR to push density,
Read More:
NetApp Insight 2018 Product Announcements
In this post, Ray Lucchesi runs down the major announcements from NetApp Insight 2018. NetApp Kubernetes Service allows for running managed Kubernetes on the public cloud or on NetApp HCI hardware. MAX Data comes out of NetApp’s Plexistor acquisition and offers a two-tier, local file system that can make use of DRAM, NVDIMMs, or 3D Xpoint memory as an ultra-fast Persistent Memory Tier and ONTAP storage as the Storage Tier. Ray thinks NetApp has been on a high lately, and these announcements show the company has no signs of slowing down.
Read More:
NetApp Insight 2018 product announcements
Are CIO’s Missing the Metadata Bus?
Storage Field Day saw the return of Keith Townsend to the delegate ranks. In this post, he takes a look at what NetApp presented at the event. They showed their Network Data as a Service, which indexes all of the metadata stored in the system, allowing for basic analytics and an easily searchable data lake. Given NetApp’s breadth across Tier 1 and backup storage platforms, Keith sees some intriguing possibilities.
Read More:
Are CIO's Missing the Metadata Bus?
Cohesity Is (Data)Locked In
Cohesity presented at Storage Field Day last month, and Dan Frith was there to get the secondary storage deep dive from the company. The features that you get with Cohesity are well known, so Dan focuses on what really piqued his interest: Cohesity’s archival features and ransomeware protection.
Read More:
PathSolutions Helps Put the Data of Your Network to Good Use
In this post, Ken Nalbone looks at the network collection and correlation capabilities of PathSolutions. They were a presenter at Networking Field Day, highlighting their TotalView platform. By combining monitoring from across the data center with proactive alerting, Ken found it an intriguing solution.
Read More:
PathSolutions Helps Put the Data of Your Network to Good Use
Storage Field Day 18 – Fifty Shades of Disclosure
Max Mortillaro attended Storage Field Day last month as a delegate. At the event, he got to experience a dense schedule of presentations from emerging and prominent IT storage companies. Be sure to check out the full video coverage of the event to see the same great content that Max got to experience.
Read More:
Storage Field Day 18 - Fifty Shades of Disclosure
Leveraging Backup to Advance Your Decision Making
Keith Townsend looks into what he saw from Cohesity at Storage Field Day. The company revolutionized the scale-out backup appliance by fitting it into an overall vision for unified secondary storage. At the event, they showed off their App Store, allowing for devs to deploy software services directly on the platform. This can allow for machine learning and analytics to be run directly on secondary data.
Read More:
Leveraging Backup to Advance Your Decision Making
SnapRoute – Is There Something New Happening in Networking?
SnapRoute launched their Cloud Native Network Operating System at Networking Field Day earlier this month. For Ed Horley, this marks a significant shift in thinking. It classifies networking as just another compute object with specific characteristics, one that is utilized to serve a workload. This takes networking from something apart, and sets it at the same level of the rest of the software-defined data center. It’s an interesting approach, and Ed digs into the implications in this piece.
Read More:
SnapRoute - Is there something new happening in networking?
Datera Shows the Value of Data in Use
Justin Warren saw something unique from Datera’s presentation at Tech Field Day last month. For him, it was particularly useful because it focused on the cost of change. Datera’s storage solution focused on lowering that cost of change, allowing for greater experimentation and innovation by organizations.
Read More:
Datera Shows The Value of Data In Use
I Once Caught a Fish This Big!!
Tech Field Day bon vivant Al Rasheed was at Cisco Live Europe this year, so naturally he was invited to be a delegate at the Tech Field Day Extra presentations being held at the same time. There he got to hear from Cisco about developments with IoT networking, and what the company is doing to protect this massively expanded threat surface. For Al, these kind of solutions are vital, but just as importance is to consider if the convenience of an IoT device is worth the security risks in the first place.
Read More:
I Once Caught A Fish This Big!!
Catch Up (Fast) – IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
It’s been almost a full calendar year since Chin-Fah Heoh last heard from IBM at Storage Field Day. They returned again last month to give an update on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. While still a relatively nascent offering, SPP is starting to gain industry recognition, and adding must-have features for the backup and recovery market. For Chin-Fah, the pricing is there to appeal to the SMB/SME market, and he sees potential in it with regional cloud service providers as well.
Read More: