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.
NetApp Insight: Fabrics, Volumes, Insights & more
David Chapa was onboard as a delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. At the event, he took away the theme that today’s NetApp is all about being “data driven.” To that effect, about the evolution of NetApp’s Data Fabric, the recently announced Cloud Volume developments, and Cloud Insights. Overall, David found what was announced impressive, but thinks the challenge will be to move from the company’s business-focused solutions and build from there.
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NetApp Insight: Fabrics, Volumes, Insights & more
What is HCI and really, does it matter?
After attending Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018, Matt Leib has a question. What should HCI stand for, hyperconverged, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. At the event, Matt got to hear from NetApp’s Gabriel Chapman about where and what HCI is actually being used for in the enterprise. Matt found Gabe’s argument that the “traditional” HCI definition isn’t really relevant in today’s enterprise. You can watch the full video of NetApp’s discussion on their appearance page from the event.
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What is HCI and really, does it matter?
HDD Capacity Threshold Reaches 15TB
Chris Evans highlights the new king of HDD capacity, the 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 from Western Digital. While only representing a 7% increase in capacity from 14TB drives, the real innovation here is these drives use host-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording, as opposed to being managed directly on the drives. This has big implications for hyperscalers, who can see greatly improved performance. Dropbox is one of the initial customers to use the drives, and Chris got a deep dive into their “Magic Pocket” architecture at Storage Field Day earlier this year.
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HDD Capacity Threshold Reaches 15TB
NetApp’s Data Fabric Gets Real
At Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018, the delegates got to see NetApp’s vision of Data Fabric come a little bit more into reality. In this piece, Stephen Foskett outlines how the company has taken Data Fabric from more of a marketing formulation into a real set of data services, orchestration, and management solutions. This is all backed by their previous release of Cloud Volumes to make hybrid storage a reality for the unique swath of customers in NetApp’s customer base.
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NetApp's Data Fabric Gets Real
Protection for your backup data from Dell EMC Cyber Recovery
At Tech Field Day, Adam Fisher got to hear from Dell EMC Protect, and about their latest solution Dell EMC Cyber Recovery 18.1. This creates a “air-gapped” vault within infrastructure to make sure your backups remain secure from ransomware and other attacks. For Adam, this provides vital protection for an often overlooked avenue of exploit.
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Protection for your backup data from Dell EMC Cyber Recovery
Jack Daniel and Tom Hollingsworth Discuss Community and Security
Be sure to checkout this conversation between security researcher Jack Daniel and our own Tom Hollingsworth. They discussed the importance and challenges of building communities within the security field. They also discussed the inaugural Security Field Day event coming up this December.
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Jack Daniel and Tom Hollingsworth Discuss Community and Security
Disaggregation or hyperconvergence?
Chin-Fah Heoh got to thinking about the current crop of HCI solutions. He thought of how companies like NetApp and Datrium have architectures that provide discrete data and compute nodes. But after seeing the presentation from DriveScale at Tech Field Day this month, disaggregation may actually prove to be more important for organizations. Their approach allows for assembling storage, compute and networking resources into virtual clusters, composing them as needed. Chin-Fah needs to dig deeper into their solution, but was fascinated at the prospect.
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Disaggregation or hyperconvergence?
Storage Field Day 15: The open convergence by Datrium
Datrium presented at Storage Field Day last month. Lino Telera got to hear about their concept of Open Convergence. This bucks the trend of traditional HCI, offering a different model for delivering tier-1 and secondary data in a scalable solution. They do this with an architecture build around stateless compute nodes and stateful storage nodes. This provides less cross talk between nodes, and allows for truly remarkable scale, as Lino saw during their presentation.
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Storage Field Day 15: The open convergence by Datrium
NetApp Data Fabric: putting in practice the “Theory of Everything” for Data and Storage
Max Mortillaro was along as a delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018 last week. He got to hear about the latest with NetApp Data Fabric, which Max sees as a major breakthrough in how organizations manage data. Data Fabric takes full control of storage infrastructure, abstracting it at the data level, where it can then offer extremely granular services. With advanced features like Cloud Tiering and Kubernetes Integration, Max wonders if this even qualifies as a storage product. While he has concerns about cost, in the end, Max calls Data Fabric a “killer solution.”
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NetApp Data Fabric: putting in practice the "Theory of Everything" for Data and Storage
Networking Field Day 19
Al Rasheed will be a delegate at Networking Field Day, coming up next week! There is a packed roster of announced presenters, so make sure you’re following #NFD19 on Twitter for Al and the other delegates thoughts. Better yet, watch along on our live stream to catch all the presentations as they happen.
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Tech Field Day 17
Adam Fisher attended his first Tech Field Day as a delegate earlier this month, after getting a taste of the experience at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018. This post catalogs his experience with the event, which he describes as “amazing.” For him, the technical deep dives and in-depth conversations really highlighted for far Adam has come in his career already, and inspired him to stay hungry to learn more. We hope to see him as a delegate at another event soon.
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From Storage to Data Virtualization
Enrico Signoretti got to see the launch of Hammerspace at Storage Field Day last month. It had a familiar ring to it, with former CTO of Primary Data, David Flynn, buying code from the now defunct company to start Hammerspace. The brilliance of the company comes down to one thing for Enrico, they obscure the issue of data gravity, allowing for virtualized views of virtualized data sets across clouds.
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From Storage to Data Virtualization
Smaller Conferences Can Have a Bigger Impact
After organizing a Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2018, Stephen Foskett wrote up a thoughtful piece about the power of smaller conferences. By having a more self-contained feel, Stephen frequently saw much more intimate connections being made between the company and attendees. This also allowed for more diverse viewpoints to be heard throughout the event.
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Smaller Conferences Can Have a Bigger Impact
NetApp’s Max Data at #NetAppInsight and #TFDx
At Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018, Matt Leib got to see the launch of NetApp Max Data. In this post, he traces the technology back to NetApp’s acquisition of Plexistor, who who saw at a Storage Field Day event back in 2016. This uses an embedded tiering architecture to allow onboard memory to hold entire databases. Matt likes that the architecture easily allows for expansion into newer “near” memory bus architectures, allowing for growth over time. For him, it’s just more evidance that today’s NetApp is far more than just a “Filer” company.
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NetApp’s Max Data at #NetAppInsight and #TFDx
One thing led to another….. vCommunity edition
Ian Sanderson shares some interesting perspective and experience entering the vCommunity over the last few years. This has led him to becoming a vExpert, as well as applying to become a Tech Field Day delegate. This has led him to expand his areas of interest and find out what’s going on outside of his existing areas of expertise.
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One thing led to another..... vCommunity edition
NetApp HCI Update
Chris Maki was a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. At the event, he got a deep dive into a number of NetApp announcements, including an update to their HCI offerings. In this post, Chris outlines some of the new hardware available, including new compute nodes, GPU accelerators, and networking.
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NETAPP INSIGHT 2018 – TFDX- Data Fabric 2.0
At NetApp Insight 2018, the company provided more details on Data Fabric 2.0. Roger Lund attended as part of Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight, and wrote up some of the details in this post. With Data Fabric 2.0, NetApp is now able to offer management & monitoring, orchestrations, data services, and data storage across clouds.
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NETAPP INSIGHT 2018 – TFDX- Data Fabric 2.0
NETAPP INSIGHT 2018 – TFDX- MAX Data
Roger Lund provides some updates that he saw at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. In this post, he focuses on NetApp MAX Data. This comes out of their recent Plexistor acquisition, and offers data management services for persistent memory. NetApp sees this as optimized for workloads in real-time analytics, in-memory DBs, AI, and data warehouses.
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NETAPP INSIGHT 2018 – TFDX- MAX Data
StarWind NVMeoF
At Storage Field Day earlier this year, Aaron Strong got to hear from StarWind. Aaron was definitely familiar with the company, and charts how the company has moved from purely software into hardware. He then looks at their demos from the event, and how the company is innovating with NVM over Fabric in a variety of ways.
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AirCheck G2 v3.0; Building on a Wifi Testing Stalwart
Mitch Dickey digs into the upcoming v3.0 firmware for NETSCOUT’s AirCheck G2, which he initially got a look at during Mobility Field Day this summer. This firmware adds a lot of new features, including support for over-the-air updates, device profile sharing via Link-Live, and improved packet capture.
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