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.
73: GreyBeards talk HCI with Gabriel Chapman, Sr. Mgr. Cloud Infrastructure NetApp
This episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast features a conversation with NetApp’s Senior Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, Gabriel Chapman. Andy presented to hosts Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. They discuss NetApp’s approach to HCI. Their architecture pairs NetApp Solidfire storage nodes with dedicated compute nodes. Their overall approach is less focused with a strict definition of HCI, and more based around being relevant for hybrid cloud infrastructure.
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73: GreyBeards talk HCI with Gabriel Chapman, Sr. Mgr. Cloud Infrastructure NetApp
75: GreyBeards talk persistent memory IO with Andy Grimes, Principal Technologist, NetApp
This episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast features a conversation with NetApp’s Principal Technologist, Andy Grimes. Andy presented to hosts Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018, where he presented on MAX Data. This software-defined persistent memory solution comes out of the assets from NetApp’s Plexistor acquisition. They discuss some of the technical details, how it is designed to use emerging persistent memory, and use cases for the enterprise.
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75: GreyBeards talk persistent memory IO with Andy Grimes, Principal Technologist, NetApp
Presenting To The D-Suite
As an event lead with Tech Field Day, Tom Hollingsworth has a lot of experience hearing presenters talk to IT professionals, the “do-ers” in IT. He looks at the problem of treating these presentations the same as C-level audiences, who are more concerned with problems then technical details. The post provides a lot of great tips for speaking to this very specific audience.
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NetApp: HCI Stands For “Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure”
Stephen Foskett wrote up his thoughts on NetApp’s HCI as he saw at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. Some may quibble if their architecture is “hyperconverged infrastructure”, but for NetApp, that’s beside the point. NetApp was focused on making a true hybrid cloud infrastructure, taking a more functionalist look at what HCI has to be. Stephen sees this as being what will allow NetApp to keep customers in the fold as they move to converged and cloud solutions.
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NetApp: HCI Stands For "Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure"
Foskett’s Twelve: Network Field Day and SD-WAN
Romain Jourdan previews Riverbed’s appearance at Networking Field Day this week. He runs down the delegates who are at the even, and what Riverbed will talk about. Make sure to follow along on our live stream, and check out the full video soon after the event.
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Foskett's Twelve: Network Field Day and SD-WAN
Composable Infrastructure is presented at Tech Field Day 17 by DriveScale
DriveScale shared their experience from presenting at Tech Field Day last month. This was their second appearance, and really impressed the delegates with their vision of composable infrastructure. Make sure to check out the full video of their presentation to get a deep dive for yourself.
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Composable Infrastructure is presented at Tech Field Day 17 by DriveScale
What future for Intel Optane?
Max Mortillaro got to hear from Intel’s Optane team at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In this post, he considers some of the trials and tribulations of the storage class memory. For Max, the challenge of a mainstream use case remains. Optane can deliver on performance, but when considering cost per gigabyte, the proposition becomes more mixed. He sees it carving out a use case as a durable caching layer for Tier 0 storage.
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They Call it Evangelist for a Reason
Tech Field Day delegate turned presenter Eric Wright was a guest on the Influence Marketing Podcast. They talked about building his role as a Technical Evangelist at Turbonomic, and the importance of maintaining a community above simply marketing or a traditional advocacy program.
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They Call it Evangelist for a Reason
NVMesh 2 – A Compelling Sequel From Excelero
Dan Frith saw Excelero emerge from Stealth at Storage Field Day last year. Now the company has released a major update to their NVMe pooling software solution, NVMesh 2. This adds MeshConnect with TCP/IP and Fibre Channel support, MeshProtect with parity-based redundancy and mirroring, and MeshInspect for analytics. Dan sees this release smoothing out some of the rough edges of NVMesh 1, and making it a lot more attractive for enterprise customers.
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NVMesh 2 – A Compelling Sequel From Excelero
Cisco ACI Cloud APIC: Fast, Cheap, Good. You Can’t Have All Three.
Inspired by Cisco’s presentation at Tech Field Day last month, Ethan Banks uses the classic “fast, cheap, good: pick 2” device for considering running Cisco ACI in the cloud. By moving this switching management plane from on-prem to Cloud APIC, Ethan doesn’t see a performance bottleneck since this will all be in cloud-native constructs. Ultimately cost may be the issue for some organizations.
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Cisco ACI Cloud APIC: Fast, Cheap, Good. You Can't Have All Three.
NetApp MAX Data: The Persistence of Memory, Revisited
Max Mortillaro takes a surrealist approach in looking at NetApp MAX Data, something he heard a great deal about at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. This is an evolution on the assets NetApp obtained in the Plexistor acquisition, providing a software-defined architecture that leverages persistent memory for data storage. This can use either NVDIMMs or Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory modules. Max was impressed by their tiering scheme in MAX Data, providing a seamless integration for this cutting edge tech into a very traditional stack.
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NetApp MAX Data: The Persistence of Memory, Revisited
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