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.
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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Dual Actuator drives: An interesting trend
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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#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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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