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.
Hammerspace – Unstructured Data Anywhere
Adam Fisher was one of the delegates at Tech Field Day last month, and got to hear from Hammerspace as they came out of stealth. They are a new player in the emerging Data as a Service market, and offer a solution that decouples data from the underlying storage. This removes this as a concern for the consumer, who interacts with data via a global namespace. Adam gets into the detail and breaks down the components in this piece.
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Hammerspace – Unstructured Data Anywhere
Getting Social and Engaging with CommvaultGo 2018 from your couch
Luigi Danakos was one of our delegates at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2018. At the event, the delegates got to hear exclusive pre-embargo announcements, and get deep dives into the interesting service offerings announced at the show. Luigi shares some of the lead up to the event in this post. Make sure to check out our full video of their presentations to get up to speed.
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Getting Social and Engaging with CommvaultGo 2018 from your couch
Is Pure Play Storage good?
Chin-Fah Heoh has seen a number of pure play storage companies present at Storage Field Day over the years. In this post, he looks at the Gartner Magic Quadrants from 2010 and 2017, looking how the Big 5 storage companies have fared in that time. NetApp remains the only company in the leaders quadrant, with Pure Storage as the notable new kid on the block. But for Chin-Fah, this doesn’t represent the death of pure play storage, rather representative of a changing of the guard.
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Goodbye X-IO, Hello Axellio and Violin 2.0!
Stephen Foskett breaks down a big acquisition in the storage market, the reborn Violin Systems acquiring X-IO. This gets complicated as Violin is buying X-IO’s legacy ISE storage line, while their edge Axellio product is being spun out into a new company. Stephen sees this as a win for both remaining companies.
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Goodbye X-IO, Hello Axellio and Violin 2.0!
My First Tech Field Day
It’s always great to hear the perspective of first time Tech Field Day delegates. Yusuf Emre Özensoy came to his first event last month, and shared a little bit about his experience. For him, what stood out not just being an attendee of the event, but being invited into a wider family as a part of it. He also enjoyed all the technical deep dives from DriveScale, Cisco, Oracle, Dell EMC, and Hammerspace.
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71: GreyBeards talk DP appliances with Sharad Rastogi, Sr. VP & Ranga Rajagopalan, Sr. Dir., Dell EMC DPD
In this episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast, Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks spoke to Sharad Rastogi & Ranga Rajagopalan from Dell EMC’s Data Protection division. They discuss the company’s new IDPA DP4400, which was also detailed at their Tech Field Day Extra presentation from VMworld US 2018. This provides up to 96TB of usable capacity for secondary storage and backups, while also providing up to 192TB of a native Cloud Tier.
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Day 1 – Networking Field Day 19
Networking Field Day is underway this week out in Silicon Valley. We’re thrilled to have Al Rasheed along for the event. He’s already written up some thoughts from his first day traveling to the event. This saw him meet with fellow delegates and looking forward to the coming presentations the rest of the week. Be sure to watch all the Networking Field Day presentations live this week!
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Day 1 – Networking Field Day 19
Live at VMworld Europe 2018: An Update on VMware Strategy and Vision, or VMware is Cool Again
In this post, Max Mortillaro considers the emergence of Kubernetes as a de facto container orchestrator. This can be seen looking at any number of IT companies, including what he saw at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. This event saw a lot of coverage around the company’s new NetApp Kubernetes Service, from their recent StackPointCloud acquisition.
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Live at VMworld Europe 2018: An Update on VMware Strategy and Vision, or VMware is Cool Again
72: GreyBeards talk Computational Storage with Scott Shadley, VP Marketing NGD Systems
This episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast features a conversation with NGD Systems’ VP of Marketing, Scott Shadley, who presented at Storage Field Day earlier this year. They talk about their smart SDDs, which will become generally available by the end of 2018. These SSDs each have a 4-core ARM processor running Ubuntu. This allows any workload that can run on Ubuntu to be performed directly on the storage layer. They look at what these drives are capable of, and how they could be deployed by organization in the near future.
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72: GreyBeards talk Computational Storage with Scott Shadley, VP Marketing NGD Systems
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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