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.
Oracle Cloud
As Oracle continues to expand into the public cloud market, they have to change a lot of minds along the way. At Tech Field Day, it seems like they got their message heard by Erik Ableson, who described the session as a “wake up call.” For Erik, what struck him is how Oracle Cloud is positioned to work well with existing enterprise workloads and cloud-native ones. While there are elements that are a managed service, their cloud offerings stand apart and should be of interest to anyone in the market.
Read More:
Hammerspace at Tech Field Day 17
It’s always exciting when a company comes out of stealth at a Tech Field Day event. That’s what Erik Ableson got to see at Tech Field Day last month, when Hammerspace went live to the world. The presented their data-as-a-service solution in an interesting way, defining the most important part of a file system as the metadata expression of the files that exist in a particular context. Hammerspace separates the shared file metadata from the file access path, allowing them to provide a single namespace regardless of where the data actually is. Erik sees them as having the potential to move unstructured data managed out of the world of scripting and into advanced policy management.
Read More:
Hammerspace at Tech Field Day 17
Exciting SD-WAN Updates From Riverbed
Kevin Blackburn was along as a delegate at Networking Field Day last week. At the event, he got to hear the latest updates on SD-WAN from Riverbed. SD-WAN is a great tool for routing connections between disparate locations in the enterprise. Riverbed demonstrated how their solution allows this to scale to large networks by seamlessly managing the overlay and underlay with a unified approach. Kevin was also impressed by Riverbed’s new subscription model pricing, as well as their overall ease of use.
Read More:
Exciting SD-WAN Updates From Riverbed
Disrupting DDI @ Networking Field Day (In Tweets)
BlueCat Networks shared a blog post detailing their team’s experience as a first time Tech Field Day presenter. The company broke down how they are innovating on the traditional query and answer nature of DNS. The delegates were impressed how BlueCat offers DNS, DHCP, IPAM services combined into a single source of truth. They then showed how this can have major implications for network automation.
Read More:
Disrupting DDI @ Networking Field Day (In Tweets)
The Recap: Kentik at Networking Field Day 19
Michelle Kincaid with Kentik wrote up a blog post detailing the companies recent presentation at Networking Field Day. The company is no stranger to the event, and it’s always great to hear their latest and greatest. The presentation updated the delegates on how Kentik is expanding the capabilities of their network monitoring by adding features for cloud infrastructure, service providers, and automation.
Read More:
The Recap: Kentik at Networking Field Day 19
Cisco Catalyst 9800 WLC – The Most Flexible WLC Yet
Kevin Blackburn breaks down the release of Cisco’s new Catalyst 9800 series wireless LAN controller. Kevin is impressed that this isn’t a single appliance, but a true platform that can run in the cloud, on a switch, or on an on-premises appliance. The Catalyst 9800 series WLC are all based on IOS-XE code, providing modularity and flexibility. Cisco presented on this at Networking Field Day earlier this month, so be sure to check out their full video for a deep dive.
Read More:
Cisco Catalyst 9800 WLC - The Most Flexible WLC Yet
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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!
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More:
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.
Read More: