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.
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Morpheus Data
Chris Evans will be joining our delegates at Cloud Field Day next week. Morpheus Data will be presenting, and Chris is looking forward to digging into their platform. They offer an end-to-end management and deployment of applications in a DevOps model, including component discovery, templates and policy. He’s interested in learning how the company will overcome some of the inherent issues that come up when adding in another abstraction layer to applications.
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Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Morpheus Data
Cape Networks Acquired by HPE
Rich Stroffolino breaks down the implications of HPE acquiring Cape Networks. Make sure to watch their recent Mobility Field Day presentation to get a handle on the tech HPE is acquiring. Adding some robust client-side sensors to their portfolio makes for an interesting addition to Aruba.
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Get Excited About Traceroute!
John Welsh saw SolarWinds’ Traceroute NG tool at Tech Field Day last month, and decided to give it a spin. It takes the fairly humdrum traceroute tool, and provides additional speed and features to help be an ad hoc network troubleshooting tool. John sees it as a useful tool in its own right, but also a gateway for potential customers to use SolarWinds’ Cloud Monitoring.
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Extreme Automation with Extreme Networks (& StackStorm)
After seeing them at Networking Field Day in January, Chris Grundemann does an extremely good job of limiting the puns, and digging into what made Extreme Networks stand out. He looks at how the company’s StackStorm acquisition laid the groundwork for their current automation solution. In the end, Chris concluded the Extreme Networks is a “formidable networking company”.
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Extreme Automation with Extreme Networks (& StackStorm)
Dialogue: What do We Mean by Predictive Analytics?
At Storage Field Day this month, Dr. Rachel Traylor heard from StarWind. They developed a prediction algorithm to proactively detect drive failures. This led Dr. Rachel to call for a dialogue with her fellow mathematicians and storage experts, what do we mean when we say predictive analytics?
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Dialogue: What do We Mean by Predictive Analytics?
ML, AI, and Marketing: A Conversation with Dr. Rachel Traylor
Inspired by recent solutions seen at Tech Field Day presentations, Rich Stroffolino and Dr. Rachel Traylor discuss what actually is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. They break down how having an algorithm doesn’t equal machine learning, and how to spot when marketing overreaches with the terms.
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ML, AI, and Marketing: A Conversation with Dr. Rachel Traylor
Huawei – Probably Not What You Expected
Huawei opened a lot of eyes with their Storage Field Day presentation last week, including delegate Dan Frith’s. He wasn’t familiar with the company’s storage products prior to the presentation, but learned them make their own SSDs and storage controller chips, getting started in flash production in 2005. He found their storage arrays have all the features considered table stakes in a modern array, but ensuring that data integrity and protection options are really built out and robust. Dan was also impressed by the company’s 3:1 deduplication guarantee.
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Huawei – Probably Not What You Expected
CFD3 Prep Post: NetApp
Justin Warren continues his preview of the presenters for Cloud Field Day happening next week. In this post he focuses on NetApp. This post focuses on a fiscal analysis of the current state of the company. After a rough fiscal 2016, and flat revenue in 2017, Justin thinks 2018 looks much better for revenue growth thanks to better cost management and increased sales. Justin is interested to hear more on how the company will deliver on its Data Fabric vision at Cloud Field Day.
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CFD3 Prep Post: Rubrik
Justin Warren is no stranger to Rubrik, having covered them across a variety of outlets. He’ll get an update from the company next week at Cloud Field Day. Justin already thinks they have a solid product, backed by impressive marketing. In this piece, he overviews how the company shifted from its backup appliance roots to embrace more software offerings running in the cloud.
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CFD3 Prep Post: Morpheus Data
Justin Warren has a very important question for Morpheus Data, what is a “unified multi-cloud orchestration tool”? He’ll get a chance to ask during their Cloud Field Day presentation next month. In his preview post, he looks at how the company purports to be an orchestrator of other familiar automation tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. Morpheus Data says this will save organizations time and money, a claim Justin has heard many times before. He’s looking forward to a deep dive for some details.
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Stop User Behavior from killing your data
Forcepoint was a first time presenter at Tech Field Day last month in Austin. In this post, Luigi Danakos takes a look at their User Behavior Analytics. Forcepoint’s approach to security is not to focus on outside threats that firewalls and policy can help stop, but rather to identify potential insider threats based on looking at behavior. This often falls outside simple rules of good vs bad behavior, requiring algorithms and statistical models to categorize the messy middle of most user actions.
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Stop User Behavior from killing your data
Come And Splash Around In NetApp’s Data Lake
Dan Frith heard from NetApp at Storage Field Day earlier this month. While no stranger to the company, Dan got to hear something relatively new from the company. Senior Technical Director Santosh Rao overviewed some of the big data platform challenges that the company is looking to address. Overall Dan thinks NetApp has a lot of tools at their disposal and a comprehensive vision to address the data market, seeing the company in a “good place”.
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Come And Splash Around In NetApp’s Data Lake
Security by Behavior
It was great to have Forcepoint make their first Tech Field Day presentation last month at our event out in Austin. John Welsh was there, and wrote up his thoughts on their approach to security. This is based around their User and Entity Behavior Analytics, which isn’t designed to prevent outside actors from accessing your system, but instead to identify the far murkier problem of user behavior. Their platform provides a way to categorize that behavior to better identify potential insider threats.
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Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Oracle
Chris Evans is previewing the companies presenting at Cloud Field Day next month. Oracle will be there, and Chris is interested to learn more about what they are offering. Of particular interest is their Ravello acquisition, which enables easily porting applications running in vSphere to Oracle’s cloud platform.
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Cloud Field Day 3 Preview: Oracle
Serverless computing highlights new security challenges in hybrid IT
Hybrid IT and cloud native services, like AWS Lamba, require a different approach than traditional IT security. A simple lift and shift approach to security will quickly reveal deficiencies of policy once compute and storage moves beyond your four walls. In this piece, Keith Townsend was able to talk to Forcepoint Security as part of Tech Field Day last month. Keith thinks the company has made the acquisitions needed to eventually provide the firewall and cloud access security broker granularity needed for hybrid IT.
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Serverless computing highlights new security challenges in hybrid IT
Western Digital – The A Is For Active, The S Is For Scale
At Storage Field Day, Western Digital presented. The delegates got to hear from both their Tegile and HGST divisions. Dan Frith highlights what he saw about ActiveScale, HGST’s scalable object system. Coupled with cloud management features, Dan thinks it’s a “solid platform”.
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Western Digital – The A Is For Active, The S Is For Scale
Cohesity Understands The Value Of What Lies Beneath
Cohesity presented at Storage Field Day earlier this month, and showed off their approach to unified secondary storage infrastructure. In this piece, Dan Frith looks at how the company doesn’t look at secondary storage as fragmented chaos, but rather an opportunity to modernize around this unstructured data. Dan reviews how they differentiate from their competitors, and how they are much more than a simple storage target for data protection.
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Cohesity Understands The Value Of What Lies Beneath
Cloud Field Day 3 Preview – Data Protection
Keith Townsend prepared an overview of the data protection companies that will be presenting at Cloud Field Day. He looks at Druva, Rubrik, and Veritas, which all have the same overall goals for data protection, but go about it in very different ways.
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Cloud Field Day 3 Preview - Data Protection
Dude, Here’s Your 100TB Flash Drive!
Nimbus Data released a 100TB 3.5″ SATA SSD, and Chris Evans gives it a look here. The device falls within their existing Exadrive DC series, but features imporved performance at 500MB/s throughput and 100,000 IOPS read and write. All of this fits within a low thermal envelope, which Chris speculates is due to their patent-pending multi-controller architecture. Add in a claim of “unlimited endurance” over the drives 5-year warranty, and standard SSD functions like garbage collection and wear levelling, and Chris sees this as an interesting option.
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Dude, Here's Your 100TB Flash Drive!
Cumulus – Not Your Average Networking
Cumulus Networks presented at Networking Field Day recently with their partner Mellanox. Larry Smith reviews what he saw from the company. Cumulus takes a core Debian Linux OS, and optimizes it to allow network engineers to configure in CLI without having to learn specific Linux commands. The benefit of a Linux core is amplified because the OS supports almost any automation tool a network admin will need.
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