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.
Managing Servers in a Serverless World
In this piece, Gabe Maentz uses the popularity of serverless models to introduce Dell EMC’s OpenManage, which he saw at Tech Field Day last month. Serverless essentially lets you focus on functions and not worry about the underlying servers. As a high volume seller of servers, Dell EMC is using OpenManage Essentials and Enterprise to simplify, automate and unify their server life cycle management functions. Gabe found the solution impressive, with a focus on practicality and ease of use for admins.
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Managing Servers in a Serverless World
#SFD15: Datrium impresses
Glenn Dekhayser saw a lot of interesting technology at Storage Field Day, but Datrium stood out to him with their focus on end user experience and value extraction from technology. Using a looser definition of HCI with discretely scalable compute and storage nodes, Datrium’s solution offers all the table stakes features expected in an HCI system. What distinguishes it is a robust GUI with lots of telemetry and easy provisioning options, as well as tight cloud integration with AWS.
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Commentary: White Papers Don’t Impress Me Much
In this post, Dr. Rachel Traylor looks at the current state of industry white papers. After surveying some recent papers promising architectural overviews and technical details, she mostly found them more akin to marketing materials due to the lack of citations and substance. She expresses this frustration with a little help from Shania Twain.
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Commentary: White Papers Don’t Impress Me Much
CFD3 Prep Post: Delphix
Justin Warren is heading to Cloud Field Day next month, and in this post, he previews one of the presenting companies, Delphix. The company has a platform designed to provide access to company data quickly and securely by taking advantage of backups. Justin outlines why a lot of companies have a need for this kind of solution, and what are some of the potential issues. He definitely wants to hear more from Delphix at the event.
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IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Has A Nice Focus On Modern Data Protection
At Storage Field Day, IBM presented on their SpectrumProtect Plus, their “SLA-based data protection”. Dan Frith breaks down what this means, essentially it’s software that supports the ability to meet SLAs through configuration-level service level objectives. While Dan may take issue that this isn’t really “SLA-based”, he thinks it shows that IBM is working to provide modern data protection solutions for their customers.
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IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Has A Nice Focus On Modern Data Protection
NetApp and IBM gotta take risks
At Storage Field Day, Chin-Fah Heoh heard from two companies with a considerable legacy in IT: NetApp and IBM. The former presented on their Data Pipeline, ONTAP 9.3 updates, and ONTAP Select. IBM meanwhile highlighted their data protection offerings with SpectrumProtect Plus.
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NetApp and IBM gotta take risks
Storage Field Day 15 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
We always appreciate it when Dan Frith hops on a plane to travel around the world to attend Storage Field Day. He was at our event last week, and declared it a “great trip.” Make sure to catch up on all our video of the presentations if you missed any of the sessions Dan sat in on. In this post, Dan discloses anything he received at the event.
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Storage Field Day 15 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
A look at the Hedvig distributed Hybrid Cloud storage solution
Chan Ekanayake had been familiar with Hedvig for some time, and knew them to be a flexible, truly distributed software-defined storage company. After getting some updates from the company at Storage Field Day, his takeaway: They are a good hybrid SDS solution that can cater for a mixed workload across the private data center as well as public cloud platforms.
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A look at the Hedvig distributed Hybrid Cloud storage solution
Cohesity SpanFS – a foundational shift
For some time now, Cohesity has been using the metaphor of the storage iceberg to show how secondary storage is often largely hidden, but a source of siloed frustration for IT. Chin-Fah Heoh heard from Cohesity at Storage Field Day, and learned how the company’s hyperconverged data platform helps address secondary storage in a unified way. Underlying this platform is SpanFS, their cloud-scale, distributed data protection filesystem.
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Cohesity SpanFS – a foundational shift
Magic happening
Since they’ve launched, Chin-Fah Heoh has seen Dropbox change from an innovative Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing service to a full fledged collaboration platform. At Storage Field Day, he got a architectural overview of how the company transitioned away from AWS to their own infrastructure. This required moving more than 500PB of customer data, and saved the company over $75 million.
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Dropbox’s Magic Pocket: Power of Software Defined Storage
Chan Ekanayake was “ecstatic” when he found out that he’d get a technical deep dive on Dropbox’s infrastructure at Storage Field Day. This piece reviews the company’s Magic Pocket, a custom built, internally hosted, software defined, cloud storage infrastructure. This was designed so the company could move from storing actual customer data from Amazon S3 to get better performance and reduce raw storage costs.
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Dropbox’s Magic Pocket: Power of Software Defined Storage
Storage Field Day 15 – Day 0
Dan Frith crossed the world from his native Australia to join Storage Field Day this week in Silicon Valley. Be sure to follow Dan’s blog and twitter while you’re watching the live stream, and join in the conversation with #SFD15.
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Storage dinosaurs evolving too
In the age of cloud, the traditional storage admin are often seen as relics of the past. But for Chin-Fah Heoh, these old “dinosaurs” are actually evolving to become vital to the modern enterprise. This is because they have a deep understanding of data. At Storage Field Day, he’s looking forward to hearing from companies like Hedvig and WekaIO on how they solve the problems of persistent storage in distributed systems. With these difficult data question more important than ever in the enterprise, Chin-Fah thinks its the best time to be a “storage dinosaur”.
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Storage dinosaurs evolving too
Mystery, Intrigue and CSR
Jane Rimmer is excited to working with a company that will be coming out of stealth at Cloud Field Day next month! Make sure to follow #CFD3 on Twitter to follow along with the conversation and check back for the full live stream of the event!
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Security has Failed, Analytics to the Rescue
Gabe Maentz was impressed at Forcepoint’s admission that traditional security has failed. At Tech Field Day last month, the company presented why drawing the line between good and bad behavior with legacy static tools isn’t adequate. Instead, they opt for a “human-centric” approach to security. Using their User and Entity Behavior Analytics, the company is able to provide dynamic intelligence into both system context and user behavior to allow organizations to see risks and threats in real-time.
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Security has Failed, Analytics to the Rescue
HCI/Not HCI – It doesn’t matter
For Keith Townsend, it doesn’t matter much if a solution is called HCI or CI. “At the end of the day, the label doesn’t matter. You can call a hotdog a sausage or a sandwich (Just as long as you don’t put ketchup on it).” In general, HCI’s promised simplifiation of IT operations works great for smaller teams, but breaks at scale. This becomes another management stack that adds to, not reduces, complexity. NetApp has an interesting approach by allowing IT to use existing SolidFire management tools on their HCI platform, thereby not introducing yet another management stack.
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HCI/Not HCI - It doesn't matter
Adding More (Red)Fish to Your Diet
In this piece, Jon Hildebrand outlines how differing interpretations of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface standard led to a surfeit of tools for multi-vendor data center administrators. At Tech Field Day last month, Dell EMC outlined how they are incorporating the new Redfish standard to provide standardized APIs that will work better across a variety of hardware.
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Adding More (Red)Fish to Your Diet
Secure Multicloud Networking with Contrail
At Networking Field Day, Chris Grundemann got hear the latest updates from Juniper Networks’ Contrail team. The team demonstrated their growing product line, which will feature Contrail Networking, Contrail Security, Contrail Cloud, and Contrail Multicloud by the middle of 2018. For Chris, this development is a reflection of the prevalence of leaf-spine architectures, and the virtualized networks often needed to overlay them.
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Secure Multicloud Networking with Contrail
Cumulus Linux and NetQ
Richard McIntosh saw a presentation from a whitebox company for the first time at Networking Field Day in January, and it left an impression. Cumulus Networks presented on their Cumulus Linux and NetQ. What struck Richard is that the entire system is just a Linux distribution. This allows admins to use familiar tools for their networking, rather than have to adapt to a proprietary solution.
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Storage Field Day 15 – Watch Live Here
For those not able to attend Storage Field Day this week, never fear. The entire event is live streamed, with full video available soon after on YouTube and Vimeo. Chan Ekanayake shared the live stream on his blog. Make sure to watch, and ask any questions using #SFD15 during the event.
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