Cloud Field Day2: The S3 storage under control with Scality

Scality presented at Cloud Field Day this summer. Lino Telera reviews what he saw at their presentation, looking at their software-defined storage solution that provides a scale-out filesystem that can access and move data across multi-cloud deployments.

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Cloud Field Day2: The S3 storage under control with Scality

Kentik Finds Truth in the Traffic

Pete Welcher did his homework before seeing Kentik’s presentation at Networking Field Day last month. He watched their prior presentations and was familiar with the company’s offerings. After all that, the company managed to impress Pete with their latest appearance. Read the full post for his detailed impression, but overall, Pete liked that Kentik allows for quick usability with built-in queries and reports, with actual anomaly detection, rapid reporting, and data collection across appliance silos.

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Kentik Finds Truth in the Traffic

Skyport Tech Field Day 15 Recap – YouTube

As part of his video review of Tech Field Day from last month, the CTO Advisor Keith Townsend takes a look at Skyport Systems. Keith found it a very opinionated solution, taking a view that the cloud will be pervasive, leaving only the most mandatory elements in the datacenter. Their approach then is to provide a secure, cloud managed on-site infrastructure.

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Skyport Tech Field Day 15 Recap - YouTube

Cisco Tech Field Day 15 Session Recap

Keith Townsend put together a video series looking at the presenters from Tech Field Day last month. He gives his thoughts on the overall event, and dives into what he saw from Cisco, particularly their ACI solution.

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Cisco Tech Field Day 15 Session Recap

Scale Computing HC3 Cloud Unity – Whats that about then?

Ian Sanderson takes a look at Scale Computing’s HC3 Cloud Unity, which uses Google Cloud’s new nested virtualization feature to offer a DRaaS solution ideally suited for SMBs. By being able to run Scale’s hypervisor on Google’s cloud hypervisor, it lets you move over your VMs to the cloud when disaster strikes without any reconfiguration hassle.

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Scale Computing HC3 Cloud Unity - Whats that about then?

Spartans and Servers and Storage, Oh My!

James Green explores the IT lessons found in the legendary Battle of Thermopylae, bottlenecks can be a big deal. He uses this example of a serialized approach to combat to show why parallelism is important both in ancient combat and for I/O in the modern enterprise. A modern example of this is DataCore Software’s just released MaxParallel for SQL Server which parallelizes workloads to optimize them for multiple CPUs. It’s a really fun metaphor and a great read!

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Spartans and Servers and Storage, Oh My!

Netscout Aircheck G2 V2 and Test Accessory

NETSCOUT’s V2 update for the Aircheck G2 has received a lot of buzz and for good reason. The update expands the functionality of the already valuable, including support for captive portals, iPerf testing, and direct packet capture. Haydn Andrews had the opportunity to test out the new update, and was pleased to see the capabilities added to an already essential piece of the wireless toolkit.

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Netscout Aircheck G2 V2 and Test Accessory

Scale Computing is Simplifying DRaaS

Matt Crape looks at Scale Computing’s HC3 Cloud Unity Platform, which offers disaster recovery as a service backed by Google Cloud. Scale is able to offer this thanks to Google’s newly announced support for nested virtualization, effectively letting you run a hypervisor within a hypervisor. Matt sees this as a viable path for SMBs to actually adopt a DR plan. Scale’s HC3 Cloud Unity makes it affordable, managed by their familiar interface, and easily moves over workloads in the event of an outage.

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Scale Computing is Simplifying DRaaS

A tale of two storage companies – NetApp and Vantara (HDS-Insight Grp-Pentahoo)

Ray Lucchesi heard competing visions from storage companies in transitions recently. At Insight, NetApp presented themselves as the data service provider for IT and a willingness to embrace the cloud. The newly created Hitachi Vantara’s philosophy is based around the move to IoT. Ray lays out each company’s goals, it’s problem with customers, and who is ultimately right in with these divergent approaches.

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A tale of two storage companies – NetApp and Vantara (HDS-Insight Grp-Pentahoo)

Intent-Based Analytics: What is it?

After their presentation at Tech Field Day last month, Apstra’s Sasha Ratkovic shares a post defining intent-based analytics. Their solution is based around formally defining a single source of truth from which you can reason about the presence of change. This allows for analytics based on that criteria, rather than a constantly fluctuating current state.

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Intent-Based Analytics: What is it?

It’s Time for Hard Drives to Join Tape In The Archive Tier

Mechanical hard drives are wonders of engineering. Despite proclamations of potential capacity limits, we’ve seen companies innovate to produce increasingly dense drives. But Chris Evans makes a compelling case here why spinning disks should be relegated to archiving going forward. This is because while throughput has increased much more slowly than capacity, we’ve actually seen latency get 50% worse in the last ten years. Combined with increased viability of cloud storage, Chris sees hard drives as viable for archive only.

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It's Time for Hard Drives to Join Tape In The Archive Tier

DataCore MaxParallel for SQL Server – Whats that about then?

DataCore Software debuted their MaxParallel for SQL server solution at Tech Field Day last month. This uses parallel processing to allow multicore systems to begin working on I/O requests without waiting for other cores to be complete. For SQL Server, this results in X quicker response and 60% more transactions processed. At the event, Ian Sanderson found out that this doesn’t specifically target SQL workloads, but instead uses a Least Recently Used caching mechanism to evict old data across the board.

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DataCore MaxParallel for SQL Server - Whats that about then?

Extreme Networks Has Good Footing to Lead Network Fabric Evolution from Hype to Reality | wirednot

Lee Badman is fairly bullish on Extreme Networks’ approach to network fabric architecture. Their approach starts with a whitepaper that actually outlines what such an architecture can actually be used for in an organization. Combined with their recent acquisition on Avaya, which Lee saw in detail at Wireless Field Day back in 2014, he thinks Extreme Networks makes the best case for a network fabric approach. They have a the track record, vision, and technical resources that are rarely found in competitors.

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Extreme Networks Has Good Footing to Lead Network Fabric Evolution from Hype to Reality | wirednot

More Gee Whiz for the Netscout AirCheck G2

For Lee Badman, it’s less of question of if a wireless professional would want a NETSCOUT AirCheck G2, but whether they have one yet. With their V2 firmware update for the device, NETSCOUT added a number of useful features, including native packet capture, detecting and characterizing interferers, and iPerf testing. Lee is looking forward to getting a hands-on review sometime soon.

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More Gee Whiz for the Netscout AirCheck G2

Commentary: High Level Data Filtration

Dr. Rachel Traylor looks at Ixia’s approach to real-time network visibility. This uses high level data filtration from a database of known bad actors to quickly eliminate large chunks of data from their analysis engine. This allows them to not have to process the entire firehose of network data and gives each successive analysis layer additional efficiency.

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Commentary: High Level Data Filtration

Back In The Saddle Of A Horse Of A Different Color

Do CCIE’s dream of CLI’s? For Tom Hollingsworth, he sees less value in keyboard based inputs of individual network devices, and now focuses on a more architectural level. He uses Aruba’s 8400 ArubaOS-CX as an example of a hard shift away from CLI, it’s still available under the covers, but the switch has been seemingly designed to require minimal keyboard input, while allowing for mass configuration and automation.

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Back In The Saddle Of A Horse Of A Different Color

A Thank You to Tech Field Day

Paul Woodward reflects back on the experience of his first Tech Field Day in this post. He found the three days of presentations surrounded by delegates from across the globe to be an exhilarating experience. We’re looking forward to seeing his thoughts on the presenting companies as part of #Blogtober!

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A Thank You to Tech Field Day

Inefficiencies of large systems

Inspired by DataCore Software’s Tech Field Day presentation, Keith Townsend reflects on the inefficiencies of large organizations, using Microsoft as an example. Microsoft is filled with skilled engineers, but often can’t be responsive to customer requests for giant projects like SQL server. This is where DataCore can come in with their I/O filter, which provides parallel streams to the storage sub-system, ultimately giving applications more I/O bandwidth.

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Inefficiencies of large systems

Seeing Tetration in action – NFD16

At Networking Field Day last month, Amy Arnold saw a presentation on Cisco’s Tetration. The platform uses machine learning to proactively create security policies based on current flow information. Amy was impressed to see that this not only has the ability to predict security policies based on current flows, but that the system can integration with services like Splunk or Phantom to communicate with devices to isolate traffic.

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Seeing Tetration in action – NFD16

Hybrid cloud platforms look to liberate VMware, Azure tie-in

In this piece, Cloud Field Day delegate Tim Crawford was quoted on what he saw on Rovius Cloud from Accelerite at the event. Tim find the solution, which is built on the former CloudStack platform, easier to use and manage compared to OpenStack.

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Hybrid cloud platforms look to liberate VMware, Azure tie-in