Not The Cisco of John Chambers Anymore

Based on his experience at Cisco Live US, Tom Hollingsworth discusses signs of a very different Cisco under new CEO Chuck Robins. Robins’ focus on software over hardware and a more hands on leadership style will lead to big changes within this iconic company.

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Not The Cisco of John Chambers Anymore

StorMagic’s SvSAN – Targeting HCI’s ROBO Sweet Spot

StorMagic presented at Tech Field Day back in February. Here, Howard Marks reviews how their SvSAN delivers hyper converged infrastructure for remote and branch office environments as well as how their unique approach to software-defined storage is designed to keep costs low while improving performance and maintaining highly available clusters.

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StorMagic’s SvSAN – Targeting HCI’s ROBO Sweet Spot

Uila are Using Your Network (and some smart analytics) to Understand What’s Really Going On

After viewing Uila’s presentation at Tech Field Day 13, Dan Frith discusses their unique approach to monitoring and root cause analysis, saying they shine at making the trip from data collection to problem identification a quick and easy process.

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Uila are Using Your Network (and some smart analytics) to Understand What's Really Going On

 

Primary Data Attacks Application Ignorance

At Primary Data’s Storage Field Day presentation, they brought up the idea that applications are “unaware”. This ignorance is to the underlying infrastructure, as they are not generally written with a specific set of hardware or specification in mind. Dan Frith shares his thoughts on their solution to this problem, DataSphere, “a metadata engine that automates the flow of data across the enterprise infrastructure and the cloud to meet evolving application demands”.

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Primary Data Attacks Application Ignorance

Storage Field Day 13 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

Dan Frith finishes up his coverage of Storage Field Day and the Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate. This includes links to all his coverage, other delegates, and his closing thoughts on the events.

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Storage Field Day 13 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

The Dawn of a New Networking Era

Jon Hildebrand was at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US. From what he saw of the presentation from Cisco at the event, they all fit into what Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins talked about in his keynote: Scale, Simplification, Security. John sees these points at play in the develops Cisco has made with ASICs, specifically in their new Catalyst 9000 line. By providing programmable ASICs that can easily add new features over time, a policy driven Digital Network Architecture Center management dashboard, and offering threat analysis on encrypted traffic, Cisco certain seems to have aligned their products around those three principals.

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The Dawn of a New Networking Era

StorageCraft Are In Your Data Centre And In The Cloud

At StorageCraft’s Storage Field Day presentation, Dan Frith was reminded of why he’s liked using their solutions in the past. The world of DRaaS, offers a “terribly simple” way to get it up and running. And when disaster does strike, the ability to immediately use their cloud as a failover means you don’t lose a lot of time in recovery either.

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StorageCraft Are In Your Data Centre And In The Cloud

Real-time Storage Analytics: one step further towards AI-enabled storage arrays?

At the Storage Field Day Exclusive event at Pure Accelerate, Max Mortillaro was struck by a recent storage trend. It seems that every storage vendor is now offering real-time analytics as part of their storage array offerings. Max looks at Pure Storage’s take on this, which combines their Pure 1 real-time analytics, with a machine learning extension called META.

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Real-time Storage Analytics: one step further towards AI-enabled storage arrays?

SNIA’s Swordfish Is Better Than The Film

At Storage Field Day, SNIA presented on their Swordfish, their scalable storage management standard. With the way that storage has radically changed in the data center over the last fifteen years, Dan think that projects like Swordfish demonstrate just how vital SNIA has become in the industry.

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SNIA’s Swordfish Is Better Than The Film

TFDx at Cisco Live 2017 – Part 1 (Preview)

Dustin Beare went to Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US this past week. In this post, he gives a quick look at what he saw from Cisco at the event. This includes how the company is approaching ASIC design, the redesigned IOS-XE, which is now more container based for easier feature expansion, and a wide range of updates from the Cisco Digital Network Architecture platforms.

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TFDx at Cisco Live 2017 – Part 1 (Preview)

The Eigencast 026: Pure Marketing

On his podcast, Justin Warren interviewed Jonathan Martin, the outgoing CMO at Pure Storage. It’s a really interesting conversation that focuses on the importance of storytelling for a company, while not losing sight of the importance of data metrics. It’s a really interesting insight into the company.

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The Eigencast 026: Pure Marketing

ScaleIO Is Not Your Father’s SDS

Dan Frith looks at ScaleIO, a Dell EMC software-defined storage solution. He runs down the comprehensive feature list in the article, and finds that with the right hardware combination, ScaleIO can offer compelling block storage performance across a variety of use cases. Dan definitely recommends giving it a try for yourself.

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ScaleIO Is Not Your Father’s SDS

Dell EMC’s Isilon All-Flash Is Starting To Make Sense

Dell EMC’s Isilon has a long history in the scale-out NAS market. Dan Frith writes up his thoughts on their latest all-flash offering. He sees this as useful in the media/entertainment vertical that Isilon already serves, where the trasition to higher resolution 4K media dramatically increases requirements. It may never be a solution for organization on a budget, but Dan sees it as well positioned for demanding workloads.

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Dell EMC’s Isilon All-Flash Is Starting To Make Sense

Protection and instant access of Microsoft SQL database – DevOps with Actifio

Tech Field Day presentations are always informative, but it’s always great when a presentation directly helps someone solve a problem. Mariusz Kaczorek remembered a presentation from Actifio at last June’s Tech Field Day event. In this post, he took what he saw from Actifio to solve an access issue with Microsoft SQL Server backups.

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Protection and instant access of Microsoft SQL database - DevOps with Actifio

What I’m Looking Forward to at Cisco Live 2017

Scott McDermott is in Vegas and ready to take on Cisco Live. In this post, he shares what he’s looking forward to at the event. This includes a trio of Tech Field Day Extra presentations from Paessler, OpenGear, and NetApp.

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What I'm Looking Forward to at Cisco Live 2017

X-IO Technologies Are Living On The Edge

Dan Frith looks at X-IO’s Axellio platform, their new entry into edge computing. The platform was designed to enable processing of streaming data as close to ingest as possible, with the resulting analytics sent back to a data center. Dan thinks Axellio is well designed for that purpose, even if it might not be applicable to the legacy systems he often works with.

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X-IO Technologies Are Living On The Edge

Axellio, next gen, IO intensive server for RT analytics by X-IO Technologies

At Storage Field Day, the delegates saw a technical deep dive on X-IO Technologies new edge computing platform, Axellio. Ray Lucchesi runs down some the notable components of the platform. This includes support for up to 460TB of raw NVMe in a 2U appliance, the ability to add two off-load modules for parallel computing or machine learning, and over 12 Million IO/sec with at 35µsec latencies.

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Axellio, next gen, IO intensive server for RT analytics by X-IO Technologies

Pure Accelerate: FlashArray Gets Synchronous Replication

Chris Evans writes about some important news coming out of Pure Accelerate. Pure Storage is now offering synchronous replication on its FlashBlade line. The feature is called ActiveCluster, and Chris got a technical deep dive on it at the Storage Field Day Exclusive event at Pure Accelerate. Chris does a great job running through the ActiveCluster architecture, and how those decisions will impact its adoption in the data center.

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Pure Accelerate: FlashArray Gets Synchronous Replication

Dell EMC’s in the Midst of a Midrange Resurrection

Dan Frith got an update on Dell EMC’s midrange Unity portfolio at Storage Field Day earlier this month. He found the line significantly more refined compared to its rather rough launch, now merging file, block or VMware Virtual Volume storage sharing in the same storage pool. The included data services also show that Dell EMC is listening to their customers. It’s a sign to Dan that midrange, while not the most exciting, is still receiving the attention it deserves.

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Dell EMC’s in the Midst of a Midrange Resurrection

Vendor Briefing: Comtrade backup for Nutanix, HYCU

Comtrade recently released HYCU (pronounced like Haiku), a backup and recovery solution for Nutanix’s HCI platform. In this post, Alastair Cooke digs into what differentiates it from Nutanix’s own built-in tools.

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Vendor Briefing: Comtrade backup for Nutanix, HYCU