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.
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
Is it time for virtual switch abstraction to fade?
From VMware’s presentation on NSX at Networking Field Day, Keith Townsend started looking seriously at the concept of a virtual switch. After working with designing cloud-based infrastructure projects, where the concept doesn’t exist, Keith was seeing the idea as outmoded in a modern data center. This caused a fascinating discussion in the VMware presentation. Keith links to it, and it definitely gets you thinking.
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Is it time for virtual switch abstraction to fade?
Storage is Getting Cloudier!
Stephen Foskett shares his thoughts on the increasing cloudification of storage. He highlights NetApp’s move into Microsoft’s Azure cloud as a prime example. It’s all part of what Stephen calls the “Year of Cloud Extension”!
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Excelero NVMesh: lightning fast software-defined storage using commodity servers & NVMe drives
Jon Klaus came away from March’s Storage Field Day impressed with Excelero. The company came out of stealth at the event with their software defined block scale-out storage, NVMesh. This uses commodity servers and NVMe drives to deliver impressive performance. Jon gives a review of their overall architecture, their value proposition, and general impressions from their presentation.
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Excelero NVMesh: lightning fast software-defined storage using commodity servers & NVMe drives
The Year of Cloud Extension
The idea of incorporating cloud storage into the data center has been around for a while. But Stephen Foskett thinks we’re seeing philosophically different approaches to it recently, with many companies embracing the premise of data non-locality. Stephen sees this change in the assumption from data being tied to a data center to the cloud as a transformative shift allowing for true data center transformation.
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Rubrik’s Doing All the Boring Enterprise Backup Stuff
Eric Shanks first saw Rubrik back at Virtualization Field Day in 2015 where he heard CEO Bipul Sinha describe the company’s vision of providing the equivalent of Apple’s Time Machine for enterprise. Today, Rubrik has released version 4.0, code named Alta, and Eric looks at how feature rich the platform has become.
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Rubrik’s Doing All the Boring Enterprise Backup Stuff
NetApp Doesn’t Want You To Be Special (This Is A Good Thing)
At Storage Field Day, NetApp’s Andy Banta spoke about the death of the specialized admin in enterprise IT. As infrastructures become automated and easier to managed, and as hardware shifts increasingly toward commodity, there becomes less of a need for these admins in an organization. Dan found it a fascinating discussion, in that it showed some of that context and consequences of the new technical solutions generally presented at Tech Field Day events.
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NetApp Doesn’t Want You To Be Special (This Is A Good Thing)
Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure//Accelerate 2017 – FlashBlade 2.0
Pure Storage’s FlashBlade 2.0 has been getting a lot of coverage coming out of Pure Accelerate, and Dan Frith is no exception. In their Storage Field Day Exclusive presentation, Pure Storage went over how FlashBlade is designed now to scale beyond fifteen blades, and went into detail on other architectural features and refinements.
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Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure//Accelerate 2017 – FlashBlade 2.0
The Purity of Hyperconverged Infrastructure: What’s in a Name?
Scott Lowe isn’t too high on the term Hyperconverged Infrastructure. For Scott, it’s basically a catch all for some combination of storage and compute in a single appliance. But increasingly, though HCI broadly offers simplicity, it can fail to meet the specific needs of an organization. Scott looks at solutions from Datrium, Dell EMC ScaleIO, and NetApp that all could be categorized as HCI, but take a fundamentally different approach.
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The Purity of Hyperconverged Infrastructure: What’s in a Name?
Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure//Accelerate 2017 – Purity Update
Dan Frith shares his notes from “Day 0” of Pure Accelerate. There, he saw Pure Storage talk about their new ActiveCluster, which Dan seems pretty excited about. He also gives his initial thoughts on Pure Storage’s announcements regarding VVols support and DirectFlash Shelf.
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Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure//Accelerate 2017 – Purity Update
Storage Field Day Is Almost Here
It’s always fun to see delegate’s perspective before and after an event. Brandon Graves went to his first Storage Field Day last week. He definitely seemed enthusiastic in this piece previewing the event. Looking forward to see what he took away.
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Storage Field Day Is Almost Here
Storage Field Day 13 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
It’s always a pleasure to have Dan Frith at a Storage Field Day event. He attended last week in Denver, and made sure to write up a full disclosure surrounding the event. If you want to see the same presentations Dan did, make sure to checkout our comprehensive video coverage!
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Storage Field Day 13 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
Don’t Build Big Data With Bad Data
Big data, machine learning, AI. If you were playing buzzword bingo, you just need to throw in IoT to win. But Tom Hollingsworth makes some great points about some of the blind spots that become apparent in these technologies that otherwise engender hagiography. For Tom, it’s an issue of where data comes in for these systems. If the starting point is flawed, either in how it was collected or in a cultural sense, the end result cannot help but be impacted.
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Don’t Build Big Data With Bad Data
WAN Design Is Changing: What That Means for You
Based on discussions at Networking Field Day last year, Pete Welcher put together of why and how WAN design is changing. Pete sees this being driven by the needs of SaaS and cloud-based apps, which require low latency. This manifests in three design choices, centralized, decentralized, and regionalized internet access. This is a really thoughtful look on the topic, make sure to check it out!
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WAN Design Is Changing: What That Means for You
NEW: The Podcast Domain and Other Fun Stuff at CLUS
We’ll be hosting a Tech Field Day Extra event from Cisco Live US next week in Las Vegas. Make sure to check out Cisco’s dedicated podcast space, the Podcast Domain! Sign up, and you can record your own content. Of course, if you can’t make it, make sure to follow along on our live stream!
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NEW: The Podcast Domain and Other Fun Stuff at CLUS
Backup and Recovery in the Cloud: Simplification is Actually Really Hard
Scott Lowe looks at the effort needed to really simplify backup and recovery to the cloud. This was inspired after seeing StorageCraft present at Storage Field Day earlier this month. For Scott, simplicity is just a mask that wraps up inherent complexity. But in StorageCraft, he saw an interesting approach to this masking. In the event of a total data loss, StorageCraft overnights disks with data that was stored nightly on their private cloud. Once received, these are then synced with the most up to date versions that occurred between the last full backup and the present time. This allows organizations to recover mission critical data from catastrophe much quicker.
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Backup and Recovery in the Cloud: Simplification is Actually Really Hard
Half 2017 in community with VMTN, VMworld 2017 and TechFieldDay
Lino Telera joined us as a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld 2016. He’s been keeping up to date with our past events, and wrote up some thoughts on the past two Tech Field Day events. Lino also gives a preview of VMworld 2017. He’ll be in attendance, and see the show moving to embrace greater industry trends of Big Data and IoT.
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Half 2017 in community with VMTN, VMworld 2017 and TechFieldDay