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.
VMTurbo growing up and out in to Turbonomic
John White takes a looks at Turbonomic, which is the new name for the company formerly known as VMTurbo. With the new name comes a refreshed UI. Gone is the old Flash interface, replaced with a modern and fast HTML5 interface. John finds it emblematic of the company as a whole, taking a solid foundation and making it even more mature. This includes a wide spectrum of available integration points for their application assurance platform.
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VMTurbo growing up and out in to Turbonomic
Assuring your network will do what you think it…
Tim Miller wrote up his thoughts on what he saw from Forward Networks at Networking Field Day last year. Their solution is billed for providing network assurance, which they break down into correctness and performance. Their presentation focused on correctness, which they use sophisticated modeling to formally verify. Tim reviews the implications of their Forward Platform in terms of business intent, highlights their strong search functionality, and predication engine.
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Assuring your network will do what you think it...
Network Verification with Veriflow
Pete Welcher saw a demonstration of Veriflow’s continuous network verification solution. In it, he saw some similarities with what he saw from Forward Networks last year at Networking Field Day. Both use formal verification of a network, with Veriflow pulling information from devices on the network and building a topograpghical model. Pete still has many of the same questions about how this would work as he did for Forward Networks, but ultimately his conclusion is “cool stuff”!
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Network Verification with Veriflow
Turbonomic: Adam Smith and App Assurance
At Turbonomic’s Tech Field Day presentation, they showed off their application assurance platform with a totally revamped UI. Rich Stroffolino found it compelling, and considered the overall implications of how Turbonomic frames their solution. They use a supply-and-demand paradigm to frame their solution. Rich considers the possibility that a framing metaphor could be a convincing product differentiator.
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Turbonomic: Adam Smith and App Assurance
Off to Tech Field Day 14!
Jason Nash is at his first Tech Field Day and is excited to hear from the presenting companies. He’s particularly looking forward to learning more about ClearSky Data, which he’s been researching for a while. Make sure to check for our full video coverage posted soon after the event.
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DatacenterDude is Headed to Tech Field Day
Nick Howell, aka the Data Center Dude, gives a video preview of Tech Field Day coming up with week in Boston. Nick is a first time delegate, but has been to several events with companies in a past life. Looking forward to see how the perspective informs his experience!
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DatacenterDude is Headed to Tech Field Day
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: NetApp
Matt Crape finishes off his preview posts for Tech Field Day this week with NetApp. He’s been impressed how the company has adapted, both with their successful integration of Solidfire, as well as their embrace of DevOps culture. The latter is especially important, as it’s enabled the companies offerings to be automated in code, gather than manually managed via a clunky GUI. Matt can’t wait to see what the company is working on next.
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Tech Field Day 14 Primer: NetApp
#TFD14 Preview – Datrium
Pietro Piutti will cross the Atlantic to join us at Tech Field Day in Boston this week. In his last preview post, he takes a look at Datrium. He describes what he found research DVX, their take on the converged data center problem. They use discrete data and compute nodes, combined with a Hyperdriver software component, to cluster total IOPS capacity within the system, rather than have competition for system resources on the fly. Pietro sees this as an interesting take on HCI, saying “even if the ingredients are familiar, the recipe is different and the serving looks yummy!” He’s get the full entree at Tech Field Day. Make sure to get your own serving by watching along on our live stream!
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Modernizing Traditional Applications with Docker
While DockerCon last year definitely had some focus on the enterprise, Josh Coen was surprised to see the emphasis on it this time around. Microsoft was all over the place at the event, and with good reason. Docker’s focus at the event was their Modernizing Traditional Applications, certainly something applicable to the fine folks in Redmond. Josh reviews the benefits of legacy app containerization, Docker’s high level stages for the process, and offers his thoughts on what he saw. Josh got a full presentation on the details at Tech Field Day Extra, as well as a look into what Portworx is doing with software-defined storage for containers.
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Modernizing Traditional Applications with Docker
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: Datrium
Matt Crape is heading to Boston for Tech Field Day 14 and is doing his homework on Datrium beforehand. He’s interested to learn more about their DVX storage solution. This effectively allows for disaggregation of storage from compute in a VM environment. Reads are done on fast local cache on the server, and writes are put back onto the DVX appliance. This allows for performance to increase at scale, and allows for high availability. Make sure to catch them on our live stream during the vent to learn more!
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Tech Field Day 14 Primer: Datrium
Ixia: Good Defense Leads to a Good Offense
Pete Welcher wrote up his thoughts on what he saw from Ixia at Networking Field Day last year. The company has a diverse and sprawling product line, so Pete focuses the post specifically on their Network Packet Broker solution. Pete sets up the conversation by considering the benefits and costs of setting up network taps. This nicely sets up what he saw from Ixia’s Visibility tool, which seems to be a nice solution rather than tapping everything. This concentrated approach let’s a network engineer prioritize what they are looking for, rather than capture everything and trying to make sense of the mass of data.
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Ixia: Good Defense Leads to a Good Offense
#TFD14 Preview – Turbonomic
Pietro Piutti is anxious to learn more about Turbonomic. He doesn’t have experience with their solution, but is intrigued with their “desired state” concept for VM infrastructure. Best of all, this isn’t locked in to a single hypervisor, it works cross platform. Pietro sees this as a major advantage and can’t wait to learn more at Tech Field Day next week!
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#TFD14 Preview – ClearSky Data
Before Pietro Piutti comes to his first Tech Field Day event, he’s writing up some presenting company previews. His first centers around ClearSky Data. The company provides cloud storage, but uses distributed points of presence as another caching layer between on-site storage and the cloud. Their 2U all-flash appliance works for hot data, which is then gradually moved further up the “cloud cache” as it needs to be accessed less and less. It’s an interesting approach and Pietro is definitely interested in learning more.
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#TFD14 Preview – ClearSky Data
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: Turbonomic
Matt Crape will see Turbonomic presented at Tech Field Day next week. The company has grown 954% in the last three years, and Matt thinks the company’s solutions are worthy of the rapid growth. They center their monitoring tools around the idea of desired state, keeping machines well balanced between performance and efficiency. After monitoring a VM deployment for a little while, their solution is soon able to give recommendations, or even full intermediation. This allows for more reliable application performance, and better quality assurance for an organization. Can’t wait to see what they’ll present about at Tech Field Day!
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Tech Field Day 14 Primer: Turbonomic
Tech Field Day 14 Preview – Datrium
Jon Hildebrand doesn’t pull any punches, saying “I consider storage to be a necessary evil in which there will always be a surly storage administrator to give me the runaround.” But in the effort of being a renaissance IT professional, decided his first Tech Field Day preview post be about a storage company, Datrium. Their DVX Rackscale storage solution intrigued Jon with is disaggregated architecture. Datrium claims that the more hosts that are added to the system, the faster it will run, up to 3,000,000 IOPS. Jon seemed really excited by their Blanket Encryption feature, which seems to mitigate a lot of performance concerns generally found with securing data.
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Tech Field Day 14 Preview – Datrium
Moving to and between clouds made simple with Elastifile Cloud File System – FastStorage
Moving data to the cloud and moving between clouds are some of the primary challenges facing organizations today. Often cloud provider lock-in is a very real concern. From what Jon Klaus saw from Elastifile, their Elastifile Cloud File System is the secret to make both easier. ECFS is designed for web scale clients and users, and can be extended into the public cloud. Designed with true distribution in mind, the file system should allow you to easy and reliably move data between on-premises and the public clouds.
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Moving to and between clouds made simple with Elastifile Cloud File System - FastStorage
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: ClearSky Data
Matt Crape is headed for Tech Field Day next week, and he’s writing up previews of the presenting companies. In this post, he looks at ClearSky Data. They offer a tiered storage solution. This leverages an edge appliance on-site with up to 24TB of flash storage, which tiers and caches hot data. This then falls back to the ClearSky Data network of PoPs, which serve to cache “warm” data, with cold data handed off to S3. Matt hopes to learn more about their recently announced data protection solution at their presentation. Make sure to tune in live to watch along with Matt during the event.
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Tech Field Day 14 Primer: ClearSky Data
Network as a Service provider TeloIP
TELoIP presented at Networking Field Day last month. Keith Townsend heard a lot to think about during the presentation. Although they position themselves as offering a SD-WAN offering, Keith sees them as a Network as a Service, targeted at MSPs, allowing them to drop a high-speed circuit at the last mile. While this wasn’t targeted at Keith’s enterprise focus, he nevertheless found them to be “an intriguing 13-year old company”.
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Network as a Service provider TeloIP
E62 – Aruba Did What?
The No Strings Attached Show takes a look at the experience from Aruba Atmosphere 2017 in Nashville. They talk about some of the live demos they saw, including a live update of a controller during the keynote. Give it a listen and hear more from Blake Krone and Sam Clements!
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Docker, Modernizing Traditional Applications
At DockerCon, one of Docker’s major pushing was modernizing traditional applications, MTA. They’re specifically targeting containerizing legacy Windows applications, a lift and shift approach by placing an entire Windows image inside a container. Edward Haletky isn’t entirely won over by the draft specifications as outlined by Docker for this process. He does like that Docker introduced certified containers, which goes a long way to alleviate security concerns, and credential specification within PowerShell. The big challenge he sees is identifying applications going forward.
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