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.
Sans SAN with StorMagic
Rich Stroffolino writes up his thoughts about StorMagic’s SvSAN solution. He sees it as an interesting way to bring enterprise class storage to sites that might not have a heavy volume of data, but need high availability and redundancy in a pure software package.
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A field day of Storage lies ahead!
Mike Preston is heading to Storage Field Day in Denver, coming up quickly in June. He’s excited by the variety of companies that are going to present, as well as meeting his fellow delegates, who Mike describes as “real storage rockstars”. You can watch the presentation along with Mike on our livestream, June 14-16.
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A field day of Storage lies ahead!
InteropITX 2017 Breakdown
Frank Owen has been going to Interop, and it’s his self-professed favorite IT conference. He wrote up a review of the experience this year, which included the Workshop/Seminar pass for the first time. With this, he saw a lot of interesting sessions on the leadership track. He also attended a Tech Field Day Extra presentation from Paessler, with a look at their PRTG infrastructure monitoring solution. We’ll look forward to seeing Frank there again!
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VMware NSX: Going Big with Micro-Segmentation
At Networking Field Day in April, VMware gave a four hour presentation, going into a deep dive on NSX. In this piece, Rich Stroffolino focuses specifically on how the platform can be used for network security applications, and increase overall visibility.
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VMware NSX: Going Big with Micro-Segmentation
NetApp and Open Source
NetApp and open source isn’t an association that immediately springs to mind. Rich Stroffolino wrote up a piece giving an overview of why that’s about to change. The company has actively engaged with the open source community over the past 18 months, centered around their developer site, thePub. Their efforts originally started back in 2011 around OpenStack, and now they have made significant contributions to the Cinder and Manila projects as well.
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Managed Storage with ClearSky Data
Rich Stroffolino writes up his thoughts on what he saw from ClearSky Data, based on their Tech Field Day presentation. He particularly highlights the companies early moves into provide a storage backend for containerized applications. The work is still in development, but Rich is excited by the possibilities.
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Managed Storage with ClearSky Data
#TFD14 Recap – NetApp Open Ecosystem
Pietro Piutti looks at what NetApp presented at Tech Field Day. The presentation focused squarely on the company’s open source initiatives. These open source projects are organized around what NetApp is calling The Pub. Pietro sees this move to open source as beneficial to everyone. Code that NetApp is contributing toward Kubernetes or Docker is accessible to anyone, and NetApp benefits by making storage more easily consumed and customized for specific uses by developers.
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#TFD14 Recap – NetApp Open Ecosystem
Turbonomic: Not a Flash in the Pan
Matt Crape has been aware of Turbonomic for some time, but until they presented at Tech Field Day, had some concerns. One was a dated Flash-based interface. The other was how to prove its monetary value. With an updated, clean HTML5 interface, the first concern is assuaged. Turbonomics Application Assurance platform also supports a “Pending Actions” portion of the dashboard. This allows you to assign costs to each component of your infrastructure, and see how changes will impact that, including cloud migration. For Matt, it’s a really compelling combination.
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Turbonomic: Not a Flash in the Pan
Tech Field Day 14 Recap: Community and the Turbonomic Vision
Turbonomic’s Eric Wright shares a blog post detailing what the company presented about at Tech Field Day earlier this month. This includes their vastly revamped HTML5 UI, which allows for users to easily see their virtual supply chain. This is a visualization of every part of a given infrastructure that effects application performance. Make sure to check out the full video if you missed the livestream during the presentation.
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Tech Field Day 14 Recap: Community and the Turbonomic Vision
#TFD14 Recap – Turbonomic: New UI, Clouds and Containers
Pietro Piutti came away impressed from Turbonomic’s Tech Field Day presentation. They showed their application assurance platform. Pietro was intrigued how this not only monitored infrastructure, but had a constant focus on looking at all components that effect application performance. This includes looking at how infrastructure and workload changes would effect the system before deploying, as well as a built in tool to show the costs of keeping apps on-premises versus moving them to the cloud.
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#TFD14 Recap – Turbonomic: New UI, Clouds and Containers
See you at Storage Field Day 13 and Pure Accelerate!
Max Mortillaro is heading to Denver next month to join us at Storage Field Day! We’ve got a full slate of companies for the event, and Max gives a quick rundown of what he’s expecting from each. For Max, the event features companies he’s heard from before and will be getting an update on (Exablox, Primary Data), those that he’s heard about or has had limited interactions with (Dell EMC, SNIA, Seagate), and one, X-IO, that’s brand new. We’re excited to hear what Max’s impressions are after he hears from them all.
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See you at Storage Field Day 13 and Pure Accelerate!
Why the Heck Would You Use NSX?
John Welsh got to drink from the firehose of a four hour VMware NSX presentation at Networking Field Day in April. He thinks the value the platform gives is in its ability to provide additional security layers through micro-segmentation. This isn’t meant to replace a hardware perimeter firewall, but can provide additional firewalls down to vNIC level. Effectively setting a stateful firewall policy per VM.
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Why the Heck Would You Use NSX?
Datrium And Open Convergence
Rich Stroffolino wrote up his thoughts on Datrium’s presentation from Tech Field Day. The company has an interesting response to the typical hyperconverged infrastructure story, something they call Open Convergence with their DVX Rackscale architecture. This allows for heterogeneous deployments of Datrium’s own nodes and existing hardware. More importantly, Datrium’s architecture separates nodes for mass storage and those for compute. This allows for servers to be stateless, easier management, and less cross-talk between nodes. It’s a very interesting rethink of how to approach convergence.
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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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