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.
Programmable ASICs in Cisco Switches
Jasper Bongertz attended his first Tech Field Day presentation while he was at Cisco Live Europe. At the presentation, he learned about what Cisco is doing with programmable ASICs, including their “Unified Access Data Plane”, which allows for encapsulation or decapsulation of packets dynamically without losing performance. Jasper also liked seeing support for Netflow directly in hardware. He thinks while it’s an important network management tool, its also vital for security considerations. Overall, he thinks Cisco has an interesting approach to making ASICs a little more flexible.
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Programmable ASICs in Cisco Switches
Excelero are doing what? For how much?
Dan Frith got a look at Excelero’s NVMesh at Storage Field Day last week. NVMesh is a virtual SAN specifically designed for the particular capabilities of NMVe drives. Dan was impressed by the speeds attainable by the solution, which scale almost linearly as additional drives are added. More impressively, this is done with no load on the target CPU, with data being interacted directly with drives via RDDA. He isn’t quite as sure if it’s ready for mass adoption yet, Excelero isn’t ready to wrap in a bunch of data services in version 1.1. But if speed is your primary concern, Dan thinks Excelero has a compelling offering.
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Excelero are doing what? For how much?
Storage Field Day 12 Day 1 Recap and Day 2 Preview
Adam Bergh wrote up his thoughts after the first day of Storage Field Day, held last week in Silicon Valley. First up was Ryussi with their MoSMB solution. Adam found it an interesting SMB3 stack, ideally suited for scalable environments due to it’s lightweight and performance considerations. Starwind then presented, and Adam enjoyed hearing about their Cloud Gateway hardware, basically a hard drive without the drive to make cloud storage more addressable to your server. Elastifile presented about their distributed file system for block storage on Linux, using a very interesting consistency algorithm to keep performance from suffering. Finally, to finish the day, Excelero presented, launching their NVMesh solution. Adam was impressed when he saw 2.4 million IOPs at 0.2ms latency using relatively inexpensive hardware.
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Storage Field Day 12 Day 1 Recap and Day 2 Preview
Ryussi – Or Why Another SMB Stack Is Handy
First time Storage Field Day company Ryussi presented at last week’s event, showing off MoSMB, their SMB3 stack. Dan Frith wrote up his thoughts on the solution. Dan thinks it could be an interesting solution for companies not comfortable with the terms of open source alternatives, like Samba.
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Ryussi – Or Why Another SMB Stack Is Handy
Storage Field Day 12 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
Dan Frith gives his disclosure of how he traveled, ate, and any swag received at the presentations from last week’s Storage Field Day.
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Storage Field Day 12 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
SD-WAN Series Part 4: Viptela
In another installment of her excellent video series on SD-WAN, Eyvonne Sharp posted another video, this time looking a Viptela. She’s used this in a production environment, so the video goes into some interesting detail. She also breaks down the difference between SD-WAN with a WAN optimization background and those with a routing background, like Viptela.
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4.5M IO/sec@227µsec 4KB Read on 100GBE with 24 NVMe cards
Excelero Storage launched at Storage Field Day last week. Ray Lucchesi was in the audience, and got to see some interesting performance numbers from their NVMesh, their software defined block storage for Linux. Ray is definitely enthusiastic about what he saw, with good reason. Excelero showed off getting 4.5 million 4K random reads and 2.5 million 4K random writes on $13,000 worth of hardware, all with 0% target CPU usage. Check out the rest of Ray’s piece for the details.
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4.5M IO/sec@227µsec 4KB Read on 100GBE with 24 NVMe cards
Storage Field Day 12!
Adam Bergh created a rundown of all the presentations in advance of Storage Field Day. He highlighted not just the companies, but also the other delegates invited to the event. Adam was clearly excited, and it was a pleasure having him with us in Silicon Valley. Make sure to check out the full video coverage for each presenter if you missed any of the live stream during the event!
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The Engineering of Elastifile
Chin-Fah Heoh was at Storage Field Day last week. He’s written up his thoughts on what Elastifile presented, and came away “impressed to the max”. He thinks the company has put some in-depth computer science research behind their product, a truly distributed file system for object storage. The key to this is their internally designed consistency algorithm, Bizur. Check out the rest of the piece for a more in-depth look and the implications of their solution.
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Building Reliability
Tom Hollingsworth looks at the issue of network reliability. At Aruba Atmosphere, he saw some impressive reliability features, including a live non-disruptive controller upgrade during one of the presentations. Tom found it impressive, but thinks a lot of the focus on reliability, is perhaps not seeing the forest for the trees. For Tom, maybe the idea of creating incredibly robust networks that absolve users from error, Tom calls for more limitations and responsibility for people working on and using them. A little knowledge goes a long way to absolving an organization from the expense of designing an implementing the “foolproof” network.
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Ryussi MoSMB – High performance SMB
Chin-Fah Heoh saw a presentation from first time Storage Field Day company Ryussi, and they were talking about their MoSMB product, a proprietary SMB stack. Chin-Fah wondered what benefits it has over SAMBA, which has a long legacy and is free. Unlike SAMBA, MoSMB is designed for high availability and more demanding workloads. It also has support for enterprise grade applications like MS SQL and MSCS. Chin-Fah thinks there’s definitely an eager market for an enterprise-grade network file share system, and MoSMB seems up to the task.
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Ryussi MoSMB – High performance SMB
Nimble, HPE and 20-Year Old Architectures
Chris Evans looks at the recently announced HPE acquisition plans for Nimble Storage. He looks at both companies positions in the storage market, and the challenges and opportunities the acquisition will enable. For Chris, the key to the overall storage market is to increase customer share on relatively thin margins. If nothing else, Chris sees Nimble Storage as a way for HPE to gracefully retire 3PAR and provide a competitive offering in the space.
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Nimble, HPE and 20-Year Old Architectures
Vault7 Lessons – Zero Trust
Whenever you begin a piece about network trust with a quote from a Nicholas Cage film, you’re doing something right. Justin Cohen uses a quote from Con-Air as a springboard to the benefits of a zero trust network policy. He looks at how increased use of encrypted traffic requires a new methodology to secure networks, as it effectively kills deep packet inspections. Justin looks at solutions from Cisco and Illumio, which can be used as solutions in this new zero trust world.
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Selected as NFD 15 Delegate
Justin Cohen is heading back to Networking Field Day in April. He went to his first one in August, and found it awesome to get hit by the networking fire house from all the presenting companies. We’ve already announced that TELoIP and IP Infusion will be presenting, with more companies to be announced soon. Make sure to check back, and set a reminder to check out all the live streamed videos!
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Storage Field Day (#SFD12) – Presenting Companies
Chanaka Ekanayake is going to his first Storage Field Day, and he’s excited by the list of presenting companies. We hope he’s enjoying the event. Remember that you can watch along with Chan right here, we’ll have live streams of all presentations.
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Storage Field Day (#SFD12) – Vendor line up
Uila: Visions of the Future
Uila presented at Tech Field Day last month, and Teren Bryson wrote up a look at their data center analysis solution. While there’s no dearth of overall analysis tools, Uila really impressed Teren by offering visualizations that he called “nothing short of stunning”. This information is gathered by virtual smart taps, which is able to intelligently provide application visibility.
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Storage Field Day 12 – Day 0
Dan Frith wrote a preview for Storage Field Day this week, including a link to all times of the presentations, and a link to the live stream. And if that’s not enough, there’s even a picture of some delicious moussaka!
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HPE is buying Nimble Storage
Andrea Mauro wrote up a reaction to the announced plans for HPE to acquire Nimble Storage. Andrea thinks HPE already had a solid storage portfolio, so he found it very surprising. Ultimately he thinks the key to this acquisition might be Nimble’s non-storage products. This includes InfoSight and their Nimble Cloud Volumes. For Andrea, these seem to offer something that HPE currently doesn’t have in their portfolio.
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Cisco Wants You to Use APIs and It Shows
Gabriele Gerbino attended Cisco Live Europe and at a Tech Field Day Extra presentation saw how Cisco is trying to simplify campus networks with Digital Network Architecture. He reviews how Cisco is bringing automation features specific for campus networks to their enterprise switches, and what the practical implications are.
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Cisco Wants You to Use APIs and It Shows
SD-WAN Series Part 3: Silver Peak EdgeConnect
Eyvonne Sharp continues her excellent video series looking at SD-WAN. This time she’s talking about Silver Peak, who presented at Networking Field Day last month. Notably, due to their end-to-end control, Silver Peak is able to identify applications based on the very first packet received.
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