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.
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Robin Systems
Thom Greene takes a look at Robin Systems ahead of Tech Field Day next week. They take an application-specific approach to the data center, which Thom finds interesting, considering how much virtual machines generally dominate. They do this by abstracting the application away from the OS in containers, using a smart storage and compute fabric as a management layer. It’s a really interesting approach. Thom appreciated looking into the company to get a better handle on containers in general. He’ll only get more info at their Tech Field Day presentation.
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Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Robin Systems
I’m heading to Tech Field Day 13!
Sean Thulin is going to Tech Field Day next week in Austin, and he’s excited for another event! He attended Storage Field Day last October, but this is first first event with a more general data center focus. He really enjoys the format of the events, especially the technical questions the delegates can ask directly to the presenting companies. He’ll be tweeting during the event, so keep your eye out for #TFD13 for all the latest updates while you’re watching along live!
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I’m heading to Tech Field Day 13!
StorMagic virtual SAN solution for vSphere and MS Hyper-V
StorMagic will be presenting at Tech Field Day in Austin, coming up in February. Andreas Lesslhumer gives a look to their virtual SAN solution. This gives small and medium-sized enterprises the ability to get high-end features at an attainable price. StorMagic’s software works with two or more commodity servers to provide a high availability virtual SAN to your vSphere of Hyper-V environment. We’re looking forward to learning more from StorMagic during their TFD presentation!
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StorMagic virtual SAN solution for vSphere and MS Hyper-V
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Veeam
Thom Greene continues his excellent previews of Tech Field Day companies he’ll see in Austin. From Veeam, he’s looking forward to learning more about their backup solution for Office 365. This alleviates a lot of the time and worry administrators have to do to make sure documents and emails don’t get deleted over time, especially important for litigation holds. Thom’s used Veeam in the past, and found that it “just works”. At Tech Field Day, he’ll get a look under the hood to some of their engineering that makes it so reliable.
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Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Veeam
Two Takes On ASIC Design
Tom Hollingsworth saw a presentation from Barefoot Networks that made him rethink ASIC design. Competing designs from Cisco put some programmable elements inside the ASIC. But Barefoot fully abstracts functionality via it’s P4 programming, the ASIC is completely configurable in code. This combines reduce complexity and increase speed. In an impressive ground-up rethink of what a network switch can do!
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Back to Tech Field Day
Andrea Mauro is heading to Tech Field Day in Austin, coming up February 1st. He give a little context for his own involvements with past events, including some Virtualization Field Days and Tech Field Day Extras, but this is his first full Tech Field Day. He gives a rundown of his impressions of the presenting companies, but overall is excited to meet with other delegates, and to get into the technical deep dives. We’re excited to have Andrea coming to Austin, and can’t wait to hear his impressions of the presentations!
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Barefoot Networks Announces First Switches With Programmable Tofino Chip
Barefoot Networks made a big announcement prior to their presentation at Networking Field Day this week, new programmable networking switches using Tofino silicon! Delegate Drew Conry-Murray reviews the what the switch will be offering, including 32 and 64-port 100 GbE models, available in Q1. We’re looking forward to learning more about them, and to Barefoot Networks’ presentation at Networking Field Day!
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Barefoot Networks Announces First Switches With Programmable Tofino Chip
A network geek pilgrimage
Kevin Myers is attending Networking Field Day this year. He’s excited to drink from the deluge of knowledge about to be poured his way. In this post, he talks about some of the topics he’s interested in getting more details about. One of them is SD-WAN. Kevin wants more under the hood details about specific mechanics. He’s also in seeing it an non-traditional applications, like Wireless ISP. We’ll be excited to see what Kevin’s takeaways are after the event. Stay tuned!
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I Like Big Files and I Cannot Lie
The inimitable Alex Galbraith uses the poetry of Sir Mix-a-Lot to ponder Dell EMC’s presentation from Tech Field Day this past November, when they reviewed their Isilon storage solution. The most important consideration from Alex’s piece, who is this for? Isilon is meant for organization with tremendous storage needs, into petabyte scale. Alex reviews how Isilon addresses these into “data lakes”, and keeps performance at a high level.
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I Like Big Files and I Cannot Lie
Networking Field Day 14 Kicks Off
Justin Cohen is excited for Networking Field Day! The event kicks off this morning and Justin made sure to share the schedule with all of his followers. Make sure you check out the live stream, or the YouTube and Vimeo content we’ll have up soon after the event. It’s three straight days of fascinating presentations from the most exciting companies in enterprise networking!
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Networking Field Day 14 Kicks Off
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: StorMagic
In the run up to Tech Field Day, starting February 1st, Thom Greene has been doing some great preview posts. In his latest, he gives a look at StorMagic. In the crowded software defined storage field, Thom sees StorMagic differentiating in meaningful ways. For one, they can run across multiple platforms, refreshing in the increasing hyperconverged world where there’s a lot of product lock-in. He also likes their support for high latency connections. He’s looking forward to finding out what’s new with the company at Tech Field Day!
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Tech Field Day 13 Preview: StorMagic
Network Field Day 14 and the Best Community Ever!
We’re thrilled to have Eyvonne Sharp as a delegate for her first Networking Field Day! She really appreciates the community the events have created. It’s great to hear that it’s not only a helpful group of people, but one that she genuinely enjoys engaging with. It’s also a welcoming group, so when you’re watching the Networking Field Day livestream, make sure to ask questions on Twitter with #NFD14. Between the delegates and the staff, we’ll get some answers!
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Network Field Day 14 and the Best Community Ever!
Building Data Storage With Containers
The state of containers in enterprise IT continues to expand. As it does, the importance of addressing storage for these stateless constructs becomes more important. Chris Evans reviews why addressing container storage is essential, and some of the solutions out there. This includes offerings from StorageOS, Portworx, and Scality. Ethan sees containers continuing the trend started with hyperconverged infrastructure, the blurring of storage and application.
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Building Data Storage With Containers
Zerostack for a cloud managed datacenter
Raff Poltronieri put together a walkthrough of ZeroStack’s current private cloud platform. Overall, he liked that the UI is easy to understand, while still supporting some powerful configuration options. Raff thinks it might be easier to manage than a typical AWS UI. We’ll see what ZeroStack has in store for us at Tech Field Day in Austin, coming up in February.
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Zerostack for a cloud managed datacenter
NFD13: SolarWinds Presents Its New NetPath Tool
I don’t want to put words into Peter Welcher’s mouth. But in his post about SolarWinds’ NetPath tool, he straight up says, “[i]t turns out, I was very impressed with the new NetPath tool!” Not a lot of room for ambiguity there! SolarWinds presented at Networking Field Day this past November, and spent the entire session going over NetPath. Peter really enjoyed the presentation, not just for what NetPath could do, but also learning the journey SolarWinds took to refine and develop the tool.
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NFD13: SolarWinds Presents Its New NetPath Tool
Tech Field Day 13 Line-up and more #TFD13 with Veeam, Uila & more
Tech Field Day is coming up in February, and Andreas Lesslhumer is excited! He posted a preview on his blog. Andreas joined us for his first Tech Field Day in Boston last year and was “blown away” by the experience. We’re happy he’s back for another one, and can’t wait to see what he thinks of all the presenting companies this time around!
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Tech Field Day 13 Line-up and more #TFD13 with Veeam, Uila & more
What Capabilities are Needed for a Startup Storage Company?
Eric Shanks seems impressed by StorageOS. The company presented at Tech Field Day this past November, and presented their distributed container storage solution. While their idea is fascinating in itself, their storage controller is itself a 40MB container image, Eric really likes how feature rich it is. While other products that have been on the market longer still have a long roadmap to implement a lot of enterprise essential features, StorageOS seems a lot more fully baked. Impressive considering they haven’t been offering a commercial product for very long!
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What Capabilities are Needed for a Startup Storage Company?
ZeroStack and the Complex Cloud Conundrum
In an age where everything from WAN to security is being defined by software in the enterprise, have we reached the saturation point? Rich Stroffolino thinks there’s one big part of the enterprise left, the data center itself. He takes a look at what ZeroStack will be doing to make a self-driving cloud environment possible. They’ll be releasing their full solution in February, but it’s a fascinating preview.
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ZeroStack and the Complex Cloud Conundrum
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Uila
As enterprise tools become increasingly virtualized, it gets harder to properly visualize performance systematically. Visibility radically decreases, leaving the prospective engineer in a veritable blackhole. That’s why Thom Greene is excited to dig into Uila’s presentation at Tech Field Day, coming up in February. Their solution drills down the virtual network, identifying traffic on the application level. This allows users to have a visualized map of performance between applications in real time. As workloads become increasingly virtualized, a solution like Uila’s is vital to let you know what is going on.
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Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Uila
Backups suck, rubrik does not
John White knows the pain of being a backup engineer. At an old job, the problems came down to two simple issues, software and hardware. You know, minor issues. Seeing what Rubrik presented at Tech Field Day in November, John likes what they offer as a solution for local backups. Built on the back of their Atlas file system with a clean graphical user interface, John thinks it offers a compelling package for any organization that can’t do backups with a service provider.
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