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.
Dreaming of SCM but living with NVDIMMs…
Ray Lucchesi give a look into a rather unique and developing part of enterprise storage: NonVolatile RAM. He walks through the history of the format, and how it has evolved to its current iteration. He finds that the current state has fairly developed hardware, but the software to take advantage of it is still developing. In some ways, it parallels where flash storage was when it first emerged as an affordable option.
Read More:
Dreaming of SCM but living with NVDIMMs…
Is Everything Pay-as-You-Go?
Eric Shanks reviews the solution he saw from Igneous Systems. He’s intrigued by what they are offering on a technical level. Overall, he considers if what they are offering is so much pay-as-you-go, or if they simply offering forward looking provisioning. Regardless, it’s well worth the read for Eric’s thoughts.
Read More:
Drive and Rack Scale Storage Architectures
Big data storage problems getting you down? Never fear! James Green put together a video highlighting two companies from last month’s Tech Field Day that are presenting solutions. Igneous offers an array of nanoservers equipped drives, making each network addressable. James also highlights DriveScale’s take on managing big data with their rack adapter to address a pool of JPOD storage. It’s a really great comparison between the two approaches!
Read More:
Drive and Rack Scale Storage Architectures
Get all the Docker talks from Tech Field Day 12
Docker was one of our presenters for Tech Field Day last month. We were really excited to hear about their latest and greatest. They’ve shared all of the videos from the event on their blog, along with some of the excited reaction. It was great to have Docker at TFD!
Read More:
Get all the Docker talks from Tech Field Day 12
The Quest for Verification with Forward Networks
Forward Networks gave a presentation fresh out of stealth mode at Networking Field Day, and it certainly made an impression with Rich Stroffolino. He outlines how the company is doing their network monitoring. They model all possible places a packet can go on a network in a constantly updating software model. This allows you to not only react when problems occur, but also for better planning and provisioning, since you can model traffic very accurately in the software model. We’ll wait to see how their solution gets deployed in an actual enterprise, but on a theoretical level it’s fascinating.
Read More:
The Quest for Verification with Forward Networks
Docker is the New Twitter
Rich Stroffolino has an interesting hypothesis here. He sees Docker in a very similar situation to Twitter circa 2011. It’s an extremely popular product, but with an ecosystem of support companies that extend it’s inherent functionality. Twitter decided to subsume more and more of this into what it natively provided, edging out the companies that once complimented it. Will Docker follow the same path? Rich points out why some of their situations are a little different as well.
Read More:
DriveScale is a new kid on the block with a very seasoned past
DriveScale clearly had the right idea for their Tech Field Day presentation. They led off listing the pedigree of the founding and senior staff, including a deep history with Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and green technology. It certainly made an impact on John White. From there the company laid out their ambitions: give enterprises the configuration flexibility to scale out horizontally in the datacenter. They do this with a 10GbE network adapter to pool a JBOD of storage to traditional pizza box servers with CPU and RAM. This allows storage to be a totally separate concern for scale. John also liked their strategy of initially targeting Hadoop as a primary use case. It’s not a huge market, but definitely one they could become well known within, given the strength of their solution.
Read More:
DriveScale is a new kid on the block with a very seasoned past
Forward Networks – go ahead, break it
Amy Arnold laments the plight of the network engineer. The agonize over network design, try to come up with every conceivable failover scenario, and then deal with the consequences. Some have the aid of a lab to help test their configuration, most don’t. That’s why what Forward Networks presented at Networking Field Day was so interesting. It allows for you to model over your network in software, and then break it in every conceivable way. Forward’s model shows every a packet can possibly go, allowing the engineer to see exactly how a scenario will play out. She was justifiably concerned about how their product will be priced going forward, but otherwise it seems like a valuable tool in the engineer’s arsenal.
Read More:
Forward Networks – go ahead, break it
Cloud Storage? In my DC? Yes please! Enter Igneous
John White reviews what he saw from Igneous Systems at Tech Field Day last month. Overall, while cloud storage in your datacenter isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, he likes the approach that Igneous is taking. He particularly calls out the RatioPerfect Architecture, which puts compute on each drive. This eliminates a lot of I/O bottlenecks. John found the price competitive, especially compared to AWS. Add in the latency benefits on on-site storage, and Igneous has a compelling solution.
Read More:
Cloud Storage? In my DC? Yes please! Enter Igneous
Shiny new NetPath Services
SolarWinds showed off their latest with NetPath at Networking Field Day. Amy Arnold seemed impressed by their solution. NetPath isn’t just a traceroute visualization tool, it uses “real” network traffic from Windows-based pollers on the network. This allows an engineer to get a better sense of how traffic flows, without worrying about packets being dropped (as much) by devices on the network. Amy says it best, “any tool that expands insight into what packets are doing is a beautiful thing.”
Read More:
Decouple Disks and Compute with DriveScale
Eric Shanks takes a look at what DriveScale presented at Tech Field Day last month. In their solution, he sees a real value play for Hadoop workloads. Whereas other applications can used virtualized storage arrays, Hadoop benefits from direct drive access to their distributed file system so it can manage storage. DriveScale allows for this with their disaggregated storage solution via their adapter. This allows you to add storage without throwing a whole other pizza box into the rack. It’s a pretty specific use case, but Eric sees it giving a lot of value to the growing base of customers using Hadoop.
Read More:
Decouple Disks and Compute with DriveScale
Efficient Resource Use Takes Interesting Turn at Scale
Tim Miller has some thoughts about DriveScale, which he saw at Tech Field Day last month. But to fully understand their solution, he delves back into a little bit of IT history. The brief but informative look back shows how IT has moved to the Big Data mindset of building clusters for each application. In the foreseeable future, we know that compute will surpass these Big Data setups, resulting in inefficiency. Tim thinks DriveScales disaggregated storage solution is setup for this reality. On a practical level, he really liked that DriveScale’s solution doesn’t insert themselves into your storage supply chain, relying instead on a simple rack adapter and software. Overall it gives a great perspective on where DriveScale is going in the future.
Read More:
Efficient Resource Use Takes Interesting Turn at Scale
Transform and Scale Out with Isilon
Rich Stroffolino gives a rundown of the Dell EMC presentation from Tech Field Day last month. They highlighted their latest hard disk offerings for their Isilon platform. This includes a look at the history of the platform, their latest node offerings, and their hybrid flash solution. Sadly, he was not treated to a look at their new all flash Nitro array. Still, Rich offers some interesting insight on how the scale of Dell EMC differed from some of the emerging vendors he also saw at Tech Field Day.
Read More:
Transform and Scale Out with Isilon
Building a hybrid cloud with Avere
Jon Klaus takes a look at what Avere is offering with their hybrid cloud solution. He has a long history with the company, going back to when they were focused on NAS optimization via a caching layer between storage and compute resources. Avere then moved into object storage translation, and is now entering into making cloud storage gateways. He gives some thoughts about what applications their gateway would benefit, weights in on caching vs tiering, and where he thinks these kind of products fit into IT. He doesn’t see the cloud ever killing the tangible benefits of on-prem, but hybrid solutions could certainly benefit both.
Read More:
Building a hybrid cloud with Avere
The Atlas File System – The foundation of the Rubrik Platform
Rubrik’s presentation seems to be impressing a lot of people. One of their biggest features is their ability to distribute backup data across various rack mounted “Brik” appliances, with easy scale out provisioning. Mike Preston has a writeup going into some of the secret sauce that let’s Rubrik do this: the Atlas File System. One of the most interesting features is how the system is able to deal with failure. The file system is able to do replication on both a node or drive level. This allows the overall system to have a whole node or up to two drives fail without any danger of data loss. Mike goes into a deep dive on all of the technical details, so make sure to check it out.
Read More:
The Atlas File System – The foundation of the Rubrik Platform
Forward Thinking Backups
Rich Stroffolino takes a look at what Rubrik presented at Tech Field Day earlier this month. They take a extremely focused approach to backups. Their solution allows for backups to their various rack mounted “Brik” devices from various sites with simple scale out and management, and even allow for seamless flow over to S3-compliant cloud storage. While not as expansive as other vendors, the focus of Rubrik makes them stand out.
Read More:
State of the Industry: Network Analytics
Gestalt IT just debuted a new feature, a weekly State of the Industry post. For their first week, they’re looking at the state of network analytics. They take a look at two competing methodologies to the problem. The first is SolarWinds NetPath tool, which sits in the network. The SolarWinds approach seems to take the ideas behind existing tools, and looks to perfect them. The other method is Forward Networks, which is presenting a top-down approach to do live mapping purely in software. Both are interesting, and point to further investment and development in the space going into 2017.
Read More:
State of the Industry: Network Analytics
Avere Systems – is it a cache, is it a tier, does it even matter?
Tier file system with caching, or a cached file system with tiers? Such is the dilemma for Ed Morgan. He took a look at Avere Systems’ Hybrid Cloud overlay for storage backends. With the so-called Tiered File System, Avere is able to increase performance across devices, as well as dynamically move data between mediums based on heat mapping. Hot data lives in RAM, warm data lives on SSDs, and old data is put on nearline NAS, as well as the ability to offload to the cloud. This allows for quick access to frequently used data, while being able to use more efficient storage to hold the bulk of cold data. Ed was impressed by how well this pairs with Avere’s C2N, which serves as the NAS/object storage device that can easily integrate to the public cloud.
Read More:
Avere Systems - is it a cache, is it a tier, does it even matter?
The Power of ONUG And What It Means To You
Tom Holllingsworth takes a look at what makes the Open Networking User Group special. Unlike other interest groups that bully their way into short term solutions in opposition to vendors, ONUG put together groups to solve communally agreed upon issues, to be presented to vendors as a solution, not a demand. Tom lays out the case why ONUG is setup to succeed in the long term, using their success at moving SD-WAN from a tech demo to a full fledged enterprise solution in just a few short years. Give it a read and try not be be excited with what they’ve got coming down the pipe!
Read More:
The Power of ONUG And What It Means To You
Vendor Briefing: SolarWinds
Alastair Cooke summarizes a recent product briefing he had with SolarWinds. He got a look at the Orion unified management console for their Server and Application Monitoring suite. Alastair liked that items were actionable within Orion, not just a hard to wrangle mass of metrics. He also liked that it allowed for customizable templates for monitoring specific applications. Better yet, these templates can be shared with other SolarWinds community members. It’s exciting to see a company embrace an enthusiastic community like that.
Read More: