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.
2017 Predictions, Prospects, and Prognostications
One of the best part of the New Year is the spate of predictions. Taylor Riggan has his own set, and they forecast a really interesting 2017 for enterprise IT. Taylor has some thoughts on where OpenStack, Hybrid Cloud, and Object Storage usage. He provides some really in-depth thoughts, so make sure you check it out!
Read More:
2017 Predictions, Prospects, and Prognostications
Jedu na Tech Field Day 13! ( TFD13 ) – Co to je?
Karel Novak is going to his first full Tech Field Day in February. He shared his post in Czech, but here’s the link for a Google Translate version to English: http://bit.ly/2iEpXGZ
Read More:
Jedu na Tech Field Day 13! ( TFD13 ) – Co to je?
Here’s to 2016 (A year in the life…)
Jon Hildebrand shares his reflections on 2016. For him, it was a year of growth. He shares his thoughts on how 2015 ended on a bit of a downer, feeling a little bit reticent to contribute in discussions at Virtualization Field Day. For 2016, he decided to make some changes. He set about making friends through VMUGs and getting involved in the community, including speaking at two UserCons. Gaining confidence with this engagement, Jon had a much more productive time, attending three total Tech Field Day events in the coming year. It was great to see Jon at events during the year, and we’re glad to help make 2016 a year of growth for him!
Read More:
Here’s to 2016 (A year in the life…)
2016 – How did I do?
It’s one thing to make New Year’s Resolutions, it’s another thing to follow up on them the next year. Matt Crape looks back at 2016 to see how he did with his resolutions from last year. Overall, he accomplished one of the three goals he set out for himself. But for that goal of better community involvement, Matt really knocked it out of the park! He earned a VMCE certification, presented at a vBrownBag Tech Talk, hosted a Veeam user group, and attended Tech Field Day in November! For 2017, Matt wants to stay involved with the vCommunity. If that’s his only resolution for the New Year, it looks like Matt has a good chance of going one for one in 2017.
Read More:
Tech Field Day 13 Delegate!
One of the best things about Tech Field Day is meeting new and interesting voices in enterprise IT. Rebecca Fitzhugh qualifies as both, and we’re thrilled she’ll be joining us at Tech Field Day in February! She’s excited to share about the experience, we can’t wait to hear her impressions. Stay tuned!
Read More:
Looking Forward to 2017
In a year that has been derided as particularly jarring, Thom Greene managed to make a pretty good go of it in 2016. He got a promotion at work, completed several certifications, did several presentations, and was invited to Tech Field Day in February. Some might take a nice 2016 and rest on their laurels the following year. But in this post, Thom outlines his vision for a 2017 that will be just as eventful.
Read More:
Apstra’s Ethereal Network State
Apstra has a really interesting idea. What if you could design your network based on what you wanted to do with it? Instead of chaffing with the constraints of vendors and hardware, Apstra provides an abstraction layer to allow you to do this. Ethan Banks saw their presentation at Networking Field Day. He wrangled with the idea that Apstra is simply providing configuration management. But instead, they are providing a solution that takes a look at the network as a whole, something network engineers rarely can do. Instead, you state what you want to do with the network, and the Apstra Operating System tells you how to make that happens. It then knows the intent of the network, and is able to heal and remediate to keep that intent in place. Ethan thinks they’re entering into a crowded market, but that kind of model could really allow them to stand out.
Read More:
Apstra's Ethereal Network State
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager – not to be missed in a cloud
Raff Poltronieri was looking for a way to deal with data coming out of vCenter Realize Operations. He tried out the Virtualization Manager from SolarWinds, and really liked the implementation. Raff liked that automation is baked right in. The other impressive thing about the solution was the ability to manager a variety of VMs within a single interface. The dashboard view allows you to drill down as much as you want without leaving. If you decide to install agents on the VMs, you can also get performance metrics down to the application level, very impressive. Raff is looking forward to seeing them at Tech Field Day in February!
Read More:
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager – not to be missed in a cloud
Future Storage, Flash, and Cloud?
As someone who would have bet good money that Zip disks were going to take over storage in the late 90s, my own ability to predict the future of storage is dubious at best. Alastair Cooke is under no such scrutiny. He reviews what some are seeing as the future of storage: a combination of flash and object cloud storage. He sees two potential solutions for this from ClearSky Data and Avere Systems. ClearSky uses a geographically tiered flash system to quickly represent your data, and Avere uses local flash to focus on file share performance. Alastair might question if flash + cloud will be the correct formulation, but he liked what he saw from Avere and ClearSky.
Read More:
Future Storage, Flash, and Cloud?
NFD13: Forward Networks Comes Out of Stealth to Impress
Peter Welcher reviews what he saw from Forward Networks once they came out of stealth. Peter seemed impressed with how Forward is able to put together a database model of network configurations that can be searched and indexed independent of actually operating on the network. This can then be used for fast troubleshooting, as well as testing configurations to make sure they’re operating within a desired state. Overall, Peter sees this as a way to not spread you senior enterprise talent too thin. While there isn’t any automated remediation backed in, the powerful forecasting tools they present make it possible to better utilize talent in your organization.
Read More:
NFD13: Forward Networks Comes Out of Stealth to Impress
Is a Cloud Gateway Enough?
For W. Curtis Preston, simply having the ability for a storage system to store data in the cloud isn’t news anymore. It’s to be expected. What’s more useful is a way to address multiple cloud site. Amazon might be the current market leader, but a storage solution shouldn’t assume you’re only going to use a single source for cloud storage. A good cloud gateway should address that, as well as letting you compute where your storage is at. It’s an interesting way to reevaluate how we judge cloud gateways going forward.
Read More:
Docker? On Windows? Yep!
Jon Hildebrand uses the native Windows support for Docker to talk about the sea change Microsoft has experienced recently. Once synonymous with lock-in, the company is now meeting their customers and developers where they are, rather than forcing a change in behavior. Jon is particularly excited to see the two different versions of Windows available to Docker images. Of the two, the Nano Server versions seems the more intriguing, as it strips out most legacy support for a truly lean instance.
Read More:
Secondary Storage is Cohesity’s Primary Goal
It says something about Cohesity that they’ve energized a lot of Tech Field Day delegates. After all, their solution is about secondary storage, which might ordinarily be relegated to an afterthought. But Tim Smith appreciates their focus. He puts in succinctly at the end of his piece: All too often, vendors forget that not all data is created equal, and thus should not be treated equally. It’s a really great point and one that Cohesity takes to heart. Their hardware and storage platforms are designed from the ground up to address the specific needs of secondary storage. This encompasses not just backups, but all data not actively used in production. It’s a huge swath of data that’s just waiting to be property leveraged. Tim thinks Cohesity has developed a way to do this.
Read More:
Secondary Storage is Cohesity's Primary Goal
Can Teridion Really Boost Internet Throughput?
John Herbert invokes a little Morpheus voice to talk about Teridion. They want to make internet transit faster. Sounds easy right? Doesn’t SD-WAN already do this? John points out that SD-WAN simply lays software over the public internet to replace previously private circuits. But the actual speed can be changed by every service provider in that route. Simply prioritizing by the least amount of service provider hops doesn’t mean it’ll actually be faster. Teridion claims that they have a solution to increase throughput by 5 to 20 times more than current internet speeds, just by accounting for this. They do this by having traffic routed through their Teridion Global Cloud Network, which has servers spread through numerous locations and SPs. They pull latency and speed info constantly to make create an optimized route for traffic. This could be very valuable to any SaaS company.
Read More:
Can Teridion Really Boost Internet Throughput?
Getting Object Storage Ready for the Enterprise – Scality Briefing Note
W. Curtis Preston was at Storage Field Day in October with Scality to hear about their latest and greatest. In this blog post, he reviews what Scality is offering in their Ring 6.4 release. It offers built in encryption with a third-party key management system included. Curtis thinks this is a much better solution for an object storage company, instead of trying to invent their own key management. It also includes a number of AWS integrations, as well as chargebacks and health checks. Additionally Scality also released an open-source S3 server that runs in a Docker container. This can be used to test how well apps can write to S3 storage. Object storage in the data center has always required some hoops to jump through, and Scality looks to have some offerings to smooth this out quite a bit.
Read More:
Getting Object Storage Ready for the Enterprise – Scality Briefing Note
Generating Maps of Your Traffic
For a network engineer, it sometimes feels impossible to avoid traceroute. Tim Miller thinks it can be a valuable tool to see where traffic is getting dropped, but it’s not without its issues. He’s highlighted some other solutions in previous posts, but the one he’s looking at today is SolarWinds. Their NetPath tool has gone from a lab toy to an official feature of their Network Performance Monitor solution in a little under a year. Tim finds it a really impressive tool. Even though it requires Windows-based polling appliances in a network, a Linux guy like Tim can still be tempted. It gives historical information layer on top of what you would find with a traceroute, and adds multipathing. Overall, Tim sees this as a very practical tool to help disentangle issues in increasingly complex networks.
Read More:
Generating Maps of Your Traffic
Introduction to StackStorm
Automation is east, but autonomy is hard. Matt Oswalt thinks the answer to making it a little easier is event-driven automation. This allows an engineer to eliminate the weakest part of any system, human error. Instead, by setting up automation event conditions ahead of time, the system can step in when needed. Matt goes through how StackStorm makes this happen. StackStorm has a wide range of support, and a number of different sensors and triggers to make this kind of setup possible.
Read More:
On Network Blindness
Notable beard accomplisher and Apstra systems engineer Derick Winkworth shares some thoughts about network blindness. He compares it to face blindness, where people can see all the individual components, but cannot recognize them together. In much the same way, many network engineers build automation into their systems, without recognizing what the purpose of that network is, suffer from that same kind of affliction. Apstra developed with Apstra Operating System in response to this. It provides an abstraction over hardware to create networks with intentionality. The benefit of this is that it allows you to built a network around what you want to do, not change your behaviors based on the network. Derick gets into the nuts in bolts in the piece, but conceptually, its a refreshing take. If you enjoy the piece, make sure to check out all of Apstra’s videos from Networking Field Day.
Read More:
Year in Review – 2016
The year is rapidly winding down, and as 2016 comes to a close, Dustin Beare gives it a look back. It’s a year that found him welcome a new son into the world, attend Networking Field Day, get a promotion at work, and pass his CCIE written exam. It’s a really great look back at how in just a year, a lot of things can change. Dustin clearly put in a lot of hard work to change the course of his career. It was a pleasure to have him as a delegate.
Read More:
Cohesity – DataPlatform in the Cloud
Josh De Jong takes a look at what Cohesity presented at Tech Field Day. While still a relatively new company, Josh thinks they have an interesting solution for secondary storage. This includes not just backup, but all data that isn’t in active production. Cohesity can eliminate a lot of storage bottlenecks by moving test/dev instances off of primary storage, and use their SSD based cache to speed up the process. Josh also liked Cohesity’s DataPlatform CE, which can back up your VMs in cloud native formats. Overall, while not all of their feautures are novel to the platform, they seem to have a robust solution for secondary storage.
Read More: