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.
Why design simplicity is bad for your network
Design simplicity sounds appealing. After all, it would be easier to understand, manage, and theoretically expand. But Kevin Myers wrote a piece on why this can ultimately be a failing. He was having a discussion at Network Field Day about the differences in an LTE network versus an enterprise LAN. LTE just seems to work, even though it’s serving a vary large user base. Kevin notes that this is because enterprise networks aren’t often designed by engineers with their intended purpose in mind, rather a vendor supplies the network and the engineer is in charge of implementing within that given design. These are often instructed to be simple, but as businesses merge and needs change, the network designed to be simple is often unable to scale easily to a new complex environment. It’s an interesting read that touches on why a lot of enterprise technology decisions have more to do with culture than anything else.
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Why design simplicity is bad for your network
OpenFlow Is Dead. Long Live OpenFlow.
Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at the curious life of OpenFlow. This once hyped panacea has found a completely new life from its original purpose of replacing the forwarding plane programming method of switches. Tom compares it to the development of Viagra as originally being intended for high blood pressure. Company’s like NEC have taken OpenFlow, with their ProgrammableFlow derivative, and adapted it to a whole new set of purposes, in this case mitigating the spread of infections within networks. It’s always interesting to see an established tool reimagined with a new purpose.
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OpenFlow Is Dead. Long Live OpenFlow.
The Igneous Synthesis
Igneous Systems proposes to offer a storage appliance that will allow you to get the benefits of Infrastructure as a Service while keep all your storage local. Rich Stroffolino gave their Tech Field Day presentation was impressed with how the company was able to synthesize the two aspects. As he points out, this often isn’t an easy task, but Igneous gives you robust local protection in their all in one storage device, while giving you cloud-centric fleet management of the entire device network across all customers.
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Coming to SD-WAN: The Build vs. Buy Decision
Presenting at Networking Field Day earlier this month, VeloCloud is offering a rather unique solution for SD-WAN. Instead of presenting themselves as a solution that an enterprise would build and deploy internally, VeloCloud takes a different approach. They’ve partnered with a number of Tier 1 and 2 Service Providers, integrating their service within their offerings, instead of using their offering as leverage for lower rates for customers. Bob McCouch has an writeup about the pros and cons of this approach, as well as some thoughts on some of VeloCloud’s particular innovations. It’s a really thoughtful look at the tradeoffs implicit in this setup.
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Coming to SD-WAN: The Build vs. Buy Decision
SolarWinds NPM 12 NetPath
Jody Lemoine got a look at SolarWinds’ NetPath product at Networking Field Day this month. For a product in its first official release, four months out of the lab, Jody thought it was a well implemented solution. He particularly like how NetPath moved beyond the confines of the enterprise network, into what’s happening with carriers and the destination networks. If you too seek to know the truth about your network, check out the rest of Jody’s piece.
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Scale-Out. Distributed. Whatever the Name, it’s the Future of Computing
Alex Galbraith was inspired to write about the wonders of synthesis. The combining of established ideas to create something new drives a lot of innovation, and what Alex saw from Igneous Systems is a prime example. Their prime innovation, taking the abundance of horizontally scaling compute power, and putting a processor on each drive. This effectively reverses the typical storage scenario of have a small number of large fault domains. With Igneous, the fault domain is exactly one drive, making each failure negligible.
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Scale-Out. Distributed. Whatever the Name, it's the Future of Computing
Scale-Out Storage Through Disaggregation With DriveScale
Ethan Banks took a look at DriveScale’s disaggregated storage solution at Tech Field Day this month. Their overall strength relies on their flexibility. DriveScale makes it both easy to manage a true scale-out solution, while also providing potential savings down the upgrade path. They do this by separating storage from compute, so while the initial install they envision being cost-neutral, down the upgrade path, you don’t have to pay for storage you already have. Ethan’s heard similar “it pays for itself” pitches before, but seemed to think the DriveScale solution could actually deliver on that promise.
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Scale-Out Storage Through Disaggregation With DriveScale
First Look at Cohesity Cloud Edition
Matt Crape follows up on his Cohesity primer now that he attended Tech Field Day. The big thing that he saw at their presentation was their introduction of the Cohesity Cloud Edition, which effectively lets you take their secondary storage solution and spin up an appliance in the cloud. Matt’s only compliant: Cohesity’s solution is so robust and feature complete, it seems like it would be a good way to handle primary storage!
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First Look at Cohesity Cloud Edition
Igneous – On Premises, Cloud Managed, Scale-Out Storage
Ethan Banks gives an overview of what Igneous Systems presented at Tech Field Day this month. It’s an interesting solution, while acknowledging the plethora of open source options for developing a storage array out there, the Igneous team walked the delegates through why they developed their own data path and hardware architecture. Ethan digs into how the company deals with drive failure, their secret he dubs “the wide Igneous stripe” , a 20+8 layout scheme.
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Igneous - On Premises, Cloud Managed, Scale-Out Storage
Apstra intends greatness beyond Sparta
Apstra has a really interesting pitch. What if instead of building your network around how each vendor’s node and appliance talked to one another and what capabilities it had, you could design the network the way you wanted it to work first, and use an abstraction layer to make sure all the individual pieces played nice with one another? That’s what Apstra is proposing with their Apstra Operating System (AOS). David Varnum gave it a look at Tech Field Day, and shares his enthusiasm for their intent-driven approach.
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Apstra intends greatness beyond Sparta
On-prem Cloud Storage with Igneous Systems
On-prem cloud storage? Sounds like a contradiction in terms. But much like jumbo shrimp, Igneous Systems makes it work. They presented at this months Tech Field Day, and Matt Crape was intrigued by what he saw. Igneous is offering an end-to-end solution with their storage array. Matt liked how Igneous rethought their solution from ground zero. Effectively, previous storage arrays are dependent on a few SAS cards, which provides a big bottleneck if and when those cards go down. Igneous calls their architecture RatioPerfect, they effectively put an ARM interposer on each drive, taking the fault domain from a slew of drives to just one. Matt still has some questions about practical implementations of their solution, but on an architectural level, it’s clear Igneous did their homework.
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On-prem Cloud Storage with Igneous Systems
Scaling storage with an army of ARM!
Mike Preston really seemed impressed by Igneous’ storage solution presented at Tech Field Day. They offer a really interesting solution to storage. Instead of have multiple drives beholden to a single powerful Xeon CPU, Igneous proposes their RatioPerfect system, one CPU for each drive! They do this with an Ethernet equipped ARM board attached to each drive, what Igneous calls “nanoservers”. These are then put together in a JBOD within a 4U rack. On top of that, Igneous proposes their solution as end-to-end, the customer hooks it up to the network and Igneous takes care of the rest of the management. Give the rest of the piece a look, Matt gets into a lot of detail about their management plane, which he thinks might be the key to future success.
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Scaling storage with an army of ARM!
The Container Storage Persistence Challenge
James Green published a great video summarizing the current state of persistent container storage. One of the more interesting offerings was presented at Tech Field Day this month by StorageOS, which runs on the application layer as a container itself. If you need to get up to speed on container storage, James made it easy with this video.
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The Container Storage Persistence Challenge
Nutanix and Plexxi – An Affinity to Converge
Tom Hollingsworth makes the case for why Nutanix should acquire Plexxi. He argues that Nutanix is less concerned about underlying networks, their play is making sure their overlay protocols can just work on top of it. Plexxi Affinities naturally compliment hyperconverged solutions, effectively building fast pathways and interconnects between endpoints where applications need to talk to one another. Tom thinks this would give Nutanix a killer offering in the crowded SDN space.
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Nutanix and Plexxi – An Affinity to Converge
Improving Stateful Container Storage with StorageOS
Ethan Banks lays out some of the problems with containers. While originally envisioned for application development, they’ve quickly worked their way into infrastructure and operations. With their easy fluidity and reduced requirements, it’s easy to see the benefits of this containerized approach. But as their role has expanded, their deficiencies have become more profound. One of the major issues, containers are generally stateless, but as they expand further into other IT sectors, the need to map these to storage volumes become all the more glaring. StorageOS provides a solution to this problem by making it easy to manage the underlying storage of these containers. They do this by running at the application layer as a 40MB container, with tight integration with Docker, Swarm, and Kubernetes. Click through to Ethan’s piece for a complete breakdown of how StorageOS works, and how you can try it out for yourself.
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Improving Stateful Container Storage with StorageOS
Forward Networks – Extraordinary Stuff!
Before November’s Networking Field Day, I was trying to find out anything I could about Forward Networks. They were in stealth until the week of the event, but I still thought I could find a few leaks or details about what they were up to, other than that they were a networking startup. Sadly, my Google-fu failed me, leaving me a blank slate for their presentation. As a delegate at the event, David Varnum was in much the same boat. To say he came away excited is an understatement. What Forward Networks does is make a complete and constantly updating model of your network. They do this by mathematically predicting every single location a packet can travel within a given network configuration. David goes into full details about why this is amazing, but the Forward Networks elevator pitch is pretty good: They’re doing for network mapping what Google did to web indexes.
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Forward Networks – Extraordinary Stuff!
The Silent Threat of Dark Data
How much do you think about secondary storage? Probably not a ton. It’s all the data that’s not mission critical, the reams of backup data, archives, test/dev, and machine generated data that lives in separate silos. Cohesity demoed a holistic solution to deal with this mess, but why do you need it? James Green knows the answer: dark data. All that data that sits in storage, without metadata or context, data you don’t even know is there. Its a problem for any business that keep financial or medical records. All it takes is one malicious attack, and all that data you didn’t even know you had becomes a huge liability. Cohesity’s solution seems like a ray of light into this work. James breaks down how exactly they go about it.
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The Silent Threat of Dark Data
A VMware guy’s perspective on containers
Like a lot of people, Mike Preston knows that containers are big in enterprise IT right now. But like me, he’s still a little fuzzy on the details. Luckily, Mike was at Tech Field Day this month to see Docker present their latest and greatest on containers, and cleared up a lot of misconceptions. He found a lot to like about containers, including some useful applications for an operations guy like him! Also, he was impressed that containers are no longer a Linux thing, Microsoft now supports Docker right out of the box with Windows Server 2016. Mike brings a really fresh perspective to containers as he’s learning more about them, and it seems like Docker answered a lot of his questions.
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A VMware guy’s perspective on containers
DriveScale Gives You Ethernet With a Side of Storage
I wrote up a review of what DriveScale showed off at Tech Field Day earlier this month. Their approach to disaggregating storage within the server rack is really interesting. As opposed to other designs I’ve seen from vendors, they offer something that’s remarkably open and adaptable. While they’re still in the appliance licensing game, they seem more interested in creating a unique architecture to make this happen. Worth the read if only to see their founders’ impressive resumes!
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DriveScale Gives You Ethernet With a Side of Storage
SPEP03 – TFD12 | Open TechCast
At Tech Field Day earlier this month, a number of our delegates and staff got to sit in on the Open TechCast. Give it a listen to hear Alex Galbraith get the latest takes from Stephen Foskett, Matt Crape, and Mike Preston!
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