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.
Nyansa Measures Network Performance Using Mobile Devices As Sensors
Drew Conry-Murray shares his thoughts on Nyansa, who presented at Networking Field Day last month. The company has an interesting approach to analytics, they use measure user experience by using mobile device endpoints as sensors, effectively turning any phone, laptop or tablet into a sensor. These on-prem metrics are then sent to Nyansa’s cloud for further analytics and to establish baseline network performance. This can be used to easily assess problems when they deviate from these baselines, and also let you see how performance of your network stacks up to others in your vertical.
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Nyansa Measures Network Performance Using Mobile Devices As Sensors
Revisiting Cisco HyperFlex, One Year After
Max Mortillaro take a look back on Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution, HyperFlex, a year later. It’s all the more important to the company, since HPE’s acquisition of SimpliVity. Max got an update at Tech Field Day Extra during Cisco Live Europe last week. Over the year, Max has moved from neutral on it to “neutral+”. Overall, he’d like to see more commitment to their development cycle if this is going to be their sole HCI play going forward. He sees their roadmap as competitive, but they’ll need to tighten up their release cycle to deliver this to their customers on a timely basis. HCI is a crowded space. Cisco’s HyperFlex shows a path to compete with all the big players, but Max thinks they’ll need to consistently deliver on their roadmap.
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Revisiting Cisco HyperFlex, One Year After
ZeroStack Aims to be a ‘Self Driving Cloud’
Rebecca Fitzhugh was at Tech Field Day earlier this month, and heard from ZeroStack. They’re offering what they envision as a self-driving private/hybrid cloud service. Rebecca really liked their clean interface, as well as their robust partnership with AWS. She’d like some more details on assigning high availability to certain VMs, but ultimately, she found their solution intriguing.
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ZeroStack Aims to be a ‘Self Driving Cloud’
Cloudian Announces HyperStore 4000 – Gets Super Dense
Dan Frith offers his take on Cloudian’s HyperStore 4000. Dan sees it as an interesting product in object storage. Instead of focusing on being “cheap and deep”, Cloudian focused on making this a smarter kind of storage. This allows governments and business to have a greater ability to verify data locality and visibility. For organizations with very sensitive restrictions on locality, HyperStore 4000 seems designed with you in mind.
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Cloudian Announces HyperStore 4000 – Gets Super Dense
Cisco DNA Series: DNA Goes Virtual
Cisco updated their DNA strategy, and Justin Cohen has a nice write up of all the implications. For Justin, this is a complete network virtualization in a box solution. Cisco has updated hardware that’s more than capable of doing this, with the released ENCS 5400 Series, which can be a combined ISR and a UCS server. Combined with flexible licensing and deployments, Justin thinks this shift in DNA could really shake things up.
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Cisco DNA Series: DNA Goes Virtual
Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 12
Dan Frith is excited to be heading to Storage Field Day in a couple of weeks. He’ll be heading out to Silicon Valley for the event March 8-10. He found the presenting companies to be a good mix of new faces and ones he’s eager to get updates from. He’s got the complete schedule posted, so make sure you check back here for live streaming during the event. If you miss that, don’t worry, we’ll have full video afterwards.
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Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 12
An Interview with Josh @EuroBrew at #TFD13
At Tech Field Day earlier this month, Alastair Cooke managed to steal a few minutes with Josh De Jong for a quick interview. They talk about how to approach learning throughout the changing technological landscape of IT. This is made more important by the fact that the cost of traditional training is often hard to come by when working for SMBs. It’s a really great conversation and food for thought for any IT professional.
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An Interview with Josh @EuroBrew at #TFD13
Backups are Important, Recovery is Essential
Thom Greene has long been impressed with Veeam for virtualization backup. Now the company has offerings for bare metal machines. Veeam Agent for Linux and Veeam Agent for Windows bring a lot of the features of their virtualization backup and recovery to this market gap. The feature Thom thought really stood out was their support for road warrior laptops, called “endpoint protection for mobile users”. If your laptop is not connected to your network drive during your scheduled backup, this feature will quietly sync changes as soon as it becomes available. As you would expect from Veeam, the Agents are extremely capable, and easy to setup.
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Backups are Important, Recovery is Essential
VxRail – One Year Later
VxRail has been on the market for about a year, and Sean Thulin got an update from Dell EMC about the HCI solution at Tech Field Day. So far, sales of VxRail have been strong, with major revisions even in the first year. Sean thinks that’s a good sign that Dell EMC is really listening to consumers. Unfortunately, the company had to admit that this lead to a dearth of professional services, creating a bit of a backlog for some customers. Sean is excited to see the next iteration of VxRail which will have options heavy on NVMe and NVDIMMs.
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Cisco’s Wireless Partnership With Apple
Ethan Banks got an update from Cisco on their partnership with Apple, previously announced at Cisco Live US 2016. Cisco went into detail about their framework to allow for application prioritization from Apple devices across the network. This is done by a white list, and developers providing QoS marks on specific packets. They also revealed improved roaming support between access points, reducing the time of switching between to from 0.5-0.7 seconds to sub-50ms. Overall, Ethan found these both to be laudable efforts from Cisco.
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Cisco's Wireless Partnership With Apple
Caffeine for the Tech Brain: TFDx at CLEUR this Wednesday
Lauren Friedman previews what she’s excited to see at Tech Field Day Extra. She really enjoys the atmosphere of TFD presentations, from the in-depth technical discussions, to the poignant questions from the delegates. We hope she enjoyed the live streams, and remember, we’re posting full videos of the sessions too!
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Caffeine for the Tech Brain: TFDx at CLEUR this Wednesday
Storage Field Day 12: storage drop bears reunited!
Storage Field Day is coming up in March, and we’re excited to have Jon Klaus returning! He wrote up a great preview of some of the companies he’s excited to see. Jon found the presenting companies to be a good mix of returning ones he’s interesting in catching up with, and new ones that will be presenting new products and solutions. It should be a great event, so make sure to check out our comprehensive video coverage, both live and after SFD!
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Storage Field Day 12: storage drop bears reunited!
On-Premises Serverless
Alastair Cooke looks at what is required to adopt serverless architecture in your data center. While services like AWS Lambda provide this for the public cloud, it isn’t as evident how to do this on-premises. Alastair breaks this down really clearly, essentially for serverless operation, you need to be able to quickly spin up and coordinate containers in response to external triggers. He quickly gives an overview of offerings from IBM and Iron.io that provide Functions as a Service. But Platform9 offers a managed serverless platform on top of an existing managed cloud environment. Their Fission solution (currently in alpha) essentially offers a managed serverless platform on top of the managed Kubernetes platform. This gives you the scale of Platform9 as a cloud provider, but you can have all of your containers on-premises. It’s a really interesting approach to the problem.
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StorMagic SvSAN – Scalable Virtual HA Storage for the Masses
Sean Thulin looks at StorMagic’s SvSAN solution, as seen at Tech Field Day earlier this month. As a virtual storage solution that sits inside your existing VM infrastructure, it’s already interesting. But Sean thought SvSAN really shined by being extremely lightweight, requiring only 1 vCPU, 1GB of RAM and only 2 nodes initially. It can also be used to help protect against large scale location failures, with mirroring that can operate on low bandwidth and even the most humble hardware requirements. StorMagic looks to have a solution that’s powerful but only needs lightweight requirements.
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StorMagic SvSAN – Scalable Virtual HA Storage for the Masses
Introduction to SD-WAN
So you’ve heard about SD-WAN, but you still have some questions? Eyvonne Sharp made a video just for you. In this introduction, she lays out what the requirements of a complete SD-WAN solution are. Once you’ve got the fundamentals down, she includes links to some specific company implementations from Networking Field Day!
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From the Beginning, Getting Started with SolarWinds
After hearing about them for a while, and seeing them present at Tech Field Day earlier this month, Alastair Cooke decided to try out what SolarWinds has to offer. The first challenge was to figure out what from their impressive catalogue to try first. After some research, Alastair decided on their Server and Application Monitor (SAM), which includes the Orion integration framework. After the install and initial setup, SAM was already giving useful notifications about domain controller memory and packet loss. Alastair is looking forward to using SAM with the Virtualization Manager from SolarWinds in his home lab to see how effective the combination can be.
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From the Beginning, Getting Started with SolarWinds
Manage hybrid cloud with Platform9 solution
Andrea Mauro takes a look at Platform9’s hybrid cloud management solution. He originally got a look at this during Tech Field Day earlier this month. With their SaaS management platform, you can go live with a private cloud OpenStack deployment in about five minutes. From their, Platform9’s support takes care of management across the entire deployment. It looks like a great way to avoid the common headaches often seen in the private cloud!
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Manage hybrid cloud with Platform9 solution
Storage Field Day (#SFD12) – A quick intro!
Chan Ekanayake is ready to come out to Silicon Valley for Storage Field Day! We’re excited to have him along as a first time delegate. He’ll be hearing from some of the most interesting companies in storage today. Remember to check back for live coverage all throughout the event, March 8-10!
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Storage Field Day (#SFD12) – A quick intro!
OpenFlow – Basic Concepts and Theory
In this post, David Varnum goes over some of the fundamental concepts of OpenFlow. He goes as far back as to distinguish the control plane from the data plane. David then goes into great detail about OpenFlow’s design and features. What inspired this deep dive into OpenFlow? At Networking Field Day in November, David saw a presentation from NEC on their ProgrammableFlow controller, a SDN product that uses the OpenFlow protocol. David found it “wildly impressive”, and wanted to get a better understanding of the protocol.
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OpenFlow – Basic Concepts and Theory
Dell EMC: When Two Hearts Beat As One
Rich Stroffolino takes a look at Dell EMC’s update on VxRail from Tech Field Day this month. For him, it was an interesting look at the process of merging two large companies together. As far as VxRail goes, the company has been met with a lot of sales success, but was also upfront on what they needed to improve on. Overall, Rich found that VxRail hasn’t lost any of its focus by merging with Dell’s PowerEdge team. Indeed, the expanded hardware offerings now make it an even more enticing HCI solution.
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