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.
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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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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