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.

Creating Private Cloud Storage that you can Actually use

Curtis Preston discusses the problem with object-based storage: applications still need NFS or SMB access. He goes on to discuss the need for cloud gateways, and the added benefits they have for hybrid cloud solutions.

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Creating Private Cloud Storage that you can Actually use

Intel to take the stage at Tech Field Day!

Sadly, Intel will not be able to present at Tech Field Day after all, but we share Mike’s excitement! Plus, check out Mike’s brief history of the company in the piece, which if named after its founders, would have been called “Moore-Noyce” (good call going with Intel).

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Intel to take the stage at Tech Field Day!

Docker to make 4th Field Day appearance!

Mike Preston is excited for Tech Field Day next week. It’ll be his first presentation from Docker. They’ve presented at three previous Tech Field Day events, but as containerization gains increasing hegemony in IT, it’s always a good time to hear from them. Check out Mike’s post for a rundown of what they’re offering, and what he’s looking forward to seeing next week!

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Docker to make 4th Field Day appearance!

Moving Ones & Zeros: Current Trends in DC Networking

Ryan Booth’s DeLorean takes him back to the Cumulus Networks presentation from Networking Field Day in February 2015. He then goes into detail on using Cumulus Linux as a routing platform. Setup is actually closer to a Debian server than a standard network switch. The overall thrust is to take tools already in use by application and server groups to make automating network deployment dramatically easier. This is a wonderfully detailed how-to article and gives the reader all they need to know to get started networking with Cumulus Linux.

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Moving Ones & Zeros: Current Trends in DC Networking

Paessler PRTG – Network Monitoring Made in Germany

Paessler’s PRTG monitoring tool is an interesting solution. Andreas Lesslhumer highlights that it’s uses aren’t just limited to network and server load monitoring, but can now also be used for virtual infrastructure. Impressively, this is done without any installed software on the monitored system. PRTG instead leverages native management interfaces. And if you’re into it, you can even monitor your network from your smartwatch, Paessler offers apps for Android Wear and Apple’s Watch OS.

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Paessler PRTG - Network Monitoring Made in Germany

Tech Field Day Extra VMworld 2016 Europe – Nimble Storage

After attending Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld Europe in October, Lino Telera gives an overview of Nimble Storage’s presentation. Nimble Storage’s application specific approach to storage creates profiles for each application, which define the application policy for the hypervisor or OS. All this matches with Lino’s view: Application is the king!

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Tech Field Day Extra VMworld 2016 Europe – Nimble Storage

StorageOS to Highlight Persistent Container Storage at CloudNativeCon and Tech Field Day Events

StorageOS will be presenting at Tech Field Day, with CEO Chris Brandon and CTO Alex Chircop. They’re currently still in beta, but their versatile container environment, running anywhere from bare metal to the cloud, is really intriguing.

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StorageOS to Highlight Persistent Container Storage at CloudNativeCon and Tech Field Day Events

Rubrik to talk cloud data management at Tech Field Day

Mike Preston has a great rundown of what he’s looking forward to from Rubrik at Tech Field Day next week. Aside from tempting Mike with free Lego (the struggle is real), he’s likes their policy based approach to data protection and disaster recovery. The strength of the policy based approach lies in the simplicity, define the tasks you want in the policies, and Rubrik’s appliance does the rest. The other benefit Mike likes is the ability to work inside backups performed by Rubrik. This includes analysis, complex search, and testing on VMs. The company iterates quickly, on their third major release in just a few years in existence. It should make for an exciting Tech Field Day presentation.

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Rubrik to talk cloud data management at Tech Field Day

SD-WAN with VeloCloud at Networking Field Day 13

Phil Gervasi is excited for some “SD-WAN goodness” at Networking Field Day next week! He’s particularly anticipating VeloCloud’s presentation, a well known presence in the space. He wants to see what differentiates VeloCloud in their solution to provide private reliability, performance and security for applications running over the public internet. He’s also looking forward to details about how their cloud network of distributed gateways works. It’s an exciting time in the SD-WAN space, its something that can be deployed and make a difference in the enterprise today. Check back for more details and coverage about VeloCloud during and after the event!

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SD-WAN with VeloCloud at Networking Field Day 13

What’s The Deal With Containers, Anyway?

In this keynote from Deltaware Data Solutions’ 2016 Emerging Technology Summit, Stephen Foskett gives essential background on the emerging trend of containerization of enterprise applications. What are containers and how will they affect enterprise IT? Why is Docker so important? Foskett addresses both the technical and architectural questions, discussing which applications will be containerized, the benefits and costs, and what it means for IT operations.

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What's The Deal With Containers, Anyway?

Tech Field Day: Seven Years Later

Tech Field Day is seven years old! Organizer in Chief Stephen Foskett looks back on how it got started, how its grown, and what the future looks like (spoiler: awesome)!

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Tech Field Day: Seven Years Later

Hardware has set the pace for latency, time for software to catch up

Jon Klaus thinks software needs to catch up to SSDs for reducing application latency. Initially, SSDs were limited by storage processors and buses build with spinning disks in mind. This has largely been remedied, so where’s the next big performance bottleneck? Latency. Jon looks at how Intel’s Storage Performance Development Kit, presented at Storage Field Day in October, effects latency by replacing the traditional Linux kernel in storage controllers.

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Hardware has set the pace for latency, time for software to catch up

Tech Field Day 12

John White writes about going from attending the OpenStack Summit in Austin earlier this year to attending Tech Field Day Extra in Vegas this August. Now he’s been invited to Tech Field Day next week, and he calls it a “dream come true.”

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Tech Field Day 12

A Warning in Time – PRTG

Alastair Cooke joined the Tech Field Day delegate panel at both VMworld US and Europe this year, and he used the Barcelona experience to get PRTG up and running. Good thing he did! PRTG caught a disk capacity issue before he ever noticed it! Uploading 80 videos in 3 days will do that. vBrownBag + Tech Field Day + PRTG = great!

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A Warning in Time – PRTG

Tech Field Day 12 Primer: Igneous Systems

Matt Crape is a first-time Tech Field Day delegate but he’s jumping in with a series of blog posts about the presenters. Here’s his take on Igneous Systems, which seems to be getting a lot of delegate interest! Matt details their dataBox storage device, which can leverage local storage for cloud-native apps to provide improved speeds for users, as well as mitigating privacy and security concerns.

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Tech Field Day 12 Primer: Igneous Systems

Tech Field Day 12 Primer: Rubrik

First-time Field Day delegate Matt Crape takes a look at Rubrik, a familiar face at the event series. He talks about their various configurable “briks” hardware appliances and their scale-out approach, which allows for superior dedupe and compression rates compared to legacy systems. He then dives into their Firefly release (announced at Tech Field Day 10) and how data can be managed by policy to promote simplicity. Watch Matt’s blog and twitter during and after Rubrik’s Nov. 16 presentation to learn more!

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Tech Field Day 12 Primer: Rubrik

DriveScale set to make first ever Tech Field Day appearance!

Mike Preston takes a look at DriveScale, a company founded in 2013 by former executives from Nuova, Sun Microsystems, and Silicon Image, but just out of stealth mode this May. He tries to make sense of their scale-up/scale-out pitch, which allows them to add compute or capacity vertically or horizontally with access arbitrated by software defined physical nodes and DriveScale’s Management Server, with connectivity via 10 Gb Ethernet. Mike is really looking forward to a deep dive into the product at Tech Field Day in November!

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DriveScale set to make first ever Tech Field Day appearance!

Igneous bringing the cloud to you at Tech Field Day

Mike Preston continues his investigation into Tech Field Day presenters with a look at Igneous.IO, a “true cloud for local data”. The Igneous solution is like nothing we’ve seen before – a hardware cloud system deployed inside a data center but with pay-as-you-go pricing. Best of all, they install and manage the system throughout its lifetime. It’s compatible with Amazon and Google API’s, so it should work with existing applications. It sounds like Mike and the Field Day delegates are very interested in learning more!

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Igneous bringing the cloud to you at Tech Field Day

Intel SPDK – A foundation block for new generation storage

Max Mortillaro tackles the topic of storage latency in his latest post. Inspired by the Intel Storage presentation at Storage Field Day, he discusses the history of storage latency and presents the need for faster software. He then discusses Intel’s Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), which might allow software latency to approach the performance of modern solid-state storage.

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Intel SPDK - A foundation block for new generation storage

Drill Baby, Drill! (into NetFlow with Kentik)

After being introduced to Kentik at Networking Field Day in August, Dustin Beare got some hands-on time with the tool. Now that he’s had a chance to use Data Explorer, what does he think? Overall, Dustin came away impressed, citing Data Explorer’s simplicity in viewing traffic flowing into a network. Kentik made it easy to pull specific queries out of NetFlow data.

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Drill Baby, Drill! (into NetFlow with Kentik)