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.
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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SPEP03 – TFD12 | Open TechCast
Unwitting Accomplices in Your Career
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, Eric Shanks takes a look back at the places and people that led him to presenting at VMUG, blogging about Enterprise IT, and being a delegate for Tech Field Day. We’re always thankful a thoughtful piece from Eric!
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Unwitting Accomplices in Your Career
Networking Field Day 13 – Sneak Preview
Tony Mattke wrote a nice preview of Networking Field Day, held just last week in Silicon Valley. He runs through all of the presenting companies, and tells us what he was looking forward to seeing. Give it a read to whet your appetite, then check out all of the video coverage here!
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Networking Field Day 13 - Sneak Preview
Friday Shorts – VMware, Veeam, Docker and Community
Mike Preston gives a brief sum up of his experience at Tech Field Day last week. Plus, Mike is a little perplexed by the popularity of Docker and containers, good thing he saw them present at the event! Mike always provides great coverage, so stay tuned for more.
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Friday Shorts – VMware, Veeam, Docker and Community
Learning “better SD-WAN” from a Non SD-WAN vendor!
After attending Networking Field Day in August, Faisal Khan came away impressed by ThousandEyes. He thought their network monitoring solution was more impressive when considered with SD-WAN, even though the company isn’t exactly pitching the solution that way. ThousandEyes can monitor a router to router span, as opposed to most SD-WAN vendors which only do end to end. Faisal runs down some of the use cases where this proves to be a superior solution. A really interesting take on what ThousandEyes is offering!
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Learning "better SD-WAN" from a Non SD-WAN vendor!
The struggles of travelling
In this piece, Matt Crape reflects thoughtfully on what it means to travel for events, how it impacts family and work-life balance. How do you measure the value of traveling to the event, and what you lose by being away from home and family? Matt does a really good job of keeping this all in perspective, laying out both the pitfalls and the benefits. We’re very grateful for his time, and thrilled that Tech Field Day was a worthwhile event!
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Throw Your Isilon in the Data Lake
Eric Shanks gives a rundown of the Dell EMC Isilon presentation he saw last week at Tech Field Day 12. He goes into what exactly the Dell EMC Isilon solution is, essentially a single namespace for an enormous storage pool. He then goes on to rundown some of the market segments Isilon would market to, as well as some of the notable features. One feature stood out to Eric, the “Smart Lock” feature, which allows you to prevent files from being changed, essentially protecting sensitive data from potential malicious agents. Plus he even tells you how to try it out on your own.
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Throw Your Isilon in the Data Lake
Container-based ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent…
Tim Miller tried out a Docker container install of a ThousandEyes image. While there were some issues with the actual Docker configuration, Tim was impressed with the service and support by Thousand Eyes, he had a customer service representative install Fedora over the phone just to try to replicate the issue. Tim got the ThousandEyes container up and running and is looking forward to trying it out in a longer trial.
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Container-based ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent...
NFD13 Forecast – Cloudy With a Chance of Software
Bob McCouch gives an overview of what he was looking forward to for Networking Field Day held last week. The two themes he saw for NFD: The Cloud and Software-centricity. Bob was really excited to get some more information on SD-WAN from VeloCloud and Viptela. Check out the full video coverage on the event page to get the latest from these and all the other presenting companies.
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NFD13 Forecast – Cloudy With a Chance of Software
Tech Field Day 12 Primer: Dell EMC
Matt Crape gives a preview of what he expected from Dell EMC for their Tech Field Day presentation last week. With such a big portfolio, it was hard to determine what exactly he expected to see. Read his post, then check out all the videos from Dell EMC’s Isilon presentation right here!
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