Becky Elliott was a delegate at Cloud Field Day in November and follows the event with an analysis of Portworx by Pure Storage. Becky mentions that Portworx takes a cloud-native approach, where “Portworx’s software-defined storage control plane abstracts away a lot of the inherent complexity of managing storage in containers and also working with heterogeneous storage.” For more of Becky’s thoughts, visit her blog!
CFD9: VMware’s vRealize Cloud Journey Story
Nothing in enterprise IT is ideal, says Becky Elliot, Cloud Field Day delegate and enterprise IT expert. That includes lifting and shifting applications instead of modernizing them to make the most of cloud-native agility like containers and object storage. VMware presented at Cloud Field Day 9 and its vRealize Suite and its SaaS and Hybrid are designed to help organizations get to the cloud and shift from on-premises vSphere to VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), perhaps at least partially solving the lift and shift problem.
Guess Who’s Attending Storage Field Day 20?
Becky Elliott wrote about her excitement and thoughts headed into Storage Field Day earlier this month. As a veteran delegate, Becky knows both the perks and challenges of being a delegate at our Tech Field Day events. She wrote about those as well as her pre-event thoughts on each of the seven presenters: Pensando, Cisco, Qumolo, Nebulon, Intel, Pure Storage, and VAST DATA. We’re excited to see what Becky thinks of the presenters post-event!
Gremlin Grappling With PathSolutions
For Becky Elliott, the ability of a network engineer to detect, troubleshoot, and respond to the inevitable network availability and performance issues borders on the preternatural. Having the right tools available can save not just time, but frustration for a lot of organizations to track down these issues. At Security Field Day, she got to hear from PathSolutions and get an overview of their TotalView Security Operations Manager. This has the ability to track down some security and networking gremlins in your network like unsecured protocols, unknown IOT devices, and unauthorized configuration changes. Becky really enjoys that all of these great capabilities are wrapped in a simple and clean UI.
SFD19: DellEMC Does DevOps
Dell EMC was one of the presenters at a busy Storage Field Day event. In this post, Becky Elliott writes up her thoughts on the presentation, one that was dominated by Dell EMC’s approach to DevOps. The company hit on the increasing imperative of automation in the enterprise and how IT silos are breaking down. Dell EMC also discussed their Ansible Playbooks for platforms like Isilon and PowerMax to help unify configuration, deployment, and orchestration. For Becky, this kind of practical focus of the presentation proved to be the most valuable.
SFD19: No Komprise on Knowing Thy Data
For Beck Elliott, Komprise stood at as one of her favorite presenters during Storage Field Day. While not her first introduction to the company, she appreciates their storage-agnostic approach and integration into file-based protocols, making it easy to use the solution with your existing storage infrastructure. The architecture for their analytics-driven data management platform is built around three pillars: dynamic data analytics, transparent data movement, and direct data access. There’s a lot to unpack from their presentation, so be sure to check out their full video coverage as well.
On the Road Again: #SFD19 Bound
Becky Elliott recently attended her fourth Storage Field Day event. Despite that and a spate of Tech Field Day Extra events over the year, the thrill of attending Field Day hasn’t been lost on Becky. This event saw her get to attend with fellow NetApp A-Team’er Ruairi McBride. We always love to watch the delegate community grow, and to see one time new delegates spread the message about the event and help bring in new voices. Storage Field Day was a packed event with a lot of interesting presentations. We can’t wait to hear what Becky thought of them in future posts. Be sure to check out our video coverage to get up to speed on all the great new tech!
HPE: What Did We See? TFDx Post-Attendance Thoughts
Becky L. Elliott attended Tech Field Day Exclusive with HPE Storage 2019. She takes a few moments to reflect on the experience and share what she learned during the event.
Smells Like Pure Spirit: Accelerate Post-Attendance Thoughts
Writer and Technologist, Becky Elliott, reflects on her experience at Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019. Follow Becky’s post series on Gestalt IT and her blog for further installments.
HPE: Let’s See! TFDx Pre-Attendance Thoughts
Becky Elliott is attending our special Tech Field Day Exclusive event with HPE Storage and is excited to learn more about the Primera storage platform and GreenLake Hybrid Cloud. She’s also wondering what HPE is doing with Cray, MapR, and BlueData. This special post at Gestalt IT is part of our Tech Talks series, which also features Matt Leib.
Pure Accelerate’s Inspired Keynote
Becky Elliott was one of the delegates to attend Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019. At the larger event, there were a number of excellent speakers. One keynote grabbed Becky was by Leland Melvin, who detailed his journey following his dream to become an astronaut.
Pure-Ly My Pre-Attendance Thoughts for Accelerate
Writer and Technologist, Becky Elliott, shares her anticipation about Pure Accelerate 2019. As a delegate and active community member, Becky explains why this is a FOMO-inducing event for her, as she covers her pre-attendance hopes, thoughts, and expectations of this year’s Accelerate. Follow Becky’s post series on Gestalt IT and on her blog.
Fun Forecasted at VMworld
One of Becky Elliott’s favorite things about a big conference like VMworld US is being surrounded by inspiring people with a shared interest and expertise. One part of that even will be Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US. There Becky will not only be surrounded by inspiring people, but she’ll get to hear in-depth technical presentations and create meaningul conversations around it. We can’t wait to see her there.
Pure Accelerate and My Pantone 300 Heart
Becky Elliott had a lot of thoughts before accepting the invite to be a delegate at Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate. She wondered if, given her affinity for a competitor, it would be a good experience. This piece does a great job arguing against the IT tribalism that can sometimes take shape, and argues for broadening horizons on technology and companies. With that kind of perspective, we can’t wait to hear what she thinks of the event.
A VAST-ly Different Storage Story
VAST Data made their first big public splash since coming out of stealth at Storage Field Day last month. At they event, they showed off their “disaggregated share everything architecture” meant to offer hyperscaler agility and scalability without the cost and data gravity of the public cloud. For Becky Elliott, their message of reducing complexity while allowing for scale really resonated.
California Dreamin’ My Way to Storage Field Day 18
Becky Elliott is returning to the delegate roundtable, coming to Storage Field Day out in Silicon Valley next week. At her third event, she’s looking forward to reconnecting with some fellow delegates, and getting deep dives from the presenting roster of companies. She’s even compiled all the past presentations by company if you want to do a little homework before next week. We can’t wait to hear what she thinks of this event!
Lose Some Complexity with Zerto at #SFD16
Becky Elliot got to see Zerto present at Storage Field Day last week. They offered something that would be immediately relevant to a project she’s working on, offering a combination of replication, DR, and backup in a single platform. While her project is too far along at this point to use Zerto, what she learned at Storage Field Day will definitely be top of mind for future endeavors.
TFDx and SFD14 Delegate Thoughts: Pre-Attendance
Becky Elliott has an exciting week ahead of her. She’ll be attending Commvault GO for the first time, including a Tech Field Day Exclusive presentation, as well as her first Storage Field Day. Becky is pretty familiar with NetApp’s position in the storage market, so she’s interested to drink from the Dell EMC firehose to see how they compare. Make sure to follow along on the Storage Field Day live stream and watch alongside all of the delegates.
Highlights from My First VMworld
Make sure to checkout Becky Elliott’s post detailing her highlights from her first VMworld. The event can be an overwhelming experience even for seasoned vets, but Becky came through the experience excited to do homework based on the sessions attended and, most importantly, a Tech Field Day delegate!
