It’s no secret that Keith Townsend is skeptical of the IT hype machine that is Kubernetes. In this post, he compares it to upgrading traffic light orchestration systems to help ease congestion. The drivers only care that it helps congestion, not what system is running. That’s why he’s impressed with what he saw from Solo IO at Cloud Field Day. They embrace namespaces in their solution, allowing you to consume infrastructure without worrying about the orchestrator. Read the full piece for all the details.
Talent Is Heavier Than Data
In this piece, Keith Townsend considers the impact of human talent on data gravity. The holy grail is to have data available instantly when you need it. There are literal physical limits to how possible this is, and he recently completed a video at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO talking about some of the use cases and the capabilities of their Activate product in regards to metadata. At Cloud Field Day, he heard from Hammerspace, which looks at how to mitigate data gravity issues with a very unique solution.
91: Keith and Ray Show at CommvaultGO 2019
In this podcast, Ray Lucchesi and Keith Townsend give their impressions of Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019. The event was their first chance to talk to Commvault’s new CEO Sanjay Mirchandani. They also got to hear about Commvault Metallic, get details about what the company will do with the Hedvig acquisition, and more.
Commvault Activate – CommvaultGo 2019
Keith Townsend sits down with Commvault Field CTO Aaron Murphy and Director of Product Management Patrick McGrath during Tech Field Day Exclusive at CommvaultGo 2019. Commvault is known as a data protection company with its Complete product representing the bulk of its revenue. Activate is a product positioned at the data platform market.
Commvault Metallic and AWS RDS on vSphere – The Future of IT
Keith Townsend was a delegate at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019, and got to hear all the exciting announcements from the event. In this post, he breaks down the details and implications of Commvault Metallica, their new SaaS offering.
Master’s Lesson in IT Management
If you’re interesting in understand the IT challenges for large shop, Keith Townsend recommends checking out a video from Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019. In it, the University of Leicester went into detail about migrating infrastructure with 20PB of data. There are a lot of challenges in this, regardless of the organization. We’re glad Keith found it interesting.
CommvaultGo 2019 Hot Take
Commvault announced a SaaS backup solution (Metallic) and went into a little detail about the acquisition of software-defined storage company Hedvig during Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019. Keith Townsend shares his impressions of the keynote in this video.
Pure Accelerate: Cloud Block Service
Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor, attended Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019 and in this post, he analyzes their latest solution, Cloud Block Service.
Commvault Breaking the Storage Laws
For Keith Townsend, Commvault’s acquisition of Hedvig signals that they may be breaking one of the cardinal rules of storage. Commvault may be thought of traditionally as a backup company, but Keith makes the argument that the acquisition proves they want to move beyond the aspirations of secondary storage. Be sure to check out all of the video coverage from our Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019 and decide for yourself!
VMware’s Cloud in 300-Words
Keith Townsend returned to the VMware campus to hear Dell Technologies share their vision of VMware on Dell Technologies Cloud during Cloud Field Day. He recorded a great “hot take” video directly after the event, be sure to check it out. He was impressed by the quality of the conversation and the willingness of Dell to be flexible in the discussion.
Dell Tech Cloud CFD6 – Hot Take
Keith Townsend returned to the VMware campus to hear Dell Technologies share their vision of VMware on Dell Technologies Cloud during Cloud Field Day. He appreciated the conversation flow of the conversation, and how the presenters were willing to curate their content to follow the interest of the delegates. It’s definitely a can’t miss presentation.
Pure Accelerate FlashArray
Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor, analyzes the Pure Storage announcement of support for Intel Optane Persistent Memory in their FlashArray storage during Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019.
Lucid Link CFD6 – Hot Take
Another mobile file system? Keith Townsend thought he was going to see a familiar song and dance from Lucid Link at Cloud Field Day. But he was pleasently surprised to see a truly different solution, with block storage served on top of S3 object storage, with a global file system distributed among clients. They had a very interesting demo, so be sure to check out their full event video coverage.
NetApp CFD6 – Hot Take
In this hot take from Keith Townsend, he looks at what NetApp showed off at Cloud Field Day. Keith is no stranger to hearing from the company, but this session had a deep technical focus. They looked at where does NetApp’s Kubernetes service run its compute. They reviewed how they separate their control plane from the cloud underlay and deploy instances large enough to support the Kubernetes infrastructure next to storage and other workloads.
EXTRAHOP CFD6 Hot Take
Keith Townsend is posting hot take reactions of all the presentations at Cloud Field Day. He was looking forward to seeing ExtraHop’s networking management features at the event and using their platform under system demand. The presentation went another way with a security heavy focus. Be sure to check it out for a full deep dive.
HashiCorp CFD6 Hot Take
Keith Townsend attended the HashiCorp CFD6 presentation on Consul. While extremely low level Keith was able to walk away with the value prop of Consul. Service discovery is becoming a more important part of the hybrid cloud management operations. Learn more of Keith’s thoughts in this video.
Morpheus Data CFD6 – Hot Take
Morpheus data presented a massive amount of capability in a single package during Cloud Field Day. In this video, Keith Townsend discusses what impressed him and where technology alone isn’t a solution for infrastructure as code.
89: Keith & Ray Show at Pure//Accelerate 2019
On this episode of the GreyBeardsOnStorage Podcast, Keith Townsend and Ray Lucchesi look at the major announcements from Pure Accelerate. They got a lot of in-depth technical presentations as part of the Storage Field Day Exclusive at the event, and they dig into the implications of DirectMemory, FlashArray//C, CloudBlockStore, and more.
Hammerspace CFD6 – Hot Take
In this video, Keith Townsend gives his first impressions of the Hammerspace presentation at Cloud Field Day 6 in Santa Clara.
The Campus and Cloud-First
We were fortunate to have Keith Townsend as one of the delegates for Network Field Day Exclusive at 128-Technologies last month. In this post, he breaks down how what he saw at the event got him thinking about how does a cloud-first strategy impact your campus network design and operations. For Keith, a lot of the decision comes down to assessing your campus end-user compute needs.