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.
Intel Answering SAP HANA’s Tough Questions
Intel’s Optane DC Persistent memory was one of the highlight announcements from Tech Field Day Exclusive At Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day. On a technical level, bit-addressable NAND flash is interesting, but what does that do for business? Keith Townsend uses the example of the in-memory database SAP HANA. Setting up a data warehouse allowed an organization to ask even more of their data, which in turn led to further memory bottlenecks. Intel’s DC Persistent memory creates the infrastructure to answer these bottlenecks and provide the next generation of business insights. For Keith, this wasn’t about allowing us to do more things today, but about fundamentally allowing us to do what we want to do tomorrow.
Intel Data Centric Business Overview
Intel presented a lot of things at their Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day. Keith Townsend got to hear about it in a lot of details as a delegate at Tech Field Day Exclusive At Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day. But after marveling at a lot of the technical speeds and feeds, Keith looks at why customers and enterprises should care and how it will ultimately impact business.
Meet Field Day Delegate – Keith Townsend
Keith Townsend is no stranger to Field Day. But after having a stint on the company side, he’s back on the independent analyst beat. Before he goes to our Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day, Mel Zura got to know him a little better for Gestalt IT’s Meet the Delegates series.
Are CIO’s Missing the Metadata Bus?
Storage Field Day saw the return of Keith Townsend to the delegate ranks. In this post, he takes a look at what NetApp presented at the event. They showed their Network Data as a Service, which indexes all of the metadata stored in the system, allowing for basic analytics and an easily searchable data lake. Given NetApp’s breadth across Tier 1 and backup storage platforms, Keith sees some intriguing possibilities.
Leveraging Backup to Advance Your Decision Making
Keith Townsend looks into what he saw from Cohesity at Storage Field Day. The company revolutionized the scale-out backup appliance by fitting it into an overall vision for unified secondary storage. At the event, they showed off their App Store, allowing for devs to deploy software services directly on the platform. This can allow for machine learning and analytics to be run directly on secondary data.
Modern Data Protection Summary
Keith Townsend lays out exactly why data is the most important asset in the enterprise and what products have the essential protection and management features to protect, mobilize, and backup your data. Among the companies and products Keith discusses are Veritas, Rubrik Datos, and Druva who he saw present at Cloud Field Day 3 as well as Commvault who presented at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault Go in 2017.
Musing: The Short Life of Influencers — EtherealMind
Greg Ferro gives some important to advice to any established or aspiring influencer in the IT world. He encourages everyone to take a stab at blogging and to stick with it because, eventually, someone will notice your hard work and make your effort worth it.
Is Oracle Cloud an alternative to AWS?
In this CTO Dose, Keith Townsend takes a look at if Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a viable alternative to AWS. He got to learn about the platform at both Ravello Blogger Day and Cloud Field Day earlier this month. He breaks down how Oracle compares as an IaaS offering to the other public cloud providers.
Moving SAP and other legacy apps to the cloud
Keith Townsend outlines two solutions he saw that enable organizations to abstract the time-consuming challenges involved with provisioning ephemeral workloads. At Cloud Field Day this month, he saw Delphix present on how their solution allows organizations to automate the process of masking sensitive data through their abstraction solution. At Tech Field Day last year, Keith also saw Actifio present on a similar solution, but aimed at abstracting legacy workloads.
