In spite of Dell’s recent announcement to spin off VMware, the two giants of tech still plan on working in tandem to deliver high quality cloud products as detailed in Dell’s March Cloud Field Day appearance. With VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation, both Dell and VMware combine the capabilities of their high-performance servers and virtualization software, respectively, to streamline and secure operations. Check out the article and watch Dell’s Cloud Field Day presentation to learn more about the two products from the two companies.
Review: TFDx PoweredUp Event
Gina Rosenthal virtually attended our Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio, and was impressed to see how Dell EMC used the event to achieve their marketing goals for their new product portfolio despite the current pandemic shutting down traditional events. Gina broke down her impressions of the events in two recent videos, so be sure to dig into them before watching Dell’s entire presentation. There were a lot of new products and solutions highlighted at the event, and Gina definitely enjoyed the experience.
Dell EMC SmartFabric Director- Weaving a Tapestry of Green
Are you ready to build your digital transformation project? Need a new network to make it work? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at Dell EMC SmartFabric Director and how it can help you building out your next new project. He got to hear about SmartFabric Director at Networking Field Day, and thinks that it shows Dell EMC is on the right track for large existing infrastructures that are looking to make leaps toward digital transformation initiatives to get a handle on how to make that happen.
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.
DellEMC Project Nautilus Re-Imagine Storage for Streams
Chin-Fah Heoh got to hear about Dell EMC’s Project Nautilus at Storage Field Day. This is their composite software platform for both streaming real-time data and historical batch data. A key component of this is Pravega, an open source storage framework for streaming data. This allows for storage streams to be treated as a new class of storage primitives, which can use protocols like Fibre Channel, SMB or NFS. Data streams can then further be fed into analytics frameworks like Flink and Apache Spark. With the increasing importance of edge computing, Chin-Fah sees Project Nautilus as an very timely framework.
Project Nautilus Emerged as Dell’s Streaming Data Platform
At Storage Field Day, Gina Rosenthal got to hear from Dell EMC’s Project Nautilus, which uses open source tools to offer real time and historical analytics and storage. This essentially serves as a framework for those tool, with ingested data streams being tiered to long term storage, connected to analytics tools like Spark and Flink, then joined by Project Nautilus’ engine to provide for scale. This is all part of Dell EMC’s larger efforts to help blunt the impact of unstructured data growth. The open source streaming data platform with Project Nautilus is definitely a key addition to that toolkit.
Taming Unstructured Data With Dell EMC Isilon
Dell EMC presented an update on Isilon at Storage Field Day. Gina Rosenthal was a delegate at the event and wrote up what they showed about how Isilon is helping organizations solve the growing problem of unstructured data. It’s hard to follow any IT analysis these days without hearing a terrifying statement about how the rapid growth of unstructured data is going to eat through existing storage options. This Emmy award winning scale-out NAS has a long history and runs Dell’s OneFS. One interesting thing they showed during Storage Field Day was the ability to run OneFS with its full policy support in the cloud. This allows organizations to put data close to their cloud compute using the tools their familiar with, something critical with Isilon’s long time customers. Gina thought this kind of extension shows how traditional storage teams can augment cloud offerings.
Dell EMC PowerOne – Not V(x)block 2.0
Dell EMC is a familiar face at Storage Field Day. As an iconic company in the storage industry, it’s always good to get an update on their latest and greatest. Dan Frith got to hear from them with an update on PowerOne, its converged “all-in-one autonomous infrastructure.” Converged infrastructure isn’t the newest idea on the block, but Dan thinks that PowerOne offers a substantially different experience than solutions of the past. In this post, Dan outlines a lot of the important automation features that help it stand out, which takes away the need to constantly consult documentation and other support documents to get the system up and running. While a lot of enterprise interest is taken by HCI solutions, Dan makes the case that Dell EMC is truly innovating with converged infrastructure to meet real enterprise need and keep it relevant.
Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With a Chance of Scale Out
Dell EMC’s Isilon storage solution has been in the industry for a while, providing capacity and performance scaling to meet the needs of petabyte scale organizations. In this piece, Dan Frith digs into the platforms latest updates, which he heard at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In the post, he looks at how Isilon’s OneFS file system is designed to provide non-disruptive scaling for organizations, and can run either in your data center or directly on a public cloud. The latter is a key new addition for Dan, who sees this having major implications for organizations looking to shift workloads to the cloud, providing features those customers depend on that aren’t available natively on public cloud platforms. Isilon is particularly popular for media and entertainment workloads, which often aren’t optimized for the cloud. This capability opens up whole new possibilities without having to abandon existing workflows and tools.
Dell Technologies PowerOne – Dell’s Private Cloud?
In this sponsored episode of the CTO Advisor podcast, host Keith Townsend talks with Dell EMC’s Conor Duffy, David Iovino, and Justin Jones. In the episode, they discuss the company’s PowerOne converged infrastructure, which was announced late last year. The company recently went into detail on this at Storage Field Day. They discuss where CI approaches fit in an IT landscape dominated by cloud and HCI, and Dell lays out how their investments in automation make PowerOne stand out. Keith wasn’t at the event, but got caught up on it with our comprehensive video coverage. After you listen to the episode, be sure to check out the video for yourself.
Dell EMC PowerOne Is Next-Gen Converged Infrastructure
Enrico Signoretti saw two sessions from Dell EMC at Storage Field Day that really piqued his interest, touching on DevOps and infrastructure automation. Enrico was really surprised by their presentation on PowerOne, a next-generation converged infrastructure. He’s admittedly not a fan on converged infrastructure in general, but in Dell EMC’s PowerOne Controller, Enrico sees something that could be an automation hub for automating all the storage infrastructure, simplifying the configuration management of large scale infrastructures. This kind of potential really stood out during the presentation.
Storage Management and DevOps
At a recent Storage Field Day event, Chris Evans got to hear from Audrius Stripeikis of Dell EMC discussing findings from their latest research on storage management automation. Their findings saw that organizations with ten or more platforms depended upon automation for service delivery. This meant dealing with three challenges, consistency, scale, and automating self-service. Dell EMC showed how their API framework is designed to meet those challenges , giving developers access to APIs to directly provision resources. Resources aren’t infinite, so Dell EMC built in additional systems to keep things manageable, but this approach simplified a lot of traditional bottlenecks in the pipeline.
TECHunplugged VideoCast SFD19 Part 1
It’s always great to have TECHunplugged’s Arjan Timmerman as a delegate at an event, and we were thrilled to have him attend Storage Field Day. This was Arjan’s fourteenth time around the table to get caught up on the latest in enterprise storage, and his enthusiasm for the experience is infectious. In this video, he previews what he expected from each of the presenters. The event had a fantastic array of presenting companies, with the latest from Dell EMC, Infrascale, Komprise, MinIO, NetApp, Tiger Technology, WekaIO, and Western Digital. Be sure to check out the preview before diving into our comprehensive video coverage.
DellEMC SmartFabric Director
With Dell EMC’s SmartFabric Director, Remington Loose sees the company tightening its focus on VMware and NSX-T fabrics. Based on what he saw at Networking Field Day, the new tool seems to meet all the major needs for a fabric. While relatively versatile, he thinks it makes the most sense putting NSX-T on top.
Fluid SDDC With Liqid and Dell EMC
Andrew Mauro attended Tech Field Day Extra presentations at Dell Technologies World last month. One of the presentations was by the composable infrastructure company Liqid. They recently announced a OEM deal with Dell EMC, so it was appropriate timing. In the post, Andrew looks at how Liqid interconnects compute, networking, storage, GPU, FPGA, and Optane resources intelligently over fabric to deliver dynamically-configurable bare-metal servers with the exact resources needed in the moment.
Dell – Dell Technologies World 2019 – See You Soon Las Vegas
If there’s an event that will talk about storage, it’s always a good idea to have Dan Frith there. That’s why we’re thrilled to have him along as a delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World. He’s looking forward to seeing what announcements Dell EMC has on tap for the event.
Protection for your backup data from Dell EMC Cyber Recovery
At Tech Field Day, Adam Fisher got to hear from Dell EMC Protect, and about their latest solution Dell EMC Cyber Recovery 18.1. This creates a “air-gapped” vault within infrastructure to make sure your backups remain secure from ransomware and other attacks. For Adam, this provides vital protection for an often overlooked avenue of exploit.
The Dell EMC Data Bunker
At Tech Field Day, Dell EMC announced a new product to the delegates, the Cyber Recovery solution, coming from their Data Protection BU. Chin-Fah Heoh wrote up his thoughts after seeing the announcement as a delegate at the event. He frames Cyber Recovery as a data bunker, isolating mission critical secondary data, while preserving the integrity of the copy. Chin-Fah thinks this falls more into the security camp rather than the storage side, but it appears to line up well with enterprise security standards.
Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld 2018
Adam Fisher was able to join as a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018. He shares his experience in this post, including how he got involved as a delegate, the TFD Vegas Suite experience, and hearing from Dell EMC’s data protection team. Overall he had an “amazing experience” and found it the perfect way to cap off the best conference he’s attended to date.
Redfish support for DellEMC PowerEdge
Andrea Mauro got to hear from Dell EMC’s automation and configuration team at Tech Field Day earlier this year. They outlined their new iDRAC9 version, but also support for iDRAC9 version on the newest generation of PowerEdge servers. Andrea thinks for organizations in a heterogenous vendor environment this support is vital for implementing automation.
