Dell EMC’s in the Midst of a Midrange Resurrection

Dan Frith got an update on Dell EMC’s midrange Unity portfolio at Storage Field Day earlier this month. He found the line significantly more refined compared to its rather rough launch, now merging file, block or VMware Virtual Volume storage sharing in the same storage pool. The included data services also show that Dell EMC is listening to their customers. It’s a sign to Dan that midrange, while not the most exciting, is still receiving the attention it deserves.


The Purity of Hyperconverged Infrastructure: What’s in a Name?

Scott Lowe isn’t too high on the term Hyperconverged Infrastructure. For Scott, it’s basically a catch all for some combination of storage and compute in a single appliance. But increasingly, though HCI broadly offers simplicity, it can fail to meet the specific needs of an organization. Scott looks at solutions from Datrium, Dell EMC ScaleIO, and NetApp that all could be categorized as HCI, but take a fundamentally different approach.


Half 2017 in community with VMTN, VMworld 2017 and TechFieldDay

Lino Telera joined us as a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld 2016. He’s been keeping up to date with our past events, and wrote up some thoughts on the past two Tech Field Day events. Lino also gives a preview of VMworld 2017. He’ll be in attendance, and see the show moving to embrace greater industry trends of Big Data and IoT.


SFD13 Primer – Dell EMC

Max Mortillaro continues his excellent primer series on the presenting companies coming up at Storage Field Day next week. In this post, he takes a look at what to expect from Dell EMC. He reviews the company’s place in the market, and how the merger of Dell and EMC was not exempt from bumps along the way. Max is interested in hearing more about VxRail and XtremIO. Make sure to watch along on the live stream during the event to stay up to date on their entire presentation!


Hardware vs. software innovation – round 4

Ray Lucchesi considers Dell EMC’s decision to kill their DSSD NVMe storage device, and frames it in the continuing debate over hardware vs software innovation. Ray thinks it’s further evidence that we are in a software innovation cycle. As further evidence, recent releases by both Excelero and E8 Storage. Both are using commodity hardware to achieve high level performance, over 4 million IO/sec with ~120 to ~230µsec response times. It’s an interesting discussion, and Ray gives both sides their due.


VxRail – One Year Later

VxRail has been on the market for about a year, and Sean Thulin got an update from Dell EMC about the HCI solution at Tech Field Day. So far, sales of VxRail have been strong, with major revisions even in the first year. Sean thinks that’s a good sign that Dell EMC is really listening to consumers. Unfortunately, the company had to admit that this lead to a dearth of professional services, creating a bit of a backlog for some customers. Sean is excited to see the next iteration of VxRail which will have options heavy on NVMe and NVDIMMs.


Dell EMC: When Two Hearts Beat As One

Rich Stroffolino takes a look at Dell EMC’s update on VxRail from Tech Field Day this month. For him, it was an interesting look at the process of merging two large companies together. As far as VxRail goes, the company has been met with a lot of sales success, but was also upfront on what they needed to improve on. Overall, Rich found that VxRail hasn’t lost any of its focus by merging with Dell’s PowerEdge team. Indeed, the expanded hardware offerings now make it an even more enticing HCI solution.


Tech Field Day “Lucky” 13 – A Preview

The Tech Field Day team is excited to have Dell EMC back for another great Tech Field Day presentation! They published a preview of what they’ll be presenting to the delegates. This includes VxRail, Data Analytics, OEM strategy, and a tour of the Modular Data Center. We’re excited to see it all unfold, so make sure to check back for the live stream, or full videos after the event!


Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Dell EMC

Tech Field Day is coming up in Austin this week, and Thom Greene wrote about what he’s looking forward to from Dell EMC. He’s excited to learn more about their VxRail hyperconverged solution. Hyperconverged Infrastructure is a crowded space, but Dell EMC thinks VxRail differentiates by being built from the ground up with VMware’s SDDC packages in mind. Of course with the size of a company like Dell EMC, you’ll have to tune into the live stream to see what exactly they’ll be presenting. We can’t wait!


I Like Big Files and I Cannot Lie

The inimitable Alex Galbraith uses the poetry of Sir Mix-a-Lot to ponder Dell EMC’s presentation from Tech Field Day this past November, when they reviewed their Isilon storage solution. The most important consideration from Alex’s piece, who is this for? Isilon is meant for organization with tremendous storage needs, into petabyte scale. Alex reviews how Isilon addresses these into “data lakes”, and keeps performance at a high level.


Transform and Scale Out with Isilon

Rich Stroffolino gives a rundown of the Dell EMC presentation from Tech Field Day last month. They highlighted their latest hard disk offerings for their Isilon platform. This includes a look at the history of the platform, their latest node offerings, and their hybrid flash solution. Sadly, he was not treated to a look at their new all flash Nitro array. Still, Rich offers some interesting insight on how the scale of Dell EMC differed from some of the emerging vendors he also saw at Tech Field Day.


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.


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!


DellEMC will make it’s first appearance at a Field Day event since merger!

You may not have heard, but two small bespoke vendors named Dell and EMC merged in a deal that finalized in September. They both have presented at Tech Field Day events in the past, but this is the first time we’ll see them present to our delegates with their powers combined! They’ll be presenting about their Isilon offering on Wednesday. Check out Mike Preston’s piece about the DellEMC merger, and what he’s looking forward to at Tech Field Day.


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