VMware was one of our presenters at Tech Field Day back in December, and they caught the attention of Field Day delegate Alastair Cooke. Writing for his blog, Alastair takes a look at Disaster Recovery options including VMware’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) product. He says that, much like insurance, Disaster Recovery products can be expensive and might feel unnecessary until you really need it most. Check out his thoughts on VMware’s DRaaS on his blog or check out the Tech Field Day presentations on our website!
I Want Network Integration, I’m Not Getting It
At Cloud Field Day, Alastair Cooke was interested in hearing from AWS and VMware about how they are approaching network connectivity and integration between the two. He’s not a fan of point solutions that function or are managed differently; they add up to more problems. While the two showed a lot of interesting integrations, ultimately he’d like to see VMware on AWS networking fully integrated with the AWS VPC network as an equal to VPC. For now, there are a collection of workable solutions involving virtual interfaces, VPNs, and proprietary network bridging (HCX).
Hardware Offloads, Not Everything Is X86
Alastair Cooke takes a look at why x86 isn’t the only option anymore for organizations looking to solve computing problems. This trend has been going on for a while, with GPUs finding new roles handling highly parallelized workloads in ML and AI. But he also highlights how NGD Systems is putting ARM cores inside SSDs to provide computation storage. He’s also looking forward to hearing about the Pensando Distributed Services Card at Cloud Field Day, which appears to offer hardware offloading for software-defined edge services, aimed at telcos. We can’t wait to hear what he thinks of their presentation!
Cloud Field Day 7 – Who Will Be Presenting?
Alastair Cooke will be joining us virtually for Cloud Field Day later in April. Instead of the jetlag that comes from crossing an ocean to usually be at an event, he’ll instead be up early to join the other delegates for the presentations. Though a virtual event, he’s looking forward to the same in-depth technical presentations, the opportunity to ask direct questions to the presenters, and the great conversations with the other delegates. In this post, he runs down what he’s looking forward to from each of the presenters. This includes a mix of Field Day stalwarts like Aruba, VMware, and Solarwinds, with newer companies to the event series, like Stellus and Pensando. Be sure to mark your calendar to join the live stream to watch the event along with Alastair.
Cohesity at Tech Field Day in 2019
Alastair Cooke is getting ready for Storage Field Day, and is particularly excited to hear from Cohesity. He’s familiar with the company, but has never seen them live at a Field Day event yet. If you need to do your homework to get up to speed on their solutions, be sure to check out this post from Alastair, which organizes all of our video coverage of their past presentations.
Vendor Briefing: Scale Computing Edge Solution
Alastair Cooke has been watching Scale Computing in the industry for a number of years now, and has seen an impressive evolution in the company. They have been gradually moving from solutions aimed at budget-conscious small businesses to a scalable solution for distributed enterprises. This change has been built on innovative multi-cluster management and scaling down the required minimums for deploying at a site. Their most recent announced was the HC150,, a HCI appliance built on an Intel NUC. Be sure to check out all their Tech Field Day presentation videos for a technical deep dive on all their innovations.
Pure Accelerates With Direct Memory Module
Alastair Cooke, discusses the new tier of storage for the FlashArray//X, Direct Memory Module, which was announced during Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019.
GIT Pure Flash Array//C Returns to the Beginning
Alastair Cooke was as a delegate for Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019. Here he shares a review of the capacity and performance of Pure Storage’s new array series. Pure provides lots of technical deep dives of all their big announcements at the event, be sure to check out our video coverage.
Pure Cloud Block Store Available on AWS
Alastair Cooke attended Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019, and got to see a number of technical deep dive presentations on the major new solution announced at the event. In this post he digs into Pure Cloud Block Store on AWS.
All-In Public Cloud for Backup
Cloud-first and all cloud for backup and archive storage might sounds nice from the comfort of the US, but Alastair Cooke takes a look at Druva’s approach to this with a New Zealand-based perspective. With slower overall internet speeds and higher cloud latency, it changes some of the equation when looking at their solutions. While this might not be the best option in that country for server backups, Alastair loves what they offer for protecting data on highly mobile laptops. Overall he thinks Druva has feature rich solution. It’s this kind of regional perspective we love to see at Tech Field Day events.
Computer, Prepare My Report
Automation Anywhere definitely made a splash with their first presentation at Tech Field Day. They’re a long time player in the fast growing Robotic Process Automation market. Alastair Cooke digs into their presentation and solution in this post.
Tech Field Day 19, Next Week
Alastair Cooke returns as a delegate this week for Tech Field Day. It’s been about a year since we’ve seen him at a full Field Day event, a bit too long if you ask us! We can’t wait to hear what he thinks about the presentations. Be sure to follow along on Twitter to join in the conversation using #TFD19.
Guarantees Are Good for Business and Engineering
Alastair Cooke has a long history with Pure Storage, first seeing the company at Virtualization Field Day all the way back in 2014. From an initial focus at offering an AFA at a price competitive with disk, the company has now expanded to offer a wide portfolio. Now, the company is offering the Forever Flash guarantee. Alastair looks at how this doesn’t stray too far from their original mission of making life simplier for customers. Instead of doing forklift upgrades, Pure replace the controllers in their array every three years.
Monitoring Data Translation As a Service – Blue Medora
Alastair Cooke heard from Blue Medora at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018 earlier this year. In this piece, he looks at how the company provides Bindplane, a solution that serves as a sort of Rosetta Stone for all of the “single pane of glass” monitoring that ends up siloed among teams. Bindplane isn’t just another monitoring tool, it’s the glue to stick together multiple data sources that can be commonly viewed and have additional tools work on in unison.
HCI Isn’t the Only Simplified Management
In this piece, Alastair Cooke looks at why Hyperconverged Infrastructure doesn’t deliver the comprehensive simplified management it often is associated with. He then looks at how since HCI first hit the market, simplification is now offered for a variety of modern products that may better service IT operations.
SolarWinds, Not Just On-premises, There Is SaaS Too
Alastair Cooke looks at how SolarWinds is offering an increasingly compelling SaaS monitoring portfolio, which he saw at two past Tech Field Day presentations. In this post, he runs down their Pingdom, Loggly, Papertrail, and AppOptics offerings.
IT Security Is a People Problem
Forcepoint had a rather unique presentation at Tech Field Day in February. The company focused on the failing of traditional security, and how they have solutions to address the largely ignored risk of security breaches inside an organization. Alastair Cooke wrote up his thoughts on their User and Entity Behaviour Analytics. Provided an organization discloses that these kind of analytics are being done, Alastair found it an interesting addition to an organization’s security toolset.
The True Meaning of HyperConverged
The definitions of words can sometimes be tricky in the enterprise. For Alastair Cooke, the problem comes when we force a term to conform to an arbitrary set of mechanical elements, rather than around business need. This was brought to mind during Tech Field Day, when NetApp presented about their philosophy behind HCI, which is far more about the simplicity of operating an environment designed purely to run VMs, than simply adding storage to a server box.
Tech Field Day Culture and Values
Alastair Cooke is out in Austin for Tech Field Day this week. He’s no stranger to the events, so he shares some of his personal rules and best practices to get the most out of the event. We’re looking forward to seeing what he thinks of the presentations this time around.
Vendor Briefing: Comtrade backup for Nutanix, HYCU
Comtrade recently released HYCU (pronounced like Haiku), a backup and recovery solution for Nutanix’s HCI platform. In this post, Alastair Cooke digs into what differentiates it from Nutanix’s own built-in tools.
