In this piece, Alastair Cooke takes a look at the state of storage as we enter the age of IoT. For Alastair, he thinks projects of central object stores being inundated with tons of IoT data miss the point. Instead he sees compute moving close to the edge to be closer to the source of the data, only sending on composites of the gross data tonnage to the data center. As part of this, he thinks Robin System’s software HCI solution has the right approach. It simplified containerization on whatever servers and storage are available, giving enterprises the flexibility and simplicity to move compute closer to the edge.
Who Is Going to Tech Field Day 13? These People, plus Me.
Alastair Cooke will be at Tech Field Day next week. In the excitement over which companies will be presenting, Alastair takes some time to also introduce the amazing delegates as well. He runs down each delegate and gives links to some of their excellent work, along with notes of where and when they’ve crossed paths in the past. It’s a great way to get to know some of the faces on the Tech Field Day livestream.
Future Storage, Flash, and Cloud?
As someone who would have bet good money that Zip disks were going to take over storage in the late 90s, my own ability to predict the future of storage is dubious at best. Alastair Cooke is under no such scrutiny. He reviews what some are seeing as the future of storage: a combination of flash and object cloud storage. He sees two potential solutions for this from ClearSky Data and Avere Systems. ClearSky uses a geographically tiered flash system to quickly represent your data, and Avere uses local flash to focus on file share performance. Alastair might question if flash + cloud will be the correct formulation, but he liked what he saw from Avere and ClearSky.
Vendor Briefing: SolarWinds
Alastair Cooke summarizes a recent product briefing he had with SolarWinds. He got a look at the Orion unified management console for their Server and Application Monitoring suite. Alastair liked that items were actionable within Orion, not just a hard to wrangle mass of metrics. He also liked that it allowed for customizable templates for monitoring specific applications. Better yet, these templates can be shared with other SolarWinds community members. It’s exciting to see a company embrace an enthusiastic community like that.
A Warning in Time – PRTG
Alastair Cooke joined the Tech Field Day delegate panel at both VMworld US and Europe this year, and he used the Barcelona experience to get PRTG up and running. Good thing he did! PRTG caught a disk capacity issue before he ever noticed it! Uploading 80 videos in 3 days will do that. vBrownBag + Tech Field Day + PRTG = great!
