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.
Chat with @RebeccaFitzhugh at #TFD13
Alastair Cooke took a break at Networking Field Day to have a chat with Rebecca Fitzhugh. They talk about the role of mentorship in career development within enterprise IT. It’s a brief but thoughtful discussion, make sure to check it out.
An Interview with Josh @EuroBrew at #TFD13
At Tech Field Day earlier this month, Alastair Cooke managed to steal a few minutes with Josh De Jong for a quick interview. They talk about how to approach learning throughout the changing technological landscape of IT. This is made more important by the fact that the cost of traditional training is often hard to come by when working for SMBs. It’s a really great conversation and food for thought for any IT professional.
On-Premises Serverless
Alastair Cooke looks at what is required to adopt serverless architecture in your data center. While services like AWS Lambda provide this for the public cloud, it isn’t as evident how to do this on-premises. Alastair breaks this down really clearly, essentially for serverless operation, you need to be able to quickly spin up and coordinate containers in response to external triggers. He quickly gives an overview of offerings from IBM and Iron.io that provide Functions as a Service. But Platform9 offers a managed serverless platform on top of an existing managed cloud environment. Their Fission solution (currently in alpha) essentially offers a managed serverless platform on top of the managed Kubernetes platform. This gives you the scale of Platform9 as a cloud provider, but you can have all of your containers on-premises. It’s a really interesting approach to the problem.
From the Beginning, Getting Started with SolarWinds
After hearing about them for a while, and seeing them present at Tech Field Day earlier this month, Alastair Cooke decided to try out what SolarWinds has to offer. The first challenge was to figure out what from their impressive catalogue to try first. After some research, Alastair decided on their Server and Application Monitor (SAM), which includes the Orion integration framework. After the install and initial setup, SAM was already giving useful notifications about domain controller memory and packet loss. Alastair is looking forward to using SAM with the Virtualization Manager from SolarWinds in his home lab to see how effective the combination can be.
IoT Puts On-Premises Back on the Agenda
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!