Eric Shanks, a Field Day delegate, celebrates 10 years of his personal site, theITHollow. He gives a special shoutout to Tech Field Day and Stephen Foskett for the opportunities gained within the delegate community. Congrats Eric!
ServiceNow Streamlines Operations
After presenting at Cloud Field Day, Eric Shanks has changed the way he views ServiceNow. At the event, the company showed how they can serve as an central management plane for business operations, unifying management and allowing automation between disparate services. In the end, Eric finds their true value as a platform themselves. “ServiceNow is more than just an ITSM tool these days. It’s a business tool.”
Are We Really Concerned with Public Cloud Vendor Lock-in?
Fear of public cloud lock-in is real for many companies. Eric Shanks looks at why this is, why this fear is historically overblown, and also what the advantages of keeping your options open actually are. He then reviews how three companies he saw at Cloud Field Day last month, Scality, Platform9, and Nirmata, address the lock-in question.
NetApp at a Crossroads
In light of their Cloud Field Day presentation, Eric Shanks knows that NetApp is at a crossroads as a company. Their traditional image as a storage vendor will have to shift as NetApp begins to adapt the cloud and move into more cloud focussed products. Eric says, however, that this will be particularly difficult for a company as large as NetApp to accomplish swiftly. After all, they cannot simply abandon all of their older products and revenue streams. But with new hires and determination, NetApp is looking to be a player in the cloud market and despite anything else, NetApp will be a very different company in the next few years.
HPE Built Another Cloud – Storage This Time
Eric Shanks gives the pros and cons of HPE’s Nimble Cloud Volumes presented at Cloud Field Day. He is optimistic that this will be familiar to many data center administrators, but worried about the lack of APIs and availability given there are only two Nimble Cloud Volumes data centers. Either way, Eric is interested that HPE has taken this approach and expects them to do well with this product in the short run.
What’s Worth Interrupting Shark week? CFD2
Eric Shanks comically reflects on his time at Cloud Field Day, claiming that the trip was worth missing Shark Week. He talks about how Field Day events work and his experience, but also about the real value of these events. Outside of sessions, he finds talking to the other delegates who have different skill sets and are from different places to be the most rewarding part of Field Day events.
Welcome to Cloud Field Day 2
Eric Shanks is excited to be attending Cloud Field Day in Silicon Valley. Here he lists the presenting companies, lays out the schedule, and relays the delegate list and their respective Twitter handles. He will be sure to post follow-ups post-event on several presenters.
Orchestrating Containers with Nirmata
After Cloud Field Day, Eric Shanks reports that Nirmata’s “value proposition is to make managing and deploying container applications on Kubernetes clusters easier.” He says that Nirmata allows the management of multiple Kubernete clusters in different cloud providers with a single orchestration layer, also reporting that their solution was easy to set up and has a clean, visible console.
Rubrik’s Doing All the Boring Enterprise Backup Stuff
Eric Shanks first saw Rubrik back at Virtualization Field Day in 2015 where he heard CEO Bipul Sinha describe the company’s vision of providing the equivalent of Apple’s Time Machine for enterprise. Today, Rubrik has released version 4.0, code named Alta, and Eric looks at how feature rich the platform has become.
What Capabilities are Needed for a Startup Storage Company?
Eric Shanks seems impressed by StorageOS. The company presented at Tech Field Day this past November, and presented their distributed container storage solution. While their idea is fascinating in itself, their storage controller is itself a 40MB container image, Eric really likes how feature rich it is. While other products that have been on the market longer still have a long roadmap to implement a lot of enterprise essential features, StorageOS seems a lot more fully baked. Impressive considering they haven’t been offering a commercial product for very long!
Is Everything Pay-as-You-Go?
Eric Shanks reviews the solution he saw from Igneous Systems. He’s intrigued by what they are offering on a technical level. Overall, he considers if what they are offering is so much pay-as-you-go, or if they simply offering forward looking provisioning. Regardless, it’s well worth the read for Eric’s thoughts.
Decouple Disks and Compute with DriveScale
Eric Shanks takes a look at what DriveScale presented at Tech Field Day last month. In their solution, he sees a real value play for Hadoop workloads. Whereas other applications can used virtualized storage arrays, Hadoop benefits from direct drive access to their distributed file system so it can manage storage. DriveScale allows for this with their disaggregated storage solution via their adapter. This allows you to add storage without throwing a whole other pizza box into the rack. It’s a pretty specific use case, but Eric sees it giving a lot of value to the growing base of customers using Hadoop.
Unwitting Accomplices in Your Career
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, Eric Shanks takes a look back at the places and people that led him to presenting at VMUG, blogging about Enterprise IT, and being a delegate for Tech Field Day. We’re always thankful a thoughtful piece from Eric!
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.
Cohesity Provides All of Your Secondary Storage Needs
Tech Field Day delegate Eric Shanks reviews what he saw from Cohesity. They’re offering a holistic offering in what they’re defining as secondary storage. Eric seemed impressed with how the Cohesity appliance handled backups, particularly not keeping numerous redundant copies in storage. He also liked that Cohesity can target any S3-compliant cloud service for backups as well. Overall, the simplicity of their offering seemed to appeal the most.
