Cisco unveiled Intersight at Networking Field Day, their SaaS platform for unified UCS and HyperFlex management. Rich Stroffolino wrote up his thoughts on the announcement. For him, it shows a commitment by Cisco to services and expanding their customer base as their path to the future.
Diving Into Design With The Aruba 8400
John Herbert takes a look at the design behind the new Aruba 8400 switch and why little things like airflow and linecard layout can help solve manufacturing issues. He also discusses how the new generation of switches like the 8400 can bring increased performance to locations that may not have the support of a full datacenter environment.
Moving beyond the CLI with Aruba 8400 (Enabling SDN for NetOps)
There are a number of programmable switches in the world, but Christopher Kusek sees Aruba’s 8400-series as something different. Instead designing programability that forces network admins to learn a completely new skillset (programming), the 8400’s Swagger interface is designed around how network admins actually do their job today. Christopher sees this as a major differentiator.
Lofty Goals for The Campus Core: Aruba 8400 Series and OS-CX
Brandon Carroll shares his thoughts on Aruba’s new 8400 Switch series, which he saw at a Networking Field Day Exclusive event. Brandon thinks Aruba has done a good job on the hardware side of designing a switch for Campus Aggregation & Core L2/L3 Ethernet deployments. The switch is powered by the Linux based OS-CX, which allows for full programmability and features a well thought out web GUI.
Storage is Getting Cloudier!
Stephen Foskett shares his thoughts on the increasing cloudification of storage. He highlights NetApp’s move into Microsoft’s Azure cloud as a prime example. It’s all part of what Stephen calls the “Year of Cloud Extension”!
The Year of Cloud Extension
The idea of incorporating cloud storage into the data center has been around for a while. But Stephen Foskett thinks we’re seeing philosophically different approaches to it recently, with many companies embracing the premise of data non-locality. Stephen sees this change in the assumption from data being tied to a data center to the cloud as a transformative shift allowing for true data center transformation.
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.
Excelero’s NVMesh Magic
Excelero made a big splash with delegates from their debut at Storage Field Day in March. Rich Stroffolino has been mulling over their presentation and wrote up his thoughts. The company’s scale out storage architecture really seemed to excite Rich at the possibility, as it was able to achieve millions of IOPS on relatively cheap hardware. This combination, despite a dearth of data services, seemed to open up a lot of possibilities.
Pure Accelerate 2017 Keynote Live Blog
Stephen Foskett was living blogging during the Pure Accelerate keynote! Make sure to check it out to get his initial reactions to all the exciting announcements.
Datera Elastic Data Fabric
Rich Stroffolino takes a look at Datera’s Elastic Data Fabric, as presented at Storage Field Day in March. With this solution, Datera hopes to provide a way to make on-site storage as flexible and automated as public cloud offerings, and to provide easy ways for organizations to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy.
Back to the Storage Future with Intel’s SPDK
Rich Stroffolino gives an over of Intel’s SPDK, which includes a storage driver that bypasses the kernel for lower latency and better scaling with NVMe storage. Intel’s software approach to performance optimization perhaps signals a performance plateau based on hardware advances alone.
Veeam Goes Hollywood, Now Has Two Agents
Veeam recently released new backup agents for both Windows and Linux. Rich Stroffolino gives them both a quick overview. He focuses on features, UI, and where they fall in Veeam’s much larger backup and recovery portfolio.
Pingdom of Heaven: Monitoring Cloud with SolarWinds
Rich Stroffolino takes a look at Pingdom from SolarWinds. As part of their Monitoring Cloud Suite, Pingdom monitors web app and site uptime and performance. This supports not just simple checks, but includes the ability to script complex page interactions to simulate user experience. Pingdom combines simulated and real world client side monitoring to give you a comprehensive performance perspective.
Robin Systems Defines Applications
Redefining IT infrastructure isn’t something to take on lightly. Robin Systems believe they have an approach. It’s focused around making the infrastructure application aware. The entire system is designed around an application manifest, a YAML file where the actual requirements of an application are laid out in a simple rules based format. This is the basis which the system uses to automate everything from deployment to performance.
Sans SAN with StorMagic
Rich Stroffolino writes up his thoughts about StorMagic’s SvSAN solution. He sees it as an interesting way to bring enterprise class storage to sites that might not have a heavy volume of data, but need high availability and redundancy in a pure software package.
VMware NSX: Going Big with Micro-Segmentation
At Networking Field Day in April, VMware gave a four hour presentation, going into a deep dive on NSX. In this piece, Rich Stroffolino focuses specifically on how the platform can be used for network security applications, and increase overall visibility.
NetApp and Open Source
NetApp and open source isn’t an association that immediately springs to mind. Rich Stroffolino wrote up a piece giving an overview of why that’s about to change. The company has actively engaged with the open source community over the past 18 months, centered around their developer site, thePub. Their efforts originally started back in 2011 around OpenStack, and now they have made significant contributions to the Cinder and Manila projects as well.
Managed Storage with ClearSky Data
Rich Stroffolino writes up his thoughts on what he saw from ClearSky Data, based on their Tech Field Day presentation. He particularly highlights the companies early moves into provide a storage backend for containerized applications. The work is still in development, but Rich is excited by the possibilities.
Datrium And Open Convergence
Rich Stroffolino wrote up his thoughts on Datrium’s presentation from Tech Field Day. The company has an interesting response to the typical hyperconverged infrastructure story, something they call Open Convergence with their DVX Rackscale architecture. This allows for heterogeneous deployments of Datrium’s own nodes and existing hardware. More importantly, Datrium’s architecture separates nodes for mass storage and those for compute. This allows for servers to be stateless, easier management, and less cross-talk between nodes. It’s a very interesting rethink of how to approach convergence.
Turbonomic: Adam Smith and App Assurance
At Turbonomic’s Tech Field Day presentation, they showed off their application assurance platform with a totally revamped UI. Rich Stroffolino found it compelling, and considered the overall implications of how Turbonomic frames their solution. They use a supply-and-demand paradigm to frame their solution. Rich considers the possibility that a framing metaphor could be a convincing product differentiator.