Storage Field Day and the Direction of Travel

The presenters at Storage Field Day in August had a concrete understanding of what practitioners actually want and need. Or so says Paul Stringfellow, one of our twelve delegates who attended the virtual event. He writes summaries of the great work being done and information presented by Nebulon, Qumulo, Cisco, and Intel, and notes how each sponsor is listening to the needs of IT professionals everywhere. Check out the presentations from each of these companies on the Tech Field Day website!


Network Field Day 23 Overview, or Throw Out Your Net Management Tools, They’re Obsolete!

There is a network management revolution going on, and legacy systems are no longer going to cut it. Airvine, Apstra, Arista, Boradcom, Catchpoint, Cisco, Intel, IP Fabric, Juniper Networks and PathSolutions came together at Network Field Day 23 to showcase how each of their products is making waves in the network management space. Peter Welcher, Network Field Day 23 delegate and tech expert came to the conclusion that it is time to modernize company’s network management tools, or die, based on what he saw at the event.


Intel Optane and the DAOS Storage Engine

There’s no doubt that Intel’s Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) engine is fast, but other than speed what does it have going for it? Storage Field Day delegate Dan Frith digs into Intel’s latest offering and highlights some of the exciting pieces of it including simple scalability and its open source nature. Check out Dan’s analysis of the Intel DAOS offering on his blog and check out the Intel team presenting at Storage Field Day.


106: Greybeards Talk Intel’s New HPC File System With Kelsey Prantis, Senior Software Eng. Manager, Intel

At Storage Field Day, delegate Ray Lucchesi had the opportunity to see Intel present on their new Optane Persistent Memory (PMEM) technology. In the latest episode of his podcast, GreyBeards On Storage, he talks with Intel’s Senior Software Engineering Manager Kelsey Prantis about Intel’s DAOS (Distributed Architecture Object Storage), a new HPC (high performance computing) file system. Ray writes that “DAOS represents the birth of a new generation of HPC storage.” Check out Ray’s GreyBeards On Storage podcast to hear their informative conversation!


Looking Forward to Network Field Day 23

Pete Welcher posted about our September Networking Field Day event over on LinkedIn. He’s looking forward to the event overall, but the highlight of this article are his thoughts about the presenting companies. He mentions Arista, Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto, which he calls “four of the top five” networking companies. He’s also keen on seeing Apstra, Broadcom, Catchpoint, Intel, PathSolutions, and VMware, though the latter is not able to present at this event this time.


Intel Regains IO500 HPC Bragging Rights From WekaIO

Chris Mellor saw Intel’s presentations at Storage Field Day and was intrigued by their use of their open source file system DAOS. In Blocks and Files, Chris writes about Intel taking the first and third place slots in the IO500 benchmarks, in part because of their DAOS system. Be sure to check out Chris’s post and Intel’s presentations at Storage Field Day on our website!


Intel Is Still a Formidable Force

Chin-Fah Heoh saw the videos of Intel presenting at Storage Field Day and was impressed with their progression in terms of storage technologies. Chin-Fah writes that their Intel’s Optane technology has been a true game changer. If you haven’t yet, be sure to take a look at Intel’s presentations on their Optane technologies the Tech Field Day website!


At Storage Field Day, Industry Analysts Applaud Innovation Set in Motion by Intel® Optane™ Technology

It was great to have Intel as one of our presenters for Storage Field Day in early August! Kristie Mann was a presenter and writes that Intel utilized their time to share a vision of the evolving memory and storage landscape. She writes a recap of their appearance at Storage Field Day and shows how Intel is opening the door to innovation through their new services. Their presentations on the many uses of Intel Optane Technology are also available in Kristie’s post. Check them out!


“High Optane” Fuel for Performance

While attending Storage Field Day as a delegate in early August, David Chapa found himself very impressed with Intel. David writes that the Intel Optane Persistent Memory Solution was a highlight of Storage Field Day for him and that it represents a potential “game-changer in high performance computing.” Be sure to check out David’s post and the videos of Intel’s presentations from our last Storage Field Day!


The Programmability Voyage With Barefoot Networks

Hardware alone isn’t the key to longevity. We learned that lesson with the Voyager program. How do those lessons parallel with ASIC design today? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at the Barefoot Networks presentation from Networking Field Day 21. They extended this metaphor to their own use of software to extend their Tofino chips using the P4 programming language. While they might not see the same 50 year life span as the Voyager vessels, it’s an approach that can better adapt to business needs as they change over time.


Priming Your Application Performance With Intel Application Device Queues

Consistent delivery is hard to pull off, whether you’re a delivery company or a networking company. With the help of the Ethernet team at Intel, however, you can accomplish some great things and set yourself up for success. After hearing from Intel at Networking Field Day last year, Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at Intel’s Application Device Queue technology and how it can help ensure consistent, reliable packet delivery. Intel is giving developers the power to enhance their networking consistency when writing applications and taking the power to make things more reliable instead of waiting for the network team to do it for them.


Architecture, Governance and Multi-Cloud: Takeaways From TFDx at VMworld

Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld had a lot of great technical deep dive content. There was also a great Cloud Roundtable discussion, which we were fortunate to have Adam Post participate in. Be sure to check out this post with his takeaways from the talk.


Cloud Is Hard. Kubernetes Won’t Save You

Public cloud providers and enterprise IT vendors alike position Kubernetes as the control plane for cloud-native applications. They promise an application environment that will run on any public or private cloud, reducing cloud lock-in and enabling hybrid and multi-cloud designs. Drew Conry-Murray breaks down the promise and challenge of Kubernetes in this post, inspired from the VMworld Cloud Roundtable.


VMworld Cloud Roundtable Discussion

At VMworld, Christopher Kusek participated in a roundtable discussion with some fellow visionaries of Cloud Architecture. They discussed the past, present, and future of Cloud Architecture and Infrastructure. This conversation highlighted a bright future for cloud, multi-cloud, security, and containers.


The Unconscious Choice for Multi-Cloud

Ownership of application and cloud architecture is constantly shifting and is becoming a shared responsibility of business, operations, developers, architects, and security. If you don’t guide the process of cloud consumption within your organization, you’ll end up with a disjointed multi-cloud. In other words: many different disconnected islands, each with incomplete, badly implemented, unaudited security and compliance standards. Joep Piscaer digs into the details in this piece.


Making Sense of Your Multiple Clouds: 5 Takeaways From VMworld

Dell Technologies presented at Tech Field Day Extra a t VMworld US 2019. In this post, they break down their multi-cloud takeaways from the larger show, and how they used these to inform their presentation to the Tech Field Day delegates.


Need Memory, Intel’s Optane DC PM to the Rescue

Intel’s Optane DC PM was one of the highlight announcements from Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel Data Centric Innovation Day. In this post, Ray Lucchesi breaks down how Optane works in memory on a server. This allows for up to to 3TB of Optane memory per socket, with latency roughly between DRAM and traditional NAND Flash. He breaks down the different modes the storage-class memory can operate in, what the durability looks like, and how it will impact enterprise applications.


The Intel Event and What It Means for the Future

Nathaniel Avery attended Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day as a delegate for our Tech Field Day Exclusive. He not only got to hear all the big announcements from it, but see in-depth technical presentations as well. For Nathaniel, any one of the announcements would have been big news. By launching major new products and updates across compute, persistent storage, and networking, he sees it as a huge overall leap in server capability.


California’s Latest Gold Rush – Google and Intel Dig in to Tap the AI Business Market Seam

Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day had no dearth of prominent announcements. So much so that some with the biggest impact might have gotten lost in the media narrative. Kurt Marko thinks one of the major announcements was Intel integrating AI-optimizations into their new Scalable Xeons with DL Boost. This allows Intel to use their x86 data center dominance into AI inferencing engines. For a deeper dive into this, be sure to check out the full video from our Tech Field Day Exclusive at the event.


Servers Running Too Slow, Just Add All the Cores!

Denny Cherry was a delegate at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day, where he got to see a lot of major announcements from the company. One that stood out was the updates to the Scalable Xeon line, which now offer up to 56 cores. Throw in support for hyperthreading and up to 8 CPUs on a single motherboard, and you can throw around some serious core counts. Denny sees these as new CPUs as excellent solutions for public cloud providers, who can now easily add compute density in a manageable power envelope.