Veeam used the time at their recent Tech Field Day presentation to show off some new features for their Backup and Recovery suite. Jon Klaus was at the event and gives his thoughts on the new improvements in this post.
Data Visualization: A Picture Is Worth a 1000 Words
Jon Klaus writes about the data visualization capabilities SolarWinds showed off at Tech Field Day. Their Orion suite contains a number of tools with advanced visualizations, including Network Atlas, AppStack, NetPath, and PerfStack.
Meet the #TFD20 Delegates: Jon Klaus
Aruba Networks did interviews with the delegates for Tech Field Day. In this post, they spoke with Jon Klaus, a familiar face to anyone who’s watched our videos. They talked about how he got involved with the event, his favorite memories, and more.
Spicing Things Up With Tech Field Day 20!
Jon Klaus will be joining us for Tech Field Day 20. We couldn’t think of a better way to help celebrate the 10th birthday of the event! In this post, Jon talks about getting back in touch with the larger Field Day family, and previews what he expects to see at the event.
Put All Your Data on Flash With VAST Data
Jon Klaus remembers when flash storage become affordable as a performance tier back in 2012. Since then, we’ve seen all-flash arrays becoming increasingly common, but the spinning disk remains for a variety of reasons. At Storage Field Day, VAST Data demoed how their novel architecture is designed to finally kill the spinning disk. They are able to do this by using cheap low endurance QLC flash, which doesn’t wear out quickly thanks to 3D Xpoint SSDs used as a write buffer. Jon runs through more fo the technical details of VAST’s approach, but he thinks its a radical rethink of storage based on the latest emerging technologies.
The Fast WekaIO File System Saves You Money!
Jon Klaus takes a look at what he saw from WekaIO at Storage Field Day. They claim to offer “the fastest and most scalable parallel file system for AI and technical compute workloads.” That’s an impressive claim, but at the event, Jon got to see an equally impressive demo, showing stunning performance for single client random read and random writes, which wasn’t disrupted by failing nodes. Overall Jon found WekaIO’s file system to be a solid offering with excellent performance, wrapped in a modern and intuitive GUI.
How To: Clone Windows 10 From SATA SSD to M.2 SSD (& Fix Inaccessible Boot Device)
Jon Klaus received a Western Digital Black SN750 M.2 SSD for testing at Storage Field Day. Naturally, he wanted to use this fast little NVMe drive as his Windows Boot disk. What he thought was going to be a simply clone and swap from an older SSD turned into anything but. If you’re considering swapping out a drive on an old Windows install, it’s a good idea to read Jon’s post to understand the UEFI vs BIOS when it comes to setting up boot drives. Who knew it could get so complicated?
Faster and Bigger SSDs Enable Us to Talk About Something Else Than IOps
For Jon Klaus, one of the major themes at Storage Field Day this week was the state of NVMe in the enterprise. Some companies like VAST Data were bullish enough to declare the death of the spinning disk, while other presenters like Western Digital were more optimistic about the long term viability of older media alongside NVMe. For Jon, what was significant was moving beyond just a speed and feed conversation around NVMe. Instead presenters focused on why geography of data and latency matters more across the entire IT stack.
My brain will be melting at Storage Field Day 18!
Storage Field Day is fast approaching in February, and we’ve already started to announce the presenting companies and invited delegates. We’re thrilled to have Jon Klaus returning to the event. He’s looking forward to what should prove to be a packed event, with stalwarts like Cohesity, WekaIO and Western Digital all making returns. We’ll be posting more delegates and companies as we get closer to the event. Stay tuned!
Zerto facilitates IT resiliency with a single VM replication platform
Jon Klaus heard from Zerto at Storage Field Day in Boston earlier this year. In this post, he digs deep into their block level, continuous hypervisor-based VM replication. Their approach allows you to rewind your VM to a specific point in time and recover the exact state. For Jon, this removes many of the problems of VM replication he’s come across in other solutions. It doesn’t use snapshots, and uses a single IO Filter that’s easily configured. Overall he’s interesting in testing it out and learning more.
NVMe and NVMe-oF 101 with SNIA: queues everywhere!
Jon Klaus gives the rundown on NVMe and NVME-oF as presented by Dr. J Metz of SNIA at Storage Field Day in June. He details the differences between NVMe and NVMe-oF and also explains why you should even care about NVMe at all. Jon also compliments SNIA’s unbiased and informative presentation.
CloudIQ is looking out for your storage system’s health
Jon Klaus writes about Dell EMC’s CloudIQ presented at Storage Field Day 16. CloudIQ’s purpose is to keep track of your storage system performance, health, capacity and notify you in case of any anomalies. Jon was impressed by CloudIQ’s functionality, but also by it being free to use for those with a Dell EMC Unity storage system and having a responsive and active development team.
I’m shipping up to Boston for Storage Field Day 16
It’s almost Storage Field Day time for Jon Klaus. He’s shipping out to Boston and will be hearing from seven storage companies over two days this week. Make sure to follow along with Jon on the live stream during the event.
VMware Virtual Cloud Network: Networking Glue for Hybrid Clouds
In this post, Jon Klaus looks at how VMware’s newly announced Virtual Cloud Network can help overcome many of the challenges of managing a hybrid cloud deployment. He particularly focuses on VMware’s NSX SD-WAN by Velocloud as the backbone that can connect remote sites while maintaining security.
Why move to one cloud, if you can move to a multi cloud?
Jon Klaus likes the cloud, but is hesitent to depend on a single provider. He looks at how Scality’s Zenko Multi Cloud Controller allows you to easily replicate storage across multiple clouds, public and private. This often increases resiliency and cost savings at the same time.
XtremIO X2: easier scaling, fewer cables and metadata aware replication
After seeing Dell EMC’s presentation at Storage Field Day last year, Jon Klaus shares his thoughts on their XtremIO X2 storage array. Jon sees several interesting features compared to its predecessor. Among other features, Jon liked the improved flexibility when scaling storage, including offering XtremIO X2 Bricks with only partially populated disks. This makes it easier for new customers to adopt. XtremIO X2 also offers improved 5:1 data reduction, which can be achieved without a performance penalty due to its “inline everything” architecture.
VMAX All Flash: Enterprise reliability and SRDF at <1ms latency
Jon Klaus gives an overview of Dell EMC’s all flash VMAX storage array, which he saw at Storage Field Day earlier this year. This brings sub 1ms latency and high IOPS to the already reliable line.
Back to SFO for Storage Field Day 14! – FastStorage
Storage Field Day is coming up next month, and we’re happy to have the inimitable Jon Klaus returning! Returning for his seventh Storage Field Day, expect plenty of probing questions, quality analysis and stroopwafels from Jon as he sees presentations from Dell EMC, E8 Storage, and Scality.
Excelero NVMesh: lightning fast software-defined storage using commodity servers & NVMe drives
Jon Klaus came away from March’s Storage Field Day impressed with Excelero. The company came out of stealth at the event with their software defined block scale-out storage, NVMesh. This uses commodity servers and NVMe drives to deliver impressive performance. Jon gives a review of their overall architecture, their value proposition, and general impressions from their presentation.
Moving to and between clouds made simple with Elastifile Cloud File System – FastStorage
Moving data to the cloud and moving between clouds are some of the primary challenges facing organizations today. Often cloud provider lock-in is a very real concern. From what Jon Klaus saw from Elastifile, their Elastifile Cloud File System is the secret to make both easier. ECFS is designed for web scale clients and users, and can be extended into the public cloud. Designed with true distribution in mind, the file system should allow you to easy and reliably move data between on-premises and the public clouds.
