At Security Field Day, PathSolutions did a deep dive into an extension to their TotalView product called Security Operations Manager. This is aimed at helping mid-market IT folks gain better situational awareness of what’s happening in their network. The idea is to help admins quickly orient themselves to what’s happening in the often messy and under-resourced world of mid-market IT, where IT generalists are the rule and security specialists often aren’t available. Justin Warren was a delegate at the event, and while he found that the UX for the solution could use an update, the focus and plain language focus of Security Operations Manager made it an interesting solution for its intended customers.
SolarWinds Joins the Cloud APM Game
Justin Warren sees the market for cloud monitoring tools as both crowded and operating on unstable ground. He got to see how SolarWinds plans to differentiate itself in this field at Cloud Field Day, with their Application Performance Monitoring suite. This consists of AppOptics, Loggly, and Pingdom, three products that SolarWinds brought in through acquisitions over the years. Justin sees this as a a cloud-based version of SolarWinds’ existing Orion platform. Justin would like to see the APM suite have deeper integration with Orion, but he wonders if these are being kept as separate to not bog down APM with legacy solutions that may not be relevant to organizations in the future. Be sure to check out his article and dig into the full presentation video for all the details.
Pensando Expands What SmartNIC Offloads Can Do
For Justin Warren, he found Pensando’s presentation at Cloud Field Day to be impressive on a technical level. They’ve developed an ARM-based chip that is programmable using the P4 network programming language. This is used in a SmartNIC called a Distributed Services Card that you install in your server to offload various network functions from the general-purpose CPU. This has the potential to offer huge performance benefits on network functions, but Justin sees this as limited to larger cloud providers and the infrastructure that supports it. Justin has questions about the actual size of the market for this solution, and how much it will cost, but was definitely impressed by the technology and team behind Persando.
DR to VMware Cloud on AWS With Site Recovery Manager
In this piece, Justin Warren considers how VMware has really embraced cloud in a big way. After some attempts at building their own cloud, VMware can concentrate on what it does well, which is providing a familiar management environment for enterprises to manage complexity at scale. This approach shows in what Justin saw at Cloud Field Day with VMware Site Recovery, which uses vSphere replication on VMware on AWS to move VMs from one cluster to another.
VMware Makes Kubernetes Even More So With Tanzu
In this post, Justin Warren considers how VMware has gone about integrating Kubernetes into its establishing management platforms, something he heard all about at Cloud Field Day. This is an inherently complex task, if for no other reason than the Kubernetes landscape is still changing and updating rapidly. Any kind of integration would seemingly have to take that on as well. For Justin, a lot of the strength of VMware’s position with virtualization is that it is a known quantity that organizations have a continuing investment with over time. Adding in Kubernetes with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid doesn’t strictly play to that strength. For Justin, the key will be for VMware to simplify the solution over time as it learns how customers actually use Kubernetes.
Disclosure: Pure Accelerate 2019
It’s always a privilege to have Justin Warren as a delegate at an event, and it was great to see him at Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019. In this post, Justin runs down just about everything that happened during the event. Be sure to check out all of our video coverage from the event to stay up to date on the technical details!
Leaving the Ecuador Open | Gestalt IT Rundown, September 18, 2019
This week on the Gestalt IT Rundown, Stephen Foskett and Ken Nalbone are joined by Justin Warren live from Pure Accelerate. They talked about all the big news from the event and what you can see from the Tech Field Day Exclusive presentations.
Commvault Buys Hedvig for $225 Million to Take on Secondary Startups
In this post, Justin Warren gives another look at Commvault’s recent acquisition of Hedvig. Both companies are familiar to the Tech Field Day audience, having presented at past events. Justin thinks the acquisition provides a great exit for Hedvig on the business front. Whether it will pay off for Commvault will depend on how well it integrates Hedvig’s exciting software-defined storage platform.
Disclosure: VMworld 2019
Justin Warren went to VMworld US 2019 this year, and he’s a familiar face at the event. It was great to have him as a delegate for our Tech Field Day Extra presentations as well. Be sure to check out our YouTube channel to get all of the video content from the event.
NetApp Active IQ Adds Machine Learning to Autosupport
Talking about Machine Learning at a Field Day event and there probably will be some calls of buzzword BINGO. But when a use of the technology actually stands out and impresses the delegates, it’s worth paying attention. That’s what Justin Warren is talking about in this piece about NetApp’s presentation. He breaks down what NetApp is doing with Active IQ. This essentially takes the 400 terabytes of telemetry data collected by the company, and applies sophisticated analysis to better help storage administrators. It might not offer the grandiose claims of other ML and AI technology, but for Justin, being a little humble means NetApp’s approach probably works a lot better.
Datera Shows the Value of Data in Use
Justin Warren saw something unique from Datera’s presentation at Tech Field Day last month. For him, it was particularly useful because it focused on the cost of change. Datera’s storage solution focused on lowering that cost of change, allowing for greater experimentation and innovation by organizations.
Monitoring Customer Data With Machine Learning
Justin Warren wrote up this piece looking at how IT companies are using machine learning to better monitor customer data. He specifically cites HPE’s InfoSight and NetApp’s Active IQ interesting examples, the latter of which he saw at Tech Field Day last month. He notes that collecting and processing information across customers allows Active IQ to notice systemic issues earlier.
Disclosure: Tech Field Day 18
We were fortunate to have Justin Warren along as a delegate at Tech Field Day earlier this month. He got to hear from a great selection of prominent IT companies and newer startups, getting technical deep dives and engaging in thoughtful dialogue. Be sure to check out all the video from the event to stay up to date with the latest in enterprise IT.
TFD18 Prep: VMware
Justin Warren is getting ready to head out to Tech Field Day in Austin later this week. Of course, he’s doing his homework before the presentations. In this piece, he’s looking at what to expect from VMware. They’ll be presenting on vSAN and particularly focusing on vSphere Health. As an Ops guy at heart with a long history with automation, there’s a lot to like with vSphere Health, even if its ideas aren’t exactly new. He’s interested to see how it handles being an advisory tool for automation versus something that remediates without constant interaction.
TFD18 Prep: Datera
Justin Warren did a full profile on Datera ahead of the company’s recent presentation at Tech Field Day in Austin. The company recently had a lot of corporate shakeup, bringing in a lot of new faces in the c-suite. This hasn’t stopped the company from impressive customer and revenue growth though. The company seems to have found a sweet spot as a software-defined storage as-a-service provider, serving customers with low-latency storage while offering stateful data portability not found on typical cloud offerings. We’re looking forward to see if Justin was just as impressed after their presentation.
TFD18 Prep: NetApp
Justin Warren wrote up a look at NetApp prior to their presentation at Tech Field Day in Austin last week. He outlines the moves NetApp has made to be relevant in the cloud, and why perhaps we’re still waiting to see revenues catch up to their technological change. That’s the context he had in mind ahead of their presentation at Tech Field Day. Be sure to watch their entire presentation on our full event video to judge for yourself.
TFD18 Prep: Solarwinds
Justin Warren must have been a good student, because he’s always sure to do his homework for Tech Field Day. Before heading down to Austin last week, Justin wrote up a preview of what he expected to see from Solarwinds. The last time he heard a presentation from them was in early 2016, so a lot has changed since then. The company has grown dramatically, positioning themselves to be an all-in-one IT management company. We’re looking forward to seeing if their presentation convinced Justin in his posts going forward.
ClearSky Data Raises $20 Million To Fuel Expansion
Justin Warren first got to hear from ClearSky Data at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld 2015. Since then the company has continued to grow, and Justin now breaks down the closing of a successful $20 million funding round, as well as a partnership with Equinix. Justin thinks the partnership and funds should help to expand the company’s Storage-as-a-Service west of Chicago in the near future.
NetApp Finds Its Cloud Feet
After hearing from NetApp at Cloud Field Day, Justin Warren feels the company has turned a corner in their cloud messaging and story. The presentation was done by Eiki Hrafnsson, who was brought into the company as part of their Greenqloud acquisition. He showed how ONTAP in the cloud and Cloud volumes have the API support needed, and provide real benefits in the public cloud.
Droplet Computing Makes The Browser The Computer
Justin Warren takes a look at Droplet Computing’s use of WebAssembly to run legacy apps in a browser. It evokes the concept originally behind Java: write once, run anywhere. By decoupling applications from the hardware and OS traditionally needed to run them, organizations can continue to run business critical custom-built applications. While Justin admits there are security concerns with running older applications, having them running in an actively patched browser seems like a better trade-off than an unpatched obsolete OS.
