NGINX Reminds Me of Bo Jackson

In Enterprise IT, we often see technology vendors begin life with a singular purpose. They see a problem, create a solution, and do one thing really well. As the product matures and the company is focused on growth, additional products and features are added. Some of them are good and some of them…not so good. Rarely do we see a technology company iterate off their initial product and continue to excel with new products and features. Ken Nalbone explains how NGINX broke this pattern, based on their presentation at Cloud Field Day.


Automation Anywhere: Bringing Bots to Your Business

Automation has been mainstream for a long time when you think about it, however, the types of automation typically seen were machines and robots designed to perform manual tasks. Many of the repeatable tasks performed by humans today are done in software, so why not automate all the repetitive business processes being performed by task workers? As part of a digital transformation project, RPA from companies like Automation Anywhere can help companies realize greater efficiencies and better user experiences. Ken Nalbone digs into what they presented at Tech Field Day earlier this year.


NetApp Cloud Insights: Visibility of Everything for Everyone

To provide a complete picture of infrastructure usage and offer optimization recommendations regardless of location be it private, public, or hybrid cloud, NetApp has recently released Cloud Insights. During his presentation at Tech Field Day 19, James Holden, director of NetApp’s cloud analytics team, provided both an overview of and deep dive into the features and functionality of Cloud Insights.


Pure Accelerate 2019 Day 2 Keynote Liveblog

Ken Nalbone and Stephen Foskett live-blogged the Pure Accelerate 2019 keynote. This is day 2, featuring Leland Melvin and James Governor.


Pure Accelerate 2019 Day 1 Keynote Liveblog

Stephen Foskett live blogged day one of the Pure Accelerate keynote. Be sure to check out all the latest announcements, then dig into our presentations from Tech Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate.


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.


Why Druva Is All About SaaS

If infrastructure can be moved partially or entirely to a cloud provider and free up IT resources, then Druva believes the same can be done for backup. This is a logical next step for backup practices and with an early seat at the backup as a service (BaaS) table, Druva is well positioned to become a leader. Ken Nalbone digs into some of the detail Druva presented at Tech Field Day earlier this year.


Compose Your Next Infrastructure Masterpiece With Liqid

The overall promise of composable infrastructure is flexibility, and like many solutions the choice of vendor depends on how much you value simplicity vs. flexibility. Liqid is a providing a more flexible solution for customers in exchange for simplicity. Being able to choose from multiple hardware vendors and also select the fabric that is the best fit is very attractive for a large number of customers, even if it requires more thoughtful planning.


VMware Shows the Value of Preparation at Cloud Field Day

Sometimes life throws you a curveball. How you react determines how successful you will be. VMware’s presentation at Cloud Field Day 5 is a textbook example of this. Much of the day’s presentations were planned to be given by a single person. Jeremiah Megie, Senior Technical Marketing Architect at VMware was planning on presenting at his first ever Tech Field Day event but was stricken by the flu just the day before.


Cloud Native Application Visibility and the Sysdig Way

When the underlying infrastructure is no longer the province of operations teams, cloud-native application visibility becomes an issue. Sysdig is off to a solid start with Linux container monitoring and have Windows containers as well as monitoring of serverless application monitoring on their roadmap. In this piece, Ken Nalbone looks at the specifics of what Sysdig presented at Cloud Field Day.


Morpheus Data 4.0 Extends Capabilities to Simplify Enterprise Cloud

Morpheus Data is one of the most complete CMPs available. With their 4.0 release including new features such as Kubernetes management and enhanced Ansible integration, Morpheus Data seeks to gain a lead on the competition. Ken Nalbone digs into more details about the release in this piece, and is looking forward to a deep dive by the company at Cloud Field Day.


I Met Stephen Foskett

In this post, Jim Palmer details his experience meeting Tech Field Day founder Stephen Foskett. Jim had previously attended Wireless Field Day last year, but got invited to Tech Field Day this year. Getting exposed to new technology and new people was a really unique opportunity and it was great to have Jim at the event. He even got Stephen to explain RAID storage to him!


Make No Mistake, Rubrik Is a Software Company

For Ken Nalbone, Rubrik’s latest Cloud Field Day appearance was all about the software. Whether it’s a deep dive into their Polaris platform or Build, their new open source community, Rubrik is committed to creating a great software product and enabling customers to enable a software focused mindset as well.


The Cohesity Powered Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid cloud has become a reality for enterprise IT and has brought with it complexity and fragmentation. Cohesity believe’s their platform is something of a Swiss Army knife for data, aimed at simplifying data management by providing a unified experience. The company’s growth and progress towards the vision of a hybrid cloud data management platform is getting closer to a reality as the company and product mature. In this post, Ken Nalbone looks at what the company presented at Cloud Field Day and how it fits into their overall vision.


Datrium’s Multi-Cloud Vision Is All About Consistency

As interest in hybrid and mutli-cloud operation models increases in the enterprise, a recurring theme has been emerging. Consistency is key. Datrium wants to provide the consistency that allows enterprise customers to select the public cloud of their choice and maintain the same tools and knowledge. Ken Nalbone saw the company present at Cloud Field Day, and thinks they are likely betting on VMware being the common platform across multiple clouds and that the ability for enterprises to move their applications without refactoring will be the preferred path to the cloud for many enterprise customers.


How Pure Storage Delivers a Unified Cloud Experience

Hybrid cloud is becoming the preferred operating model of choice for enterprise IT. Ken Nalbone looks at why Pure Storage believes they can provide a consistent experience across clouds to their customers, based on what they presented at Cloud Field Day earlier this year.


Datera and the Move Towards Software Defined Storage in the Enterprise

When discussing modern applications, infrastructure is often not given much though except to say that it should be easy to provision according to the needs of the application itself. Those who provide the infrastructure to applications developers and end users know this is no trivial task. Ken Nalbone looks at how Datera’s software defined storage platform helps bridge the this gap, which he got a close look at during Storage Field Day earlier this year.


Netrounds Brings Testing to Network Infrastucture

Ken Nalbone give Netrounds’ presentation from Networking Field Day a closer look in this piece. They showed off their testing solutions that make it easier for IT to get visibility into application and network performance, and ultimately enable organizations to meet their SLAs. While the goal in the software-defined data center is to abstract infrastructure, that doesn’t eliminate it as a potential source of issues. That’s why for Ken, testing like Netrounds provides is essential


Tracing Down a Root Cause With LightStep Tracing

Moving from monolithic apps toward microservices has sped development, but brought new complexities. LightStep showed off their LightStep [x]PM platform at Cloud Field Day last year, but this was targeted at large enterprises. With their recently released LightStep Tracing, the company is offering a SaaS solution that provides an easy on ramp into distributed tracing, without a completed setup process.


PathSolutions Helps Put the Data of Your Network to Good Use

In this post, Ken Nalbone looks at the network collection and correlation capabilities of PathSolutions. They were a presenter at Networking Field Day, highlighting their TotalView platform. By combining monitoring from across the data center with proactive alerting, Ken found it an intriguing solution.