Looking for more information on the hybrid Field Day setup versus being all remote? Jim Jones, and Brian Knudtson, Field Day delegates, discuss their experience from this past Cloud Field Day and Field day as a whole with special guests Joe Houghes and Matt Crape. Take a look at their podcast discussion here! . Take a look at their podcast discussion here!
Congrats to Tech Field Day for Hitting 10 Years!
For Matt Crape, 2016 was a big year, in no small part thanks to being invited to his first Tech Field Day event. For our 10th anniversary, Matt is looking back at what the event has meant to him and how it has impacted his career and life in a big way.
One Year in @ VMware – A Q&A With Myself
Matt Crape has been working at VMware for about a year. In this post, he reflects on how the opportunity came at him very quickly, and what he misses from working on the customer side. One of the things he misses are events like Tech Field Day. But as Matt says, without those events, he couldn’t be where he is today. We’re glad we could be part of Matt’s career journey!
Sometimes things get old …
Changes in career are rarely easy decisions to make. Matt Crape outlines how he weighed his option in this post. We love having Matt at Tech Field Day events! We’re glad they were able to help expand his network, and give him a wider IT perspective.
2017 – A Personal Reflection
It’s been a busy year for Matt Crape. He presented at the Veeam Online User Group, got his VCP7-DTM certification, and was a guest on some podcasts. In this post, he lays out some goals to make 2018 a similar success. We enjoyed having Matt attend three Field Day events in 2017!
DataCore Divides & Conquers to Increase SQL Server Performance
DataCore Software’s newly released MaxParallel for SQL Server offers an interesting IO optimization feature to help prevent bottlenecks. Matt Crape thinks the solution has some interesting application for distributing an otherwise heavy workload to make it more manageable. He’s interested in learning more about it in the future and getting into the weeds on how it works.
Riverbed’s Xirrus offers more than just connectivity
Matt Crape got to hear from Riverbed at Tech Field Day last month, where they demonstrated how they are integrating their Xirrus assets post acquisition. Matt found their approach to secure wireless deployment makes them stand out in a crowded market.
Scale Computing is Simplifying DRaaS
Matt Crape looks at Scale Computing’s HC3 Cloud Unity Platform, which offers disaster recovery as a service backed by Google Cloud. Scale is able to offer this thanks to Google’s newly announced support for nested virtualization, effectively letting you run a hypervisor within a hypervisor. Matt sees this as a viable path for SMBs to actually adopt a DR plan. Scale’s HC3 Cloud Unity makes it affordable, managed by their familiar interface, and easily moves over workloads in the event of an outage.
Security From The Ground Up With Skyport Systems
Making a system secure is a unique challenge unto itself. But having the option to historically verify that your system has remained secure requires a fundementally different approach. That’s what Skyport System did with their ground up architecture. This allows for a complete cloud management on-site servers architected to always be able to verify security. In this post, Matt Crape gives his thoughts on their solution.
TFD15 Primer: Skyport Systems
Skyport Systems is drawing a lot of interest from our Tech Field Day delegates. Matt Crape will see them present next week and wrote up a preview of what to expect. Skyport essentially offers a highly scrutinized environment for workloads to run via a hardware appliance in your rack. Infrastructure security is first and foremost for Skyport Systems. Matt wants to hear more about how migration of VMs will work with the solution, as Skyport uses the Xen hypervisor. He’ll get his fill during their presentation this week.
TFD15 Primer: Scale Computing
Preparing for Tech Field Day next week, Matt Crape put together a preview of Scale Computing. Matt sees why the company has found success in the HCI SMB market. They offer the novelty of relatively upfront pricing and package their HCI without excessive licensing costs. Matt’s interested to hear an update on how they plan to tackle other markets, as well as respond to other companies moving into their traditional SMB strength.
TFD15 Primer: Datacore
DataCore Software is presenting at their first Tech Field Day event next week. Matt Crape found this a little surprising since the company has been around for almost twenty years, and has been a player in the storage virtualization market with SANsymphony since 2011. At first look, Matt found running on Windows Server to be an odd choice for SANsymphony, but ultimately makes the case that the ecosystem support makes sense for the product. Since SANsymphony gets the drivers support of Windows, what you’re left with is a robust, extensible, software-based solution.
Tech Field Day Extra – Kingston Technologies
Matt Crape shares his thoughts from Kingston’s presentation at Tech Field Day Extra from this year’s VMworld US. The company focused on its NVMe storage offerings, specifically their new DCP1000 and DCU1000, which offer up to 4TB of NVMe in either a PCIe or U.2 format. Both supply a lot of IOPS, and Kingston provisions them with 28% extra capacity to provide wear durability. Matt sees them being really valuable in video rendering and other large processing applications.
Advice to Vendors: Know Your Identity
Technology is easy, identity is hard. That’s what I got after reading this piece by Matt Crape, and I completely agree. Most companies are iterating in their respective markets. There’s nothing wrong with that, as refinement is essential to business consistency. But when a market gets crowded, it’s important for a company to know what they specifically want to do, and how their identity can lead to differentiation. This is especially important when presenting to people that know the industry and technology well, such as our Tech Field Day delegates!
Turbonomic 5.9 – Now with more Cloud
Turbonomic’s Tech Field Day presentation certainly left an impression on the delegates, including Matt Crape. Previously, he hadn’t seen what made the company’s application assurance platform stand out. Now, he sees it as a valuable operations tool to not only monitor, but actively manage application performance, with a tightly focused set of tools. The recent additions that support hybrid cloud, including the costs of migrating workloads, only make it more valuable.
ClearSky Data & Cloudy Storage
At Tech Field Day this month, Matt Crape saw a presentation from ClearSky Data. They propose to bridge the usual compromise of cloud storage, giving you the same easy expandability without the performance penalty. They utilize a on-site flash cache to talk to metro-based Points of Presence to achieve this. Matt reviews ClearSky Data’s solutions for backup and disaster recovery as well.
NetApp is Taking Point with Trident
At Tech Field Day this month, NetApp talked about their initiatives in open source and DevOps. Matt Crape was impressed with what he heard. Their Trident project gives developers resources to provision storage without having to go through a storage administrator. What makes this practical from an operations side is that the admins can preset quotas and storage limits to make sure their developers aren’t going overboard. Matt thinks its impressive the way NetApp is adapting their company to take advantage of a new IT landscape.
Turbonomic: Not a Flash in the Pan
Matt Crape has been aware of Turbonomic for some time, but until they presented at Tech Field Day, had some concerns. One was a dated Flash-based interface. The other was how to prove its monetary value. With an updated, clean HTML5 interface, the first concern is assuaged. Turbonomics Application Assurance platform also supports a “Pending Actions” portion of the dashboard. This allows you to assign costs to each component of your infrastructure, and see how changes will impact that, including cloud migration. For Matt, it’s a really compelling combination.
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: NetApp
Matt Crape finishes off his preview posts for Tech Field Day this week with NetApp. He’s been impressed how the company has adapted, both with their successful integration of Solidfire, as well as their embrace of DevOps culture. The latter is especially important, as it’s enabled the companies offerings to be automated in code, gather than manually managed via a clunky GUI. Matt can’t wait to see what the company is working on next.
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: Datrium
Matt Crape is heading to Boston for Tech Field Day 14 and is doing his homework on Datrium beforehand. He’s interested to learn more about their DVX storage solution. This effectively allows for disaggregation of storage from compute in a VM environment. Reads are done on fast local cache on the server, and writes are put back onto the DVX appliance. This allows for performance to increase at scale, and allows for high availability. Make sure to catch them on our live stream during the vent to learn more!
