Max Mortillaro attended Storage Field Day last month as a delegate. At the event, he got to experience a dense schedule of presentations from emerging and prominent IT storage companies. Be sure to check out the full video coverage of the event to see the same great content that Max got to experience.
Storage Field Day 18 – It’s as Intense as Storage Field Day Gets
It’s hard to believe it, but Storage Field Day next week will be Max Mortillaro’s 7th such event. It’s hard to image having one without him around the delegate table. Despite the prospect of jet lag and a little information overload, he’s excited to hear from the full roster of presenting companies on tap. Be sure to tune into the event live stream to catch all the presentations along with Max.
Forward Networks: Bringing Sanity to a Network Near You
Max Mortillaro isn’t exactly a networking guy, so it takes a lot for him to have a “wow” moment when hearing from them. That’s just what he got from Forward Networks during their presentation at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2019. They showed off their Enterprise offering, which builds on a free mapping tier and adds Verification, Prediction, Comparison and Integration features. You’ll have to check out their presentation for all the details, but Max found it very impressive.
Multicloud : The Buzzword We’ll Keep Hearing in 2019?
Max Mortillaro breaks down the idea of multicloud. It’s a potent buzzword in IT, but who is actually doing it? He looks at some of the stated reasons organization investigate multicloud, the common paths to getting there, and the inevitable issues that arise from the reality of it. He was intrigued by what he heard from Cisco at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe, even if their presentation on Cisco CloudCenter took a while to tease out the really valuable aspects for IT professionals. It made him stop worrying (a bit) and embrace the possibilities of multicloud.
Cisco HyperFlex 2019 Edition: Mixed Feelings
Max Mortillaro attended his fourth Cisco Live Europe this year, and also got to hear presentation at Tech Field Day Extra at the event. All that time has proven Cisco’s commitment to HyperFlex, which received important updates at the event, including improvements from a security and usability perspective, certification of SAP HANA, one-click upgrades, NVMe and more. Max remains convinced that Cisco has a compelling story around HCI, but he still has some questions about the overall strategy.
EP11 – Data Management with Komprise: Transformation without Disruption – with Krishna Subramanian
This episode of the TECHunplugged Podcast digs into one of the presenters from Storage Field Day last year, Komprise. Hosts Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro both attended the event. They’re speaking with Komprise President and COO Krishna Subramanian about how the company helps organizations get the best value out of their file-based storage investments.
Should Cisco reinvent itself? Thoughts ahead of Cisco Live Europe 2019
Max Mortillaro will be attending Cisco Live Europe, and is looking forward to attending Tech Field Day Extra sessions at the event. In past years, he’s focused on Cisco Hyperflex, but this year he has a different focus. He’ll be looking to get more details on Cisco’s strategy this year, especially compared to some of the renewed competitors in their markets.
Live at VMworld Europe 2018: An Update on VMware Strategy and Vision, or VMware is Cool Again
In this post, Max Mortillaro considers the emergence of Kubernetes as a de facto container orchestrator. This can be seen looking at any number of IT companies, including what he saw at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. This event saw a lot of coverage around the company’s new NetApp Kubernetes Service, from their recent StackPointCloud acquisition.
What future for Intel Optane?
Max Mortillaro got to hear from Intel’s Optane team at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In this post, he considers some of the trials and tribulations of the storage class memory. For Max, the challenge of a mainstream use case remains. Optane can deliver on performance, but when considering cost per gigabyte, the proposition becomes more mixed. He sees it carving out a use case as a durable caching layer for Tier 0 storage.
NetApp MAX Data: The Persistence of Memory, Revisited
Max Mortillaro takes a surrealist approach in looking at NetApp MAX Data, something he heard a great deal about at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. This is an evolution on the assets NetApp obtained in the Plexistor acquisition, providing a software-defined architecture that leverages persistent memory for data storage. This can use either NVDIMMs or Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory modules. Max was impressed by their tiering scheme in MAX Data, providing a seamless integration for this cutting edge tech into a very traditional stack.
NetApp Data Fabric: putting in practice the “Theory of Everything” for Data and Storage
Max Mortillaro was along as a delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018 last week. He got to hear about the latest with NetApp Data Fabric, which Max sees as a major breakthrough in how organizations manage data. Data Fabric takes full control of storage infrastructure, abstracting it at the data level, where it can then offer extremely granular services. With advanced features like Cloud Tiering and Kubernetes Integration, Max wonders if this even qualifies as a storage product. While he has concerns about cost, in the end, Max calls Data Fabric a “killer solution.”
NetApp Insight 2018 – Hello Stranger, We Meet Again
Max Mortillaro is coming to Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018. He’s hoping to reconnect with a company he’s hasn’t directly worked with. On the eve of 2019, he thinks the company’s transformation is more than just PR, and seems to represent substantive change. He’s excited to get more details during the Tech Field Day Extra presentations.
EP10 – Computational Storage: A Paradigm Shift In The Storage Industry with Scott Shadley and NGD Systems
On the latest episode of the TECHunplugged Podcast, hosts Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman discussed computational storage with Scott Shadley of NGD Systems. This followed NGD Systems’ presentation on the subject at Storage Field Day last month.
Komprise: Data Management Made Easy
Max Mortillaro considers that while data management and secondary storage are big concerns in modern IT, they are far from a solved problem. At Storage Field Day last month, he heard a presentation from Komprise, which seeks to bring a real world focus to data management. Max outlines how they can help slay the serpent de mer traditionally associated with data management.
The Rise of Computational Storage
At Storage Field Day last month, Max Mortillaro got a deep dive into one of the emergent companies in the computational storage space, NGD Systems. They seek to move away from traditional Von Neumann architecture and process data directly on the storage layer. Each NGD System drive is equipped with an ARM processor, RAM, and an ASIC for processing specific data sets. In their testing, NGD was able to reduce the number of servers needed for a given workload to 25% when using their computational storage solution. Make sure you check out Max’s TECHunplugged Industry Insights research paper on computational storage for a more comprehensive deep dive.
I will be at Storage Field Day 17! Wait, what is a “Storage Field Day”?
We’re happy to have the bon vivant Max Mortillaro joining us again for Storage Field Day later this month. This will be Max’s sixth Storage Field Day, and with that experiences, he’s dropping some knowledge about it. He looks at what makes Field Day events unique, namely the engaged conversation between delegates and company presenters. If you’ve ever wondered about becoming a delegate, you can always sign up right on our site!
Druva acquires CloudRanger, expands backup capabilities to AWS
Max Mortillaro looks at Druva’s acquisition of CloudRanger, which offers a data protection solution for AWS. Max got to see a lot from Druva at their recent Cloud Field Day presentation, and thinks the acquisition will offer a nice compliment to the company’s existing Data Management as a Service portfolio.
Cisco Hyperflex 3.0 – A Mature Hyper-Converged Solution Ready for Next-Gen Workloads
Max Mortillaro gives his thoughts on HyperFlex 3.0, which he got a deep dive on at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. This release featured support for Hyper-V, 40 GbE networking, and self-encrypting drives. But for Max, the bigger accomplishment with the release is showing that Cisco is serious with innovating and remaining competitive with HyperFlex.
Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2018: what news under the skies of Barcelona?
At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe, Max Mortillaro to getting out of his comfort zone with Cisco. He’s familiar with their compute and storage offerings, but he’s hoping to get a deep dive into more of their core business. ACI and HyperFlex are of particular interest at this event. Be sure to follow #CLEUR18 on Twitter to catch all the updates from the delegates.
Uila App-Centric Monitoring: Deep Packet Inspection meets beautiful UI
After hearing about Uila from friends and colleagues, Max Mortillaro checked out the company’s presentation from Tech Field Day last year. He found their monitoring solution compelling, particularly their use of deep network packet analysis. This allows for transactional data, which can even give visibility into areas not strictly inside the infrastructure. According to Max, Uila has “a very interesting product that delivers outstanding business outcomes, while keeping true to their network engineering roots.”
