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.”
Dell EMC VMAX All-Flash: A proven solution for mission-critical systems
Max) Mortillaro shares a great piece inspired by Dell EMC’s recent Storage Field Day presentation on their VMAX All-Flash array. He starts out by outlining the how and why organizations define what exactly are mission-critical applications. This naturally leads into a discussion of VMAX All-Flash, which Max describes as “a perfect fit for mission-critical systems”. He digs into how this third iteration of VMAX adds some useful new features for those organizations that need highly available Tier-1 storage.
E8 Storage: The Mercedes-Maybach 6 of NVMe Flash Arrays
Max Mortillaro heard from E8 Storage at Storage Field Day last month. In his blog post, he’s pretty clear: (f)rom a performance perspective, E8 Storage will just blow your mind away. Their radical approach to storage proved very exciting for Max, and he sees their solution as ideal for Tier-0 applications requiring high throughput, high IOPS and low latency.
The challenge of doing data management at scale
Ahead of being a delegate at Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2017, Max Mortillaro looks at problems of data management. This centers around the creation of isolated data silos, which Max refers to as data archipelagos. These may simplify some operational considerations, but also inherently cause sprawl and overall inefficiency of resources. However the opposite, the dream of a global namespace is often impossible due to regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. In this light, Max considers if data management isn’t a necessary evil, but a business enabler to bridge these two extremes into something more functional.
InfiniBox: solving the enterprise storage cost vs performance equation?
Infinidat will be presenting at Storage Field Day next year, but Max Mortillaro has an extensive preview of the company out now. He gives an overview of their software-defined storage solution, InfiniBox. Max sees it as an interesting solution for primary storage than offer petabyte-scale solution, high availability, and efficient caching without the expense of an AFA.
I will be at Commvault Go and Storage Field Day 14!
Max Mortillaro will be back for a pair of events in November. He’s excited to attend Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO as well as attending Storage Field Day. He’s looking forward to a deep dives from Commvault, various Dell EMC divisions, comparing storage approaches from E8 Storage and Infinidat, and getting deep into object storage from Scality. It’ll be a busy month for Max!
X-IO Axellio and Edge Computing: an NVMe-enabled emerging architecture model?
Max Mortillaro follows up on his preview post about X-IO’s Axellio Edge computing platform. Max clarifies that this is meant to be an OEM solution designed to be a standalone application platform. He likes the ability to use 72 dual-port NVMe SSD drives, but the real secret sauce is the extra I/O via PCIe. It makes Max think that maybe the concept of edge computing requires a fundamentally new platform, one that Axellio exemplifies.
Cohesity FlashProtect – a look into Pure Storage and Cohesity Integration
After Tech Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate, Max Mortillaro talks about the collaboration between Pure Storage and Cohesity saying it “is not only logical, but also important for both companies.” The addition of Cohesity as a secondary storage and data protection solution allows for a deep integration with Pure Storage snapshotting capabilities. Max says that this will provide an advantage to both parties, helping them extend their respective ecosystems and expand their market share.
Real-time Storage Analytics: one step further towards AI-enabled storage arrays?
At the Storage Field Day Exclusive event at Pure Accelerate, Max Mortillaro was struck by a recent storage trend. It seems that every storage vendor is now offering real-time analytics as part of their storage array offerings. Max looks at Pure Storage’s take on this, which combines their Pure 1 real-time analytics, with a machine learning extension called META.
SFD13 Primer – Dell EMC
Max Mortillaro continues his excellent primer series on the presenting companies coming up at Storage Field Day next week. In this post, he takes a look at what to expect from Dell EMC. He reviews the company’s place in the market, and how the merger of Dell and EMC was not exempt from bumps along the way. Max is interested in hearing more about VxRail and XtremIO. Make sure to watch along on the live stream during the event to stay up to date on their entire presentation!
SFD13 Primer – SNIA
Max Mortillaro takes a look at SNIA ahead of their Storage Field Day presentation next week. He finds the breadth of the organization impressive, touching on everything from standards to community engagement. At their presentation, SNIA will focus on their standard for storage management, SwordFish, and persistent memory related activities. Make sure to check out the live stream to watch along with the delegates, and send it question via Twitter with #SFD13.
SFD13 Primer – X-IO Axellio Edge Computing Platform
Max Mortillaro gives X-IO a look ahead of their Storage Field Day presentation later this month. He runs through the company’s origins as the Seagate Advanced Storage Group, before being spun out in 2007. He then goes on to give a preview of Axellio, their edge computing platform. For Max, writing the piece was an example of what makes Storage Field Day exciting: discovering new technologies and platforms, and getting excited for a technical deep dive.
Storage Field Day 13 Primer
Max Mortillaro takes a look at one of the presenters coming up at Storage Field Day, Exablox. Despite being targeted more at the SMB storage market, Max thinks they have an impressive set of enterprise class feature. He’s anxious to get a technical deep dive. Make sure to watch along on our live stream!
See you at Storage Field Day 13 and Pure Accelerate!
Max Mortillaro is heading to Denver next month to join us at Storage Field Day! We’ve got a full slate of companies for the event, and Max gives a quick rundown of what he’s expecting from each. For Max, the event features companies he’s heard from before and will be getting an update on (Exablox, Primary Data), those that he’s heard about or has had limited interactions with (Dell EMC, SNIA, Seagate), and one, X-IO, that’s brand new. We’re excited to hear what Max’s impressions are after he hears from them all.
Thoughts on Consumer and Industrial IoT
Massimiliano Mortillaro shares some thoughts on the current state of IoT. From the enterprise side, he likes the fact that we’re leaving the pure hype phase of the segment, something that couldn’t be said in 2016. At Cisco Live Europe, he saw some very practical implementations, particularly Cisco’s LoRaWAN technology, which enables devices to operate up to 10 years on an embedded battery. He also considers some of the security and, perhaps most importantly, ecological considerations of the coming age of IoT. It’s a really interesting overview of the space, and will get you thinking about how to prepare for the coming IoT deluge of devices.
Revisiting Cisco HyperFlex, One Year After
Max Mortillaro take a look back on Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution, HyperFlex, a year later. It’s all the more important to the company, since HPE’s acquisition of SimpliVity. Max got an update at Tech Field Day Extra during Cisco Live Europe last week. Over the year, Max has moved from neutral on it to “neutral+”. Overall, he’d like to see more commitment to their development cycle if this is going to be their sole HCI play going forward. He sees their roadmap as competitive, but they’ll need to tighten up their release cycle to deliver this to their customers on a timely basis. HCI is a crowded space. Cisco’s HyperFlex shows a path to compete with all the big players, but Max thinks they’ll need to consistently deliver on their roadmap.
How Tech Field Day influenced me in 2016
Max Mortillaro reflects back on what he’s learned from Tech Field Day events in 2016. It was a really eventful year for him, and he found a lot of value both personally and professionally with the events. Overall, he loves the emersion the event allows. They provide in-depth technical discussions with likeminded colleagues. It’s a community of enterprise IT goodness, and it was a pleasure to have Max at the events.
Cohesity – a secondary storage leader in the making?
Max Mortillaro reviews what he saw from Cohesity at Tech Field Day this past November. He really seems to think their holistic focus on secondary storage could provide for major cost savings in an enterprise. Their dedupe abilities seem to really be able to reduce your secondary storage data footprint. With 80% of storage coming from disparate secondary sources, Cohesity seems designed to wrangle it all in one manageable interface.
