Rich Stroffolino has an interesting hypothesis here. He sees Docker in a very similar situation to Twitter circa 2011. It’s an extremely popular product, but with an ecosystem of support companies that extend it’s inherent functionality. Twitter decided to subsume more and more of this into what it natively provided, edging out the companies that once complimented it. Will Docker follow the same path? Rich points out why some of their situations are a little different as well.
Transform and Scale Out with Isilon
Rich Stroffolino gives a rundown of the Dell EMC presentation from Tech Field Day last month. They highlighted their latest hard disk offerings for their Isilon platform. This includes a look at the history of the platform, their latest node offerings, and their hybrid flash solution. Sadly, he was not treated to a look at their new all flash Nitro array. Still, Rich offers some interesting insight on how the scale of Dell EMC differed from some of the emerging vendors he also saw at Tech Field Day.
Forward Thinking Backups
Rich Stroffolino takes a look at what Rubrik presented at Tech Field Day earlier this month. They take a extremely focused approach to backups. Their solution allows for backups to their various rack mounted “Brik” devices from various sites with simple scale out and management, and even allow for seamless flow over to S3-compliant cloud storage. While not as expansive as other vendors, the focus of Rubrik makes them stand out.
State of the Industry: Network Analytics
Gestalt IT just debuted a new feature, a weekly State of the Industry post. For their first week, they’re looking at the state of network analytics. They take a look at two competing methodologies to the problem. The first is SolarWinds NetPath tool, which sits in the network. The SolarWinds approach seems to take the ideas behind existing tools, and looks to perfect them. The other method is Forward Networks, which is presenting a top-down approach to do live mapping purely in software. Both are interesting, and point to further investment and development in the space going into 2017.
The Igneous Synthesis
Igneous Systems proposes to offer a storage appliance that will allow you to get the benefits of Infrastructure as a Service while keep all your storage local. Rich Stroffolino gave their Tech Field Day presentation was impressed with how the company was able to synthesize the two aspects. As he points out, this often isn’t an easy task, but Igneous gives you robust local protection in their all in one storage device, while giving you cloud-centric fleet management of the entire device network across all customers.
DriveScale Gives You Ethernet With a Side of Storage
I wrote up a review of what DriveScale showed off at Tech Field Day earlier this month. Their approach to disaggregating storage within the server rack is really interesting. As opposed to other designs I’ve seen from vendors, they offer something that’s remarkably open and adaptable. While they’re still in the appliance licensing game, they seem more interested in creating a unique architecture to make this happen. Worth the read if only to see their founders’ impressive resumes!
