Mike Preston got to hear from Rubrik twice at Field Day events, including a very early appearance at Virtualization Day back in 2015. Now he’s going to get a much closer look after accepting a role with the company in their Technical Marketing team. We’re excited to see what’s in store for Mike in this self-proclaimed Chapter 2. Best of luck!
Ravello expanding HVX platform to bare metal
Mike Preston shares his thoughts on the announcement of Ravello on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. He first saw Ravello prior to their acquisition by Oracle, at Virtualization Field Day in 2015. He’s glad to see the solution getting support after the acquisition. With this release, Ravello can run VMs on Oracle Cloud with hardware support, including running their HVX hypervisor on bare metal. Mike ran some benchmarks and saw impressive initial performance with this offering.
NetApp SolidFire HCI – Scale what you want, when you want
Mike Preston is less concerned whether NetApp’s recently announced hyperconverged infrastructure solution is “true” HCI as much as he cares if their blend of software and hardware can help him solve problems. To that effect, Mike gives his thoughts on the overall solution. He found the solutions uniquely scalable, which when combined with SolidFire QoS and “automation sauce” makes for an intriguing offering, no matter how you classify it.
The concept of “Scale In” for high volume data
Returning from Storage Field Day, Mike Preston talks about “scaling in” as opposed to out or up in relation to X-IO Storage’s new product, Axellio. He says, “Axellio is basically an OEM box… targeted at companies and enterprises that need a mass amount of computing and storage performance requirements in order to solve specific problems.” Mike believe that X-IO are on to something, but are still learning exactly how to bring this product to the market.
Is there still a need for specialized administrators?
Mike Preston asks the question, “is the storage admin dead?” in response to Andy Banta’s NetApp SolidFire presentation at Storage Field Day. He talks storage provisioning and performance as well as quality of service before praising NetApp SolidFire for having “taken some very difficult and complex tasks and turned them into a simple policy.”
Turbonomic 5.9 adds visibility into YOUR cloud!
As Mike Preston has sought to expand his knowledge and experience with AWS, he’s come to realize there’s a large visibility gap into its disparate services and offerings. With Turbonomic’s 5.9 update, Mike thinks he’s found a way to bridge that gap. This brings their application assurance platform into the hybrid cloud world. This includes how performance and overall cost would be effected by cloud migration, all in real time. For a minor release number, Turbonomic has added some important features.
SNIA comes back for another Storage Field Day
SNIA will be presenting at Storage Field Day later this month. Mike Preston is excited for a number of reasons. For one, it’s the first time he’s seen a Storage Field Day presentation from a non-profit organization. He’s interested in hearing what they have to say on the future of storage architectures, standards, and trends. We’ll be live streaming during the event, and always check back later for full video coverage!
X-IO Technologies – A #SFD13 preview
Mike Preston gives a preview ahead of X-IO’s presentation at Storage Field Day. Mike was surprised that X-IO had been around for 25 years, yet he wasn’t really familiar with what they’re offering. He looks at their recently announced Axellio platform for real-time streaming edge analytics. He’s excited to get into a technical deep dive with the company. Remember, you can watch along with Mike with our live stream during the event.
Hear more from Exablox at Storage Field Day 13
Exablox is presenting at Storage Field Day next month in Denver, and Mike Preston is excited. He’s looking forward to getting to know more about the company’s OneBlox solution, specifically their custom object based file-system. He’ll get to drink from the firehose during their presentation. Make sure to watch the live stream during the event to follow along!
Primary Data set to make their 5th appearance at Storage Field Day
Primary Data returns for their fifth presentation at next month’s Storage Field Day. Mike Preston will be there, and he has a preview to get everyone up to speed. He reviews their corporate history and DataSphere solution, which helps organization disaggregate applications from the data they use. It’s an interesting product, and we’re sure to get a technical deep dive during their presentation.
A field day of Storage lies ahead!
Mike Preston is heading to Storage Field Day in Denver, coming up quickly in June. He’s excited by the variety of companies that are going to present, as well as meeting his fellow delegates, who Mike describes as “real storage rockstars”. You can watch the presentation along with Mike on our livestream, June 14-16.
The Atlas File System – The foundation of the Rubrik Platform
Rubrik’s presentation seems to be impressing a lot of people. One of their biggest features is their ability to distribute backup data across various rack mounted “Brik” appliances, with easy scale out provisioning. Mike Preston has a writeup going into some of the secret sauce that let’s Rubrik do this: the Atlas File System. One of the most interesting features is how the system is able to deal with failure. The file system is able to do replication on both a node or drive level. This allows the overall system to have a whole node or up to two drives fail without any danger of data loss. Mike goes into a deep dive on all of the technical details, so make sure to check it out.
Scaling storage with an army of ARM!
Mike Preston really seemed impressed by Igneous’ storage solution presented at Tech Field Day. They offer a really interesting solution to storage. Instead of have multiple drives beholden to a single powerful Xeon CPU, Igneous proposes their RatioPerfect system, one CPU for each drive! They do this with an Ethernet equipped ARM board attached to each drive, what Igneous calls “nanoservers”. These are then put together in a JBOD within a 4U rack. On top of that, Igneous proposes their solution as end-to-end, the customer hooks it up to the network and Igneous takes care of the rest of the management. Give the rest of the piece a look, Matt gets into a lot of detail about their management plane, which he thinks might be the key to future success.
A VMware guy’s perspective on containers
Like a lot of people, Mike Preston knows that containers are big in enterprise IT right now. But like me, he’s still a little fuzzy on the details. Luckily, Mike was at Tech Field Day this month to see Docker present their latest and greatest on containers, and cleared up a lot of misconceptions. He found a lot to like about containers, including some useful applications for an operations guy like him! Also, he was impressed that containers are no longer a Linux thing, Microsoft now supports Docker right out of the box with Windows Server 2016. Mike brings a really fresh perspective to containers as he’s learning more about them, and it seems like Docker answered a lot of his questions.
SPEP03 – TFD12 | Open TechCast
At Tech Field Day earlier this month, a number of our delegates and staff got to sit in on the Open TechCast. Give it a listen to hear Alex Galbraith get the latest takes from Stephen Foskett, Matt Crape, and Mike Preston!
Friday Shorts – VMware, Veeam, Docker and Community
Mike Preston gives a brief sum up of his experience at Tech Field Day last week. Plus, Mike is a little perplexed by the popularity of Docker and containers, good thing he saw them present at the event! Mike always provides great coverage, so stay tuned for more.
DellEMC will make it’s first appearance at a Field Day event since merger!
You may not have heard, but two small bespoke vendors named Dell and EMC merged in a deal that finalized in September. They both have presented at Tech Field Day events in the past, but this is the first time we’ll see them present to our delegates with their powers combined! They’ll be presenting about their Isilon offering on Wednesday. Check out Mike Preston’s piece about the DellEMC merger, and what he’s looking forward to at Tech Field Day.
Cohesity bringing secondary storage to Tech Field Day
In this piece, Mike Preston gives a great preview of what he’s looking forward to from Cohesity later today at Tech Field Day. Aside from the company’s temporary proximity to the Stanley Cup, he’s interested in the company’s secondary storage solution. In particular, he likes that once backup data resides within Cohesity’s appliance, users can perform comprehensive search , as well as quickly create environment copies. Another highlight was the 3.0 release by the company to bring physical Windows and Linux support, allowing physical servers to use the solution along with already supported VMs. We’ll have the latest videos and updates from Cohesity after their presentation to our delegates, make sure to check back soon!
Intel to take the stage at Tech Field Day!
Sadly, Intel will not be able to present at Tech Field Day after all, but we share Mike’s excitement! Plus, check out Mike’s brief history of the company in the piece, which if named after its founders, would have been called “Moore-Noyce” (good call going with Intel).
Docker to make 4th Field Day appearance!
Mike Preston is excited for Tech Field Day next week. It’ll be his first presentation from Docker. They’ve presented at three previous Tech Field Day events, but as containerization gains increasing hegemony in IT, it’s always a good time to hear from them. Check out Mike’s post for a rundown of what they’re offering, and what he’s looking forward to seeing next week!
