Nate Avery previously previewed what to expect from Igneous’ Cloud Field Day presentation, looking back at a 2016 Tech Field Day presentation to see how their messaging has changed since coming out of stealth. After hearing the company present at the event, he looks at their DataProtect solution, which enables enterprises to backup on-premises file data to a given cloud service provider. This hits all the major notes a solution like this requires, with a novel indexing scheme, full and incremental backups, tiering, and compression. He found everything they showed to be fast and fluid, but he thinks they are better positioned as a hybrid cloud backup provider, focused on one-way movement of data from on-prem to the cloud.
CFD8 Preview – Igneous Systems
There were a lot of familiar names to Nate Avery in the list of presenters at Cloud Field Day. But Igneous was not one of them. He looked at their previous Tech Field Day presentation from 2016, and saw a company newly out of stealth showing off an interesting infrastructure-as-a-service offering. Looking at the company ahead of their presentation in 2020, he sees an exciting pivot with the company. Today they are less concerned with deploying boxes to an organization, and more being able to get metadata from files everywhere in the environment. We can’t wait to hear Nate’s takeaways from the presentation.
ExtraHop the Modern Solution for Cloud Traffic Inspection
Nate Avery attended Cloud Field Day earlier this year, and got to hear from ExtraHop. They discussed their Reveal(x) product which solves the problem of packet inspection in clouds such as AWS. Since the cloud doesn’t have the same port mirroring technologies available as on-prem hardware, Reveal(x) offers very unique capabilities.
Appearance – Gestalt IT at CFD6
During Cloud Field Day in September, Gestalt IT recorded a series of discussions for Dell Technologies Cloud. Along with Kati Lehmuskoski and Ather Beg, Nate Avery discussed the future of enterprise cloud with Nick Brackney. In this post, Nate includes all three interviews.
Cloud Field Day 6 Preview -Solo.io
Nate Avery got to hear from Solo.io at Cloud Field Day. Their solution center around service mesh solutions, an area that Nate sees as exploding with competition and features. In this post, he looks at the different apps the company makes, and what he was expecting to see from their presentation. Be sure to check out their full video coverage from the event.
Cloud Field Day 6 – Dell Technologies
In this video, Nate Avery digs into what he saw from Dell Technologies at Cloud Field Day. He digs into Dell and VMware’s commitment to bringing cloud to features and pricing to customer’s on-prem datacenters.
Cloud Field Day 6 Preview – HashiCorp
In this post, Nate Avery looks at what to expect from HashiCorp at Cloud Field Day. This is their first Field Day event, and Nate gives a little background on his experience with the company. While primarily being known for Terraform, Nate clearly illustrates how the company goes well beyond that familiar solution. Be sure to look for Nate on the live stream and for more of his impressions after the event.
Banyan and Zero Trust in a Post VPN World
At Security Field Day, Nate Avery heard from Banyan. They offer a VPN alternative built on the idea of bringing the least privilege access model to remote access. Instead of setting a list of patch requirements like older secure remote access solutions, Banyan uses reputation scores to determine worthiness of access, can work with mobile devices, and can continuously check the posture of a device. Nate think the security and efficiency implications of this might make it the approach to use in the future.
Security Wasn’t Always My Day Job
Nathaniel Avery finds himself in a familiar position to a lot of people in IT. Originally his role as a Solutions Architect didn’t have to have security strictly in mind, rather focused on compliance and best practices. But the role has evolved where it is now of primary importance. At Security Field Day, these themes were reiterated, with looks at the latest in microsegmentation and zero-trust security approaches.
Liqid – Is Composable Hardware the Future of the Data Center?
Nathaniel Avery was a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World earlier this year, and got to hear from Liqid. In their latest presentation, the company showed off their composable infrastructure architecture. Given that the company just signed a partnership with Dell EMC, it put the presentation in a whole new light. Nathaniel’s background is in infrastructure architecture, and he was fascinated by some of the new IT use cases that might benefit by Liqid’s approach.
The Intel Event and What It Means for the Future
Nathaniel Avery attended Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day as a delegate for our Tech Field Day Exclusive. He not only got to hear all the big announcements from it, but see in-depth technical presentations as well. For Nathaniel, any one of the announcements would have been big news. By launching major new products and updates across compute, persistent storage, and networking, he sees it as a huge overall leap in server capability.
NGINX Post F5 Acquisition
Nathaniel Avery got to hear from NGINX at Cloud Field Day earlier this month. This was made an even more interesting presentation in light of the company’s recent acquisition by F5 Networks. For now, it appears that NGINX is operating business as usual, and isn’t changing the company’s model of building a commercial product on top of their open source web server. Nathaniel was pleased to see that the acquisition has not made the NGINX GitHub page any less lively.
Tech Field Day Exclusive at Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day
Nathaniel Avery will be a delegate at Tech Field Day Exclusive At Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day. While Intel has put out some releases regarding the event, a bit of a mystery still remains. Nathaniel is looking forward to getting some more details at the event. You can watch along on the live stream to get the full details with Nathaniel!
NetApp Active IQ – A Logical Next Step in Maintenance
Nathaniel Avery wrote up his thoughts on NetApp’s Active IQ, something he saw quite a bit about at Tech Field Day earlier this month. This service offers configuration suggestions based on a massive dataset of anonymized data the company collects on deployments, which are then processed by machine learning algorithms to look for larger trends. Active IQ also lets customers compare configuration efficiencies with similar customers, which is key to making sure you’re getting the most for your money. Throwing around terms like ML made Nathaniel a little skeptical, but he came away impressed by the capabilities.
SolarWinds Takes on Security
Security might not be top of mind when thinking of SolarWinds, but after seeing their presentation at Tech Field Day, Nathaniel Avery is starting to consider them in a new light. They demoed their SolarWinds Access Rights Manage for Microsoft Active Directory, trying to solve the classic problems of account and permission management. Combined with their large existing customer base, and their consistent UI across products, Nathaniel thinks they can make an aggressive move into the security market going forward.
SolarWinds – Moving Monitoring in the Right Direction
Nathaniel Avery got to hear from Solarwinds last week at Tech Field Day from the company’s home base of Austin. He got to see how the company’s IT portfolio has expanded, now encompassing over 50 products, including network management, systems management, database management, IT security, helpdesk, and DevOps. What he really enjoyed hearing was how Solarwinds put work into their product design to make moving within this massive product portfolio less daunting, like trying to match interfaces when possible. It’s that behind the scenes kind of conversation you can only get at a Tech Field Day event.
Tech Field Day Delegate – Part Deux
Nathaniel Avery returned for his second Field Day event as a delegate at Tech Field Day in Austin last week. After attending Cloud Field Day last year, it was an interesting change to hear presentations from more broadly across the data center. As a returning delegate, he definitely brushed up on the presenters before the event, and was better prepared for the off-camera networking that’s an important part of the Tech Field Day experience.
Addressing Public Cloud Storage Hurdles w/ SoftNAS
Nate Avery gives an overview of what he saw from SoftNAS at Cloud Field Day this month. He found the layout and concept of their cloud storage solution should make any admin familiar with on-prem NAS devices comfortable. He particularly highlights the advantages of SoftNAS’s data tiering and migration versus what is natively provided by the public cloud.
Troubleshooting – Can’t Login to SoftNAS Appliance (Azure) – “Incorrect Username/Password”
Nathaniel Avery troubleshoots a problem he had logging in when trying out the SoftNAS, a company he saw present at Cloud Field Day this month, virtual appliance in his Azure account. He gives a quick overview of the problem before going step by step on how to fix it, but he recommends anyone else follow the manual in the future.
Up in the Air
On his way to Cloud Field Day this week, Nathaniel Avery talks about the value of being a part of the community and the camaraderie of the Tech Field Day delegates. He encourages others to put themselves out there, in whatever medium, share their knowledge and experience, and be a part of the community.
