Dan Frith is a frequent delegate at our Storage Field Day events and never fails to come out of those events with a plethora of thoughts on the presentations he saw. We always appreciate Dan’s hard work in recapping and digging down into so many of the presentations offered at our events. Dan’s latest post highlights the several blog posts he wrote for the latest Storage Field Day, as well as posts from some of his fellow delegates. Many thanks to Dan for giving us his perspective!
Intel Optane and the DAOS Storage Engine
There’s no doubt that Intel’s Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) engine is fast, but other than speed what does it have going for it? Storage Field Day delegate Dan Frith digs into Intel’s latest offering and highlights some of the exciting pieces of it including simple scalability and its open source nature. Check out Dan’s analysis of the Intel DAOS offering on his blog and check out the Intel team presenting at Storage Field Day.
VAST Data – the Best Is Yet to Come
As a delegate at Storage Field Day, Dan Frith had the opportunity to see VAST Data present at their second Tech Field Day event. Dan writes that the VAST Data presentations were excellent and informative. This isn’t the first time around the block for many in the VAST data team, and that’s helped them quickly evolve, put together helpful offerings, and progress in meeting market needs. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out the presentations from VAST Data on our website!
Nebulon – It’s Server Storage Jim, but Not as We Know It
Dan Frith had the chance to see Nebulon present at Storage Field Day, and was intrigued enough that he had a follow-up briefing with their team to go over their cloud-defined storage (CDS) offering. CDS effectively delivers storage that is defined and managed through the cloud while consuming no server CPU or memory resources. Dan writes that this has a lot of appeal, especially if you anticipate needing to scale up or down quickly. Check out Nebulon’s presentation on their cloud-defined storage offering on our website!
Qumulo – Storage Your Way
As a delegate, Dan Frith got to see Qumulo present at Storage Field Day. Dan writes that Qumulo provides their customers the power to handle high workloads, the ability to scale, and the opportunity to see into the platform and know exactly what is going on. Qumulo has caught his attention, and he’ll be following them closely from now on. For Dan’s full analyses on Qumulo’s presentations at Storage Field Day, check out his post!
Pure Storage Announces Second Generation FlashArray//C With QLC
Pure Storage recently announced an all-QLC version of the FlashArray//C and presented at Storage Field Day last month to explain the unique technical capabilities of their new offering. Dan Frith was (virtually) at that presentation and writes in his latest post that the new FlashArray//C could be a compelling option for workload consolidation as it moves to all-QLC. Dan has been impressed with the growing Pure Storage portfolio and will be watching them with interest moving forward. Take a look at Dan’s post and the Pure Storage presentations on their second generation FlashArray//C with QLC on our website!
Cisco MDS, NVMe, and Flexibility
Dan Frith was a delegate at our most recent Storage Field Day. While he was there, he saw Cisco present on their NVMe storage transport solutions. Dan writes about his take NVMe and their presentations in his blog. Check out all of Cisco’s presentations on NVMe Transport from Storage Field Day on our website!
Storage Field Day 20 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
Dan Frith didn’t get the “normal” in-person Storage Field Day Delegate treatment this time, but he still wanted to share a little about his experience and SWAG boxes he received from the presenters. As always, we’re very grateful to Dan for his time spent as a delegate and are glad he enjoys the Tech Field Day keyboard cloth as much as we do!
Storage Field Day 20 – I’ll Be at Storage Field Day 20
Dan Frith is excited for Storage Field Day. He’ll be watching along on the live stream as presenters like Cisco, Intel, Nebulon, Pensando, Pure Storage, Qumulo, and VAST Data. We can’t wait to hear what Dan and our event delegates think of the presenters. If you miss the live stream, we’ll have videos of all the presentations on our YouTube channel to watch on demand.
WekaIO and a Fresh Approach
WekaIO is no stranger to presenting at Storage Field Day, and Dan Frith was definitely interested in hearing their latest updates at our most recent event. They presented their storage solution as something that bridges the compromises between performance and sharable, claiming to support exabyte scale across a single namespace, with networked storage performance faster than local storage. They offer this with a simple management interface and an expected enterprise feature set, including end-to-end data encryption. While its easy to get caught up in hype from a single presentation, Dan has heard from WeakIO several times now, and remains impressed with the technology and implementation.
Storage Field Day 19 – Wrap-Up and Link-O-Rama
It’s always a pleasure to have Dan Frith as a delegate at a Storage Field Day event. Making the trip over from Australia isn’t easy, but lending his keen intellect and unique perspective to the proceedings is always appreciated. In this post, Dan shares links to other posts from the event from his fellow delegates. It’s this sense of greater community that makes Field Day events stand out.
Dell EMC PowerOne – Not V(x)block 2.0
Dell EMC is a familiar face at Storage Field Day. As an iconic company in the storage industry, it’s always good to get an update on their latest and greatest. Dan Frith got to hear from them with an update on PowerOne, its converged “all-in-one autonomous infrastructure.” Converged infrastructure isn’t the newest idea on the block, but Dan thinks that PowerOne offers a substantially different experience than solutions of the past. In this post, Dan outlines a lot of the important automation features that help it stand out, which takes away the need to constantly consult documentation and other support documents to get the system up and running. While a lot of enterprise interest is taken by HCI solutions, Dan makes the case that Dell EMC is truly innovating with converged infrastructure to meet real enterprise need and keep it relevant.
Komprise – Non-Disruptive Data Management
Data management has been one of the fastest growing sectors of IT, with new startups popping up and older companies pivoting to address it. Komprise showed off their robust data management solution at Storage Field Day, and Dan Frith wrote up his thoughts about it in this post. He found they offered a way to intelligently access and store your unstructured data, something increasingly important when so much unstructured data is generated on a daily basis, with no signs of slowing down. What really made Komprise stand out to Dan though is their emphasis on making this management transparent to the administrator, something often overlooked in competing solutions. Be sure to check out his post for a feature deep dive, then watch their full presentation.
NetApp and the StorageGRID Evolution
Dan Frith is no stranger with Storage Field Day and the storage industry at large. It’s that kind of deep expertise that lends itself to excellent analysis of each presenter. In this post, Dan breaks down the updates he heard from NetApp on their object storage platform, StorageGRID. For Dan, the update really shows how the workloads people are using for object storage have changed, and how NetApp is working to stay on top of this to offer a compelling product to customers. They also showed off new hardware in the form of the SG1000 compute appliance, the dense SG6060 with a 2PB per node capacity, and the all-flash SGF6024. With Dan’s background with service providers, he really appreciates the flexible deployment models NetApp offers, with multi-tenancy built into the solution from the ground up.
Western Digital, Composable Infrastructure, Hyperscalers, and You
Western Digital had an impressive presentation at Storage Field Day, showing the breadth of offerings from the iconic storage media company. At the event, their Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing Scott Hamilton dived into how NVMe over Fabrics solves a lot of the storage problems required to operate at the very largest scale, and enables interesting new models like composable infrastructure. For Dan Frith, composable infrastructure right now seems eager to cater to the needs of hyperscalers. But far from making Western Digital’s presentation uninteresting, their continued investment and refinement of the approach means that when enterprises want to move to that approach, the storage ecosystem will be ready for them.
Stellus Is Doing Something With All That Machine Data
It’s always great when events like Storage Field Day can help bring new companies to light and assist with their launch. Stellus Technologies recently came out of stealth at Storage Field Day, and definitely made an impression on our delegates. They built a solution to answer what they saw as the problem of exponential growth of unstructured data, combined with the massively increased size of data sources themselves. Quite simply, file systems developed for the age of spinning disk weren’t meeting current needs. Their Stellus Data Platform was designed to provide native parallelism, scale, and consistency, while letting organizations scale performance and capacity independently. They do this with a Key-Value-over-NVMe Fabrics architecture, that Dan thinks has major implications as organization adopt ever increasing drive capacities. We can’t wait to hear more from this exciting startup!
Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With a Chance of Scale Out
Dell EMC’s Isilon storage solution has been in the industry for a while, providing capacity and performance scaling to meet the needs of petabyte scale organizations. In this piece, Dan Frith digs into the platforms latest updates, which he heard at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In the post, he looks at how Isilon’s OneFS file system is designed to provide non-disruptive scaling for organizations, and can run either in your data center or directly on a public cloud. The latter is a key new addition for Dan, who sees this having major implications for organizations looking to shift workloads to the cloud, providing features those customers depend on that aren’t available natively on public cloud platforms. Isilon is particularly popular for media and entertainment workloads, which often aren’t optimized for the cloud. This capability opens up whole new possibilities without having to abandon existing workflows and tools.
MinIO – Not Your Father’s Object Storage Platform
Dan Frith definitely was intrigued by what he heard from MinIO at Storage Field Day. They showed off their private cloud focused high performance, software-defined, distributed object storage server infrastructure. They made the distinction the private and public cloud have very different needs, and designed their solution with peta-scale. The solution is entirely written in Go and open-sourced, allowing organizations to avoid having a license key as the ultimate vendor leverage. Storage folks may have a set of expectations when it comes to object storage, but Dan makes the case that this is very different from the typical object storage stack. Dan does have some questions about how they will monetize the approach, but allowing storage admins to dig into the code and selling support subscriptions has worked well for some open source companies.
Infrascale Protects Your Infrastructure at Scale
Dan Frith frequently crosses an ocean to join us for Field Day events, including the most recent Storage Field Day. As someone particularly interested in data protection overall, he was really interested to hear from Infrascale. The company was new to Dan prior to the presentation, but judging from this post, Dan is very glad to have seen their in-depth technical presentation. He found the company distinguished themselves by offering hardware as a core part of the offering, rather than building a solution based on one of the major data protection vendors. Be sure to watch their presentation and let us know what you think!
Tiger Technology Is Bridging the Gap
Even though they’ve been around since 2004, Tiger Technology made their debut presentation at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In this post Dan Frith digs into some of the solutions they presented at the event. This includes their Tiger Bridge, a filter driver that offers capacity management, cloud integration, and hierarchical storage management across storage platforms by a global namespace. From what Dan saw at the event, Tiger Technology did a good job of ensuring that the bridge between on-prem storage and multiple cloud storage options is reliable. This should allow organizations to more easily navigate between optimizing architecture for how their users want to work and storage companies that deliver solutions to those customers.
