Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World was full of excellent presentations and great conversations with the delegates. In this post, Dan Frith shares some of his final thoughts from the event, as well as sharing a lot of great resources and writings inspired by the event. Be sure to check out all the posts, as well as the full video of all the presenters.
Big Switch Are Bringing the Cloud to Your DC
We were happy to have Dan Frith along as a delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World. One of the presenters at the even was Big Switch Networks. He was definitely impressed by Big Switch’s networking approach, with a focus on cloud-native and API integration front and center. For shops that have to demonstrate the value of any infrastructure investment, Dan thinks Big Switch offers an ideal solution.
Kemp Keeps ECS Balanced
At Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World, Kemp presented on their newly validated load balancing solution for Dell EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage. Dan Frith makes the argument that while ECS comes with some integrated load balancing, Kemp is able to offer improved service availability and resilience, ultimately delivering more value from your infrastructure.
Liqid Are Dynamic in the DC
Dan Frith crossed an ocean to join us in the desert for Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World. There he heard from the composable infrastructure company Liqid. While he still thinks CI isn’t set to completely dominate the data center, he found “the possibilities that composable infrastructure present to organisations that have possibly struggled in the past with getting the right resources to the right workload at the right time are really interesting.”
Dell Technologies World 2019 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
Dan Frith made another sojourn across the ocean to attend Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World. He got to hear presentations from Big Switch, Liqid, and Kemp. Be sure to watch all the presentations to get a sense of the event. In this post, Dan discloses where he went and what he had while attending the overall conference.
Dell – Dell Technologies World 2019 – See You Soon Las Vegas
If there’s an event that will talk about storage, it’s always a good idea to have Dan Frith there. That’s why we’re thrilled to have him along as a delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World. He’s looking forward to seeing what announcements Dell EMC has on tap for the event.
Storage Field Day 18 – Wrap-Up and Link-O-Rama
It’s always a pleasure to have Dan Frith at an event, and the most recent Storage Field Day was no exception. As always Dan provides a comprehensive list of not just the posts he’s written, but those from all the other delegates as well. If you want to get caught up on all the delegates thoughts from the event, it’s a great place to start!
Datera and the Rise of Enterprise Software-Defined Storage
In this post, Dan Frith takes a look at what Datera presented at Storage Field Day earlier this year. This isn’t the first time Dan has looked at their “Enterprise Software-Defined Storage” solutions, and he remains impressed how the company blends continuous optimization with high availability. This positions them as a unique value proposition in an otherwise crowded software-defined datacenter world. They seem to have the right blend of product and messaging to bridge the glacial inertia typical of enterprise storage with top-down management trying to move to the cloud.
WekaIO Continues to Evolve
WekaIO definitely made an impression on the Storage Field Day delegates last month, and Dan Frith is no exception. In this post, he looks at WekaIO Matrix. This is a feature rich software-defined storage solution that can run across a breadth of environments, offering performance faster than a local system. The do this with a storage architecture built to take advantage of the native capabilities of flash, without worrying about legacy HDD. Dan thinks they made a compelling case to move people who need the performance of DAS with the benefits of distributed storage.
VAST Data – No More Tiers Means No More Tears?
Dan Frith is shedding no tears for tiers after seeing VAST Data come out of stealth at Storage Field Day last month. Leveraging a greenfield architecture built around NVMe over fabric and Storage Class Memory, they claim to offer Tier 1 performance at scale without the actual cost of Tier 1 storage. Dan was definitely impressed by the ambition of their approach, and thinks their disaggregated share-everything approach to storage is impressive.
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus – More Than Meets the Eye
Dan Frith attended Storage Field Day in February and got an update on IBM’s Spectrum Protect Plus software. After learning about it at Storage Field Day 15, Dan recognized the importance of their approach to data protection. With this update, he sees that the company is working to enable their customers to modernize data protection with new use cases and analytics.
Western Digital Are Keeping Composed
Although they presented a broad set of technology and products at Storage Field Day in February, Dan Frith focused on Western Digital’s composable infrastructure offerings. He likes their story and sees composability as a technology to “free the average enterprise IT shop from the shackles of resource management ineptitude”. It’s not magic, but it’s certainly cool!
StorPool and the Death of Hardware-Defined Storage
Dan Frith got to hear from StorPool at Storage Field Day last week. The company has been in the software-defined storage game for a while, and offers a solution that lets you pool attached disk and SSD storage on servers into single shared block storage pool. Dan was impressed they include a robust set of data management features on top. He sees this as particularly appealing to service providers. While “hardware-defined” storage isn’t going away tomorrow, for Dan, solutions like StorPool show that SDS can definitely deliver compelling solutions without being locked into hardware.
NetApp and the Space in Between
For Dan Frith, NetApp’s presentation at Storage Field Day was a little extra special, as they got to hear from co-founder Dave Hitz on his last day. He outlined the current state of NetApp’s cloud strategy, something that Dan thinks is underrated in IT. They’ve had some missteps along the way, but Dave outlined why some workloads don’t move to the cloud, why most will, and how NetApp is creating cloud storage solutions aimed to bridge the gap.
Cohesity Is (Data)Locked In
Cohesity presented at Storage Field Day last month, and Dan Frith was there to get the secondary storage deep dive from the company. The features that you get with Cohesity are well known, so Dan focuses on what really piqued his interest: Cohesity’s archival features and ransomeware protection.
Storage Field Day 18 – Day 0
Dan Frith is no stranger to Storage Field Day, but it’s still always a treat when he decides to cross the ocean and join as at the event. In this post, Dan previews the events, includes a full schedule, and even links to the video. Be sure to check out our full event playlist to see all the same presentations as the illustrious Mr. Frith.
Komprise Continues to Gain Momentum
After hearing from Komprise at Storage Field Day late last year, Dan Frith got to have a deeper conversation with their president and COO Krishna Subramanian. This was based on a new round of funding for the company. For Dan, he still finds their unstructured data management solution to be an under appreciated but vital need for most organizations. Adding features like NAS to NAS migration and deeper analytics only sweetens the deal.
Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At Storage Field Day 18
World traveler and storage guru Dan Frith will make his way from Down Under to join us for Storage Field Day in late February. While in Silicon Valley, he’ll get to hear from long time storage veterans like Western Digital and NetApp, along with disruptive startups like Cohesity, Datera, and WekaIO. Dan is no stranger to the event, and we’re looking forward to his thoughts on the presentations. Be sure to mark your calendar and watch along on our live stream!
NVMesh 2 – A Compelling Sequel From Excelero
Dan Frith saw Excelero emerge from Stealth at Storage Field Day last year. Now the company has released a major update to their NVMe pooling software solution, NVMesh 2. This adds MeshConnect with TCP/IP and Fibre Channel support, MeshProtect with parity-based redundancy and mirroring, and MeshInspect for analytics. Dan sees this release smoothing out some of the rough edges of NVMesh 1, and making it a lot more attractive for enterprise customers.
Storage Field Day 17 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama
It’s always great to have Dan Frith as a delegate for Storage Field Day. In this post, Dan puts together a list of all of his and other delegate coverage from the event. It’s an impressive amount of quality coverage. As more rolls in, be sure to check back at the Storage Field Day event page for a comprehensive list.
