In this video, Joep Piscaer is joined by Raff Poltronieri and Ather Beg as they discuss their thoughts toward the Cloud Field Day event they attended as delegates in early April. Specifically, the trio hones in on VMware’s presentation regarding the VMware Cloud on AWS, voicing their concerns about limitations in use cases while also digging into the exciting integrations that can be leveraged. Be sure to check out the video to hear their thoughts, and also tune in to VMware’s Cloud Field Day presentation to help guide your own opinions towards the release.
Is Veeam’s Strategy Unsexy but Customer-Focused?
Delegates Joep Piscaer and Raff Poltronieri joined us for Cloud Field Day in March. Veeam Software presented at this event and discussed their cloud strategy, including insight on how they enable customers to manage their data across multiple platforms. In this video, Joep and Raff tackle the question, “Is [Veeam Software’s] strategy to support data protection across on-prem, cloud, SaaS and containers unsexy but customer-centric, or are they missing the point of cloud-native?”
How VMware Marketplace Makes Simple to Deploy Vendors and Open Source Solutions
Raff Poltronieri joined us for his 7th full Field Day event with Cloud Field Day. At the event, he heard from VMware’s Product Marketing & Strategy Manager Nee Palaka, who led a deep dive on the VMware Marketplace. Raff really liked the potential of VMware Marketplace, which lets vendors reach VMware’s customer base, and also provides an opportunity for customers to use and install third party solutions plus open source products inside their VMware environments. He sees three main use cases for Marketplace, simplifying moving customers to the cloud, maximizing their investment in VMware’s platform, and ensuring developer flexibility.
Moving the Control Plane to Multi-Cloud With New vRealize Operations
Multi-cloud automation and orchestration is a daunting task, but Raff Poltronieri thinks VMware has an intriguing solution with vRealize Operations. While Raff wasn’t a delegate at the event, he followed along on the live stream remotely, and was able to get a lot out of the presentation. During the presentation, VMware reviewed their four tenants of self-driving operations, something they hope to implement in vRealize Operations. Raff digs into the specifics in this piece.
Using Pipelines for Administrators in Code Stream
One of the great thingsabout Tech Field Day events is that they are live streamed with full video available soon after the presentation. This allows anyone to check out the technical content at their own convenience. That’s what Raff Poltronieri did with VMware’s Tech Field Day presentation last month. In this post, he digs into Code Stream, one of the components of VMware’s multi-cloud automation platform. Coding isn’t directly in Raff’s comfort zone, but he got a lot out of what this new solution is capable of from the presentation.
Storage is not just a bunch of disks, said SoftNAS
Raff Poltronieri wrote up a look at what SoftNAS presented at Cloud Field Day last month. He breaks down the company’s take that storage is “not just a bunch of disks”, and how SoftNAS Cloud provides a data control and management platform to manage large amounts of data in the cloud.
Dataset life cycle: Multi-cloud at Cohesity
Raff Poltronieri heard from Cohesity at Cloud Field Day last month. This presentation focused on the Cohesity DataPlatform, which Raff found pretty exciting. The presentation touched on how this could be used for long term retention and VM migration. Cohesity’s platform allows customers to avoid being locked in with a public cloud’s proprietary formats, giving great mobility and versatility.
Data Platform: the Cohesity solution to manage and optimize the fruition of enterprise data
Raff Poltronieri gives an overview of the Cohesity DataPlatform that he saw at Cloud Field Day this month in this piece. This is central to Cohesity’s vision for secondary storage, providing a unified space to access secondary data across a variety of uses, rather than have the same data replicated all over the place. All of this is exposed to open APIs, making it ideal for additional automation and orchestration.
Security has failed! Forcepoint has not.
Raff Poltronieri was struck by Forcepoint’s presentation at Tech Field Day. It isn’t often and security company will be upfront with a statement like “security has failed” to lead their presentation. This talk outlined the failings of traditional security, and illustrated how Forcepoint is User Enhanced Behaviour Analysis to give better insights into potential security vectors.
Joining the TFD special team, again – TFD16
Raff Poltronieri will join the prestigious Four Timers Club when he makes his way down to Austin for Tech Field Day this month. In this post, he runs introduces the other delegates he’ll be spending the event with, and starts to look at what to expect from the presenting companies.
Enterprise Data as a Service (DaaS): the new paradigm of Actifio
Actifio presented at Tech Field Day earlier this year in Silicon Valley. We were lucky to have Raff Poltronieri as a delegate, and he’s shared his thought about what he’s saw. He looks at their Sky Platform 8.0, and how it gives organizations the agility needed to let business drive IT.
Ixia CloudLens to dive in the public cloud traffic
Ixia presented at Tech Field Day earlier this year, giving a deep dive into their CloudLens visibility platform. Raff Poltronieri wrote up his thoughts on the solution, finding it an interesting option for cloud agnostic monitoring and visibility.
How to Build a Datacenter with Skyport Systems
Raff Poltronieri starts off his Tech Field Day coverage with a look at Skyport Systems. They offer an on-site virtualization platform but managed centrally in the cloud via their SkySecure Center Cloud Management Service. This was developed around the idea that the cloud will win, but some on-site servers can’t or won’t make the transition. On-site infrastructure needs to move to be simultaneously less complex and more secure in these instances. Skyports cloud managed on-site solution does this by being architected from the ground up to be a hardened and secure platform.
Actifio, the Swiss Army knife of data
Raff Poltronieri last heard from Actifio last year at Tech Field Day in Boston. Next week he’ll have a chance to get caught up with them in Silicon Valley. Raff found it extremely versatile when he first saw it last year, and this time around, he’s looking forward to a deeper look at their Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. He’s also interested in some use case applications, particularly disaster recovery.
A new Tech Field Day is approaching
It’s always exciting to have Raff Poltronieri return for another Tech Field Day event. He’s excited to meet the three new delegates in attendance, and offers some basic words of advice for the event. He and all the other delegates can look forward to drinking directly from the IT fire hose from the presenting companies next week!
Openstack made easy: Platform9
A lot of organizations look to move to OpenStack, but are put off by apparent complexity that will require additional personnel. Raff Poltronieri reviews what he saw from Platform9 at Tech Field Day, a SaaS solution for OpenStack that makes it a much more accessible and affordable solution.
Lions and snakes – a quick review of Turbonomic
Raff Poltronieri gives a preview of Turbonomic, ahead of their presentation at Tech Field Day next month. Raff initially became familiar with the company when tasked by a client to find something that could replace VMware vROPS. After some research, he found their solution offered the best price to quality ratio. Raff sees it as a valuable tool for one-man IT shops that need to automate and autotune their infrastructure.
Zerostack for a cloud managed datacenter
Raff Poltronieri put together a walkthrough of ZeroStack’s current private cloud platform. Overall, he liked that the UI is easy to understand, while still supporting some powerful configuration options. Raff thinks it might be easier to manage than a typical AWS UI. We’ll see what ZeroStack has in store for us at Tech Field Day in Austin, coming up in February.
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager – not to be missed in a cloud
Raff Poltronieri was looking for a way to deal with data coming out of vCenter Realize Operations. He tried out the Virtualization Manager from SolarWinds, and really liked the implementation. Raff liked that automation is baked right in. The other impressive thing about the solution was the ability to manager a variety of VMs within a single interface. The dashboard view allows you to drill down as much as you want without leaving. If you decide to install agents on the VMs, you can also get performance metrics down to the application level, very impressive. Raff is looking forward to seeing them at Tech Field Day in February!
