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.
StorPool Presents at Storage Field Day 18
StorPool was one of the presenters at Storage Field Day last month, and shared a blog post about their experience with the delegates. The company offers scale-out block storage software that offers high performance with low latency. Their presentation definitely left an impression with the delegates. Be sure to watch their full presentation video available on our YouTube channel.
Democratizing Data Management
At Storage Field Day last month, Enrico Signoretti got to hear a few different takes on what data management will look like in the future. He think Cohesity has had the right idea on the subject for a while, with the addition of an application marketplace making things even easier for customers. But NetApp really impressed by showing how SnapMirror replication to make copies of data in the cloud, making data easily accessible to lots of people in an organization. While NetApp’s product isn’t quite as mature as their vision, Enrico think both companies are doing a superb job with their data management strategies.
Faster and Bigger SSDs Enable Us to Talk About Something Else Than IOps
For Jon Klaus, one of the major themes at Storage Field Day this week was the state of NVMe in the enterprise. Some companies like VAST Data were bullish enough to declare the death of the spinning disk, while other presenters like Western Digital were more optimistic about the long term viability of older media alongside NVMe. For Jon, what was significant was moving beyond just a speed and feed conversation around NVMe. Instead presenters focused on why geography of data and latency matters more across the entire IT stack.
Exploiting Secondary Data With NDAS From NetApp
Chris Evans got to hear about NetApp Data Availability Services at Storage Field Day last month. While the service is being pitched as a tool of IT generalists, Chris sees longer term value for it as a secondary option for data search and analytics. If this is a broader data management play, the company will need to expand beyond structured data, but Chris was impressed by what he saw.
#SFD18 Introduces Us to VAST Data
Matt Leib digs into the public launch of VAST Data, which happened during their Storage Field Day presentation last month. The developed their Universal File System based on the belief that all data across storage tiers can be handled by their single architectural environment. Part of this is done by aggressively using Intel Optane as a write cache for metadata, complimented by JBOF NVMe connected by ethernet or Infiniband to server environments. By disaggregating storage from compute, the company also adds scale beyond the rack to the equation as well. For Matt, it was an impressive debut.
SFD18-Western Digital
Western Digital offered something different at Storage Field Day, being a provider of the storage that most other presenters use in their products. Highlights include details about 96-layer 3D NAND production, and HDD advancements including Helium, and using technologies like MAMR, HAMR and SMR to push density,
Are CIO’s Missing the Metadata Bus?
Storage Field Day saw the return of Keith Townsend to the delegate ranks. In this post, he takes a look at what NetApp presented at the event. They showed their Network Data as a Service, which indexes all of the metadata stored in the system, allowing for basic analytics and an easily searchable data lake. Given NetApp’s breadth across Tier 1 and backup storage platforms, Keith sees some intriguing possibilities.
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 – Fifty Shades of Disclosure
Max Mortillaro attended Storage Field Day last month as a delegate. At the event, he got to experience a dense schedule of presentations from emerging and prominent IT storage companies. Be sure to check out the full video coverage of the event to see the same great content that Max got to experience.
Leveraging Backup to Advance Your Decision Making
Keith Townsend looks into what he saw from Cohesity at Storage Field Day. The company revolutionized the scale-out backup appliance by fitting it into an overall vision for unified secondary storage. At the event, they showed off their App Store, allowing for devs to deploy software services directly on the platform. This can allow for machine learning and analytics to be run directly on secondary data.
Catch Up (Fast) – IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
It’s been almost a full calendar year since Chin-Fah Heoh last heard from IBM at Storage Field Day. They returned again last month to give an update on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. While still a relatively nascent offering, SPP is starting to gain industry recognition, and adding must-have features for the backup and recovery market. For Chin-Fah, the pricing is there to appeal to the SMB/SME market, and he sees potential in it with regional cloud service providers as well.
VAST Data Must Be Something Special
It’s always a unique experience when a company comes out of stealth at a Field Day event. At Storage Field Day last month, the delegates, including Chin-Fah Heoh, got to be part of the public unveiling for Vast Data. Aside from having a very amiable tech evangelist, Chin-Fah was impressed by their unique architecture, which uses stateless compute nodes running the Vast Universal File System in containers, which connect to Databoxes that store metadata via Intel Optane. Their data reduction was just as impressive, and left Chin-Fah with a very positive impression about this emerging company.
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 9: A Conversation With Stephen Foskett
In this episode of Voices in Data Storage, Enrico Signoretti interviewed Tech Field Day founder Stephen Foskett. Enrico has now seen the event from both a presenting company side, and as a delegate. The two talk about current trends in storage and go into detail about the Tech Field Day event series.
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.
Podcast #3 – Chris & Matt Review the SFD18 Presenters
In this podcast episode, Chris Evan and Matt Leib did an off the cuff rundown of the Storage Field Day presenters. The event was jam packed with interesting IT companies, and the two do a great job of running through what stood out from Cohesity, Datera, IBM, NetApp, StorPool, VAST Data WekaIO and Western Digital.
Join Western Digital for Storage Field Day 18 on Feb 28th
Western Digital is a familiar name in the storage space, so it’s great to see them presenting again at Storage Field Day next week. You can watch their presentation on our live stream, where they’ll be talking about their NVMe SSDs, memory extension drives to NVMe-over-Fabric composable infrastructure, and enterprise NVMe all-flash arrays.
Storage Field Day 18, Here I Come!
Paul Woodward is making the trip to Silicon Valley next week for Storage Field Day, his second full Field Day event. If you want to watch all the same presentations as Paul, be sure to stay glued to our live stream throughout the event. Plus, get involved with the conversation with #SFD18 on Twitter.
A Packed Field Day
Enrico Signoretti is no stranger to the Field Day family, and he’ll be attending his first event of the year with Storage Field Day next week in Silicon Valley. He’s looking forward to the mix of storage industry stalwarts and intriguing startups that will be presenting, and finding out just who the secret company is. Be sure to tune into the live stream to find out for yourself.
California Dreamin’ My Way to Storage Field Day 18
Becky Elliott is returning to the delegate roundtable, coming to Storage Field Day out in Silicon Valley next week. At her third event, she’s looking forward to reconnecting with some fellow delegates, and getting deep dives from the presenting roster of companies. She’s even compiled all the past presentations by company if you want to do a little homework before next week. We can’t wait to hear what she thinks of this event!
