Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro were in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. In this video, they dig into why the single pane of glass seems to be the goal of many companies in IT, but why it can actually add to complexity for actual IT operators. They saw some companies presenting multiple panes of glass, each with specific functions, but ultimately adding to sprawl. With organizations that use solutions across a number of vendors, a single pane of glass tied to one company still requires moving to different tools. They discuss how to possibly create an “ideal” single pane of glass that taps into the API driven enterprise, and what they heard from Cisco Workload Optimizer in moving closer to that future.
Is Storage Still Relevant?
Gina Rosenthal asks the question, is storage still relevant? After hearing from Western Digital at Storage Field Day, the answer would seem to be yes. The presentation left Gina with a reminder that software innovation can only occur with hardware innovation. To feed into this positive feedback loop, Western Digital is investing in storage technology for emerging workloads with some exciting results. They spent a portion of their presentation showing how the advent of NVMe over Fabric allows for emerging new technological deployments, like composable infrastructure. By disaggregating the resources in a data center, and allowing them to be assembled on demand, organizations can optimize for demanding new workloads. This only touched on one of the many topics presented by Western Digital at the event, so be sure to check out their full video coverage.
The Hard Disk Is Dead! (But Only in Your Datacenter)
It’s almost de rigueur these days to declare the spinning disk dead. In an age of plentiful cheap flash, the performance limitations and mechanical complexity of a traditional hard drive can make it seemingly hard to justify. But as Enrico Signoretti points out, it’s not that the disk will die. Rather after seeing Western Digital lay out their roadmap at Storage Field Day, the disk will increasingly not be for small enterprises anymore. Instead, much like what happened with tape, disk will serve a valuable need in storing the ever increasing amounts of data for hyperscalers. As a random access medium, dense disk storage is ideal for cold, but not frozen, data, where things like retrieval time still matter. Because of this, far from the death of the disk ,Enrico sees a long life ahead.
Western Digital Presents at SFD19
Keiran Shelden remembers a time that’s probably familiar to many in IT. When he was building his first computer in the early aughts, 80GB seemed like more capacity than he could ever use. Like the rest of us, Keiran quickly found a use for the space. Analysts now say that by 2023, the world will use 103 Zettabytes of storage. As the creator of a lot of storage used in the world, Western Digital is a key provider of storage, resulting in a lot of interest from Keiran and the other delegates at Storage Field Day. They showed off their roadmap of how they plan to meet the ever increasing density and reliability needs of the enterprise and hyperscalers. Be sure to check out the full post, then dig into our video coverage of the presentation.
Storage Field Day 19–Current State of the Storage Industry
Joey D’Antoni has attended his second Storage Field Day event, and combined with his extensive experience in IT, it gave him a chance to take stock of the current state of the storage industry. He sees the industry separating among those who need or create ultra fast storage like NVMe, and those that cater to higher density storage required by hyperscalers. What he heard from companies like Western Digital at Storage Field Day was that far from being an endangered species, the spinning hard drive is here to stay, with disk manufacturers working to provide ever increasing density and reliability. This is being done with innovative new writing technologies on disk, and by adding multiple actuators on a drive. Doing this provides the advances in density needed to continue to make spinning disks relevant across the industry.
Come to MAMR! Western Digital Unfurls HDD Tech Roadmap
Western Digital is an iconic name in the storage industry, having a long history creating the disks behind the arrays that power the enterprise. At Storage Field Day, they went into detail about their hard drive road map for the future. This includes a near term move to energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording, which should allow for increasing density and reliability on drives. The delegates got a look at the 18TB HC550 drive, which will use the new recording tech and arrive on the market later in 2020. Western Digital also laid out their eventual transition plans to MAMR, as well as plans to bring triple stage micro actuators to the market soon. Chris Mellor broke down all the details and implications in this post.
Preview Storage Field Day 19 – Day 1
Arjan Timmerman put together a series of videos previewing what he expected to see at Storage Field Day. This video sets out some background on Tiger Technology, NetApp and Western Digital. These represent an interesting selection of experience with the event. Tiger Technology is new to the Field Day family, but has been a force in the media and entertainment space since 2004. NetApp has a long history both in enterprise storage and presenting at Storage Field Day. And Western Digital is an iconic provider of storage who is quickly becoming a familiar sight at the event. Arjan was excited to hear from each company at the event, and we can’t wait to hear more of his thoughts on the presentations going forward.
TECHunplugged VideoCast SFD19 Part 1
It’s always great to have TECHunplugged’s Arjan Timmerman as a delegate at an event, and we were thrilled to have him attend Storage Field Day. This was Arjan’s fourteenth time around the table to get caught up on the latest in enterprise storage, and his enthusiasm for the experience is infectious. In this video, he previews what he expected from each of the presenters. The event had a fantastic array of presenting companies, with the latest from Dell EMC, Infrascale, Komprise, MinIO, NetApp, Tiger Technology, WekaIO, and Western Digital. Be sure to check out the preview before diving into our comprehensive video coverage.
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.
Tiers, Tiers, and More Storage Tiers
Enrico Signoretti is no stranger to Storage Field Day events. This gives him some helpful long term context to identify larger industry trends he sees playing out among otherwise unrelated presentations. At the most recent Storage Field Day, the importance of tiering across the storage industry came across loud and clear. From Tiger Technology demoing their simple, seamless and smart filter driver for Windows servers, to Komprise analyzing an organizations entire data domain to optimize data placement, to WekaIO using object storage in the back-end of their file system to store unused blocks, Enrico saw many examples of tiering being used to provide performance, capacity, and scalability at a reasonable price.
Storage Announcements at Western Digital’s Storage Field Day
Western Digital recently shook up a lot of their strategy in the enterprise, so it’s no surprise that a lot of people were eager to hear what they had to say at Storage Field Day. While not a delegate at the event, Tom Coughlin at Forbes watched the presentation to get caught up on all the news. The storage stalwart gave updates on their latest storage technology, like how they are using helium-filed drives utilizing shingled magnetic recording to provide media for companies approaching zettabyte scale. They also presented their Zoned Storage technology, which provides a unified approach to manage naturally serialized data at scale, important when you need predictable performance at cloud-scale. Be sure to read the rest of Tom’s post for his thoughts, then dig into the videos for all the details.
Tiger Bridge Extending NTFS to the Cloud
For Chin-Fah Heoh, just seeing the name of Tiger Technology on the presenter list for Storage Field Day was enough to get him excited. Then he realized that he was familiar with the company in the media and entertainment space. At the event, the showed their Tiger Bridge solution, which effectively lets you extend NTFS into the cloud. While NTFS is a venerable file system, for Chin-Fah, it’s also the most reliable and go-to file system in Windows. They showed how their hierarchical storage management tiering tech is capable of replication and disaster recovery, while at the same time reducing those dreaded cloud egress charges. It was an great debut presentation for the company at Storage Field Day, be sure to check out their full video.
Storage Field Day 19 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure
We are always supremely grateful to our delegates for carving out some time to attend Field Day events. This is especially true for our international delegates, who often brave double-digit flights across an ocean to attend. Dan Frith made such a trip to attend Storage Field Day. We’re very glad he endured some not inconsiderable jet lag to drink from the storage fire hose at the event. Be sure to check out all of his blog coverage from the event, and dig into the comprehensive video archive of all the presentations on our YouTube channel.
First Steps to Tackling My Anxiety
For 2020, Keiran Shelden set a goal to help overcome his anxiety about public speaking. It’s a laudable goal, and attending events like Storage Field Day provides a lot of opportunity to get your feet wet while being surrounded by a supportive community. Keiran has found that accepting some of the speaking opportunities around the event, like being a guest on the On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast, were positive experiences as well. Whether through the spoken or written word, Keiran’s voice is always valuable at Field Day events.
Hadoop Is Truly Dead – LOTR Version
Chin-Fah Heoh didn’t initially set out to write a post declaring the death of Hadoop. But what he heard at Storage Field Day made it seem like he had to. While at the event, he participated in the On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast at Pure Storage, ostensibly to talk about storage metrics. However Hadoop quickly became the focus of the discussion. From there, other presentations further showed solutions that made it impossible to consider any other premise. Because this is the world of technology, Chin-Fah doesn’t think it’s impossible for Hadoop to live again in some other fashion, but right now the case is beyond terminal.
TECHunplugged at Storage Field Day 19
Our most recent Storage Field Day may have finished, but that doesn’t mean there still isn’t a lot of great content to explore from the event! Luckily we just so happen to have wall to wall video coverage of all the presentations, so you can digest all the storage goodness at your leisure. Of course, the Field Day experience isn’t just defined by great technical presentations. We couldn’t do our events without our amazing delegates around the table. They great productive dialogue and ask the hard questions about the tech to help bring even more value out of the presentations. In this post, Arjan Timmerman put together a full list of all the presenters and delegates. Be sure to check out their blogs to get to know the faces around the table a little better, and follow them on Twitter for a ton of storage thoughts in your feed.
Preview for SFD19 – Day 1
Arjan Timmerman and the rest of the TECHunplugged crew have really been putting out some great video content recently. In this video, he gives us his initial thoughts on the first three companies that presented at our recent Storage Field Day event. With Tiger Technology, NetApp and Western Digital, we got to see a full spectrum of voices from across storage IT. Tiger Technology is a new voice to the Storage Field Day stage, so part of the session is just about getting familiar with their considerable solutions portfolio. NetApp is no stranger to the delegates, but continues to shift from a more traditional storage company into the cloud with advanced data management, so it’s always good to get up to date on their latest. Finally Western Digital is a company with a lot of consumer awareness, that’s recently pivoted some of their enterprise focused solutions. It’s great to be able such breadth in a single day at Storage Field Day.
Top 5 Takeaways From #SFD19 Day 1
One of the great things about Field Day events is that they are live streamed on the internet, expanding our pool of delegates from the dozen individuals in the room to a much wider audience. We always love to hear people’s impression from the live stream, and Jason Benedicic has a great write up with his takeaways from our recent Storage Field Day event. For Jason, the event showed the breadth of quality engineering talent from across the world, showed NetApp’s exciting solutions with Active IQ and StorageGRID, and demonstrated that spinning disks aren’t dead yet. Be sure to check out all his thoughts in this post, and if you’ve watched the Storage Field Day presentations, why not share your big takeaways as well!
On the Road Again: #SFD19 Bound
Becky Elliott recently attended her fourth Storage Field Day event. Despite that and a spate of Tech Field Day Extra events over the year, the thrill of attending Field Day hasn’t been lost on Becky. This event saw her get to attend with fellow NetApp A-Team’er Ruairi McBride. We always love to watch the delegate community grow, and to see one time new delegates spread the message about the event and help bring in new voices. Storage Field Day was a packed event with a lot of interesting presentations. We can’t wait to hear what Becky thought of them in future posts. Be sure to check out our video coverage to get up to speed on all the great new tech!
Meet Field Day Delegate – Ruairi McBride
Ruairi McBride got a taste of Field Day at Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018, but he’s getting his first full drink from the IT firehose at Storage Field day. He is a “storage aficionado”, a NetApp A-Team member and VMware vEXPERT. We are humbled that he would take the long journey from the UK to come to the event as a delegate. Get to know him better in this interview with Gestalt IT.
