The IT industry’s reliance on acquisitions is a necessary driver of innovation, though they often seem to get in the way of competition and progress. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, recorded during Cloud Field Day 21, features Ray Lucchesi, Jon Hildebrand, Ken Nalbone, and Stephen Foskett considering whether acquisitions in the IT industry are a necessary evil or a detriment to innovation. Acquisitions are often seen as a double-edged sword, with both positive and negative implications. On one hand, acquisitions can fuel innovation by providing smaller companies with the resources and market access they need to scale their ideas. On the other hand, they can stifle competition, lead to cultural clashes, and sometimes result in the disappearance of promising technologies or products.
Journey to the Far Edge
Jon Hildebrand reflects on the challenge of designing data centers for edge environments, which are far more unpredictable than traditional data centers. Drawing from personal experience, he discusses how they managed factors like cooling, power, and network connectivity, but also encountered unforeseen issues like vibrations from the trailer’s movement that led to structural problems. These challenges highlight the need for specialized equipment, such as those from OnLogic, a company that produces rugged, industrial-grade computers designed for extreme environments. Read more in this LinkedIn Pulse article following OnLogic’s presentation at Edge Field Day 3.
The Mainframe is Still Going Strong
Despite the hype about modern applications, the mainframe remains central to enterprise IT and is rapidly adopting new technologies. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast features Steven Dickens, Geoffrey Decker, and Jon Hildebrand talking to Stephen Foskett about the modern mainframe prior to the SHARE conference. The modern datacenter is rapidly adopting technologies like containerization, orchestration, and artificial intelligence, and these are coming to the mainframe world as well. And the continued importance of mainframe applications, especially in finance and transportation, makes the mainframe more important than ever. There is a tremendous career opportunity in mainframes as well, with recent grads commanding high salaries and working with exciting modern technologies. Modern mainframes run Linux natively, support OpenShift and containers, and support all of the latest languages and programming models in addition to PL1, Cobol, DB2, and of course zOS. We’re looking forward to bringing the latest in the mainframe space from SHARE to our audience.
Cloud Field Day 18: After-Action Perspective From the Delegates
We loved Nathan Bennett’s group Cloud Field Day after-action report video and wrote up an article to go with it at Gestalt IT. The event offered a platform for tech companies to showcase their developments and gain feedback from our delegates. Juniper Networks presenting their AI integration into Apstra, while Mezmo impressed with its telemetry capabilities and user-friendly interface. Long-standing industry player, VMware, was noted for its adaptability in the multi-cloud environment, proving that the evolving tech landscape remains exciting and innovative. Get the delegate reaction to all the presentations in this video!
Regaining Network Sanity Amongst the Clouds With Prosimo
Jon Hildebrand dives into the challenges of multi-cloud networking and how Prosimo aims to address these. Prosimo’s multi-cloud platform is designed to simplify the process of setting up secure connections among major cloud platforms. However, Hildebrand expresses some concerns over the long-term business model, such as the need to constantly sync with developments from multiple cloud providers and the potential risk of service deprecation.
Cloud Field Day 18 – After Action Report
This “after-action report” is a YouTube video featuring a group of Cloud Field Day delegates discussing the presentations and content from our recent event. Organized by Nathan Bennett, these videos give an immediate and unvarnished look at the presentations.
Achieving Disaster Recovery SLAs in Minutes With Cohesity
Cohesity presented at Cloud Field Day last month, where the company announced workflows to leverage the Cohesity platform for disaster recovery. In this post, Jon Hildebrand digs into one of the options for the shortest recovery SLA option, Failover/Failback. He gives in overview of how this is handled on the platform, and how it enables a much more simplified DR method.
How Cohesity Expands Data Protection Capabilities in the Cloud
Cohesity returned to Cloud Field Day earlier this year with an excellent presentation, and on the company blog, Jon Hildebrand wrote about what the company presented in this post. They reviewed their approach to offering a single cloud-native solution for backup and recovery workloads to span the public cloud and the data center. Be sure to check out the full edited video of their presentation.
Flipping The Script – From Delegate to Presenter
Jon Hildebrand has flipped the script from Tech Field Day delegate to Cloud Field Day presenter for Cohesity. Here, he talks about his preparation for the event and what it takes to have a successful Tech Field Day presentation.
Head in the Clouds: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Jon Hildebrand takes a look at what Oracle presented at Cloud Field Day last month. They specifically focused on their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. He appreciate what Oracle is trying to do with their infrastructure SLAs, which can represent significant risk reduction for more timid organizations. Overall he found their messaging and solutions should keep them relevant in the overall cloud infrastructure conversation.
The Yin Yang of Dell EMC Storage
Jon Hildebrand takes a look at what he heard from Dell EMC’s storage team at Tech Field Day last month. Overall he saw the company’s XtremIO team taking a page out of the VMAX playbook, emphasizing calm growth with their XtremIO 2 platform, learning lessons from the initial growing pains of the platform. Jon sees this as a way to move the platform into the self-described “boring reliability” of VMAX.
Adding More (Red)Fish to Your Diet
In this piece, Jon Hildebrand outlines how differing interpretations of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface standard led to a surfeit of tools for multi-vendor data center administrators. At Tech Field Day last month, Dell EMC outlined how they are incorporating the new Redfish standard to provide standardized APIs that will work better across a variety of hardware.
NetApp: Old Dogs Learning New Tricks
After attending their Tech Field Day presentation, Jon Hildebrand reviews the transformation of NetApp saying, “the goal is easier accessibility by those that aren’t traditionally data center specific personnel. I really believe that NetApp is on the right path in being able to do so.”
The Dawn of a New Networking Era
Jon Hildebrand was at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US. From what he saw of the presentation from Cisco at the event, they all fit into what Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins talked about in his keynote: Scale, Simplification, Security. John sees these points at play in the develops Cisco has made with ASICs, specifically in their new Catalyst 9000 line. By providing programmable ASICs that can easily add new features over time, a policy driven Digital Network Architecture Center management dashboard, and offering threat analysis on encrypted traffic, Cisco certain seems to have aligned their products around those three principals.
Tech Field Day 14 Preview – Datrium
Jon Hildebrand doesn’t pull any punches, saying “I consider storage to be a necessary evil in which there will always be a surly storage administrator to give me the runaround.” But in the effort of being a renaissance IT professional, decided his first Tech Field Day preview post be about a storage company, Datrium. Their DVX Rackscale storage solution intrigued Jon with is disaggregated architecture. Datrium claims that the more hosts that are added to the system, the faster it will run, up to 3,000,000 IOPS. Jon seemed really excited by their Blanket Encryption feature, which seems to mitigate a lot of performance concerns generally found with securing data.
Here’s to 2016 (A year in the life…)
Jon Hildebrand shares his reflections on 2016. For him, it was a year of growth. He shares his thoughts on how 2015 ended on a bit of a downer, feeling a little bit reticent to contribute in discussions at Virtualization Field Day. For 2016, he decided to make some changes. He set about making friends through VMUGs and getting involved in the community, including speaking at two UserCons. Gaining confidence with this engagement, Jon had a much more productive time, attending three total Tech Field Day events in the coming year. It was great to see Jon at events during the year, and we’re glad to help make 2016 a year of growth for him!
Docker? On Windows? Yep!
Jon Hildebrand uses the native Windows support for Docker to talk about the sea change Microsoft has experienced recently. Once synonymous with lock-in, the company is now meeting their customers and developers where they are, rather than forcing a change in behavior. Jon is particularly excited to see the two different versions of Windows available to Docker images. Of the two, the Nano Server versions seems the more intriguing, as it strips out most legacy support for a truly lean instance.
