Tech Field Day delegate turned presenter Eric Wright was a guest on the Influence Marketing Podcast. They talked about building his role as a Technical Evangelist at Turbonomic, and the importance of maintaining a community above simply marketing or a traditional advocacy program.
Cloud-Like Expenses with an On-Premises Experience
In this post, James Green outlines how ClearSky Data’s unique approach allows for cloud-like expenses but with an on-site experience for on-demand primary storage. James initially saw the company at Tech Field Day last year.
2017 – A Personal Reflection
It’s been a busy year for Matt Crape. He presented at the Veeam Online User Group, got his VCP7-DTM certification, and was a guest on some podcasts. In this post, he lays out some goals to make 2018 a similar success. We enjoyed having Matt attend three Field Day events in 2017!
TFD14 – NetApp
Larry Smith Jr. takes a look at the open source initiatives from NetApp, as presented at Tech Field Day earlier this year. This reflects a change in focus from the company. Previously seen as a pure storage company, their embrace of open source and DevOps culture through thePub marks a decidedly different company. Larry was particularly impressed by their NetApp Docker Volume Plugin, moving into the world of container storage management.
TFD14 – NetApp
Earlier this year, Larry Smith Jr saw NetApp present at Tech Field Day. The company presented their work with open source projects to further their relevance to the DevOps community, centered around their thePub initiative. Larry found it an impressive change in tone from a company mostly known for storage arrays.
Datrium Technology Update
Pietro Piutti was impressed by the fresh and unique approach of Datrium at Tech Field Day in May. Now he is looking at their two major technology updates. The first of these announcements is that Datrium will be extending its support beyond VMware. By doing so, Datrium positions themselves as the one single converged platform that can serve vSphere, RHV/oVirt, and Docker workloads. The second and arguably bigger announcement is Split Provisioning, the possibility independently to scale Compute Nodes (up to 128) and Data Nodes (up to 10). These two milestones represent a huge advancement allowing customers to deploy multi-hypervisor infrastructures with different size options, from a small “one-rack” deployment up to a large one for Service Providers use cases.
10 on Tech Episode 023 – Andrew Sullivan on Enabling Customers with Open Source
In this episode of the 10 on Tech podcast, James Green from ActualTechMedia interviews Andrew Sullivan and Brendan Wolfe of NetApp. They discuss why enterprise technology vendors invest in open source projects for the benefit of their customers, how strategic commitment from vendors to certain open source projects gives customers a sense of security, and NetApp’s “Trident” storage provisioner for Kubernetes.
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 Year of Cloud Extension
The idea of incorporating cloud storage into the data center has been around for a while. But Stephen Foskett thinks we’re seeing philosophically different approaches to it recently, with many companies embracing the premise of data non-locality. Stephen sees this change in the assumption from data being tied to a data center to the cloud as a transformative shift allowing for true data center transformation.
Tech Field Day 2017: Storage Management, the Cloud and Data Protection, Oh My!
ClearSky Data definitely made an impression with the delegates during their Tech Field Day presentation last month, and it looks like the feeling was mutual. Courtney Pallotta with ClearSky wrote up their impressions from the event, and the company enjoyed getting feedback from our expert delegates. Make sure to check out the full videos of their presentation to get caught up.
Turbonomic 5.9 – Now with more Cloud
Turbonomic’s Tech Field Day presentation certainly left an impression on the delegates, including Matt Crape. Previously, he hadn’t seen what made the company’s application assurance platform stand out. Now, he sees it as a valuable operations tool to not only monitor, but actively manage application performance, with a tightly focused set of tools. The recent additions that support hybrid cloud, including the costs of migrating workloads, only make it more valuable.
Nothing but ClearSky Ahead
Tim Smith gives a look at what he saw from ClearSky Data at Tech Field Day. The company has an interesting approach to storage, providing it as a managed service remotely, over private fiber. This is able to achieve production level speed and capacity. Tim thinks it could be the perfect way for companies firmly invested in on-premises or private clouds to dip their toes into more public waters.
Turbonomic 5.9 adds visibility into YOUR cloud!
As Mike Preston has sought to expand his knowledge and experience with AWS, he’s come to realize there’s a large visibility gap into its disparate services and offerings. With Turbonomic’s 5.9 update, Mike thinks he’s found a way to bridge that gap. This brings their application assurance platform into the hybrid cloud world. This includes how performance and overall cost would be effected by cloud migration, all in real time. For a minor release number, Turbonomic has added some important features.
Turbonomic Announces Version 5.9, Adds Support for Hybrid Cloud
Turbonomic released version 5.9 of their application assurance suite, and Dave Henry runs down the new features. These include support for hybrid cloud management and automation, performance boosts to their analytics engine, and a move to an HTML5 interface. Dave thinks the release is timely as more organizations look to move to hybrid cloud, but notes that support for public cloud providers, while it includes the big players, isn’t comprehensive.
Why Do Technology Vendors Invest In Open Source?
James Green looks at the motivations behind companies investing in open source projects. NetApp has made major strides in this over the past 18-months, and presented extensively on it at Tech Field Day.
More Isn’t Always Better
At Turbonomic’s Tech Field Day presentation, James Green was impressed by their focus and vision for how their application assurance solution should work. Instead of collecting metrics that simply generate noise, Turbonomic focuses only on those which effect application performance. Their monitoring is a byproduct rather than a feature in and of itself. He thinks this focus allows them to make their offering rather unique.
#TFD14 Recap – Datrium: not the HCI solution you’d expect
According to Pietro Piutti, HCI has certainly eased some of the traditional pain points of virtualization, ease of deployment and scalability, but with some tradeoffs. The interdependency of HCI nodes effectively makes takes away their stateless nature, as is the can in a more traditional SAN based model. Datrium’s DVX solution solves this by differentiating data and compute nodes, which reduce east-west chatter and returns servers to statelessness. Make sure to check out Pietro’s post for a technical deep dive.
ClearSky Data & Cloudy Storage
At Tech Field Day this month, Matt Crape saw a presentation from ClearSky Data. They propose to bridge the usual compromise of cloud storage, giving you the same easy expandability without the performance penalty. They utilize a on-site flash cache to talk to metro-based Points of Presence to achieve this. Matt reviews ClearSky Data’s solutions for backup and disaster recovery as well.
#TFD14 Recap – ClearSky wants to move your SAN to the Cloud
Pietro Piutti took a look at what ClearSky Data presented about at Tech Field Day this month. They propose to use an edge flash cache appliance attached to their Global Storage Network to allow organizations to shift primary storage to the cloud and simplifying DR and backup. Pietro digs into the technical details, and the current geographical scope of the company where their solution can be deployed.
NetApp is Taking Point with Trident
At Tech Field Day this month, NetApp talked about their initiatives in open source and DevOps. Matt Crape was impressed with what he heard. Their Trident project gives developers resources to provision storage without having to go through a storage administrator. What makes this practical from an operations side is that the admins can preset quotas and storage limits to make sure their developers aren’t going overboard. Matt thinks its impressive the way NetApp is adapting their company to take advantage of a new IT landscape.
