NetApp and open source isn’t an association that immediately springs to mind. Rich Stroffolino wrote up a piece giving an overview of why that’s about to change. The company has actively engaged with the open source community over the past 18 months, centered around their developer site, thePub. Their efforts originally started back in 2011 around OpenStack, and now they have made significant contributions to the Cinder and Manila projects as well.
Managed Storage with ClearSky Data
Rich Stroffolino writes up his thoughts on what he saw from ClearSky Data, based on their Tech Field Day presentation. He particularly highlights the companies early moves into provide a storage backend for containerized applications. The work is still in development, but Rich is excited by the possibilities.
#TFD14 Recap – NetApp Open Ecosystem
Pietro Piutti looks at what NetApp presented at Tech Field Day. The presentation focused squarely on the company’s open source initiatives. These open source projects are organized around what NetApp is calling The Pub. Pietro sees this move to open source as beneficial to everyone. Code that NetApp is contributing toward Kubernetes or Docker is accessible to anyone, and NetApp benefits by making storage more easily consumed and customized for specific uses by developers.
Turbonomic: Not a Flash in the Pan
Matt Crape has been aware of Turbonomic for some time, but until they presented at Tech Field Day, had some concerns. One was a dated Flash-based interface. The other was how to prove its monetary value. With an updated, clean HTML5 interface, the first concern is assuaged. Turbonomics Application Assurance platform also supports a “Pending Actions” portion of the dashboard. This allows you to assign costs to each component of your infrastructure, and see how changes will impact that, including cloud migration. For Matt, it’s a really compelling combination.
Tech Field Day 14 Recap: Community and the Turbonomic Vision
Turbonomic’s Eric Wright shares a blog post detailing what the company presented about at Tech Field Day earlier this month. This includes their vastly revamped HTML5 UI, which allows for users to easily see their virtual supply chain. This is a visualization of every part of a given infrastructure that effects application performance. Make sure to check out the full video if you missed the livestream during the presentation.
#TFD14 Recap – Turbonomic: New UI, Clouds and Containers
Pietro Piutti came away impressed from Turbonomic’s Tech Field Day presentation. They showed their application assurance platform. Pietro was intrigued how this not only monitored infrastructure, but had a constant focus on looking at all components that effect application performance. This includes looking at how infrastructure and workload changes would effect the system before deploying, as well as a built in tool to show the costs of keeping apps on-premises versus moving them to the cloud.
Datrium And Open Convergence
Rich Stroffolino wrote up his thoughts on Datrium’s presentation from Tech Field Day. The company has an interesting response to the typical hyperconverged infrastructure story, something they call Open Convergence with their DVX Rackscale architecture. This allows for heterogeneous deployments of Datrium’s own nodes and existing hardware. More importantly, Datrium’s architecture separates nodes for mass storage and those for compute. This allows for servers to be stateless, easier management, and less cross-talk between nodes. It’s a very interesting rethink of how to approach convergence.
VMTurbo growing up and out in to Turbonomic
John White takes a looks at Turbonomic, which is the new name for the company formerly known as VMTurbo. With the new name comes a refreshed UI. Gone is the old Flash interface, replaced with a modern and fast HTML5 interface. John finds it emblematic of the company as a whole, taking a solid foundation and making it even more mature. This includes a wide spectrum of available integration points for their application assurance platform.
Turbonomic: Adam Smith and App Assurance
At Turbonomic’s Tech Field Day presentation, they showed off their application assurance platform with a totally revamped UI. Rich Stroffolino found it compelling, and considered the overall implications of how Turbonomic frames their solution. They use a supply-and-demand paradigm to frame their solution. Rich considers the possibility that a framing metaphor could be a convincing product differentiator.
Off to Tech Field Day 14!
Jason Nash is at his first Tech Field Day and is excited to hear from the presenting companies. He’s particularly looking forward to learning more about ClearSky Data, which he’s been researching for a while. Make sure to check for our full video coverage posted soon after the event.
DatacenterDude is Headed to Tech Field Day
Nick Howell, aka the Data Center Dude, gives a video preview of Tech Field Day coming up with week in Boston. Nick is a first time delegate, but has been to several events with companies in a past life. Looking forward to see how the perspective informs his experience!
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: NetApp
Matt Crape finishes off his preview posts for Tech Field Day this week with NetApp. He’s been impressed how the company has adapted, both with their successful integration of Solidfire, as well as their embrace of DevOps culture. The latter is especially important, as it’s enabled the companies offerings to be automated in code, gather than manually managed via a clunky GUI. Matt can’t wait to see what the company is working on next.
#TFD14 Preview – Datrium
Pietro Piutti will cross the Atlantic to join us at Tech Field Day in Boston this week. In his last preview post, he takes a look at Datrium. He describes what he found research DVX, their take on the converged data center problem. They use discrete data and compute nodes, combined with a Hyperdriver software component, to cluster total IOPS capacity within the system, rather than have competition for system resources on the fly. Pietro sees this as an interesting take on HCI, saying “even if the ingredients are familiar, the recipe is different and the serving looks yummy!” He’s get the full entree at Tech Field Day. Make sure to get your own serving by watching along on our live stream!
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: Datrium
Matt Crape is heading to Boston for Tech Field Day 14 and is doing his homework on Datrium beforehand. He’s interested to learn more about their DVX storage solution. This effectively allows for disaggregation of storage from compute in a VM environment. Reads are done on fast local cache on the server, and writes are put back onto the DVX appliance. This allows for performance to increase at scale, and allows for high availability. Make sure to catch them on our live stream during the vent to learn more!
#TFD14 Preview – Turbonomic
Pietro Piutti is anxious to learn more about Turbonomic. He doesn’t have experience with their solution, but is intrigued with their “desired state” concept for VM infrastructure. Best of all, this isn’t locked in to a single hypervisor, it works cross platform. Pietro sees this as a major advantage and can’t wait to learn more at Tech Field Day next week!
#TFD14 Preview – ClearSky Data
Before Pietro Piutti comes to his first Tech Field Day event, he’s writing up some presenting company previews. His first centers around ClearSky Data. The company provides cloud storage, but uses distributed points of presence as another caching layer between on-site storage and the cloud. Their 2U all-flash appliance works for hot data, which is then gradually moved further up the “cloud cache” as it needs to be accessed less and less. It’s an interesting approach and Pietro is definitely interested in learning more.
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: Turbonomic
Matt Crape will see Turbonomic presented at Tech Field Day next week. The company has grown 954% in the last three years, and Matt thinks the company’s solutions are worthy of the rapid growth. They center their monitoring tools around the idea of desired state, keeping machines well balanced between performance and efficiency. After monitoring a VM deployment for a little while, their solution is soon able to give recommendations, or even full intermediation. This allows for more reliable application performance, and better quality assurance for an organization. Can’t wait to see what they’ll present about at Tech Field Day!
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.
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: ClearSky Data
Matt Crape is headed for Tech Field Day next week, and he’s writing up previews of the presenting companies. In this post, he looks at ClearSky Data. They offer a tiered storage solution. This leverages an edge appliance on-site with up to 24TB of flash storage, which tiers and caches hot data. This then falls back to the ClearSky Data network of PoPs, which serve to cache “warm” data, with cold data handed off to S3. Matt hopes to learn more about their recently announced data protection solution at their presentation. Make sure to tune in live to watch along with Matt during the event.
Wicked Cool! Tech Field Day 14, Here I Come
We’re heading to Boston for Tech Field Day, coming up in May! Matt Crape will be there for his second event, having joined us for a Tech Field Day last year in November. It was an experience to remember, and we hope this event will prove to be just as memorable!
