Dr. Rachel Traylor joined Tech Field Day as a delegate last week. Hearing from the presenting companies, she was struck at the difference in approaches between mathematicians and engineers. The former are much more deliberative before proclaiming a solution, whereas the latter often don’t worry about a solid foundation before moving to a solution. In SkyPort Systems, Dr. Traylor found a company bucking this trend, building their solution from the ground up to embrace security principals on a zero-trust model.
Meeting of the Tech Minds – Tech Field Day at Riverbed
Michael Sheehan of Riverbed gives a preview of their Tech Field Day presentation. They focused on how their SteelFusion and SteelConnection solutions can help centrally manage the modern distributed enterprise without losing any business agility. They particularly focused on applications for edge locations. Make sure to watch their full video coverage for a technical deep dive.
Tech Field Day 15 Preview: Ixia
Keith Townsend gives a preview of what to expect from Ixia at Tech Field Day this week. The company has a wide portfolio, including Network Hardware Testing, Security and Network Visualization. Keith focuses on the last two in the preview, which are of vital importance to any modern enterprise. He isn’t overly familiar with Ixia’s offering, so he expects a deep dive during the presentation.
TFD15 Primer: Skyport Systems
Skyport Systems is drawing a lot of interest from our Tech Field Day delegates. Matt Crape will see them present next week and wrote up a preview of what to expect. Skyport essentially offers a highly scrutinized environment for workloads to run via a hardware appliance in your rack. Infrastructure security is first and foremost for Skyport Systems. Matt wants to hear more about how migration of VMs will work with the solution, as Skyport uses the Xen hypervisor. He’ll get his fill during their presentation this week.
Techfield Day 15 Preview: DataCore
DataCore presents at their first Tech Field Day this week. Keith Townsend digs into their background a little bit to give some context prior to their presentation. The company offers a virtual SAN solution, and Keith wants to know how they will differentiate from competitors like vSAN, Nutanix and HPE SimpliVity. While the market may be crowded, Keith sees room for as long as a company can eke out more performance from the underlying storage. DataCore does this via parallel I/O, which has benefits for analytics workloads specifically.
Tech Field Day 15 Preview: Skyport Systems
Tech Field Day is coming up, and Keith Townsend previews Skyport Systems, a return presenter from Networking Field Day in 2016. The company offers of HCI solution on a zero-trust model, meaning the network, application, computing, and user layers share no level of trust between them. Skyport also offers a way to wrap existing applications to take advantage of the security features unique to their architecture. Keith is curious to learn more of how Skyport manages this disruptive change in infrastructure within organizations. Make sure to follow along on the live stream this week to learn more too!
TFD15 Primer: Scale Computing
Preparing for Tech Field Day next week, Matt Crape put together a preview of Scale Computing. Matt sees why the company has found success in the HCI SMB market. They offer the novelty of relatively upfront pricing and package their HCI without excessive licensing costs. Matt’s interested to hear an update on how they plan to tackle other markets, as well as respond to other companies moving into their traditional SMB strength.
Techfield Day 15 Preview: Actifio
The CTO Advisor himself, Keith Townsend, will be at Tech Field Day next week. He’s looking forward to getting an update from Actifio. Since he last saw them at Storage Field Day in 2014, the company has moved from what Keith calls a copy-data focus to secondary data. With the recent investment boom in the segment, Keith is interested to hear more about their updated strategy.
TFD15 Primer: Datacore
DataCore Software is presenting at their first Tech Field Day event next week. Matt Crape found this a little surprising since the company has been around for almost twenty years, and has been a player in the storage virtualization market with SANsymphony since 2011. At first look, Matt found running on Windows Server to be an odd choice for SANsymphony, but ultimately makes the case that the ecosystem support makes sense for the product. Since SANsymphony gets the drivers support of Windows, what you’re left with is a robust, extensible, software-based solution.
Actifio, the Swiss Army knife of data
Raff Poltronieri last heard from Actifio last year at Tech Field Day in Boston. Next week he’ll have a chance to get caught up with them in Silicon Valley. Raff found it extremely versatile when he first saw it last year, and this time around, he’s looking forward to a deeper look at their Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. He’s also interested in some use case applications, particularly disaster recovery.
A new Tech Field Day is approaching
It’s always exciting to have Raff Poltronieri return for another Tech Field Day event. He’s excited to meet the three new delegates in attendance, and offers some basic words of advice for the event. He and all the other delegates can look forward to drinking directly from the IT fire hose from the presenting companies next week!
Tech Field Day 15 Preview: Scale Computing
Keith Townsend is looking forward to hearing from Scale Computing at next week’s Tech Field Day event. He was introduced to the company at Storage Field Day back in 2014, and the landscape for virtualization and HCI has changed substantially in the interim. Keith is interested to hear how the company plans to move into the larger enterprise market, a departure from their previous SMB market focus.
Ano opět – Tech Field Day 15 – Před odletem
Karel Novak will join us for another Tech Field Day event next week, after attending one in Austin earlier this year. It’s always exciting to have him on board. For our non-Czech readers, here’s a translation of his announcement post: https://tinyurl.com/yabw5nka
TFD15 Tech Field Day 15 – Ermahgerd i’m going!
It’s always exciting to have new delegates coming to an event. For Tech Field Day next week, we have the privilege to include Ian Sanderson to our delegates. He’ll be getting to drink directly from the IT firehose, with presentations from Actifio, Cisco, DataCore Software, Ixia, Riverbed, Scale Computing, and Skyport Systems.
