The TECHunplugged crew was about in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 and got to hear about HyperFlex Application Platform. In this video, Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro discuss the evolution of HyperFlex as Cisco’s HCI solution, something Max has been following for a number of years. HXAP is a standalone add-on running on top of HyperFlex which gives the ability to run containers. This complete new cluster builds on top of a Linux KVM environment with a Kubernetes environment. They dig into how this fits into the overall container landscape and the implications for organizations in the video.
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Threat Response
At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020, Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro got to hear from the Cisco Threat Response team. They enjoyed seeing Cisco ability to dive into threats to your networking environment as they are being monitored, and how this is integrated into a further online knowledge base to better educate about emerging threats. With security teams traditionally understaffed, Cisco Threat Response is vital to gather together all the threats facing your organization in a manageable interface and provide further context for how this will continue to impact your organization. It’s not a traditional metrics-based dashboard, but an excellent way to get a security overview.
TECHunplugged at Cisco Live Barcelona 2020 – Introduction
In this video Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman talk about Cisco Live in Barcelona 2020. They talk about Tech Field Day Extra, Cisco in general, HyperFlex, UCS and IoT. They discuss why the appreciate the unique access events like Tech Field Day Extra provide. During busy industry shows like Cisco Live, it’s one thing to hear all the announcements live. But Tech Field Day Extra provides access to experts on the announcements, and often hosts sessions going into technical deep dives on the latest technology.
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco UCS Updates at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in Barcelona
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro of the TECHunplugged crew cover what they saw from Cisco UCS at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. This x86 server infrastructure has been around for a decade, and at the event, Cisco announced updates to the latest Intel processors, as well as adding in support for the AMD Rome platform, providing up to 64 cores on a processor. This processor competition coming to Cisco UCS can only spell good things for customers down the road. UCS Gen 5 also adds new support for NVMe, adds novel blade designs, and still providing GPU dense options. In the words of Arjan, Cisco is “doing something special with UCS.”
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Live Barcelona – No Love for Single Panes of Glass
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.
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.
Veeam Enhanced NAS Backup – TFD20
Veeam’s Michael Cade was one of the company’s presenters at our tenth anniversary Tech Field Day event. In this video, he takes the time to answer some questions that there wasn’t enough time to fully address during the event.
Commvault Activate – CommvaultGo 2019
Keith Townsend sits down with Commvault Field CTO Aaron Murphy and Director of Product Management Patrick McGrath during Tech Field Day Exclusive at CommvaultGo 2019. Commvault is known as a data protection company with its Complete product representing the bulk of its revenue. Activate is a product positioned at the data platform market.
A Quick Recap on This Week at Commvault GO
In this post from Kori Younger, she goes over her thoughts about what happened a Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO. This included details on their recent acquisition of Hedvig, the launch of the SaaS Commvault Metallic service, and expanded features of Commvault Activate.
CommvaultGo 2019 Hot Take
Commvault announced a SaaS backup solution (Metallic) and went into a little detail about the acquisition of software-defined storage company Hedvig during Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019. Keith Townsend shares his impressions of the keynote in this video.
Dell Tech Cloud CFD6 – Hot Take
Keith Townsend returned to the VMware campus to hear Dell Technologies share their vision of VMware on Dell Technologies Cloud during Cloud Field Day. He appreciated the conversation flow of the conversation, and how the presenters were willing to curate their content to follow the interest of the delegates. It’s definitely a can’t miss presentation.
Lucid Link CFD6 – Hot Take
Another mobile file system? Keith Townsend thought he was going to see a familiar song and dance from Lucid Link at Cloud Field Day. But he was pleasently surprised to see a truly different solution, with block storage served on top of S3 object storage, with a global file system distributed among clients. They had a very interesting demo, so be sure to check out their full event video coverage.
NetApp CFD6 – Hot Take
In this hot take from Keith Townsend, he looks at what NetApp showed off at Cloud Field Day. Keith is no stranger to hearing from the company, but this session had a deep technical focus. They looked at where does NetApp’s Kubernetes service run its compute. They reviewed how they separate their control plane from the cloud underlay and deploy instances large enough to support the Kubernetes infrastructure next to storage and other workloads.
Cloud Field Day 6 – Dell Technologies
In this video, Nate Avery digs into what he saw from Dell Technologies at Cloud Field Day. He digs into Dell and VMware’s commitment to bringing cloud to features and pricing to customer’s on-prem datacenters.
EXTRAHOP CFD6 Hot Take
Keith Townsend is posting hot take reactions of all the presentations at Cloud Field Day. He was looking forward to seeing ExtraHop’s networking management features at the event and using their platform under system demand. The presentation went another way with a security heavy focus. Be sure to check it out for a full deep dive.
Hammerspace CFD6 – Hot Take
In this video, Keith Townsend gives his first impressions of the Hammerspace presentation at Cloud Field Day 6 in Santa Clara.
Videocast From Pure Accelerate 2019
Max Mortillaro was a delegate at Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019. In this video, he shares his thoughts about FlashArray //C, which was announced at the show. The delegates got a deep dive into this during the Field Day presentations.
TECHunplugged Videocast #1 – Liqid and Composable Infrastructures
In this take, TECHunplugged Analyst Max Mortillaro talks about Liqid, composability, and their upcoming Gen-Z composable infrastructures. Max was a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World, and got to hear directly from Liqid at the event. Their PCIe-based composability lets customers create pools of resources for servers or VMs that aren’t bound by physical enclosures. What’s exciting though is what is coming down the road. Be sure to watch the video to find out Max’s thoughts.
NGINX on a Floppy
The humble floppy disk hasn’t been relevant for a few decades, but that didn’t stop NGINX from grabbing some dongles and showing off what they can do with 1.4MB of storage. They were able to run a web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, and content cache off the disk. If you want to see what they had in store for the Cloud Field Day delegates, be sure to check out the full edited video of their presentation.