NGINX Sprint Hackathon Roundtable Discussion

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Sprint 2020 Hackathon Delegate Roundtable

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: Stephen Foskett

The Tech Field Day delegates discuss the NGINX Sprint 2020 hackathon team presentations. The discussion, lead by Stephen Foskett, covers the judging metrics, prizes, and outcome of the hackathon. The delegates also discuss the content presented, including the ideas and implementation created in just a few days.


NGINX Sprint Space App Demo Discussion

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Demos with Tech Field Day from Sprint 2020

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: Stephen Foskett

Now that the NGINX team has demonstrated the various capabilities of NGINX Plus by deploying a “space app” with many features, the Tech Field Day delegates get their turn. They discuss the app, along with their impressions of NGINX Sprint 2020 overall, in this roundtable moderated by Stephen Foskett.


Monitor a Web App with F5 Beacon

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Demos with Tech Field Day from Sprint 2020

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: Adil Laari, Forrest Crenshaw, Åsa Persson

Åsa Persson, Regional Sales Directir, discusses how to monitor a web application using F5 Beacon. She is joined by Adil Laari, Product Manager, who give an overview of the capabilities of F5 Beacon: App monitoring, user experience monitoring, and actionable insights. Finally, Forrest Crenshaw gives a demonstration of F5 Beacon in action with the space app deployed in this NGINX Sprint 2020 demo series. During and after this demo, the team takes questions from the Tech Field Day delegates.


Make Your Web App Resilient with F5 DNS Cloud Service

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Demos with Tech Field Day from Sprint 2020

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: Rick Salsa

Rick Salsa, Product Manager, continues the NGINX Sprint 2020 space app demo by deploying a global DNS cloud service. The F5 DNS Cloud Service includes DNS Load Balancer which can distribute server load across multiple instances. During and after this demo, James takes questions from the Tech Field Day delegates.


Add an API with NGINX Controller API Management

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Demos with Tech Field Day from Sprint 2020

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: Liam Crilly

Liam Crilly, Director of Product Management, continues the NGINX Spring 2020 space app demo by publishing the app API for other consumers. He uses NGINX Controller, an API lifecycle management solution for NGINX Plus. During and after this demo, Liam takes questions from the Tech Field Day delegates.


Secure a Web App with NGINX App Protect

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Demos with Tech Field Day from Sprint 2020

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: Daniel Edgar

Daniel Edgar, Project Manager, continues the NGINX Sprint 2020 Space App demo by adding a web application firewall, NGINX App Protect. This high-performance, lightweight WAF is a dynamic model integrated with NGINX Plus. During and after this demo, Daniel takes questions from the Tech Field Day delegates.


Improve Performance with NGINX Plus

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Demos with Tech Field Day from Sprint 2020

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: James Jones

James Jones, Solutions Architect, continues the NGINX Sprint 2020 web app demo with a focus on improved performance. James adds an NGINX Plus load balancer with microcching to reduce the impact on the Unit server. He also adds the ability for Promethius to access metrics from the environment. During and after this demo, James takes questions from the Tech Field Day delegates.


Deploy a Web App on NGINX Unit

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Demos with Tech Field Day from Sprint 2020

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: Libby Meren, Timo Stark

Libby Meren, OSS Product Marketing Manager, and Timo Stark, Professional Services Engineer, demonstrate how NGINX Unit can be used to deploy a dynamic application. In this first demonstration from NGINX Sprint 2020, Timo and Libby build a gallery of planets in a Docker container. The container includes NGINX Unit and WordPress alongside a skeleton API based on node.js. NGINX Unit supports multiple languages, and the demonstration includes php and JavaScript. After this demo, Timo and Libby take questions from the Tech Field Day delegates.


NGINX Sprint 2020 Keynote Wrap-Up

Event: Tech Field Day at NGINX Sprint 2020

Appearance: NGINX Sprint Day 1 Wrap-Up with Tech Field Day

Company: NGINX

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Personnel: Gus Robertson, Jon Kuhn, Sidney Rabsatt

The Tech Field Day delegates attending NGINX Sprint 2020 discuss the day 1 keynotes in an interactive question and answer session. They are joined by NGINX SVP and GM, Gus Robertson, VP of Product Management, Sidney Rabsatt, and VP of Products, Jon Kuhn. The discussion focuses on the direction of NGINX within F5 as well as the positioning of various products, including the newly-announced SaaS offerings.


Hybrid Cloud Kubernetes with vSphere and Pure Storage

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Pure Storage

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Personnel: Cody Hosterman, Jon Owings

Cody Hosterman, Director VMware Solutions Engineering, and Jon Owings, Principal Solution Architect, discuss Pure Storage’s Hybrid Cloud Kubernetes offering with vSphere. Although Pure Storage supports Kubernetes without VMware, many of their customers are looking for a supported, integrated offering with vSphere through Tanzu and a cloud-native storage (CSI) driver. Pure Storage offers two options: VMFS with tag-based placement and vVols with feature-based placement, and policy-based storage provisioning. Pure Storage Orchestrator determines storage placement regardless of the physical storage configuration with automatic failover as containers are stopped and restarted. Pure Storage also offers an integrated Cloud Block Store in Amazon AWS, enabling seamless data access from VMware Tanzu to Amazon EKS or other Kubernetes offerings in the cloud. Owings and Hosterman take questions from the Storage Field Day delegates during their demonstration of this functionality.


Pure Storage FlashArray//C with QLC

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Pure Storage

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Personnel: Pete Kirkpatrick

Pete Kirkpatrick, VP Engineering, Chief Hardware Architect, gives a deep dive into the Pure Storage FlashArray//C with all-QLC flash. Pure Storage announced an all-QLC version of the FlashArray//C previously, but this array is now shipping, bringing a new price point for the all-flash storage array market with availability, reliability, and enormous capacity. Kirkpatrick gives some background into the use of QLC NAND flash, including the problems that arise with lower performance and endurance of this medium. In a discussion with the Storage Field Day delegates, he presents the unique technical capabilities Pure Storage brings to this type of flash.


Pure Storage FlashArray//C in the Marketplace

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Pure Storage

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Personnel: Mike Kieran

Mike Kieran, FlashArray Product Marketing, gives a review of Pure Storage’s innovation over the last decade, including the market dynamics of flash storage. FlashArray and FlashBlade give Pure Storage a complete set of offerings across the entire data storage market, with FlashArray//C, FlashArray//X, and FlashBlade. Pure Storage is announcing the shipment of the first all-QLC FlashArray//C, new use cases for workload consolidation, and the new economics of QLC-based flash.


Nebulon Cloud-Defined Storage Demo

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Nebulon Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Nebulon

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Personnel: Andy Roberts, Clint Wyckoff

Clint Wyckoff, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer, demonstrates the Nebulon solution. He begins with an overview of the demo infrastructure, which consists of an nPod on four servers equipped with Nebulon SPUs and local SSDs. The first demo focuses on a VMware vSphere environment with SSDs in each server. Next, Andy Roberts, Solutions Architect, shows how to automate Nebulon using python to boot from Nebulon using CentOS. Finally, Wyckoff uses an Ansible playbook to set up a Kubernetes cluster with the Nebulon CSI driver via helm chart. Throughout the presentation, the Storage Field Day delegates are ask questions and make comments.


The Cloud Based Control Plane – Nebulon ON

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Nebulon Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Nebulon

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Personnel: Josh Price, Michael Heyeck

Michael Heyeck, Cloud Architect, presents Nebulon’s cloud-based control plane, Nebulon ON. Because the management stack comprises three quarters of the traditional storage operating system, Nebulon ON allows all Nebulon users to have an up to date management solution at all times. The SPUs, installed in each application server, run a lightweight storage operating system called nebOS. Nebulon ON is a true web scale product, designed to securely manage customer infrastructure as a service. Infrastructure is provisioned according to standard templates, with VMware, Kubernetes, and MongoDB offered initially. Heyeck is joined by Josh Price, Hardware Architect, as he takes questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.


The Endpoint – Nebulon Services Processing Unit (SPU)

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Nebulon Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Nebulon

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Personnel: Josh Price

Josh Price, Hardware Architect, details the Nebulon Services Processing Unit. The SPU replaces the RAID card of FC HBA in the application server, connecting server SSDs and presenting local or shared volumes. A group of SPU-equipped servers is called an nPod by Nebulon, scaling out to 32 servers. The SPU includes all the attributes of an enterprise all-flash array: a high-performance 8-core CPU and 32 GB NVRAM, hardware-accelerated encryption engine, two data plane ports and one cloud connection. The SPU offloads the full storage stack, with enterprise data services and no software dependencies. Throughout the presentation, Price takes questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.


Introduction to Nebulon Cloud-Defined Storage

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Nebulon Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Nebulon

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Personnel: Craig Nunes, Siamak Nazari

Siamak Nazari, CEO, introduces Nebulon’s cloud-defined storage solution at Storage Field Day 20. Founded in 2018, Nebulon includes many of the original 3PAR team, including CEO David Scott (now Executive Chairman), Chief Software Architect Nazari (now CEO), Platform Director Sean Etaati (now CTO), and CMO Craig Nunes (now COO). Nebulon cloud-defined storage (CDS) is an on-premises server-based enterprise-class storage solution that consumes no server CPU or memory resources and is managed through the cloud.

COO Craig Nunes then joins the presentation to present the ideal customer case for Nebulon: Demanding infrastructure managers who need low latency storage for mission-critical on-premises workloads. They buy from their existing server vendor, with HPE and Supermicro leading the way.


Intel Optane Technology in the Cloud

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Intel

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Personnel: Frank Ober, Kristie Mann

Frank Ober, Principal Engineer, Intel Optane Solutions, presents the use cases for Intel’s Optane™ technology in cloud computing. He presents the case of VKontakte, which leverages Intel Optane SSDs and persistent memory, as well as Intel FPGAs to accelerate their cloud solution and reduce compute cost 40%. The session closes with a summary from Kristie Mann, General Manager, Intel Optane Persistent Memory Division.

 


Intel Optane Persistent Memory Usages

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Intel

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Personnel: Andrey Kudryavtsev, Kelsey Prantis, Kristie Mann

Kristie Mann, General Manager, Intel Optane Persistent Memory Division, discusses the use case for Intel’s Optane™ technology as persistent memory. Intel launched the first generation Optane Persistent Memory (PMem) product in 2019 and recently introduced the second-generation 200 series. Optane PMem DIMMs are compatible with DDR but include a protocol to allow asynchronous communication between the media, DRAM, and the processor, as well as a memory controller that allows data to be used directly in any location. Optane PMem can be used as capacity memory (Memory Mode) or as native persistent memory (App Direct Mode).

Since block I/O limits today’s storage system performance, Intel has been developing a new technology known as DAOS which allows Intel Optane persistent memory technology to be used in an advanced storage stack for high-performance computing with advanced storage features. Kelsey Prantis, Software Engineering Manager, and Andrey Kudryavtsev, HPC Storage Architect, then go into detail about DAOS in a discussion with the Storage Field Day delegates. They present record-breaking performance of the solution from IO500 with solutions at TACC and Argonne National Labs.


Intel Optane SSD Usages

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Intel

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Personnel: Christopher Tobias

Christopher Tobias, General Manager, Optane Software Solutions Division, presents the use case for Intel’s Optane™ technology in SSDs. He begins with a discussion of the Ceph project, to which Intel is a major contributor. Optane SSD for RocksDB/WAL delivers consistently low latency to speed up workloads on Ceph. Next Tobias discusses how Intel Optane SSD technology is able to accelerate analytics performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers organization in a Cisco HyperFlex HCI environment. The final example is a VMware vSAN solution for Cerner, where Intel Optane SSDs improved VM performance by 60% with 33% fewer nodes.


Intel Optane Technology Primer

Event: Storage Field Day 20

Appearance: Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 20

Company: Intel

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Personnel: Christopher Tobias

Christopher Tobias, General Manager, Optane Software Solutions Division, introduces Intel’s Optane™ technology. Tobias begins with a general overview of memory technology, including DRAM, Intel Optane Technology, and 3D NAND, along a spectrum of cost, capacity, and performance. He then presents the unique properties of Intel Optane technology: It is persistent, allows write in place, is byte addressable, and is low latency. Intel Optane Technology is part of a complete memory and storage hierarchy, from tape and HDD to DRAM, in-package memory, and compute cache, based on the 90/10 locality “rule.”