The Independent IT Influencer Event
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Datrium Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Datrium
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Personnel: Rex Walters
Rex Walters, VP of Product, provides a high level overview of Datrium’s DVX platform. This provides virtualized compute, primary data management, secondary data protection, and off-site DR in a single package.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: StarWind Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: StarWind
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Personnel: Max Kolomyeytsev
Max Kolomyeytsev, Director of Product, dicsusses the company vision of ProActive support and how it’s implemented.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: StarWind Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: StarWind
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Personnel: Max Kolomyeytsev
Max Kolomyeytsev, Director of Product, shows how VTL plays in the overall StarWind ecosystem. He discusses the most common use cases for VTL and how it works with other StarWind products to deliver customers the required data protection functionality.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: StarWind Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: StarWind
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Personnel: Max Kolomyeytsev
Max Kolomyeytsev, Director of Product, demonstrates how StarWind VTL helps Veeam Backup and Replication infrastructure to non-disruptively add backup to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage to the Data Protection plan.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: StarWind Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: StarWind
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Personnel: Scott Alan Miller
Scott Alan Miller, Ideology Inspirer, looks back at StarWind VTL, which started back in the day when organizations started to need fast disk-based storage to replace tape in tape-centric backup infrastructures. He talks about why virtual tape has become relevant today. In particular, he discusses the new use cases it gets with the trend for use with object storage and public cloud as a backup, as well as for long term archival storage.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: StarWind Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: StarWind
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Personnel: Anton Kolomyeytsev
Anton Kolomyeytsev, CEO of StarWind, introduces the company. Started in 2009 with a strict focus on SDS and HCI solutions for SMB and enterprise ROBO. Right now, StarWind is the leading provider of turnkey SMB and ROBO HCI solutions. Their second biggest focus is VTL-based backup storage systems with cloud and object storage connectivity.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Western Digital Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Western Digital
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Personnel: Mike McWhorter
Mike McWhorter, Senior Technologist, DCS Field Applications Engineering, reviews the use case of using their ActiveScale object storage with Hadoop. Using the new S3A feature in Hadoop, you can connect S3-compatible object store in Hadoop as a second tier of storage. This is a response to the disk use of Hadoop’s HDFS, which triple replicates already massive datasets. ActiveScale can serve as the cold storage tier for Hadoop data.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Western Digital Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Western Digital
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Personnel: Roger Weeks
Roger Weeks, Technologist, DCS Field Applications Engineering, overviews ActiveScale, their scale out object storage. The latest updates include erasure coding and replication, as well as support for multi-site availability zones.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Western Digital Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Western Digital
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Personnel: Shailendra Tripathi
Shailendra Tripathi, Fellow, DCS Engineering, goes into a technical deep dive on IntelliFlash architecture and design. The software is engineered around a multi-tier system to provide workloads with low latency at the speed of persistent memory. Shailendra then reviews how the systems handles distribution to create a single logical flash pool with robust resiliency.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Western Digital Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Western Digital
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Personnel: Narayan Venkat
Narayan Venkat, VP DCS Business Unit, gives an overview of Tegile’s IntelliFlash solution, dating back to its founding in 2010 and shipment of its first AFA in 2014. IntelliFlash is designed to provide a single flash platform that can be viable for any workload.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Western Digital Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Western Digital
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Personnel: Phil Bullinger
Phil Bullinger, SVP DCS Business Unit, introduces Western Digital’s Data Center Systems portfolio to the delegates. This ranges from consumer facing SanDisk and WD brands, through enterprise offerings like HGST and Tegile. This lineup enables Western Digital to have a hand in the entire hardware pipeline from the transistor to the end-user experience.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: NetApp Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: NetApp
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Personnel: Jeff Baxter
Jeff Baxter, Chief Evangelist for ONTAP, presented the latest updates in ONTAP version 9.3. The update is designed to optimize and simplify data management with features such as adaptive QoS, 40% faster performance on AFF HA pairs, improved efficiency, and stronger compliance tools. The updates reflect NetApp’s ongoing commitment to enhancing the software aspect of ONTAP, focusing on making it suitable for modern, scale-out infrastructures and providing predictable upgrade cycles for users.
During the presentation, Baxter highlighted NetApp’s strategy of a six-month cadence for software releases, ensuring regular updates, and keeping functionality predictable and reliable for both partners and customers. He detailed the significant software optimizations that have led to substantial performance improvements, exemplified by the 40% performance boost on certain workloads using the same hardware. Another focal point was the update to adaptive QoS, a feature that now allows for real-time adjustment of workload performance based on IOPS per terabyte, enabling consistent performance as workloads scale.
Moreover, Baxter emphasized the role of ONTAP in the data fabric architecture, crucial for linking multiple clouds and modernizing traditional data centers. ONTAP’s flexibility allows it to operate across a variety of environments, including in the cloud as a software-defined solution. Security enhancements in version 9.3, such as enhanced encryption and compliance tools, were also presented as key improvements, empowering users to better protect their data and comply with regulatory requirements. The updated ONTAP facilitates adaptive, simplified provisioning and greater storage efficiency by incorporating advanced deduplication processes.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: NetApp Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: NetApp
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Personnel: Santosh Rao
Santosh Rao, Senior Technical Director of Workloads and Ecosystem at NetApp, provides a comprehensive architectural overview of NetApp’s data pipeline strategy during Storage Field Day 15. The discussion begins with a recognition of the challenges faced by legacy data architectures, particularly their inefficiencies and limitations in handling modern analytics workloads. NetApp is actively extending its data pipeline capabilities to operate effectively from the edge to the core and up to the cloud. This transition aims to address the data dynamics in legacy systems by accommodating new-age applications like NoSQL databases and big data solutions, while also considering the implications of cloud-facing architectures, and the fluctuating cost implications of cloud storage.
Rao highlights the shifting landscape regarding enterprise installations, noting a departure from traditional architectures, such as those built around VMware, towards leaner systems utilizing Linux and KVM. This shift acknowledges the growing influence of cloud computing and the emergence of the edge as critical data sources. However, challenges remain, particularly the prohibitive costs and administrative burdens of maintaining multiple copies of data across different systems, which is often unsustainable as data volumes grow. NetApp identifies a significant opportunity to step in as an intermediary player that ensures data fluidity and resource efficiency, enabling enterprises to leverage cloud advantages without being locked into a single vendor or facing exorbitant data management costs.
In his presentation, Rao also discusses the evolving needs of data systems at the edge, showcasing innovations and partnerships pivotal for enhancing NetApp’s presence in this domain. For instance, NetApp’s engagement with vector data and solutions like ONTAP Select demonstrates the company’s strategy to empower edge computing while synchronizing it with core and cloud resources. This approach not only signifies NetApp’s strategic neutrality across different platform ecosystems but underscores its commitment to optimizing data handling across diverse operational landscapes. Through AI and machine learning capabilities, particularly in real-time analytics and low-latency applications, NetApp aims to deliver a robust architecture that supports modern data-driven requirements, thus resonating with both enterprise needs and industry trends.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: NetApp Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: NetApp
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Personnel: Jeff Baxter
Jeff Baxter, Chief Evangelist for ONTAP at NetApp, outlined NetApp’s strategic vision for the integration of NVMe and storage-class memory into its products, emphasizing the company’s commitment to innovation in the storage industry. The approach was presented against the backdrop of broader industry changes, including the shift toward data-driven environments and the increasing importance of digital transformation in changing how businesses operate and create value. Baxter noted that leveraging NVMe and storage-class memory is crucial as these technologies become more ingrained in the industry’s future.
During the presentation, Baxter underscored the significance of flash memory in the digital transformation and its prevalence amongst high-performance workloads. He described how NetApp initially missed the inflection point of all-flash adoption but subsequently climbed to the second position in the market and aims to reach the top. The talk drew distinctions between NVMe and existing technologies, noting the dramatic improvements in performance and reduction in latency that NVMe offers, which align with the demands of emerging applications like artificial intelligence and real-time analytics. The session included a discussion on hybrid storage solutions, which allows layering of storage-class memory with solid-state drives for optimized performance and cost-effectiveness, and positioned NetApp to harness these technologies efficiently in enterprise environments.
Baxter also touched upon various media layers and the company’s forward-looking architectural strategies to manage these complex storage tiers seamlessly. He clarified that NetApp does not produce solid-state media but collaborates closely with major suppliers to ensure readiness for the enterprise market. NetApp seems to be preparing for a holistic adoption of these solutions within their data center architecture, envisioning the integration of NVMe and storage-class memory as standard across infrastructures, while simultaneously developing mechanisms to move and manage data effectively across different storage layers. Overall, the presentation conveyed a strong message of NetApp’s commitment to innovation and adaptation in the rapidly evolving storage industry, ensuring their solutions are both cutting-edge and aligned with customer needs.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Hedvig Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Hedvig
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Personnel: Gaurav Yadav, Shufan Ge
Gaurav Yadav, MTS, Hedvig, reviews how the Hedvig platform has been optimized to serve as a backup target. Then Shufan Ge, MTS, Hedvig reviews some of the object storage capabilities of Hedvig.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Hedvig Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Hedvig
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Personnel: Srividhya Anantharamakrishnan
Srividhya Anantharamakrishnan, MTS, Hedvig, shows how Hedvig can be thought of as both primary and secondard storage via converged backups. Hedvig does this via their scheduled snapshotting mechanism.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Hedvig Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Hedvig
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Personnel: Suhani Gupta
Suhani Gupta, MTS, Hedvig, demonstrates how Hedvig distributed storage integrates with containers, Kubernetes, and other distributed environments.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Hedvig Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Hedvig
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Personnel: Abhijith Shenoy
Abhijith Shenoy, MTS at Hedvig, gives an overview of how multi and hybrid cloud deployments look when using Hedvig’s platform. This showcases using the cloud as a stretch cluster, forming a single cluster between on-premises and cloud resources. Hedvig enables making all data actively available to apps, regardless of where they live.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Hedvig Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Hedvig
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Personnel: Avinash Lakshman, Bharat Naik
Avinash Lakshman, CEO of Hedvig gives an overview of the companies platform. The talk touches how Hedvig enables organizations to modernize, secure data, and reduce OpEx. Then Bharat Naik, MTS at Hedvig, provides a introduction of Hedvig’s distributed storage architecture.
Event: Storage Field Day 15
Appearance: Dropbox Presents at Storage Field Day 15
Company: Dropbox
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Personnel: James Cowling
James Cowling, Principal Engineer at Dropbox, reviews how the company’s infrastructure provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace. This includes efficiencies in cost, performance, and overall agility.
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