Symantec Presents at Tech Field Day 8

Event: Tech Field Day 8

Appearance: Symantec Presents at Tech Field Day 8

Company: Symantec

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Personnel: Don Angspatt, Jerry Gallin, Oscar Wahlberg, Ranga Rajagopalan, Saveen Pakala

At Tech Field Day 8, Symantec presented a comprehensive update on its Storage and Availability Management portfolio. Featuring the soon-to-be-released 6.0 version of Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server, the focus was on supporting private cloud adoption, enhancing resiliency in multi-tiered applications, and delivering improved storage optimization. The event showcased new technologies geared toward helping enterprises transform their existing infrastructure into more agile, efficient, and resilient platforms for mission-critical applications.

During the presentation, Symantec executives and product managers emphasized the strategic importance of getting “the private cloud you want from the infrastructure you’ve already got.” This message was demonstrated through a series of sessions and live demos highlighting new features in version 6.0. These included file system-level deduplication and compression for primary storage, automation of recovery for multi-tier applications using Virtual Business Services (VBS), fast failover support for Windows environments, and enhanced integration between Application HA and Backup Exec for VM auto-restore. These enhancements targeted the challenges faced by enterprises amid mounting pressure to virtualize and evolve toward private cloud architectures without sacrificing the performance or stability of their mission-critical environments.

The event also included lively and candid discussions among the Tech Field Day delegates, many of whom questioned traditional enterprise assumptions embedded in Symantec’s messaging. Several attendees expressed skepticism about large-scale private cloud transitions or suggested that traditional “glass house” IT centers are no longer leading innovation. Symantec acknowledged that while cloud adoption isn’t always immediate, their solutions, like VBS and multi-platform clustering, offered practical bridges between legacy systems and modern cloud-readiness. The session concluded with strong interest in the technical depth of the demos and an open invitation to explore further, positioning Symantec’s 6.0 release as a significant step in merging enterprise reliability with the agility demanded by modern IT.


Nasuni Tech Field Day Presentation: The Cloud Inside the Storage Controller

Event: Tech Field Day 8

Appearance: Nasuni Presents at Tech Field Day 8

Company: Nasuni

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Personnel: Andres Rodriguez

For years, the traditional storage controller has been a game of RAM and disk. Put the cloud inside and what you have is a third component.

In this clip from Tech Field Day 2011 Nasuni CEO, Andres Rodriguez, explains what the next generation of storage controllers looks like and how integrating the cloud changes everything.


Nutanix Presents at Tech Field Day 8

Event: Tech Field Day 8

Appearance: Nutanix Presents at Tech Field Day 8

Company: Fusion-io, Nutanix

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Personnel: Ajeet Singh, Dheeraj Pandey, Mitch Crane, Mohit Aron

Nutanix CEO and co-founder Dheeraj Pandey presented at Tech Field Day 8, introducing the company’s converged infrastructure solution that merges compute and storage into a single scalable appliance designed for virtualized environments. By drawing inspiration from architectures used by hyperscale cloud providers and adapting them for enterprise needs, Nutanix offers simplified management and improved performance, aiming to eliminate the complexity and inefficiencies tied to traditional SAN-/NAS-based datacenter approaches.

In the presentation, Pandey used a humorous animation to illustrate the traditional virtualization stack’s struggles with SAN management and performance bottlenecks. This was contrasted with Nutanix’s approach of co-locating compute and storage within each node, eliminating the need for separate storage networks or devices. Nutanix’s architecture was described as highly cloud-inspired, with its foundation in commodity x86 hardware, leveraging SSDs and Fusion I/O for caching, and intelligently managing data through MapReduce for performance and availability. This hyper-converged model allows enterprises to enjoy cloud economics and scale-out simplicity in a turnkey solution—all while using standard protocols like NFS and iSCSI.

Throughout the session, the Nutanix team detailed the system’s underlying technology and highlighted its benefits for mid-sized enterprises and service providers, including simplified deployment, linear scaling, and a unified management interface. The appliance’s design supports high-performance virtualization and VDI using local storage tiered by access frequency, while offering enterprise features like snapshots, failover, and intelligent data locality management. Nutanix emphasized a generalist-friendly approach to infrastructure, aiming to empower virtualization and IT ops teams with a self-healing, low-maintenance, one-box platform, and concluded by demonstrating a live UI walkthrough and discussing real-world deployments in legal and financial firms.


Arkeia presents at Tech Field Day 8

Event: Tech Field Day 8

Appearance: Arkeia Presents at Tech Field Day 8

Company: Arkeia Software

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Personnel: Bill Evans

Arkeia Software presented at Tech Field Day 8 with a focus on the company’s background, data deduplication technology, and strategies for offsite data protection. Bill Evans, representing product management, outlined the company’s mid-market focus and discussed their innovations in virtualization and backup methodologies. A significant portion of the presentation was dedicated to explaining Arkeia’s approach to deduplication, particularly their unique technology called “progressive deduplication,” which is designed to reduce bandwidth and accelerate data movement offsite for cloud backup solutions.

Arkeia Software, founded in 1996, specializes in network backup solutions for both physical and virtual platforms. They deliver backup software and appliances and have built a strong presence in North America and Europe. Their product strategy emphasizes virtualization, with announcements about support for platforms like VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, and more. A major technological advancement discussed was Arkeia’s progressive deduplication, acquired from Kadena Systems. This method improves upon traditional fixed and variable block deduplication by allowing overlapping blocks of a fixed size, enabling higher compression rates and faster data processing. It includes on-the-fly hashing and progressive matching to minimize workload and avoid redundant data storage during incremental backups.

Throughout the presentation, Evans stressed the importance of deduplication in reducing cloud bandwidth usage, especially as mid-market companies look to replicate data to the cloud rather than rely on traditional tape-based offsite storage. He highlighted how deduplication improves storage efficiency across time, systems, and applications, particularly in virtualized environments. The discussion included the challenges and benefits of source-side vs. target-side deduplication and considerations about restore points, agent usage in backups, and risks like rogue administrators or malicious deletions. The session concluded with insights on when to use tape versus cloud solutions, noting that while cloud is viable for small data volumes, larger deployments often still require physical transport due to bandwidth constraints.


Introducing Actifio with Ash Ashutosh at TFD4

Event: Tech Field Day 4

Appearance: Actifio Presents at Tech Field Day 4

Company: Actifio

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Personnel: Ash Ashutosh

Ash Ashutosh, Founder, President, and CEO of Actifio, introduces the company and its technology. This video was recorded as part of Gestalt IT Tech Field Day 4 on November 12, 2010.

In his presentation at Tech Field Day 4, Ash Ashutosh introduced Actifio as a company aiming to revolutionize the way enterprises handle data management, particularly around the often redundant and fragmented process of making multiple data copies for backup, disaster recovery, analytics, compliance, and development. Ash outlined the problem with the current paradigm, explaining how most organizations spend multiple times more on managing data copies than on the original data, storing as many as 13 to 120 copies across different tools and use cases. Each of these tools—whether for backup, snapshots, replication, or test environments—creates and manages its own copy in isolation, resulting in inefficiency, complexity, and ballooning costs. Actifio’s approach is to unify these processes by using a single intelligent platform that virtualizes data and allows various applications to interact with a consistent, optimized data store.

Actifio’s core innovation is a system built around four fundamental primitives of data management: copy, store, move, and restore. The company’s value proposition is in consolidating these activities across traditionally siloed backup and storage systems into one “virtual data pipeline.” Through a new object-based file system and sophisticated metadata that includes application context and lifecycle management policies (SLAs), Actifio separates data management from the underlying storage infrastructure. This allows companies to use existing storage hardware or cloud storage providers while dramatically optimizing how data is copied and moved. By allowing instant restore and dramatically reducing the time and resources needed for backup and recovery, Actifio addresses persistent pain points such as long backup windows and slow recovery times. The system is designed to function transparently within existing IT environments, enabling incremental, non-disruptive adoption.

Ash emphasized usability and simplicity by aligning the user experience with modern paradigms, notably avoiding outdated storage concepts like “LUNs” and relying instead on SLA-based, policy-driven workflows. The platform provides seamless support for physical and virtual environments, enables restoration across varied infrastructures, and dramatically cuts network and storage overhead through deduplication and compression. Actifio’s design allows it to be applied in scenarios ranging from local data protection to remote disaster recovery and active-active multi-site environments without imposing a specific disk solution, reinforcing its storage-agnostic philosophy. Ash concluded by noting that Actifio invested significant engineering effort—backed by 16 patents filed—into making the platform robust and scalable while maintaining a clear focus on user needs, honed through collaboration with dozens of early customers in the Boston area before expanding its market presence.


Cisco UCS Roundtable

Event: Tech Field Day 2

Appearance: Cisco Presents at Tech Field Day 2

Company: Cisco Datacenter

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Personnel: Bas Raayman, Ed Saipetch, Edward Haletky, Greg Ferro, Jason Boche, John Obeto, Omar Sultan, Scott Lowe, Simon Seagrave, Stephen Foskett

Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) redefines the economics and operational model of data centers. It combines computing, networking, and storage infrastructure with management and virtualization in a single system to reduce total cost of ownership and increase agility. This roundtable session at Tech Field Day 2 featured a discussion of UCS technologies by leading industry experts and bloggers.

During the roundtable, participants discussed various defining attributes of Cisco UCS, including simplified management, scalability, and the utility of service profiles for hardware abstraction. These service profiles enable administrators to assign configurations and identities to blades which can be quickly swapped or moved between chassis with minimal disruption and no manual reconfiguration. This abstraction not only simplifies hardware replacement and upgrades but also facilitates operational consistency across deployments. For large enterprises, this ease of scalability and minimal intervention reduces provisioning time and administrative overhead, allowing departments to quickly deploy services without depending on multiple IT teams.

Another significant discussion focused on the secure multi-tenancy capabilities of UCS. While the term conveyed support for isolated environments for different internal business units through features like vFilers and quality of service (QoS) policies, several roundtable participants pointed out that this model does not fully address broader security concerns—particularly those involving data confidentiality and integrity across external organizations. Experts emphasized the lack of comprehensive definitions and standards in cloud and virtualization security, and although Cisco shows promise by being involved in efforts like CloudAudit and the Cloud Security Alliance, ambiguity remains. Ultimately, the consensus suggested that while UCS is a forward-thinking platform with strong potential, particularly in terms of orchestration and manageability, its security model is still evolving and may not meet every organization’s rigorous requirements just yet.

Lastly, the conversation also touched on UCS’s approach to integrating Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), offering compatibility with existing storage networks while consolidating bandwidth. This convergence potentially reduces infrastructure and overhead but still requires precise zoning and provisioning on both Fibre Channel and iSCSI. Despite its powerful features, UCS’s appeal remains dependent on customer understanding and awareness; some IT professionals noted confusion about its value proposition beyond hardware convergence, particularly in smaller enterprises. However, the collective agreement was that UCS serves as a strong foundation for modern data centers, with potential cost advantages and streamlined operations—especially when the full scope of its features and integration models are thoroughly understood and leveraged.


Carter George presents Ocarina Networks capacity optimization in 2009 at TFD1

Event: Tech Field Day 1

Appearance: Ocarina Networks Presents at Tech Field Day 1

Company: Ocarina Networks

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Personnel: Carter George

Recorded at Tech Field Day 1 on November 13, 2009, Carter George presented Ocarina Networks’ capacity optimization technology. He discussed various data deduplication and compression approaches, contrasting them with Ocarina’s “application-aware” technology. Ocarina Networks, which was later acquired by Dell, focused on creating free space on existing storage rather than selling new storage solutions. George emphasized the importance of integrating their technology with existing storage vendors to ensure seamless operation and user transparency. This presentation is part of the “Best of Tech Field Day” series.

Carter George explained that Ocarina’s solution, named the “ecosystem,” stands for extract, correlate, and optimize. This process involves decompressing files to their raw data, deduplicating them, and then applying content-aware compression. Unlike traditional deduplication methods that operate on the zeros and ones stored on disk, Ocarina’s approach extracts and decompresses data to find duplicates that standard methods might miss. This is particularly effective for files that are already compressed, such as Office documents, videos, and images. By identifying and removing duplicates at a more granular level, Ocarina can significantly reduce storage requirements.

George also highlighted the flexibility and efficiency of Ocarina’s technology. The solution can be deployed as an appliance or software, depending on the storage environment. It reads files from existing storage, processes them to reduce size, and writes them back, ensuring data integrity through checksum comparisons. The technology supports various file types and can be tuned for specific use cases, such as photo sites or virtual machine environments. Additionally, Ocarina’s algorithms include specialized methods for images and videos, offering both lossless and visually lossless compression options. This comprehensive approach allows Ocarina to provide substantial storage savings and improved data management for large-scale data centers and diverse storage environments.


Virsto Technology Preview – VF Cache on VNX

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: Virsto Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: Virsto

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Personnel: Brian Martin


Virsto for vSphere 2.0

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: Virsto Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: Virsto

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Personnel: Mike Gigante


Introduction to Virsto Software

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: Virsto Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: Virsto

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Personnel: Mark Davis


Virsto Technical Architecture

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: Virsto Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: Virsto

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Personnel: Brian Martin


Solid-state considerations for scale-out architectures

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: NexGen Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: NexGen

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Personnel: John Spiers, Kelly Long


NexGen chose a hybrid design for long term architectural viability

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: NexGen Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: NexGen

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Personnel: John Spiers, Kelly Long

Storage QoS is more than just a way to isolate workloads on a shared storage system to guarantee performance levels, it is the key enabler for long-term hybrid architecture viability, John Spiers, Co-Founder and CEO and Kelly Long, Co-Founder and CTO describe why. Topics include hybrid, benefits of storage QoS, storage media proliferation, hybrid storage system challenges, QoS controlled tiering and caching, storage efficiency and affordability.


Managing Shared Storage Performance with NexGen

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: NexGen Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: NexGen

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Personnel: John Spiers, Kelly Long

Chris McCall, Vice President of Marketing discusses how NexGen provides new capabilities that allow customers to isolate, control, automate, and guarantee performance in a shared storage environment. Topics include storage QoS, and performance service levels.


Overview of the NexGen n5 Storage System

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: NexGen Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: NexGen

Video Links:

Personnel: John Spiers, Kelly Long

In this video, Chris McCall, Vice President of Marketing provides a quick overview of the NexGen n5 Storage System. Topics include target market, PCIe architecture, active-active, and read/write solid-state, storage QoS, and performance service levels.


Cofounders Kelly Long and John Spiers introduce NexGen Storage

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: NexGen Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: NexGen

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Personnel: John Spiers, Kelly Long

Kelly Long and John Spiers discuss lessons learned from decades of storage system development and the idea behind NexGen Storage. Topics include customer challenges LeftHand Networks couldn’t address, technology opportunities, storage industry capability gaps, and NexGen Storage company history.


Asigra Cloud Backup Demonstration

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: Asigra Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: Asigra

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Personnel: TBD


Asigra Introduction

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: Asigra Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: Asigra

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Personnel: TBD


A Tintri Customer Perspective: Maples Fund Services

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: Tintri Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: Tintri

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Personnel: Rob Girard


Technical deep dive on the Tintri architecture and file system

Event: Storage Field Day 2

Appearance: Tintri Presents at Storage Field Day 2

Company: Tintri

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Personnel: Ed Lee, Mark Gritter


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