Tech-Field-Day

With my second Tech Field Day event in the bag, I have come to start to notice patterns throughout the event. I wouldn’t say that I made any judgements or assumptions because of them, but rather I found that identifying them helped me take in more this time around. One non-technical attribute that I started picking up right away was product identity. I’m not referring to brand identity, which would be akin to something like immediately recognizing logos, tag lines, etc. Rather, I’m referring more so to “what problem are you going to solve for me?”. ...

I recently wrote about my experience with seeing Turbonomic as part of Tech Field Day 14. Despite the fact that it is almost a month later, I still find myself thinking about their product. Specifically, how it can result in real-dollar savings in a lot of environments. A lot of tools can give you ROI calculations, or other “soft” savings. Turbonomic, on the other hand, is able to give you a solid, real-world dollar figure, based on your own environment. ...

Datrium was the last of the presenting companies at Tech Field Day 14. Although I did some research for my primer post, I still wanted to learn more about their tech. There’s no better way to do that than to toss some of their folks into a room full of IT professionals. Another point that I was hoping we would touch on is what the term “Open Converged” meant to them. In a nutshell, Datrium took the typical hyperconverged model and split it into two components: compute & storage. So how is this not just a traditional setup? The magic happens in their software. In theory, with Datrium’s DVX solution you still have a chunk of storage and a bunch of compute nodes. The difference comes with that “open converged” philosophy. The two pieces are tied together through software, however, either side can be scaled independently. The solution also isn’t tied to proprietary hardware, thus making the solution “open”. ...

One of the big draws towards any cloud-based storage is expandability: you aren’t responsible for maintaining drives, adding shelves, or even for the cooling and caring of the arrays. The biggest downside is typically speed. Moving data to the cloud usually means that what used to be sub-millisecond to access can now take significantly longer. ClearSky Data saw this challenge and wanted to provide a solution. We went for a bit of a deep into their storage offering at Tech Field Day 14 in order to get a better understanding of how their platform works. ...

One presentation that I was looking forward to at Tech Field Day 14 was from NetApp. Best known as a long-lived storage company, in recent times NetApp has been making a big push for DevOps. Considering NetApp’s history, it was shockingly refreshing to sit through an excellent presentation while only hearing the term ONTAP a couple of times. I outlined some of the existing DevOps-ish material and projects in my NetApp primer post, but I wanted to focus on their Trident project. Andrew Sullivan ( @andrew_ntap) was able to set the tone with a great overview of some DevOps initiatives and Kapil Arora ( @kaparora) gave us a great walkthrough of how NetApp’s Trident project works. ...

With my recent trip to Tech Field Day 14, I was happy to see that we were getting to spend some time with Turbonomic. Although I am not a customer, I have taken a look at their product plenty of times in the past, but one aspect that always held me back was the somewhat dated interface. The tool itself is quite interesting, and I know quite a few people who run it in production, but I had trouble justifying the true monetary value that it offered. I emphasize monetary value as I could easily see the operational value of the tool… keep in mind that I’m an IT Manager by day ;) ...

Although not part of the initial announcement, NetApp stepped up to the challenge and will be joining us for Tech Field Day 14. I was quite happy to see them added to the list as they are a company that I have been following for a long time. Although I am no longer a customer of theirs, I do know that they have a lot of very smart people doing very cool things there. ...

Datrium is a company that I have heard of, but I am not overly familiar with. Even though they were founded in 2012, admittedly the first time I really paid attention to them was at VMWorld 2016. Now in all fairness, I was talking to the engineers there as I was picking up my vExpert Raspberry Pi. Then again recently, at the Toronto VMware UserCon, I struck a conversation with an SE to get a better idea of what Datrium does, but more specifically, what makes them different. ...

Turbonomic (formerly known as VMTurbo) will be making their sixth appearance at a Tech Field Day event come Tech Field Day 14. So what does Turbonomic do? To the casual observer, they might just seem like another performance monitoring and reporting tool, however, that would be a gross understatement and a large injustice. Turbonomic, founded in 2009, has appeared on the Inc. 500 which is a list of some of the fastest growing companies. In 2016 they achieved a 3-year growth of %954, which is quite impressive, to say the least. So what has been the cause of all this growth? To put it simply: desired state. ...

ClearSky Data was founded in 2014 with the goal of simplifying primary storage by turning it into an on-demand service. They set out to accomplish this by leveraging both on-premises and cloud technologies, and by tossing a bit of flash storage in there, they came up with a fairly nifty solution. LIVING ON THE EDGE Prior to being invited to Tech Field Day 14, the name ClearSky Data did not ring a bell, but some research has turned up an interesting product / service offering. What ClearSky Data offers is a tiered storage solution: an on-premises appliance (handily enough called the Edge), warm storage (located ’nearby’), and cold storage (AWS S3). The Edge appliance, which is the caching / performance tier, is located alongside your compute. It contains a pool of up 24TB raw of flash storage used for caching hot data and can scale up to four appliances. ...