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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

As readers of this blog may know, I was invited to participate in Tech Field 12 last November. For those who are not familiar with TFD, it is an event where a panel of delegates (consisting of bloggers, analysts, industry folks, etc.) get to sit down with vendors of all sizes. The delegates get to pick the brains of the vendors, and the whole event is recorded and streamed live. ...

When I first looked at the lineup for Tech Field Day 12 (which was before I was asked to join), I was excited to see the list of companies. Some of them I know reasonably well, while there were a few on there that I had never heard of. DriveScale was one of them. When I wrote my ’ primer’ post about them, it was a bit challenging as there is not a ton of information out there about them, but that also makes it fun. Having a bit of background on the presenting companies is great, but it is also engaging to learn about them during these presentations, in most cases from their founders or lead engineers. ...