Tech Field Day

The first stop for us at Tech Field Day 12 was Cohesity’s office, where we had a nice breakfast waiting for us (along with a great delegate gift consisting of a multi-end USB cable, a notebook, a portable battery, and a Polaroid Snap camera). Soon after settling in, we got straight down to business. I had previously written a ’ primer’ regarding Cohesity, and I saw them present recently at the Toronto VMUG, but I still wasn’t fully familiar with the brand or their offering. Cohesity markets itself as secondary storage, a market that its founder, Mohit Aron, felt was being underserved. Without repeating everything from my previous post, the common use-cases for secondary storage include data sets such as backup targets, cold data, and test / dev. ...

Igneous Systems recently presented at Tech Field Day 12, and honestly, I was quite looking forward to learning more about them. All I really knew going into the presentation was that they provided ‘cloud storage, on premises’. Once we started picking into the details, things definitely got interesting, along with some mind-crippling moments when trying to digest what was presented. A Quick Overview Igneous’ stance is that data is growing at a tremendous rate. Things such as IoT sensors, media (4K video for example), and just raw data (think bio-medical or mineral data), chew up lots of space. In fact, one of the delegates I was talking to mentioned that he goes through petabytes a year! So, the problem is very real, even though it may not be common. ...

This will be last of the primers for the upcoming Tech Field Day 12 event. Some of you may notice that I have not covered off Intel - unfortunately they have had to cancel their appearance due to a scheduling conflict on their end. Too bad as their sessions in the past have been quite informative. So, let’s talk about Dell EMC. Unless you have been living under a rock, you likely heard about the Dell and EMC merger that was finalized earlier this year. From the time it was announced (October 12, 2015) to the time the merger closed (September 7, 2016) there was a lot of speculation as to how things would look after the completion of the $67 billion deal. Things are still very much in a ‘settling’ phase, but the new behemoth is still moving forward. ...

DriveScale will be presenting at Tech Field Day 12, and it looks like they will have a lot to share. It took me quite a few reads to finally wrap my head around what they do, but I think I have a clear picture now. Based out of Sunnyvale CA, and founded in 2013 by some extremely smart folks, DriveScale only came out of stealth in May of this year. At the same time, they announced $15 million in Series A funding. One of the investors includes Foxconn (via one its subsidiaries - Ingrasys Technology), who are the largest contract electronics manufacturer in the world. I imagine that can be a pretty lucrative deal if things pan out. ...

In my last post I covered off Docker, and I touched on how containers have exploded in use over the last couple of years. One thing that I didn’t go into detail about is the underlying storage for these containers. In a lot of cases, these containers will get spun up and not have any persistent storage. Docker does allow for the use of persistent storage with its containers, but it can be a little limiting. ...

I’m definitely excited to see Docker present at the upcoming Tech Field Day 12. I had meant to sit in on their exclusive vExpert demos at VMWorld 2016, but I, unfortunately, had a conflict at the time and skipped it (boo). I was bummed as I don’t know a ton about Docker, but I definitely want to learn more. For background, Docker Inc. was founded in 2010 after it was split off from dotCloud, which originally developed the container technology that became Docker. As it stands, Docker Inc. has had $180 million in funding across 6 rounds, and it has helped change the landscape of traditional application deployments. ...

Igneous Systems, founded in 2013, is a Seattle-based company who will be making their first Tech Field Day appearance. According to Crunchbase, they are under the 50 employee mark, so still very much in startup mode, which can have its benefits alongside some challenges. I have not heard of them prior to the Tech Field Day 12 event, but I am definitely curious to see what they bring to the table. Doing some research, I found out that Igneous Systems currently holds 11 patents with the US Patents Office - so not a huge number, but it is an indication of some sort of innovation. One of those patents appears to be for their ‘distributed erasure-encoding protection (DEEPr)’ - I’m not sure what that scheme is, but hopefully we’ll find out. ...

Rubrik will be presenting at Tech Field Day 12 on Day 2 (November 16th, 14:00 PDT), and I’m quite looking forward to hearing more from them. I had a chance to chat with some engineers from Rubrik in the Solutions Exchange at VMWorld 2015, and a couple of times at local VMUGs since. At the time the product struck me as unique in that it seems to revolve around simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency. ...

Cohesity will be presenting at the upcoming Tech Field Day 12 event, and I opted to do some research on them ahead of time. Cohesity was founded in 2013 and has gone through two rounds of funding, totaling $70 million. Headquartered in Santa Clara, they currently have over 100 employees. So, what does Cohesity do? They focus on secondary storage, which could include domains such as test/dev, but particularly backup storage / repositories. Cohesity is an interesting mix in that they provide storage, features using said storage, and services, namely backups. In a nutshell, they bill themselves as ‘hyperconverged storage’. ...