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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 ;) ...

The second keynote during VeeamON started off with a strong focus on “cloud”, so much so that we were greeted by Paul Mattes, Vice President - Global Cloud Group. Between both keynotes, we saw lots of numbers and stats thrown out, which I usually don’t take much value in. However, what is noteworthy is that the stats illustrated tremendous growth via revenue, customers growth, and the number of companies using cloud technologies. ...

A slew of announcements came out yesterday via partner day, and if you were following along on Twitter, you hopefully caught some of them. Today though, with the general session, we dove into those a bit more. I’ll recap those announcements in this post, with a bit of a high-level overview. Expect to see some more in-depth posts on some of these features in the near future. Before we jump into the announcement, I wanted to focus on Veeam’s messaging. Over the past little while, there has been a definite shift in the messaging: what was once Backup & Recovery, is now all about Availability. Availability means that’s organizations will keep running, regardless of disaster. As Peter McKay put it “Poor experience is just as bad as no experience”. Veeam is focusing on keeping business running, no longer are we in a position where companies want to react to disasters, rather business now needs to make disasters non-disruptive through proactive planning. ...

One of the greatest benefits that I have received with the Veeam Vanguard program is the people. Being able to chat with some of the brightest folks in the industry is something that is hard to put a price on. That’s why I have come to really look forward to Vanguard Day before VeeamON. This is the time where we get some great presentations and great conversations going. Kicking the day off was a great presentation from Michael White, who is heading up the Veeam Availability Orchestrator project. To get us all in the right mindset, he did a great presentation on the nuances of Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity. What was great about this presentation is that Michael, who has years of relevant experience, was able to give us real-world examples of issues that he has run across in the field. ...

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. ...

SWOVUG Q2 2017 - Nimble Storage This past Thursday (April 20th, 2017) was the first SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) meeting of the year. Considering the weather, attendance was pretty good and with that, we had some lively conversations and presentations, which is the whole point of a user group. There were lots of new faces, and many familiar ones, which is always a great mix. ...