Tfd

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...