Thursday, September 15

One of the highlights of VMworld with the debut of Nutanix. They received a lot of attention, as well as a “Best of VMworld” award, for their scale out “compute cluster”, which incorporates servers storage into a blade form factor. We’re very pleased to have the fine folks from Nutanix joining us at Tech Field Day as well! Tune in at 8:00 AM Pacific time on Thursday to learn more.

A company I’m very glad to see at Tech Field Day is Nasuni, which is much more than a cloud storage gateway. I’ve been working with Nasuni for almost a year now, and am very familiar with their offerings and technology. But I’m betting the delegates might not know what they’re up to. And I’m very pleased to let you know that Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez will be covering some excellent new information during their 10:30 AM Thursday session!

Symantec is perhaps the most-frequent Tech Field Day presenter, but this is a break from the past Backup Exec- and NetBackup-focused sessions. This time we’ve got the Symantec Storage folks (i.e. Veritas) and they’re spilling the beans on the long-awaited version 6.0 of Storage Foundation. I’m a big fan of this software, having used it for over a decade, and am looking forward to hearing what’s new at 1:30 PM.

While touring the show floor at the NAB show earlier this year, I ran into DataDirect Networks, probably the biggest and most successful storage company most people have never heard of! DDN sells tons of storage in the media and entertainment business (explaining their focus on the NAB show), but they have a lot of great products that are gaining attention in other markets as well. We are very pleased that DDN will give us all a peek at what they are working on at 4 PM Thursday!

Party With The ExecEvent

Every Tech Field Day event has featured a Thursday-evening party so the presenting companies and invited delegates can get to know each other better. In the past, we’ve visited venues as diverse as the Computer History Museum, The Museum of Flight, and Fenway Park, and have invited friends and locals to join us. This time we’re doing something different again.

We coordinated the date of Tech Field Day with our friends over at The ExecEvent so we could throw a joint Thursday evening bash. Joining our presenters and delegates will be the representatives of various companies who are meeting in Santa Clara for that event. This gives everyone involved another reason to attend the party, and will likely lead to many interesting industry discussions.

Friday, September 16

I’ve previously written about the all-flash enterprise arrays announced by Pure Storage at VMworld, where they got lots of attention. Now it’s time for the Tech Field Day delegates to take a closer look at their technology. Join in Friday morning at 8 AM Pacific to hear what they’ve got to say.

Arista Networks can be considered a “friend of the event” after presenting at Networking Field Day last year, and more so since they are allowing us to use their facility for the rest of the day Friday. We’ll start off with Arista themselves at 10:30 Pacifc. They’ll undoubtedly cover their high-performance Ethernet switches with a twist: VMware integration (another “Best of VMworld” winner) and the ability to run certain applications right in the chassis. Nifty stuff.

SolidFire is generating tremendous buzz in the industry with their all SSD storage solution. Targeted at storage service providers, the SolidFire storage appliances deliver massive performance and efficiency as well as automated management. We are thrilled that SolidFire will be able to demonstrate their product to the Tech Field Day delegates at 1:30 PM Friday.

We’ll wrap up with a backup industry veteran, Arkeia Software. Although perhaps not the most well-known name, Arkeia is staking a claim on distributed data protection leveraging a special twist on data deduplication and even offering a credible solution for cloud servers. Tune in at 4 PM Friday to learn more!

Stephen’s Stance

Tech Field Day 8 really is the most diverse and startup-laden event we’ve ever hosted. I am personally very excited to see every presentation, and invite you to join in live on Thursday and Friday between 8 and 6 Pacific. Live streaming video will be at TechFieldDay.com!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Tech Field Day 8 Presenter Lineup
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Tech Field Day is all about community

As some readers of my blog know, I organize the independent Gestalt IT cooperative. We’re a group of folks who investigate and discuss enterprise IT technology, writing articles, running online communities, and organizing live events. Field Day is our chance to come together in various locations for face-to-face meetings with interesting product and technology companies. We’re in San Jose this week for our first networking-focused Field Day event, and things are getting interesting!

Networking on Networking

We brought a dozen well-known networking pros to San Jose for Field Day, most of whom had never met in person. It’s ironic that our online-centric world highlights the value of live interaction to such an extent, but it was evident right from the start. While planning the event, Greg Ferro and I put together a list of dozens of possible delegates, finally picking a “dream team” we hoped to get involved. Amazingly, just about every one of these folks walked through the doors and sat down Wednesday night!

The networking community is much like other enterprise IT crowds like storage and virtualization. They are reeling from the pressures of vendors driving adoption of products, the impact of server virtualization, and the increasing industry consolidation. A key topic of discussion was the continual assault on perennial market leader, Cisco. They see an opportunity for HP, Juniper, Brocade, and the other challengers to chip away at Cisco’s margins and topple their control of major niches.

Consolidation on Ethernet and IP continues to be a challenge. Network-centric vendors try to pull storage and other traffic into their traditional protocols, and the results are controversial to say the least. Topics like TRILL, FCoE (and FCoTR), and DCB/CEE caused intense debate in this crowd. But their discussions were nearly as heated when discussing Apple’s role in the enterprise world, the future of IT, cloud computing, and many other topics besides. The talk ranged to photography (cameras seem to be a hobby for many), coffee, travel, and family as well.

HP’s Attack on Cisco

Thursday began with a half-day session at HP’s beautiful Executive Briefing Center. The focus here was the burgeoning war between HP and Cisco. HP’s A-series networking products (acquired with 3Com) appear to match the technical capabilities of Cisco’s high-end datacenter networking equipment, but the Field Day crew remained skeptical. They continually returned to questions about HP’s support for professionals like themselves with documentation and training, as well as their long-term commitment to the networking field.

They were impressed by HP’s Intelligent Management Center (IMC) demonstration, and presenter Les Stuart was ready and able to field their questions. The S-series of security products (acquired with TippingPoint) also piqued interest, though many were concerned about the pricing.

Through it all, though, everyone remained respectful of HP. They seems ready to take on any company everywhere in the data center stack. Although questions remain on whether they will succeed, everyone agreed that they are uniquely positioned due to their size, resources, customer footprint, and broad product range. HP is the enterprise IT company to watch.

SolarWinds: Mining Metrics

Being a storage guy, I was not familiar with SolarWinds, but just about everyone in this networking group had experience with them. In fact, this session was much more focused on feedback and suggestions than education and exploration. SolarWinds dived deep into their ability to collect performance metrics and presented their future architecture for scalability. Although it was difficult for me to follow the discussion, the Field Day crew was impressed!

Cradlepoint Links 3G/4G and the LAN

Turning the tables, the Field Day delegates were unfamiliar with one of my favorite networking companies, Cradlepoint. This small firm from Boise markets a line of routers that link networks with wide-area wireless data on 3G/4G mobile networks. Tech Field Day runs on a PHS300 battery-powered router while on the road, and I am impressed with the MBR1200 high-availability router I’m testing at my home office. Once they took a look, the entire Field Day crew was excited about this technology, even suggesting new product ideas.

Force10 Takes the Whiteboard

Breaking from the more-corporate sessions of the day, Force10 eschewed the projector and turned to the whiteboard exclusively. Steve Garrison gave the lay of the land before turning the session to a deep dive into networking architecture and the company’s 10 GbE products. The Field Day delegates really responded to this presentation method, a lesson that future presenters would be wise to learn!

Computer History and the Babbage Engine

Thursday ends with a retreat to one of my favorite San Francisco locations, the Computer History Museum. All delegates, presenters, and a few friends will gather for socializing, ogling artifacts from our industry, and even a demonstration of the Babbage Engine!

Friday: Juniper, Arista, and Xsigo

Tomorrow will see Juniper Networks, Arista Networks, and Xsigo Systems take the floor. I will update this post with coverage of their sessions tomorrow evening!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Notes From Networking Field Day 2010
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

So I set out on a personal quest, asking the sponsors of the gimmickiest stunts to explain what point they were trying to make. Why did McAfee have two Ford GT’s? Why did Xirrus have boxers? And why wouldn’t that robot shut up?

Interop Las Vegas Show-Floor Booth Gimmicks from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

Note: No booth babes are included in this video, though they were all over the show floor. I have a problem with companies using booth babes and chotchkies, but it might not be what you think!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Interop Show-Floor Gimmicks: What’s the Tie-In?
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Sure, prices remain high, but they’re falling fast and many folks are already implementing 10 GbE in their data centers. Intel CNAs have dropped to around $900, Cisco Nexus switches are running around $1,500 per 10 GbE port and Arista has hit $400, and 10 GbE iSCSI storage arrays are available. Intel has declared that 2009 is the year of iSCSI, and server vendors are moving to make that happen, embedding 10 GbE ports on motherboards. If you’re looking to go cheap, check out D-Link’s 10 GbE iSCSI xStack array, which sells for under $13,000 and can be populated with 15 of your favorite drives.

So is 10 GbE worth the upgrade? Absolutely! Microsoft reported wire speed iSCSI to a NetApp array at WinHEC (see my writeup on wire-speed 10 GbE iSCSI on Gestalt IT). How would you like to push over a gigabyte per second with non-crazy-or-high-end hardware? iSCSI over 10 GbE works great, and Microsoft and NetApp, at least, have demonstrated that they can make use of all that bandwidth.

Then there is Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Cisco has been pushing that technology hard as a unification of datacenter interconnectivity, and Microsoft announced that they are putting together a logo test for Fibre Channel over Ethernet FCoE hardware. Storage array makers are hopping onboard, too, and angling for position in this new market. It’s not just the year of 10 GbE; 10-gig is the future of connectivity, and the future is here.

I’m moving lots of my enterprise storage and networking content to Gestalt IT so I can focus on lower-end topics here. If you want to catch my latest work on those topics, it’s worth subscribing!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | 10 GbE, iSCSI, FCoE, Microsoft, and the Future
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Today, Brocade announced that it has completed its acquisition of Foundry Networks.  This is just the latest move in the strategic game to control the next generation of Ethernet, and possibly all local connectivity, including storage. Although 1 Gb Ethernet, 4 and 8 Gb Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand are all still going strong, the attention of the industry, the pundits, and the prognosticators (myself included) is firmly fixed on enhanced 10 Gb Ethernet. So Brocade’s move seems especially relevant to the core question of which companies will thrive and which will fail in a 10 Gb world.

Cisco is, as always, the big player everyone is gunning for. They created a subsidiary, Nuova, to develop a next-generation architecture, then absorbed the company in April. The result of Nuova’s work is Cisco’s Nexus line of data center switching products as well as much contribution to enhancements to Ethernet, known as Data Center Bridging (DCB) to the IEEE, Data Center Ethernet (DCE) to Cisco, and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) to others. The whole Nuova episode worked out quite well for Cisco, and they are well-positioned in the next-generation Ethernet game.

Although the fight to control the next generation of datacenter I/O can sometimes seem like a two-way battle between Cisco and Brocade, there are many players involved:

• Woven Systems launched its second-generation product in October. Aimed squarely at the largest data centers, the Woven line sells at bargain prices and expands incrementally, maintaining performance, according to the company.
• Force10 has also found success selling a complete line of 10 Gb Ethernet products, from the core data center to the edge.
• HP’s ProCurve line is mostly focused on smaller businesses, but the number-two supplier of networking hardware shouldn’t be discounted in this horse race!
• Arista Networks is another dark horse. With ex-Cisco “Data Center 3.0 commander” Jayshree Ullal and ex-Sun Andy Bechtolsheim, Arista has so far played its 10 Gb song to a cloud computing refrain. But the company reportedly has strong technology, and could be a contender in the converged I/O space as well.

This playing field is wide open. I expect Brocade and Cisco to be major players over the next few years, and that HP will acquire one of the other players at some point to add to their ProCurve line. But no matter who wins, the dominance of 10 Gb Ethernet is a safe bet.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Who Will Capture the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Crown?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.