I'll be presenting at two private events and one public webinar this week!

I’ve been quite busy lately recording webinars, writing articles, and setting up speaking events. This week, I’m in Boston and New York for private speaking engagements. I’ll also be recording a webinar with an exciting new storage/virtualization company, Nutanix, and I urge you to tune in to that one!

Nutanix is Truly Innovative

Watch Nutanix present at Tech Field Day 8

It’s rare to come across a truly innovative idea in enterprise IT, but that’s exactly what Nutanix is. They’ve taken the scale-out Google Filesystem and ran with it, applying it to the core issues of sever and desktop virtualization.

My webinar with Nutanix is little bit different from the typical “give them an excuse to go through their slide deck” event. We’ve organized it as a discussion between me, Tiffany To of Nutanix, and a customer of the company. Tiffany will have a set of slides as backup, but we won’t walk through them one by one.

I’m glad to be able to shake things up a little bit, since the old webinar formula is getting pretty stale. We were able to do this thanks to the third party involved in this production: Truth in IT. They have put together an excellent webinar platform and are eager to try new ideas.

If you would like to view the recording, it is now available. You can register to view this webinar at the TruthinIT website.

Speaking Engagements in the Northeast

I’m also speaking on a couple of interesting topics this week. Today, I’m giving an overview of enterprise storage industry trends to an investment banking firm. I often get this sort of request, and am happy to develop a customized presentation. In this case, the event was initiated by an attendee at my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar.

On Thursday, I’ll be speaking at a private event in New York City sponsored by Dell and Symantec. This time, the topic is the divergent paths of performance and capacity in enterprise storage. This is another topic I’ve spoken and written about in the past, but developed some new content just for this CIO audience. I will probably be delivering similar evening speeches and events next year.

Sadly, my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar in San Diego next week has just been canceled by the organizer. I was really looking forward to this, my final seminar of the year. But I’ll be in San Diego regardless, and look forward to meeting up with some of my friends who are planning to attend. If you are around next week, drop me a line.

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance

I’ve also recorded a webinar with Oracle last week. We talk about my favorite Oracle product: The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. This hasn’t been posted yet, but I’ll link to it here when it appears!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Two Online Events You Should Attend (And Two More That You Can’t)
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.

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.

A Better Way to Dedupe Data: Dedupe Everywhere

You might also want to read When Marketing Becomes Pointless and The Epidemiology of Viral Videos

Stephen’s Stance

If you’ve been following the IT industry and my blog for a while, you probably recall the Mini Cooper stunts EMC pulled earlier in 2011: They packed a bunch of contortionists into a Mini at their New York event, while simultaneously parking a bunch of logo covered cars in front of NetApp headquarters. This was intended to demonstrate something about storage, but the exact point escaped me. In the end, the whole thing seems mean-spirited and pointless.

The Symantec video included here is an entirely different animal. It’s exactly the sort of thing I approve of: A lighthearted look at a serious technical topic with only a gentle poke at the “opposition”. And I bet producing this video was a lot less expensive than hiring an acrobat school! Let’s hear it for social media!

Disclaimer: Symantec is a frequent presenter at Tech Field Day and I have worked with them often on other projects. But this post is my own idea and I’m getting no compensation related to this video. I just liked it and wanted to spread the word!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | How Many Social Media Marketing Campaigns Fit Into a Mini Cooper?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Join us (in Boston or online) for Tech Field Day 6 in two weeks!

Most of my readers know that I run the blogger co-op called Gestalt IT and organize the Tech Field Day event series. I see these activities as an example of “doing well by doing good” since they are incredibly popular with IT companies that present as well as the independent thought leaders who attend. A few weeks from now, I will head off to Boston for a special event focused entirely on server virtualization. Tech Field Day 6 brings together so many great things that it’s hard for me to summarize it!

Like all previous Tech Field Day events, the backstage work starts a few days before the presentations begin. I will arrive in Boston on Tuesday, June 7 to begin getting everything ready, and the delegates will join me on Wednesday, June 8. This is when some of the most important, and overlooked, elements of Tech Field Day really come together. If the event is all about community, then the preevent work is all about building the foundations that let community happen. We will gather Wednesday night to get to know each other, and I will also have a chance to make sure that everyone understands what Tech Field Day is all about.

The delegates will spend all day Thursday and Friday, June 9 and 10, meeting with key companies in the server virtualization space. We have Tech Field Day veterans like Symantec, SolarWinds, and VKernel presenting, as well as Embotics and a brand-new company still in stealth mode. We are also very excited that VMware will finally have their own presentation time Thursday afternoon. Although they have been involved in many of our events, this is the first time that VMware will present on their own.

Every Tech Field Day event includes a party, but we’re doing something much more exciting this time around: In association with VMunderground and the New England Area VMware Users Group, we have decided to bring a large number of local virtualization enthusiasts together at Fenway Park on Thursday night. Tickets are free, but space is limited, so reserve yours today. This promises to be a great evening of socializing and talking tech, even though the Red Sox will be at new Yankee Stadium that night.

All Tech Field Day presentations will be streamed as video live over the Internet, so tune in on June 9 and 10 at TechFieldDay.com, and follow the #TechFieldDay hashtag on twitter. We also have groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, if that’s your thing, and will be collecting posts and other articles on our Tech Field Day 6 links page. Then there’s Flickr, Vimeo, and even Digg!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Tech Field Day Boston: Virtualization and Baseball
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.

• My writing:
  • Join the Tech Field Day 6 Delegates at VMunderground Beantown Party as a Service (BPaaS)!
  • Dragon Dictate for Mac: Utterly Frustrating
  • You Really Can Have a Complete Backup System Up and Running in 10 Minutes!
  • Foskett Services Develops How-To Video Content For Druva Software
  • Announcing “Virtual” Tech Field Day 6!
  • Boxcar Growl Plugin Not Working?
  • What Exactly Is Symantec V-Ray?
  • Local Snapshots in Mac OS X Lion Time Machine: Is It A Good Idea?
• Videos from Interop and EMC World:
  • Introducing Ciphertex at Interop 2011
  • Synology RackStation RS2211 at Interop
  • Ryan Woodings demonstrates the Metageek iPad app
  • Jussi Kiviniemi talks about Ekahau and Metageek
  • Interviewing Thomas Jones at EMC World
• Other great stuff:
  • Greg Ferro noted GoldenEggs x86-64 Server Comparison and Visualisation
  • Jason Boche’s cool Co-scheduling Visualized

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, May 27, 2011
This post was categorized as Everything. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Symantec's newly-announced "V-Ray" technology does ... something ... maybe

Data is getting bigger, virtualization is expanding, and data protection applications are ill-prepared to deal with it. This much we can all agree on. But Symantec’s introduction of “V-Ray,” which the company describes as “X-Ray vision into … virtual environments” has just left me puzzled. Is this “marketecture” or some sort of technology or product?

Symantec’s V-Ray Vision

As discussed at Symantec Vision 2011, there is a distinct need within virtualized environments to improve visibility and transparency. As additional layers are added, each is obscures those below it. Virtual machines simply lack the level of visibility seen in physical environments.

The solution, we are told, is “V-Ray.” It “provides transparency of backup images across physical and virtual environments,” which certainly sounds like a positive goal. And Symantec can leverage its “intellectual property around file systems, security, and storage.” But what exactly is Symantec doing here?

I had numerous discussions with Symantec folks at Vision 2011, and it turns out that V-Ray is, in fact, a term for a number of technological features common to many products. First delivered in NetBackup and Backup Exec, the technology known as V-Ray allows these products to identify files within virtual machine images, enabling file-level recovery. It will also be leveraged by Symantec’s Endpoint Protection security products, allowing quicker scanning when the product “knows” which files have already been scanned and which have changed.

Put together, these features will allow these products to interact more efficiently and completely, sharing configuration information and other metadata. The V-Ray concept will extend into management applications and across Symantec’s software portfolio.

Symantec also made this clever video. Too bad it doesn’t say what exactly V-Ray is!

Stephen’s Stance

Anything that enables better management of virtual machines is a win in my book, but I wish this “V-Ray” idea wasn’t so opaque. I’d love a single page specifying exactly which technologies fall under this umbrella and that this “deep technology” really does.

Symantec has great IP for managing storage and applications as well as protecting data, but they haven’t always been able to leverage and communicate this technology. V-Ray is a step in the right direction conceptually, merging their storage, backup, and security smarts and spreading the result far and wide. But right now it appears to be more “marketecture” than real substance. Here’s hoping it matures into some solid, useful offerings in time for Symantec Vision 2012!

Disclosure: Symantec paid my expenses to attend Symantec Vision 2011 and has repeatedly sponsored Tech Field Day and other activities I am involved with. I am under no obligation to the company to write about their products, positive or negative.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | What Exactly Is Symantec V-Ray?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

As I wrote, this got longer and longer. So I’ve split it up into a series of posts:

• Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camcorder Review
• Azden SMX-10 Stereo Shotgun and Generic OLM-10 Lavalier Microphone Review
• Zoom H1 “Handy Recorder”: Hands-On Review
• Sony NEX-5 Camera Review

Recent Examples

Here are some example videos made with the equipment described above.

Symantec Donating to Teacher Exchange

A bit yellow (there’s no white balance on the Zi8) but this was a very dim and noisy location with a hastily-recruited camera-woman (thanks, Gina!). If I hadn’t had a good mic the recording would have been ruined by the environment, but everything worked out fine in the end.

Drobo S Unboxing

This was shot with the Zi8 on a tripod and the lav mic clipped to my shirt. It was a quiet environment, and the long lav wire allowed me to move around freely.

Introducing Ciphertex at Interop

Another show-floor video where I used the Zi8 and Azden mic handheld. It was a bright but very noisy location with a moving subject – a real challenge for a handheld mic!

Meeting Thomas Jones at EMC World

Another recruited cameraman for a hand-held shot with the Zi8 and Azden mic. Thomas asked about the mic, prompting me to write all of this!

Stephen’s Stance

Good equipment can make the difference between an amateurish embarrassment and professional production when it comes to video recording. The combination of the Zi8 and my pair of microphones collect good enough source material to keep me in the latter category. Combined with the capabilities of Apple’s iMovie software, I can produce respectable videos anywhere I happen to find myself.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | My “On the Road” Video Recording Kit
This post was categorized as Apple, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Now I have been asked to write an article for TechTarget on the very same subject: How to select a virtual server backup product. I’d like to request input for this piece, and hope we can work together to produce a useful list of recommendations. Note that this isn’t a buyer’s guide like the DCIG effort: There will be no exhaustive lists of functions and features here. Instead, I’m writing about the options available in a more general sense.

I came away from the Tech Field Day presentations by Veeam, Symantec, and others impressed by the creativity of virtual server backup approaches. Clearly, these aren’t the same old backup products! W. Curtis Preston quipped that a hypervisor sometimes seems like a little datacenter in a box, and that changes everything. Every action taken impacts the operation of the whole system, but the virtualization layer also adds new flexibility.

Virtual Server Backup Features

What would you look for in a virtual server backup product? Here’s my initial concept:

• Supported environments - What dependencies do the products have?
  • Do they require integration features like VCP or VADP? We should definitely talk more about the integration features offered by the hypervisor!
  • Some products support only virtual environments, while others work on traditional machines as well. And what about non-VMware support?
• Advantages and disadvantages – Applications designed for virtual environments certainly offer many advantages, but what about the drawbacks?
  • How important is it to use a single unified product across both virtual and non-virtual environments, as many traditional backup vendors suggest?
  • Is the whole “full-machine vs. file-level” argument worth having?
• Application integration – To what extent to they extend above the OS and hypervisor?
  • I’d like to talk about integration with common virtualized applications, but which are most prevalent?
  • We should talk about crash-consistent backup, too, especially when it comes to virtual machines.
  • Then there’s management integration: What options are there for automated deployment and setup? And what metrics and reports are important?
• Advanced features – These new products have some pretty impressive features!
  • Is deduplication a critical need in the backup app?
  • We should also talk about non-scheduled approaches like continuous data protection (CDP)
  • There are also alternative backup targets, like snapshots, disk/VTL, and the cloud
  • I’m also curious about throttling/QoS features
• Other areas
  • What about supportability of virtual machine backups – are there issues with companies not allowing advanced backup features to be used?
  • Do the “new guard” of virtual server backup companies offer any unique support and integration options?

I’d like to identify a few key features to look for in particular. What are the most-important elements for a virtual server backup product, as opposed to a traditional offering?

Finally, what about non-VMware environments. I know a bit about Microsoft DPM, having been at the introduction of that product, but what offerings are there for Hyper-V or Xen environments? How do they differ from VMware-focused products?

Stephen’s Stance

I welcome the input of end-users, analysts and consultants, and the product vendors themselves. I want to come up with a good guide to selecting these products, and I think an open discussion is a good way to make that happen. Who knows, it might even be a worthwhile companion to the information in the DCIG guide!

I’m not sure how the final article will be released, but I believe it will be offered as a free download on BitPipe.com. Regardless, the discussion and commentary here will remain free, open, and available. Thank you!

Updates

I’ve already had some excellent feedback from Twitter. Thanks!

• @Stu suggested I read What’s Next in VMware Backup
• @ChrisDearden says “what about talking about how to get the data out of the backup system – ie to offsite / archive etc” and “I’m not sure if trap is the word I would use. no more than all the tape based providers use the same format (“
• @WGoderis says “what about scalability , what if you need to back up hundreds or thousands of vms”

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | How To Select a Virtual Server Backup Product?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This regular series features highlights from the week.

• Tech Field Day related
  • One of the biggest announcements at Tech Field Day was Druva, launched at our event. Their presentation drew quite a bit of attention! Can Druva succeed at mobile backup?
  • The delegates wanted to share their advice for presenters: How To Give an A+ Presentation at Tech Field Day and Presenting at Tech Field Day
  • Another hit presentation was Drobo’s new business products: Tech Field Day #5 wrap-up – Day 1 – Drobo and Drobo – My visit from Tech Field Day
  • Then there was Xangati, which had a shortened presentation. TFD5: Xangati – Stepping stone to Skynet or datacenter “DRS”
  • The big kick-off was Symantec: Impressions of Symantec from Tech Field Day
  • Gestalt IT Tech Field Day #5 Experience
  • HP StoreOnce – the basics of HP deduplication
  • The HP coffee machine was a hit, too: Introducing Chai Field Day and Joking around with the HP EBC coffee machine
• Other great posts
  • I’ve been a proponent of the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. But not everyone is happy: Users frustrated with Seagate’s next-gen hybrid drive
  • I talked to Sonia Lelli about SAN management in virtual environments. Wanted: SAN management tools for a virtualized environment
  • A great Steve Duplessie piece: Why is Everyone so Fired Up About Big Data?
  • Greg Ferro is right on (as usual): Your Cloud Future Is In China
  • Great news for Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley, and company: Infosmack Podcast to be distributed by The Register
  • I was glad to have Matthew Norwood’s help with this: Wrapping My Head Around The Nexus1000v – Part 1

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, February 18, 2011
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.

Thin provisioning needs communication to function, and zero page reclaim is only the array side of the story. WRITE_SAME helps reduce I/O load, but the server needs to use it. Wouldn’t it be nice if the operating system, file system, or volume manager would use these commands to help recover capacity?

We need a bridge. We need to cross the gulf between the storage array (that expects all these zeros or some other way to recover this space), and the host (who has this information)

That’s the thing that gets me riled up. The application and the file system know that this data is no longer used. If there was only some way, some bridge, that allowed them to talk to the storage array and say, “Hey, you can get rid of that now. I don’t need it anymore.” See? We need a bridge.

Well, guess what? We have some bridges. One of my favorite developments in storage of the last year is this Thin Reclamation API that Symantec has. I really like what they’re doing.

Symantec (formerly Veritas) have the file system and the volume manager. If you’re an enterprise guy like me (I was using HP-UX in 1996) you have used the Veritas File System and Veritas Volume Manager before.

Symantec calls all this Veritas Storage Foundation now. It has the information thin provisioning storage arrays need, and they’ve come up with a way to communicate: Being a software company, Symantec implemented just about every communication method, because not everybody uses this WRITE_SAME, and not everybody uses zero page reclaim. Some of them have their own API for recovery. So Symantec tried to implement as many thin methods as they possibly could right in the file system and volume manager.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who are using it, and they say that it works. They say that it’s brilliant. Because you turn on this feature and, suddenly, the file system starts telling the array “I don’t need this data anymore.” Suddenly one of my major complaints about thin provisioning goes away.

But I have a question: Why doesn’t everybody do this? Why isn’t this in the Linux file systems and volume managers? Why isn’t Microsoft working on this? Why doesn’t everybody have this capability? It’s not rocket science. It just takes a little bit of development effort to try to come up with some kind of way to have the file systems talk.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | The Bridge: Veritas Thin (Provisioning) API
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.