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Posts Tagged ‘cfd2’

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: NetApp

July 21st, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

NetApp is one of the grand daddy’s of the storage industry. I first encountered NetApp 16 years ago. I was struck how relatively easy it was to use and set up. Having unified management across all its devices made learning it simpler than many competitors and the knowledge stayed relevant as in time you upgraded to the bigger, better, faster, more option. I loved that NetApp championed the use of NFS for VMware early on even though you often had to purchase an additional NFS license. I worked for a company that was one of the very first VMware on NFS on NetApp at scale customers. LUNs are yuck (still) and NFS provided so many advantages over the clunky block based alternatives of FC and iSCSI. NetApp was at the forefront of virtualisation and I was happy to see it soar.

In the decade since it seems it spent way too many cycles trying to integrate other things and landed up spinning its wheels when others caught up to the ease of use and in many cases surpassed in performance and flexibility. NetApp had SnapShots, SnapMirror and secondary storage before many others and being able to move data around easily was very attractive, however everyone else caught up. Arch competitor EMC combined with Dell and HPE split up and then bought Nimble and SimplVity.

SolidFire

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Categories: CFD2, Tech Field Day Tags: , , , ,

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: HPE Nimble Storage

July 21st, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Nimble Storage is a storage company with lofty goals of “giving users the fastest, most reliable access to data – on-premise and in the cloud”. The premise is their wording, certainly not mine, really should be premises, Nimble!

Nimble has an interesting Tech Field Day history as it announced its original product, the CS200 hybrid array at Tech Field Day 3 in Seattle in 2010. Fast forward to March 2017 when Nimble was purchased by HPE for just over $1 Billion.

HPE Land

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Categories: CFD2, Cloud, Storage, Tech Field Day Tags: , , ,

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Gigamon

July 21st, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Gigamon is an established vendor which provides network traffic visibility. In its simplest form it is a large network tap. You chose what traffic you want to inspect more closely and run it through Gigamon’s devices. Gigamon then can hand off to other vendor products to then analyse the data. It could be security scanning with an intrusion detection system or watching traffic for data loss prevention or seeing if you have a bot net running internally.

In terms of virtualisation inspection, Gigamon already has its GigaVUE solutions which provide visibility into virtual workloads running in VMware networking with ESXi and NSX as well as OpenStack KVM powered clouds. Its Cloud Field Day so of course Gigamon is heading to the clouds and has recently announced the Gigamon Visibility Platform for AWS.

Enterprises love the simplicity of cloud networking, create a VPC with pretty much all the address space you need. Connect via an API and easily connect servers and clouds together. Nothing can communicate unless you specifically say it can so some of your firewalling is already taken care of and all the config can be more easily managed as code. Amazon looks after all the underlying compute, network and storage so you don’t have to, sounds great. It can be easy to think you then don’t have to worry about more security at the network level. Well, you may have permissioned a web server to be able to talk to an app server but how do you know what is actually running across port 443. What if the web server is in AWS but your app server is on-prem?

Visibility Platform for AWS

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Categories: AWS, CFD2, Cloud, Tech Field Day Tags: , , , ,

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: ServiceNow

July 21st, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

ServiceNow has a SaaS suite of products and is trying to take traditional enterprise IT Service Management to the next level. It has had a number of leadership changes recently so seems to be shaking itself up for new things.

ITSM products have been often maligned and I have been fairly vocal over the years in my scorn for some ITSM/ITIL products. They often insert an inordinate amount of unnecessary bureaucracy between getting things done and protecting your IT estate. This causes all sorts of problems. IT teams try as hard as they can to navigate around the horrible tools they are forced to use, hence some shadow IT. ITSM bureaucrats continually add more and more process to trap more and more potential issues, more process = more hassle. Processes get so complicated and change is avoided at any cost. It can take weeks to shepherd a change through the system and finally get approved. People dump as much as they can in a change to avoid having to repeat the process. Business users have to log IT issues in a system that makes them feel IT doesn’t care. IT SLAs are tracked through the ITSM tools so solving tickets becomes wack-a-mole for IT staff.

ITSM Dispair

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Categories: CFD2, Cloud, DevOps, Tech Field Day Tags: , , ,

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Rubrik

July 21st, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

What a journey Rubrik has had so far, a 2 year old company that has ambitious plans to redefine that stodge of datacenter technologies, backup. Rubrik recently received a further $180 million in a Series D round at a $1.3 billion valuation. Yes, that’s a more than billion dollar valuation for a company that does backup, wow! Rubrik says it has hardly dipped into its $61 million Series C round but is going for hyper growth. It currently has several hundred enterprises as customers. Interestingly in the Series D funding announcement Rubrik mentioned investing heavily in R&D with this money. They’ve already had 8 product releases with the latest including a number of cloud features so I would think sales and marketing is where the money will need to be spent to increase customers. Hyper growth phase is normally less about R&D and more about knocking on the doors of prospective customers so will be interesting to hear the latest company plans.

All the Data

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Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Scality

July 20th, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Scality has been a previous Tech Field Day presenter.

Scality is one of the new storage companies leveraging the AWS S3 storage API standard to create new enterprise storage options beyond your typical block and file store. S3 is object storage which is all about scale, built to store billions of objects or massive petabyte sized files or stores.

Scality already provides an open source implementation of the AWS S3 API called Scality S3 Server. Interestingly it is packaged as a Docker container so can leverage the benefits of Docker such as the same deployment mechanism from a developers laptop to being deployed in production and further scaled out via Docker Swarm.

Scality RING is the enterprise friendly version of S3 Server for more critical workloads with the usual enterprise feature requirements of security, support, availability, etc.

AWS S3 is all great but some enterprises aren’t willing to store everything in a public cloud. There may be (often unfounded) security concerns or more valid concerns about bandwidth usage, data gravity and cost. If you have PBs of on-prem storage for your media files, x-rays, satellite images etc. you would love the ease of use of the S3 API but accessed locally. Scality can provide this S3 API on-prem as well as the replicated, highly available storage infrastructure running on standard x86 underneath. Having S3 locally also allows your developers to test functionality locally for things that may eventually access AWS S3.

Zenko

Scality has now announced Zenko which is an open source multi-cloud controller and this is what I expect we’ll hear more about at Cloud Field Day.

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Categories: AWS, CFD2, Cloud, Storage, Tech Field Day Tags: , , , ,

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Platform9

July 20th, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Platform9 is a regular Tech Field Day presenter and I am lucky to be able to heard from them directly when I attended Virtualisation Field Day 4 in 2015 when it was just starting

The company was founded in 2013 by some clever VMware people who wanted to create a company to provide managed cloud infrastructure with two important distinctions. They wanted their offerings to be SaaS managed and wanted it to use open source software.

It’s first product was a cloud managed OpenStack. OpenStack was (is?) hellishly complicated to set up and manage yourself so Platform9 stepped in and offered a cloud managed OpenStack which would run on-premises. Platform9 would take all the hassle away of deploying and upgrading OpenStack and you could spend your time using your OpenStack private cloud rather than managing it.

As the cloud landscape evolved and containers became the next big thing, Platform9 added a managed Kubernetes option. Kubernetes is also difficult to set up so Platform9 came to the rescue. Clouds don’t stand still and Platform9 now has an alpha version of its own Serverless offering called Fission (plenty to say about this).

Platform9 is a cloud infrastructure management company following the current cloud trajectory in what seems like an ideal evolving portfolio: Managed servers, then managed containers then managed Serverless.

The company has had a recent fund injection of $22m with a mix of existing a new investors to bring the total capital raised to date to £36.5m, a helpful war chest. It currently manages 200 enterprise clouds worldwide.

Hybrid Cloud

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Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Nirmata

July 20th, 2017 1 comment

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Nirmata is a new Tech Field Day presenter and a company that I haven’t heard of before. Nirmata means architect in Indo-Aryan languages and its mission is to “enable enterprises to innovate faster, by transforming how software is deployed and operated.”

It seems Nirmata has been running for just short of 4 years and founded by a team who are interested in using DevOps to fully automate the management of applications across clouds. Co-founder Jim Bugwadia came from Cisco and isn’t just the hand waving inspirational, strategy management type but likes to still keep his developer hands busy saying he codes in Go, Java, and Javascript. Other co-founders: Damien Toledo was from NetScout and Ritesh Patel was from Brocade.

Nirmata runs a cloud service to fully automate the management of containerised applications across public and private clouds as well as connected devices. I’m not sure what the connected devices refers to though.

Enterprise are adopting more and more DevOps as well as deploying new applications in containers. They are also wanting to potentially V2C (VM to Container, the new version of P2V, physical to virtual) existing applications to take advantage of some container functionality such as a standardised packaging format and simpler deploys. Nirmata says it can plumb seamlessly into a CI/CD pipeline and give enterprises the security segregation and auditing they need.

There is built in service discovery and what seems could be a sort of API gateway which they call a service gateway. This seems a little more advanced than just network routing to get requests to the right containers, keen to understand more.

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Categories: CFD2, Tech Field Day Tags: , ,