Back to Silicon Valley for Storage Field Day 15

After few months from my first visit in San Francisco (CA) for Cloud Field Day 2 (http://techfieldday.com/event/cfd2/), another important meeting is taking place around Santa Clara (CA), focused on Storage, data, software defined storage, hyper-convergence and cloud storage. For me is an honor and a pleasure be chosen as delegate for the Storage Field Day 15.

For those who don’t know, Tech Field Day is a periodic (sometimes bi-weekly) and itinerant appointment with technology, where a group of vendors have shown their solutions to a representative group of tech people called delegates. Delegates are leaders, influencers and blogger that are coming from every part of the world.

This is the first time ever in a Filed Day for one of famous (and oldest) IT company of the world: IBM. During the last years, we see a radical change of direction from the oldest hardware company, which is still alive with their legacy products, to new line of products services cloud oriented like BlueMix (known as IBM Cloud ) and object storage solutions, IoT and data protection for physical and hybrid environment.

Continuing with the first time ever participation, this is also the time for Huawei presented in a Tech Field Day. This big company from Honk Kong, really rocks in Europe with mobile and enterprise products like switch, server and storage. Focusing on storage, Huawei has many solutions and services with some important success story from mid-range to high enterprise. Personally I experienced with switches with discrete success, but I’m still curious to see what solution they are going to show in this event.

Cohesity is breaking rules and the roles in the data protection, providing boxed software and hardware solution for secondary data like backup, archives, and Test/Dev environments with an affordable cost of ownership and operations.

In many conversations with my customers, I’ve always sustained that the software is the real value of a storage solution: it handles, optimize and make available data for the consumption process like virtual machine, applications and containers.

Moving from traditional storage architecture to the converged and hyper converged systems, the software becomes the central element that acts as control and data plane, to handle commodity hardware pieces, like a set of x86 servers, and creating a resilient and performant logical volume layer.

Depending on the hyper-converged technology adopted, today we count a lot of solution in the market.

StarWind is a software solution that simply transform a sets of x86 server in a powerful hyper converged system for every needs: deliver physical and virtual environment with a particular support for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Cytrix.

Datrium is another interesting HCI solution that promise to be a leader in open convergence: a solution composed by scale out compute node and data node. This marks another important difference in the way to linearly scale physical infrastructure using different building block models.

Hedvig has developed an interesting distribute storage platform that simplify the deployment, scaling and management of applications across several protocols (like iSCSI block, NFS, Swift and S3) and in hybrid way (on-premise, in cloud or both).

Weka.io promise to “solve I/O Starvation Problem”. In shorts, the problem data accessibility is caused by many factors like RAID protection, bandwidth etc. This solution with the adoption of MatrixDDP technique is literally redesigning the data protection algorithm to reduce latency and increase performance on-premise and in cloud.

Back to the event, is important to say that the success of this format for “cyber folks”, is the live streaming and the chance to interact with discussion making questions through delegates simply Tweeting or DM with them. Live show, vendors and delegate list and whatever to stay update for Storage Field Day 15 are available here: http://techfieldday.com/event/sfd15/

Mark your calendar, save the link in your bookmark and… stay tuned for updates that, seen the last communications, are coming!

Salva