It’s April already, and that means I will be attending Cloud Field Day 7 this month. Usually, this means a trip to the US and a few non-stop days of jetlag and learning. Due to the travel bans currently in place, Cloud Field Day 7 will be an online-only event, so I won’t be jetlagged, just up early, although not as early as Justin Warren. There is an interesting list of presenters, as usual, there are some familiar faces and some new companies.
Covid-19 responses mean that some of these presenters will be at other Tech Field Day events, the final lineup is still subject to change.
Aruba has been a frequent presenter at Tech Field Day events since 2012, mostly at Network and Wireless Field Days, as well as hosting Tech Field Day at their own conference AirHeads. It looks like their recent past presentations have been around modern wireless networks and SD-WAN. I imagine Aruba will talk about hybrid cloud connectivity, probably with an emphasis on policy-based management. Aruba has its own Tech Field Day event, Aruba Round Table with Tech Field Day.
Igneous presented at Tech Field Day 12, quite a few years ago. It looks like their focus has changed a little, now they are about data protection and management. I am interested in how they achieve petabyte-scale data protection and what tangible business value they deliver with DataDiscover, which is their data indexing/management product. Igneous will now present at Cloud Field Day 8.
Illumio has presented at both Network and Security Field Day events over the past few years. Illumio has a set of products that are about network microsegmentation and policy-based control of network traffic. I wonder whether we will see some of their special sauce applied to Kubernetes as a replacement for Envoy in a service mesh. I’m also interested in hearing about unified policy-based network security management in a multi-cloud environment and hope Illumio will have something to say.
Pensando is making their first Tech Field Day appearance, so I can only judge from their web site. The web site is full of buzz words like edge and 5G. I was a bit concerned about the lack of any concrete information until I found that there is custom hardware in their software-defined services. It looks like part of the solution is a PCIe card that is similar to the AWS Nitro card, delivering hardware-accelerated storage and network functions virtualization. The web site talks about software-defined service es at the edge. I want to hear about the operational deployment of this platform and the developer experience for creating applications that run on the platform.
SolarWinds are old friends for Tech Field Day, and for me, I’ve been to the SolarWinds HQ in Austin for at least two Tech Field Day events and always get good barbeque for lunch when we visit. With the breadth of management tools that SolarWinds has, it is hard to know what they will be showing us.
Stellus is new to Tech Field Day this year, having presented at Storage Field Day 19 in January. Their product is a ridiculously high-performance NAS. A cursory look at their web site shows that they separate the persistent storage layer from the throughput/data mover layer. Capacity runs to over 1PB while throughput is up to 80GBps with the two numbers scaling independently. I will be interested to hear what the cloud angle is on a hardware product, maybe we will learn about a whole new product.
VMware is also an old friend of Tech Field Day, with 19 event badges on their page, including the very first Tech Field Day event. I want to hear more about Tanzu and the suite of products for multi-cloud application deployment and management.
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