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You are able to see my first doodle and blog post containing information about the launch of Scality ARTESCA here.

During the second half of the Scality ARTESCA launch we switched from the ActualTechMedia webcast and came over the the Tech Field Day portion. You are able to watch the videos once available here.

The Tech Field Day session started with a discussion led by James Governor and Joey D’Antoni focusing on dev-ops and the edge. There was much discussion around kubernetes and the need for object storage as well as the need to automate processes at the edge. We then saw a demonstration by Scality of the new ARTESCA UI. The UI seemed very mature offering you the ability to not only manage ARTESCA platforms but also Scality RING and other S3 compatible repositories such as AWS and Azure Blob.

Whilst in many cases theses systems will be managed and accessed via API’s by developers and then via DevOps automations I believe certainly at the edge there is a need for a fully featured UI to allow operational troubleshooting and maintenance.

One of the elements that was pleasing to see is that the ARTESCA UI allowed for visibility and reporting of the underlying infrastructure layers including Kubernetes and the HPE hardware status. I was also very impressed by the including analytics, including predicted analytics as well as the integrated object browser where you couldn’t only browse objects but add and edit meta data.

Please see above my doodle from the second part of the Scality ARTESCA launch and below some of the UI screenshots.

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You can learn more about Scality ARTESCA here >> SCALITY ARTESCA | scality

and you can see more from HPE on Scality here >> HPE Object Based Storage for Scality Solutions | HPE

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Here is my doodle from today's VMware’s Cloud event. Great content shared and good to see further maturity in VMware ‘s approach to the cloud.

Key elements

• VMware Cloud allows you to run traditional and modern applications in a standardised way across on-premises and public clouds

• With Tanzu developers can leverage a native set of APIs irrespective of the cloud where the application will run

• With Tanzu and vCloud Foundation you get a true Dev Sec Ops approach with intrinsic security and operations considered as part of the development process and not as an afterthought

• New VMware Cloud Universal licensing gives you a flexible way based upon credits to consume VMware Cloud irrespective of where you run the workloads, On-Premises or in AWS

• With VMware Cloud Universal you also get access to the Success 360 program for full support with your transformation journey as well as Cloud Console to centrally manage your licensing and monitor your workloads with vRealize integration

My doodles below depict my study notes from the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals training delivered remotely to customers and partners by Matt Hester and Garrett Bundy.

Below are my notes covering Modules 1 through 4

Further resources can be found at the links below

• Use the Azure portal

• Customize the dashboard

• Estimate costs with Azure pricing calculator

• Predict and optimize with Cost Management and Azure Advisor

• Estimate the Total Cost of Ownership with the Azure TCO calculator

• Take the Role Based Assessments at Pluralsight

• Sign up for the AZ900 certification exam

• Visit Microsoft Learn for more free education about Azure

• Create an Azure account

• Create a website hosted in Azure

• Configure an App Service

• Overview of Azure Cloud Shell

• Work with Panes

I found the above video by the fantastic John Savill really informative. Make sure to check out his YouTube channel for more fantastic Azure content (1) John Savill - YouTube.

Core Cloud Concepts and Core Azure Services

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Core Azure Services

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Security, Privacy and Compliance

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Pricing and Support

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Here is my doodle for the @PliopsLtd session at #sfd21 they offer a key-value (KV) based storage processor that accelerates, improve reliability and capacity of SSD storage for data persistence and indexing tasks for transactional DB’s, real-time analytics, edge applications and software-defined storage.. This allows their customers to use more affordable QLC SSD’s, whilst outperforming more expensive alternatives as well as helping overcome the processor bottleneck that you will see in most modern solutions with the workloads mentioned.

Unlock the Full Potential of SSDs – Pliops

Their solution is currently (Jan 2021) around two months away from being mass-produced and whilst theoretically could be used in shared storage solutions or delivered as part of a cloud service will initially focus on directly attached storage workloads.

The Pliops storage processors is a half-height, half-length PCIe card that sits in the storage path between your workload and the onboard SSD storage. You reference the storage using a standard NVMe block interface or via a KV (key-value) library API.

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The Pliops card takes your in-efficient dataset, applies data protection, thin provisioning and then compression prior to it being written to the SSD’s. The Pliops processor results in 90% less writes and 77% less reads to your SSD’s.

Today the Pliops card has to be used with Linux based workloads and has a starting point of 3 SSDs within a solution supporting up to a maximum of 64TB per processor, you can scale out with multiple cards. They have future plans to support other platforms including VMware.

Their data protection allows for multiple single drive failures, with rapid recovery whilst delivering performance that is faster than RAID 0 with the SSDs alone.

Pliops is typically utilised with a wide variety of database and analytics workloads, including but not limited to MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra and SAP Hana.

Pliops-Storage-Processor-–-Solution-Brief.pdf

Conclusion

It was good to hear from the Pliops team especially so early in their journey, they have an innovative solution and if you are looking to reduce costs and increase performance for your highly critical database and analytical workloads you will want to be considering Pliops.

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Nasuni presented on Day 2 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Please see my doodle above covering their presentation . I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

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NetApp presented on Day 2 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. See my doodle above covering their presentation. I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

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Tintri presented on Day 1 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. See my doodle above covering their presentation. I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

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You are able to watch the presentation back for yourself on the Storage Field Day website

MinIO Presents at Storage Field Day 21 - Tech Field Day

Alongside VMware I have found the NetApp presentation to be one of the most interesting and relevant for myself. NetApp presented the Microsoft Azure NetApp Files services as well their Virtual Desktop Services offering. This was a really refreshing presentation for me, I had assumed with NetApp presenting we would have seen traditional storage solutions running in the cloud but I was presently surprised by the content presented.

Azure NetApp Files

Firstly we saw the Microsoft Service named Azure NetApp Files. A service ran by Microsoft natively in Azure (Not through the marketplace) allowing you to run Windows and Linux workloads in the cloud with high performance, as well as offering enterprise grade storage management including snapshots, clones, replication and tiering)

Azure NetApp Files supports NFS v3 and v4.1 as well as SMB3 allowing for a range of file based use cases, discussed was use cases around Enterprise File Repositories, Databases, HPC and VDI

https://cloud.netapp.com/azure-netapp-files

NetApp Virtual Desktop Services (VDS)

NetApp VDS comes from the acquisition of CloudJumper earlier this year. VDS is SaaS control plane allowing you to deploy, manage and optimise virtual desktop environment across on-premises and public clouds. Unlike Citrix and VMware Horizon, VDS leaves the brokering up to Microsoft RDS or WVD in the native cloud infrastructures and concentrates on the management capabilities mentioned previously.

With Microsoft’s release and continued improvement of WVD I am increasingly seeing customers wanting to look at the native Microsoft offering without rapping a third party brokering service. As such NetApp VDS sits nicely in this gap allowing admins to rely on WVD for the element it is best at whilst adding full lifecycle management capabilities.

https://cloud.netapp.com/virtual-desktop-service

Conclusion

It was refreshing to see cloud services from a traditional storage vendor like NetApp and I look forward to learning more and covering more about these technologies.

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StorPool installs on standard servers, running on Linux it pools all performance and capacity across nodes starting initially from 3 nodes. It offers high throughput with up to 1 million IOPS per node offering in excess of 10million IOPS in a 10 node system, critically with extremely low latency. StorPool is focused on new-age IT workloads including KVM and Kubernetes but also support vSphere and Hyper-V. Due to it’s high performance, low latency and software defined nature StorPool is often utilised by Hosting Providors and MSPs to deliver multi-tenant cloud solutions.

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Scality offer Scale-Out File and Object Storage Solutions with Support for On-Premises, AWS S3, Google Cloud and Azure.

Scality presented their experiences with kubernetes as they redesigned the distriubtion of their key offering Scality RING from RPM packages to their own bespoke MetalK8’s offering. Their Zenko solution stood out to me, Zenko offers the freedom to use object and file storage solutions on-premises and in the cloud whilst having unified management, single namespace, metadata search, flexible replication between clouds, all whilst still storing data in the native cloud formats.

Zenko supports, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi, as well as on-premises solutions such as their own RING offering and legacy NAS.

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Pure Storage presented their software defined storage management platform for Kubernetes PortWorx. PortWorx was acquired by Pure Storage in September this year after working closely within many customers utilising PortWorx for Kubernetes projects on top of Pure Storage. PortWorx will continue to be agnostic of the underlying storage platform and offers Kubernetes centric, Backup, DR, Migration, Security and Automation tools alongside software defined storage. Another of it’s USPs is its application centric approach aligned with how containers are deployed apposed to a machine centric approach that other solutions take.

An interesting presentation from a solution that ticks a number of boxes for those looking at storage management solutions for Kubernetes, if you would like to try PortWorx out yourself check out the interactive demos https://central.portworx.com/.

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Today is the first day of Cloud Field Day 9 #CFD9, due to COVID taking place online over 3 days with 7 organisations presenting to the field day delegates. For more information check out the #CFD9 page here

The first organisation presenting at #CFD9 was VMware covering VMware vRealize portfolio but with a specific focus on how the portfolio can be used in conjunction with the public cloud and the VMware Cloud solutions on AWS and other platforms.

You can see my doodles from the presentationbelow but I was particularly impressed how far VMware has come with delivering aaS options for the portfolio that have feature parity with the on-premises versions. Also VMware Network Insight stood out as an invaluable tool to plan application migrations. I will blog further about these elements and the portfolio separately.

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The first doodle, covers positioning of the portfolio, recent updates announced at VMworld and how VMware Network Insight (VRNI) can be used to plan a migration of individual applications to the cloud.

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The second doodle covers utilising vRealize Operations Manager monitoring and managing your VMC workloads as well as using VMware vRealize Automation to create user deployable solutions agnostic of the infrastructure the workload will run on.

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I was really impressed to see how VMware was maturing their EUC offerings with a look at day 0 operations and on-boarding of new hires, automation and ease of management. With the changes to work habits VMware EUC solutions have been pivotal at supporting businesses transform and allow flexible working and new working requirements.

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Here is my first doodle from VMworld 2020 covering the general session with Pat Gelsinger and Sanjay Poonen. There is lots of discussions about VMware’s Any App, Any Cloud, Any Device, with Intrinsic Security vision with a strong focus on abstracting, securing and supporting operations for kubernetes across multi cloud.

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Today I attended the virtual vRetreat event with Runecast and 10Zig, above you can see my doodle covering the Runecast presentation by @kev_johnson.

Runecast allows VMware administrators to proactively manage their vSphere patching, security compliance and HCL compatibility. By doing this it is predicted up to 90% of known issues can be prevented.

As discussed yesterday I am lucky enough to be one of the delegates during the current Dell EMC Storage, Tech Field Day Exclusive event. Today the presentations focused on Dell EMC Power Scale, Power Protect and Power Scale use cases.

You can see my doodles from todays session below. Keep an eye out for posts covering my thoughts and opinions of the demonstrated technologies.

The second presentation from this afternoons vRetreat covered Datrium DRaaS. Their DRaaS offering allows you to replicate from any on-premises VMware infrastructure to a fully managed instance of VMware on AWS.