Tech Field Day

On Disabling Comments

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There has been some variably constructive criticism of my disabling comments on the “Two Big Vendor Takeaways from Storage Field Day 5” post. This isn’t the first time I’ve disabled comments, and it won’t be the last. In fact, I had my post ready to go 48 hours before I published it, postponing partly because I wanted to make a calm decision about whether to disable comments. I ultimately decided to disable them. Here’s what I thought about. Before I get into it, this is not a post about Storage Field Day 5. If you want to talk about that, this is not a good place! This is a post about why I chose to discourage conversation! Given what we’d already seen on …

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Two Big Vendor Takeaways from Storage Field Day 5

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Storage Field Day 5 is now over and was a marathon of vendor information and tech information. A marathon. I’m tired from 17 hour days, I’m addicted to caffeine, and my brain and body hurt. We had some great people along, on both sides of things. We had great vendors all around, even if some of the presentations were more controversial than others. That’s what I want to talk about here. Problem #1: Efficient Use of Time Tech Field Day participants and viewers already know a lot about the problems a vendor is addressing. We’re on the front lines of this stuff. We help our customers and organizations work around these problems every day. We know budgets aren’t infinite, that …

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Statseeker

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I was fortunate have been invited to Gestalt IT’s Network Field Day 4. I’m a systems guy so it seems odd that I’d go to a networking event, but as silos in IT fall and virtualization wants to do everything in software there’s quite a lot for a guy like me to contribute. Even if it’s just to add a different point of view to some of the network-centric discussions with vendors. Anyhow, one of the vendors we spoke with was Statseeker. They make statistics gathering software for network equipment. You might be inclined to think that network performance monitoring is a pretty dull topic, and you may have noticed that I usually don’t write specifically about products here. The …

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Wisconsin VMUG in Green Bay – April 5, 2012

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Just a reminder that there’s a Wisconsin VMUG gathering in Green Bay, WI this coming Thursday, April 5, 2012. Rod Gabriel (@ThatFridgeGuy) says that 80 people are registered so far, so the turnout will be excellent. Scott Herold of VKernel/Quest will be there to talk about performance & capacity planning (ostensibly with the VKernel tools). Mike Chudzik from Pure Storage will be there to talk about smashing performance bottlenecks, ostensibly by using their storage devices which are all-flash storage arrays and pretty sweet. I’ve seen both of these vendors via Tech Field Day, and they have some interesting things going on. Last in my list (may not be last in the presentation order), Jeremy Gruenke of Johnsonville Sausage will be …

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The Realities of Single Panes of Glass

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The folks at Virtualization Tech Field Day 2 were tweeting about single panes of glass (I think they were playing buzzword bingo) and reminded me of my feelings on the topic. I’ve never thought a single pane of glass was all that special, or necessary. Once upon a time, when I was the IT guy for a small environment, I never used them because I didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle of tying everything together, arbitrarily creating dependencies and unnecessarily complicating my life. Now, as an “enterprise” guy, I can’t use a single pane of glass to see into my storage, network, backups, etc. because of the politics & silos with the storage, network, and backup teams. And even if …

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Why Your Company Should Be A Part of Tech Field Day

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Next week I will be participating in my third Tech Field Day, this one in Austin, TX. It’s a great opportunity for both independent bloggers and companies. Here are four big reasons I think more companies should be participating in Tech Field Day. 1. The ability for actual users, and potential users, to give you direct feedback. Who is your company listening to for feedback? How does your company get feedback from actual users of your products, or potential users of your products? If it’s through your marketing or PR channels you might be getting a filtered version. Analysts are good, but in many cases they’re not actually going to use your product. With Tech Field Day there’s no filter. …

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If You Ever Needed Convincing About VAAI…

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If you needed any convincing about the benefits of VAAI, here’s a graph of what happened when I took our new VAAI-capable HDS AMS 2500, copied a 25 GB template VM to it, then cloned three more VMs from that template. I did the cloning one at a time, rather than in parallel, mainly because I was in shock that it took about 30 seconds for each one to complete and in my giddiness I didn’t think to do any other testing. I have only the Hitachi write rate highlighted, but that tells the story: So far, the only drawback I can see to the new VAAI offloads are just that you’ll need to rely more heavily on your array’s …

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Networking Tech Field Day

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Events, like people, have lifecycles. They are born, they grow up, they die. With Gestalt IT’s latest event, a networking-specific gathering in the heart of Silicon Valley, Stephen Foskett’s idea of a blogger-centric vendor tech gathering is becoming a teenager. It’s pretty much fully-grown, has its drivers license and a lot figured out, but it still has some awkward social moments, and even has to deal with obnoxious schoolyard bullies. I count myself incredibly fortunate that I’ve been invited to two of these events. The first was the Tech Field Day in Seattle, focused on storage. This one, the sixth Field Day, was on networking. I found myself surrounded by battle-hardened networking gurus, outnumbered 11 to 1. Daunting, sometimes, but …

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