Tech Field Day Boston 2010 Summary
I was a delegate at the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Boston 2010
It was a good trip.
Presenters were Data Robotics, VKernel, EMC/VMWare, HP, and Cisco Systems.
We dined with principals from all of the presenting companies, where the dining events were sponsored by ESG and Akorri.
In all, the sponsors were engaged with Gestalt IT, and wholeheartedly embraced the Tech Field Day concept.
Arrival Reception
Hyatt Harborside Hotel, Boston, MA
ESG sponsored this meet-and-greet. At the affair, we met the C-level officers of the company, who introduced themselves in a low-key way, and just mingled with us.
Real low-key. I like that. So did all attendees. As usual, such behavior emanates from the top, so props to Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst at ESG.
It was also a good opportunity to reconnect with previously known attendees and meet new ones.
As usual Stephen Foskett, of Gestalt IT, had an opening day contest where David Davis (@davidmdavis) won the grand prize, a 16 GB Apple IPAd!
In all, a good evening.
Data Robotics
Sheraton Hotel, Framingham, MA.
Data Robotics reprised their earlier sponsorship of Gestalt IT Tech Field Day San Jose 2010 with a kickoff at TFD Boston 2010, earning the first back-to-back briefing.
New Data Robotics CEO, Tom Buiocchi, introduced Data Robotics to us, and laid the stage for the unveiling of their newest product.
As with the last TFD where the Drobo Elite was revealed, this time Data Robotics announced the immediate availability of their new product, the Drobo FS.
The Drobo FS is a network-attached storage device, via a built-in Gigabit Ethernet port, utilizing Data Robotics’ patented BeyondRAID technology to deliver data recovery from a two-drive failure in the Drobo.
The Drobo FS has five drive bays, and coupled with no artificial limitation of the size of drives to be used, it can deliver 15 TB of storage today.
Another feature that makes the Drobo FS stand out from previous offerings is DroboApps. With this, Data Robotics is encouraging open source devs to create apps to leverage and extend the functionality of the Drobo FS a la the Microsoft Windows Home Servers, of which the HP StorageWorks x510 Data Vault leads that pack.
SMB Impact: Great, with a bullet projectile! After seeing the Drobo products at the last Gestalt IT Tech Field Day, I remarked that Data Robotics was a company that is going places. Based on the swiftness with which they are expanding their product lines, I believe that they would continue to do so. When the added benefit of veteran leadership by Tom Buiocchi is factored in, Data Robotics looks very good.
VKernel
Andover, MA.
Virtualization is upon us, and unfortunately, the sprawl created by the virtual machines that are the offspring of this technology present their own management issues, both in the planning, provision, and maintenance of these VMs.
To the rescue is VKernel.
We dive in.
VKernel produces a line of capacity management tools for both the industry leader, VMWare, and for Microsoft’s Hyper-V.
According to VKernel CEO Doug McNary, their products, the VKernel Capacity Optimizer, VKernel Performance Optimizer, and VKernel Cost Visibility, are powerful, easy to use and low cost products simplify the complex and critical tasks of planning, monitoring and predicting capacity utilization and performance bottlenecks.
VKernel products are used by over 13,000 system administrators, where the products have proven their ability to maximize capacity utilization, reduce virtualization costs and improve application performance.
Next up, Alex Bakman, founder and CTO of VKernel come on to talk to us about the products.
VKernel is dedicated to producing tools for system administrators to utilize to solve issues, help capacity optimization, and reduce the time spent reading 800-page manuals. The tools however, are not real-time monitoring tools. They are there to give capacity advise via analytics. It should be noted: “capacity planning is predicting failures, while diagnostics is the ability to determine the causes of those failures”, a situation generally mixed up. (Thanks to Greg Ferro, @etherealmind) for that breakdown.
I am most please to find out that VKernel supports both VMWare and Hyper-V in most of its products, though Microsoft Systems Center is required to run the Hyper-V stat.
Alex is confident and persuasive. We find in the demos of his products that he indeed has a lot to be confident about: the VKernel products are about as easy to use as any other product on the market today. They are fast, and as an added benefit, the presented results are easy to understand, and act against.
In addition to the products listed above, VKernel also has some free tools, the VKernel VM Stats, VKernel Capacity View, and VKernel SnapshotMyVM tools.
SMB Impact: Huge. VKernel products can be used by any size company with a virtualized infrastructure. From the architecting stage to planning to recovery of over-provisioned assets.
In fact, it will be an important component of our plans as we move forward to re-architecting the infrastructure at LogikLabs. Yeah, we like it that much.
EMC Corporation
Hopkinton, MA.
EMC Corporation, or EMC2, or EMC, is the largest pure-play storage hardware and management company in the land. It is also the parent company of VMWare. We are at the Hopkinton, Massachusetts headquarters facility.
As the 800-pound gorilla in both the storage and virtualization fields, EMC is in the catbird seat, especially in virtualization. As a result, if they keep on innovating, there is no doubt they can keep ahead of the competitor looming in their rearview mirror.
We are briefed on EMC/VMWare’s vision on storage efficiency, capacity planning, management, and performance quantification by Chad Sakac, the vice president for the VMWare Alliance at EMC.
Some of the content of this conversation are under embargo. However, Devang Panchigar, a fellow delegate, has a video of the public parts of this briefing here.
SMB Impact: Potentially huge. Listen, virtualization, in all forms – Operating system, application, storage, networking, etc. – is here to stay. The company that does not realize that while producing products in one of the categories above is going to be Netware’d. Easily, and inevitably.
That said, I am pleased to see that VMWare is not resting on it’s laurels after attaining this peak. For one thing, it had first-mover advantage. That is NOT a preordination of greatness going forward. What would make VMWare truly great is what they do when actually faced with a worthy competitor.
In Microsoft, and with the path they are taking, i.e., totally devalue the underlying operating systems, they have found a worthy competitor. However, they seem to be up to the task. Which is good.
Day 1 After Hours
Dinner at the EMC Skybox at Fenway Park
Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts
Dinner was a very lavish affair, starting with our being able to enjoy Fenway Park to ourselves without having to jostle with the proletariat.
The exact venue was the EMC skybox at Fenway, a location that offered humbling memories of the baseball greats that have played at Fenway.
We had our run of the place, from walking the Hall of Fame to prancing atop The Green Monster. As a New York Yankees Fan, being able to do so, in the home of our lifelong rivals, was most exhilarating. Thank you, EMC.
HP StorageWorks
Tom Joyce, whom I listened to a couple of weeks ago at the HP StorageWorks Tech Day in Houston, Texas, again led off about HP, the StorageWorks decision, and HP’s converged infrastructure architecture in general.
After that, Patrick Osborne led us through a deep dive into the HP StorageWorks x9000, a product of HP’s purchase of IBRIX.
This is big NAS iron, virtualized.
It is very evident that HP’s purchases of both IBRIX and LeftHand networks is paying off handsomely.
SMB Impact: Minimal. This is a product for larger enterprises. However, for data centers, this product must be in the conversation.
Cisco Systems
Cisco occupied the last two available slots for TFD Boston 2010.
Cisco is in the same boat as VMWare, in my opinion.
It is the product of a very aggressive acquisition and growth strategy. Along the way, it has also benefited from the fall of its former members in that triumvirate known as The Big Three of networking in the days of yore, namely Cisco, Cabletron, and 3Com. As with EMC in storage, Cisco is a very determined company, and is not bound by stupid NIH (not-invented-here) conventions.
Cisco UCS
From the resources put into it, you would have to know that Cisco’s Unified Computing System is its response to HP’s Converged Architecture Infrastructure. According to Cisco, “UCS is a cohesive system that unites computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization.”
All well and good, right?
Actually, no.
While Cisco is a networking powerhouse, it does not have the pedigree in compute, storage, or virtualization.
Knowing that Cisco has teamed up with EMC and VMWare to form the VCE coalition in order to speed up UCS.
Guru Chahal from Cisco walks us through Cisco’s UCS plans.
Guru is very persuasive, and confident. The Cisco blades do have some pretty good technology contained in them, and Cisco is looking to leverage its networking dominance to the unified data center.
In all pretty impressive
Next, we are treated to a session on secure multi-tenancy in data centers. For anyone wanting to completely virtualize a data center, this lecture is an apt primer, and we were all engrossed in it. Save for the name!
Next Ed Saipetch and Scott Lowe, both evangelists at VMWare came forth and told us of the new product from EMC, Cisco, and VMWare, the vBlock.
Taken from currently shipping SKUs, the vBlock is, IMO, a marketing exercise created to solve the nebulous issue of what the VCE coalition would like to do in order to differentiate their products. While most of the delegates like the concept, it woefully failed the WIIFM test, in that there was no clearly defined messaging as to why the product existed at all. Furthermore, the vBlock selection artificially constrained users to using a predetermined set of products in order to maintain that designation.
After that, we repaired to a brewhouse for dinner.
