The Tech Field Day staff have added live streaming from Tech Field Day 5 in San Jose this week.

Tech Field Day always includes innovative companies and sometimes sees launches, but it’s rare to have a company launch itself at an event like this. Nimble Storage was successful in using our 2010 Seattle event as their springboard, and remote data protection newcomer Druva followed their lead this week.

Druva is not as new a company as the “launch” nomenclature indicates. The company has spent years building a data protection product, inSync, for remote enterprise PCs and already boasts hundreds of customers. The company is profitable and successful already, but decided to come to the United States and initiate a growth effort.

The Druva staff felt that the influential delegates invited to Tech Field Day 5 would be key to achieving notice in the crowded enterprise IT market, and their February 10 presentation was the first time the company engaged with this audience.

Following the Druva presentation, W. Curtis Preston and I met with Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and CEO of Druva to discuss the product and the market.

A 30-day trial of inSync is available for download if you would like to try it out.

The entire presentation is embedded below.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Druva Launches at Tech Field Day 5
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NetEx was my first surprise when scheduling presenters for Tech Field Day 5. I saw the word “networking” on their trade show booth and mentally lumped them in with companies like Riverbed, F5, and Silver Peak. It has something to do with WAN acceleration, right?

This all changed once I started talking with the folks from NetEx. Their technology does indeed accelerate data transfer over a network, but it’s much more useful than I expected. NetEx is a data movement accelerator – hey, that’s got something to do with storage! Their HyperIP product makes what others do better, including past Field Day presenter, Veeam. They make data replication faster for iSCSI arrays, virtual machines, and enterprise storage devices. They also allow legacy data movers to work over IP. I’m really not sure how I overlooked their capabilities for so long!

Technology like this is a perfect fit for the enterprise datacenter-focused Field Day events like Tech Field Day 5. We’ll have a wide variety of delegates representing servers and virtualization, storage, networking, and more. And all of them will find something to like about NetEx, Symantec, Data Robotics, and the other Field Day presenters.

Bob MacIntyre of NetEx agreed, telling me he was excited to participate and “looking forward to a highly interactive discussion with some of the industry’s independent thought leaders, analysts and bloggers.” MacIntyre sees Tech Field Day 5 as a way to ”increase the awareness of company and our HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance through an intimate and educational environment.” I’d say he’s got a clear picture of what this event is all about.

NetEx will be presenting on Friday, February 11. We’ll be streaming their presentation (and the others as well) live so everyone can tune in online. Check back at the Tech Field Day site to watch on the 10th and 11th!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | NetEx Joins the Roster of Tech Field Day Presenters
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Tech Field Day has come a long way since the first event back in 2009. The hectic rush to pull together delegates, presenters, and logistics has been replaced by a steady and predictable process. A crew of professionals has been assembled to make everything happen smoothly, from contracts and paperwork to travel planning to streaming video. After selecting over 50 presentations and almost 100 delegates, we’ve gotten good at making this thing happen.

But we didn’t start the Field Day series to become event planners; we wanted to build a community of the new guard of freelance writers, bloggers, and other influential folks that included interesting companies in IT infrastructure. Measuring success can be challenging, but the surest metric is repeat visits: Most of the companies that presented in the past have asked to join us for another event, as have most of the delegates.

The two previous Data Robotics presentations are favorites among the Field Day delegates!

This is why I’m so pleased to announce our first three-time Tech Field Day presenter: Data Robotics was quick to come on board for our very first event, and returned for Tech Field Day 2. Now they will make a third presentation as part of Tech Field Day 5! Data Robotics will host the afternoon presentation at their headquarters in Santa Clara, following Symantec’s morning session on Thursday, February 10.

Data Robotics gave those first Field Day delegates an advance peak at their new Drobo S and DroboElite models, and launched their Drobo FS product at Tech Field Day 2. Will the Drobo product line continue to grow at Tech Field Day 5? I’ll definitely be paying attention! The Field Day presentations, including Data Robotics, will be streamed live on February 10 and 11!

The new Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Data Robotics, Mario Blandini, explained why he wanted to bring the company back a third time. ”Tech Field Day events are a great value for us at Data Robotics,” he told me. “There is never a shortage of productive input among the delegates, and the intimate gathering makes for fantastic technology discussions.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. We’re glad to have you back!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Data Robotics Is First Three-Time Tech Field Day Presenter
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Gestalt IT is pleased to announce our next Tech Field Day event. The Field Day delegates will convene in and around San Jose, CA on February 9 and 10, 2011. There, they will engage some of the most innovative and interesting IT infrastructure companies, with leading enterprise software provider, Symantec, headlining.

Follow the news at our Tech Field Day 5 page!

The unique Field Day℠ concept brings together as equals two groups that rarely meet: Product vendors and independent thought leaders. The event includes a dozen hand-picked delegates and just five speaking slots. Both vendors and delegates are nominated and selected by an independent team of volunteers based on interest, technology and passion. The resulting discussions are packed with technical information, with feedback and questions flowing both ways across the table. To expand access, the event will also be streamed live on the Internet.

Delegates will spend two to four hours with each vendor, learning about their products, technology, and relevance to modern IT practices. The Gestalt IT Tech Field Day events have attracted some of the biggest names in information technology, and this event is no exception. Symantec will headline, bringing the delegates on-site for a half-day session. Other presenting sponsors will be announced in the coming month.

Only about a dozen hand-picked delegates will attend this Tech Field Day event. Our selection process focuses on the unique characteristics of thought leaders: Independence, open-mindedness, technical knowledge, and influence are key criteria. The global team of delegates come from a variety of backgrounds, including server virtualization, enterprise storage, networking, security, and systems administration.

Field Day alumni, Bill Hill, Scott D. Lowe, Devang Panchigar, and W. Curtis Preston will be joined by new delegates, Sean Clark, Eric Siebert, and others. Each has distinguished himself in his community, and each was selected by a team of delegates from past events.

About Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day

Complete delegate and sponsor lists are available at the Gestalt IT web site. We encourage those interested in IT infrastructure topics to follow the delegates on Gestalt IT (gestaltit.com), Twitter (bit.ly/TFD5TL), Facebook (bit.ly/TFDGFB), LinkedIn (bit.ly/TFDLI), Flickr (bit.ly/TFDpics) and Vimeo (bit.ly/TFDvids).

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is the concept behind Gestalt IT – that experts in a variety of disciplines are stronger when they work together. As a group, we formed a media organization focused on promoting community among independent thought leaders in IT infrastructure topics. Our productions include the Gestalt IT web site and the series of Tech Field Day events. Gestalt IT Media LLC community organizer, Stephen Foskett, can be contacted at GestaltIT.com, sfoskett@gestaltit.com, or (508)451-9532.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Announcing Tech Field Day 5: Returning to Silicon Valley in February 2011!
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A Compelling Product

At its core, Compellent is a storage software company. Their Storage Center software creates a “virtual storage array” from standard building blocks. The resulting storage product is one of the most flexible and (excuse the pun) compelling midrange storage systems on the market. Consider the following roundtable discussion from our recent Tech Field Day event in Seattle, which includes a discussion of Compellent’s products and technologies by independent voices in the industry:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:59 — 102.7MB)

Compellent’s Storage Center scales up, adding additional storage capacity to existing arrays without disruption and integrating this added bandwidth and capacity seamlessly. Compellent also has an impressive tiered storage and thin provisioning story, since data blocks are virtualized and can be moved between tiers dynamically. Full-featured integrated snapshot technology completes the picture, adding data protection credentials.

Compellent’s scale-out story is impressive as well, but is more about replication and virtualization than the clustering technology used by others, including Dell’s EqualLogic. Compellent’s newly-introduced Live Volume can be thought of as a volume manager for virtual servers, allowing their storage to exist simultaneously on two different storage arrays. Supporting VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer, Compellent claims that Live Volume enables a “grid of Compellent arrays”, but it’s not the sort of scale-out grid one would get from EMC’s recently purchased Isilon, HP’s LeftHand, Dell’s Compellent, or NAS specialist Panasas. It’s more of an active-active mirror of storage than a true cluster. Learn more about Live Volume in the following video by Rodos:

Let’s also take a moment to consider the hardware Compellent currently uses: They deploy and sell this software on SuperMicro servers with Xyratex disk enclosures, and Seagate hard disk drives, and connect everything with QLogic, Emulex, and Brocade storage networking gear. This is all pretty much standard-issue for storage vendors: Most no longer produce their own controllers or disk enclosures, and the standard components Compellent uses can be swapped from other sources if needed.

Compellent’s Mid-Market Strategy

Compellent has not traditionally competed in the stratosphere of enterprise storage dominated by EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max, the HDS/HP USP/VSP, and (to a lesser extend) the HP 3PAR InServ. Instead, the Minneapolis-based company has been happy to sell into the fat middle of the market, and has gained a loyal following in smaller-but-still-impressive enterprises. Nowhere is this more evident than at Compellent’s annual “C-Drive” customer conference: It’s amazing, really, for a smallish storage company to have such a devoted user base!

Although they offer two NAS front-ends, Compellent is a block storage player through and through. Their “Storage Center with NAS” offering is decidedly low-end, employing Windows Storage Server 2008 on a 1U server for SMB and NFS connectivity. The newer and more-impressive zNAS is based on the OpenSolaris operating system, including ZFS a friendly interface “co-developed” with Nexenta. Neither product is an in-house Compellent design, nor are they competitive in the high-end “big data” market touted by NAS leaders EMC, NetApp, and BlueArc.

Compellent’s Fit Within Dell

Assuming the acquisition goes through, attention will turn to the fit for Compellent’s Storage Center technology and marketing within Dell. What will Dell get for three quarters of a billion dollars? What will it mean to the enterprise storage market as a whole?

Dell’s EqualLogic acquisition, though expensive, is now widely seen as a success. The Round Rock management team allowed EqualLogic the freedom to develop and compete, while bolstering their hardware and manufacturing story with commodity components. The combination has become a dominant plater in the mid-market iSCSI storage space, and Dell is likely to attempt a repeat of that strategy here. It was widely rumored that 3PAR management preferred Dell’s to HP’s offering based on a promise of similar autonomy.

We assume Dell would replace the EMC-sourced CLARiiON with Compellent in their midrange storage arsenal, replacing the SuperMicro servers. Although Compellent would likely be allowed to develop and grow within the Dell umbrella, there is substantial overlap with the existing EqualLogic line. One would expect Compellent to focus more on Fibre Channel and FCoE (which they recently delivered), though iSCSI support is unlikely to be dropped. A longer-term strategy would see EqualLogic and Compellent combining their midrange storage IP and management team within Dell.

Considering their success selling CLARiiON block storage, Dell’s acquisition would strap a rocket to Compellent’s sales. Once the Dell hardware is grafted in, profits will grow substantially as well. This is a major win for Dell, which needs the kind of margins that only in-house IP can drive. The price is right, the market is ready, and the fit is solid.

What Comes Next

Some are suggesting that this is the end of the storage acquisition parade, but many holes remain. Dell still lacks enterprise NAS, data deduplication, and cloud storage success, and companies like Oracle have only just begun to bulk up their storage strategies. Dell’s acquisitions of Ocarina and Exanet have yet to pay dividends, likely driven by the immaturity of those products. One would not be at all surprised if they continued shopping in the storage space: Panasas, BlueArc, Sepaton, FalconStor, and Overland all look ripe for purchase. Although Compellent is a win for Dell, it is not likely to be their last acquisition.

Disclosure: Compellent sponsored and presented at Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day 3.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Thoughts On A Dell Acquisition Of Compellent
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Starting clockwise with Camden Ford of Xsigo, the crew included the following:

• Howard Marks
• Scott D. Lowe
• Greg Stuart
• Stephen Foskett
• Jason Boche
• Allan Ruiz
• Craig Stewart
• Luigi Danakos

Download the roundtable video podcast now, or subscribe in iTunes to tune in to the discussion!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Podcast 10: Xsigo Discussion at VMworld
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage

The Tech Field Day staff have been working behind the scenes to improve the quality and timeliness of video output from our event. We are pleased to present the first result of this work, in the form of live streaming from Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week.

After fighting yet more networking gremlins, Tech Field Day resumed at The Hoffman Agency wit a presentation by SolarWinds. We had come to expect quite a lot from this company after their fine presentation at Net Field Day in September, and the delegates were not disappointed. SolarWinds discussed their various management products, as well as their approach to high availability and database design.


The Delegate roundtable revealed that almost everyone knew of SolarWinds, and two used their products in production! Many positive comments were made about the product as well as their “Thwack” online community.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | SolarWinds: Live From Tech Field Day San Jose
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, Networking, Storage

The Tech Field Day staff have been working behind the scenes to improve the quality and timeliness of video output from our event. We are pleased to present the first result of this work, in the form of live streaming from Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week.

Day 2 of Tech Field Day began with data management startup, Actifio. The Boston-based software company just recently came out of stealth and were eager to discuss their technology with the Field Day delegates.

The Actifio presentation was led by Ash Ashutosh, a well-known storage industry veteran. Ash discussed the data management issues faced by companies today and his personal decision to lead the company to address them. Rather than duplicating both effort and data, Actifio attempts to address backup and disaster recovery in a unified fashion.

The following delegate roundtable discussion began with a consideration of the company’s products but quickly turned to the state of the industry. Would companies buy from a startup? Is this a sign of a new trend in which intelligence is moved away from storage capacity? These are the questions addressed by the delegates.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Actifio: Live From Tech Field Day San Jose
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The Tech Field Day staff have been working behind the scenes to improve the quality and timeliness of video output from our event. We are pleased to present the first result of this work, in the form of live streaming from Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week.

NAS acceleration specialist Avere, led by industry veteran Ron Bianchini, was the third presenter at Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose. Ron and marketing VP Rebecca Thompson led the team through a rousing technical presentation, and left many delegates saying they were very impressed.

Following the Avere presentation, the delegates spent 20 minutes discussing the technology, application ideas, and the future of the company.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Avere: Live From Tech Field Day San Jose
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, Storage

The Tech Field Day staff have been working behind the scenes to improve the quality and timeliness of video output from our event. We are pleased to present the first result of this work, in the form of live streaming from Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week.

Tech Field Day in San Jose began at the NetApp briefing center. The session kicked off with an introduction by co-founder and engineer, Dave Hitz. Dave spent the rest of the session in the audience, contributing his knowledge to every session. Next up was Steve Daniel, who discussed benchmarks and performance. Steve also covered the role of NAS and SAN in today’s datacenter.

Joshua Konkle talked about cloud and object storage NetApp’s acquisition of Bycast. At our prodding, Konkle also talked a bit about pNFS and alternative object storage approaches.

After Konkle was Greg Kleiman who initiated a discussion of the role of tiering and caching in storage. (We will revisit this topic with Aprius this afternoon!)

Santosh Rao covered the development of NetApp’s storage operating system, ONTAP. After discussing the progress from 7.x to 8.x, Rao discussed the new features in 8.0.1, introduced just this week.

Our morning with NetApp concluded with a joint discussion about the new FlexPod offering, along with Cisco and VMware. NetApp was represented by “virtual storage guy”, Vaughn Stewart. Joining him was Ravi Neelakant of VMware and Thomas Scheibe of Cisco. The FlexPod discussion was a highlight for many Field Day delegates, who compared it to “the elephant in the room”, the VCE vBlock.

We finished up with our roundtable discussion focused on NetApp’s morning session. This discussion will be posted to our podcast feed, but here’s a sneak preview!

Our video crew also grabbed some interviews with the NetApp folks, presented at the top and below.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | NetApp: Live From Tech Field Day San Jose
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, Server Virtualization, Storage