Techfieldday

We focus a lot of time talking about public cloud and provisioning. Infrastructure as code has changed the way in which we can deploy our workloads and how our teams are structured. We’re even allowing other teams to deploy their own workloads through our cloud management portals. But some things haven’t changed all that much. When I mention ServiceNow the first things that come to your mind are probably “Change Ticketing”, “CMDB”, or “Asset Management”. While ServiceNow certainly does all of those things, the real purpose of ServiceNow is to streamline operations. Many people who work in the enterprise probably think of ServiceNow as something that just gets in their way. No one wants to stop what they’re doing to enter a change ticket, wait for an approval or update a configuration item once deploying new servers, it’s a pain. But ServiceNow really is meant to speed up the operations process. ...

Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend Cloud Field Day 2, out in Silicon Valley. Cloud Field Day 2 brought a group of industry thought leaders together to speak with companies about their cloud products and stories. I was a little surprised to hear a reoccurring theme from some of the product vendors, which was: customers being so worried about being trapped by a public cloud vendor. Is It True? Based on my cloud consulting job, I can say that yes, many times customers are a bit worried about being locked in by a public cloud vendor. But most times this isn’t a crippling fear of being locked in, just a concern that they’d like to mitigate against if possible. But it’s like most things in the industry, you pick a valued partner and move forward with a strategy that makes sense for the business based on the information you know right now and a bet against the future. When virtualization was a new thing, I don’t recall that many conversations about making sure that both vSphere and Hyper-V were both in use in the data center so that lock-in could be prevented. We picked the partner that we saw had the most promise, capabilities, and price and built our solutions on top of those technologies. It’s still like that today, where you’ll pick a hardware vendor and attempt to prevent having multiple vendors because it increases the complexity of your services. You wouldn’t want to hire more people so that you can support two platforms, you’d want to hire the right employees to operate your corporate vision. ...

It is a pretty fair assumption that the Netapp company that you’re currently familiar with will be a much different company within the next five years. I say this because there isn’t much of a choice for anything else. Where is Netapp? When I say Netapp, my guess is the first thing that you think about is a good ole’ storage array that’s been sitting in a data center. Netapp has been around for a pretty long time, and pre-dates virtualization. The storage array has had a pretty good run in the data center and provides all the capabilities that enterprises have been looking for in a storage array. The write anywhere file layout (WAFL) introduced a very performant file system and RAID DP (Dual Parity) are part of the legacy of Netapp. Unfortunately, the legacy of Netapp has started to make them feel like a “legacy” company over the past few years. ...

HPE recently announced that they were getting deeper into the cloud game bin introducing their Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV) solution. Now while this sounds a lot like a storage array function, it’s really its own separate cloud that is focused only on storage. The idea behind it is that storage in both AWS and Azure isn’t great for enterprises and they want a better option to connect to their EC2 instances or Azure VMs. ...

Once a year the Discovery channel has a Shark-a-palooza around all things sharks. Silly contests like having Olympic swimmers race CGI sharks, Dirty Jobs hosts doing gross stuff with sharks, people busting shark myths… you get the picture. It’s one of my favorite weeks because you can learn stuff about cool animals and there is something to watch on TV during the summer. But this year I gave up much of my Shark Week for a good cause. The folks over at GestaltIT were having their Cloud Field Day 2 in Silicon Valley and they were gracious enough to invite me to join them as a delegate. ...

Tech Field Day will be presenting Cloud Field Day 2 on July 26th through the 28th in Silicon Valley. If you have the time, please join in on the fun and watch the live stream right here. The schedule will consist of nine great companies all explaining the ins and outs of their solutions and it’ll get real geeky. The schedule is found below and all times are Pacific US. So be sure to do the conversions. ...