I am going to Tech Field Day 20! And I can wholeheartedly say that I am looking forward to it. I you exclude the brief TFDx with VMware NSX last year, this will be my first, full-length, non-storage Field Day. For the last 10-ish years I’ve been focusing on storage, backup, data replication & disaster recovery. But I actually started out in the hypervisor corner of IT. And my entire career I’ve been shoving my nose into other IT fields and product suites. It’s one of the advantages of working for a (back then) smaller VAR, and keeps life interesting. Tech Field Day 20 will be the perfect opportunity to find out how outdated my knowledge is on those non-storage fronts.
Events
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The first SSDs in our storage arrays were advertised with 2500-3500 IOps per drive. Much quicker than spinning drives, looking at the recommended 140 IOps for a 10k SAS drive. But it was in fact still easy to overload a set of SSDs and reach its max throughput, especially when they were used in a (undersized) caching tier.
A year or so later, when you started adding more flash to a system, the collective “Oomph!” of the Flash drives would overload other components in the storage system. Systems were designed based on spinning media so with the suddenly faster media, busses and CPUs were hammered and couldn’t keep up.
Queue all sorts of creative ways to avoid this bottleneck: faster CPUs, upgrades from FC to multi-lane SAS. Or bigger architectural changes, such as offloading to IO caching cards in the servers themselves (e.g. Fusion-io cards), scale-out systems, etc.
Storage Field Day 18 will be a full event, according to Stephen Foskett. And Stephen doesn’t use italics too often! Three days, likely 3-4 sessions a day, each two hours long. Add a jetlag, a foreign language and new technology, which all need inline processing to keep up to speed. Outside of the sessions: very interesting conversations (tech and non-tech) while we drive between companies, so no naps. In other words: our brains will be melting for three days at Storage Field Day 18. And I’m VERY much looking forward to it!
Yes, I’m sorry about the title too. But also glad to announce I’m shipping up to Boston for Storage Field Day 16 this week! Just ignore the fact I’m not on a ship but on a train for now, and all should be well… Next stop is AMS, then a direct flight to BOS. It’s going to be a slightly shorter, two-day Storage Field Day this time around. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to receive a lot less content!
Last week I’ve attended Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. I was invited by Dell Technologies via the influencer program, which basically means we get access to the same content as the press or analysts. I’ve spent the weeks alternating between general keynotes, briefings, interviews and catching up with friends and colleagues. In this post I’ll try and summarize some of the main topics of the Dell Technologies World 2018, focusing on what appealed most to me.