Zerto

I have arrived in Silicon Valley again for another Cloud Field Day event and I’m looking forward to several presentations, as well as getting to actually physically meet people again. In this post, I share some thoughts on the upcoming presenters and to make a few educated guesses as to what they will be presenting, simply for the fun of it.

What is Cloud Field Day?

In case you are not aware or are new to Tech Field Day (TFD) events, Cloud Field Day (CFD) is an event where companies present their latest and greatest, via live streams, on the Tech Field Day website and LinkedIn. Streams are also recorded and added to the Tech Field Day YouTube channel for later viewing.

Isn’t that just a webinar?

Nope, these events are interactive as the companies presenting are doing so to a number of industry experts who ask the questions you are thinking about when watching, allowing greater insight and benefits to watching the streams. I am one of a number of delegates who will be attending both in person and virtually to comment on or challenge companies on their content, to help viewers make decisions on vendor offerings and solutions. Delegates are not afraid to ask difficult questions, one of my personal favourite aspects of the events and why I watched so many prior to being involved.

Great, who is presenting at CFD14?

The following companies are presenting, in chronological order.

Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company – Zerto provides a continuous software experience for DR, backup and data mobility.

Zerto will be presenting their latest updates around ransomware recovery, AWS, Zerto for Kubernetes and more. Zerto have been in the replication and ransomware protection game for a while now and even offer some backup services. I expect this presentation to focus on new features in Zerto 9.5 such as additional RBAC and MFA along with Zerto Kubernetes Manager and other new features for security and ransomware protection.

NetApp

NetApp are an enterprise storage leader with a current focus on data and the cloud.

Whilst I do not know what NetApp are going to present, if I had to guess, I would bet, it will be around their recent certification with VMware to offer Storage as a Service (STaaS) as a supplemental NFS storage repository to VMware cloud services running on AWS, Azure and Google. NetApp are the first storage vendor to be approved for this type of offering, a logical progression given their on-premise enterprise storage reach and the adoption of hybrid cloud.

Morpheus Data

Morpheus Data – Modernising apps and managing hybrid clouds for enterprise

I looked into Morpheus Data last year whilst architecting a multi-tenant cloud platform, and they have an interesting backstory that led to where they are today. Essentially, they exist from the need to control and abstract silos of resources to facilitate a hybrid cloud management layer, integrating with most virtualisation and cloud stacks. Will be interesting to see what they present at #CFD14 and if I had to guess here, I would assume something around VMware automation given their recent announcements, let’s see.

Weka

Weka – Next generation data platform for challenging AI and high-performance workloads

Weka aim to be a cloud filesystem providing tiered file services with variable block dedupe, compression and most recently, joined the ranks of the few that offer fingerprinting to reduce data capacity requirements through data similarity. I’m fairly sure this presentation will be aimed at their recent updates in V4 to move from being AWS native to supporting multiple clouds in AWS, Azure, Google and Oracle.

Alkira

Alkira – Reinvented networking for the cloud era connecting and integrating network services across clouds

Alkira will be presenting a solution to help demystify the complexities involved in effectively managing a multi cloud network. Cloud Area Networking is often difficult to manage and even harder when factoring in DR, so it will be interesting to see how challenges can be alleviated and addressed. I would guess an abstraction layer for automation in these regards will be presented.

Lightbits Labs

Lightbits Labs – scale out disaggregated storage platform that performs like local flash for the cloud native DC

Lightbits Labs have recently won a BIG Innovation Award 2022 for the industry’s first solution to provide NVMe over TCP and have built a close relationship with Intel to leverage various Intel workload accelerators, to reduce latencies and increase performance at every step. I expect to see a massively scalable solution here for a Cloud Data Platform, should be interesting given some of their recent announcements and something that would slot nicely into the hyper scalers given the advertised scaling capabilities.

Komprise

Komprise – Intelligent data mobility solution for unstructured data providing visibility, mobility and value

Komprise have focused on providing intelligent data tiering to minimise cloud costs such as egress charges. Keeping hot data and constantly pulling it out of a cloud costs a lot of money. Komprise will be showing Smart Data Workflows to identify where data should reside. Insight to unstructured data is important long term and leans into FinOps to govern Cloud Spending. I expect to see benefits around another layer for ransomware protection given recent announcements, the more layers protecting, the better I feel.

How do I watch?

You can watch #CFD14 from the main Tech Field Day event page and confirm the presentation schedules here:

https://techfieldday.com/event/cfd14/

You can also follow Twitter and LinkedIn using #CFD14 for live streams. Enjoy!

It’s been in the back of my mind to write a blog, as with everything else that gets done, I’ve decided to make the time.

“Why is it time to give something back publicly?”

For many years, I along with every other IT engineer on the planet, has made use of other people’s writings or musings through whatever medium was available at the time. Let’s be honest, you only know what you know, you learn from exposure and sometimes playing about with technology isn’t enough. Often time can be a constraint and this is when people turn to forums, blogs, help sections or whatever else can be garnered from a google search in time of need or interest. I now feel it is time I gave something back because I feel I have benefited so much from the writings of others. To this end, I have decided another way I can give something back to the community publicly outside of internal assistance, is to share my findings via a blog. I have no idea what will end up here, it could be a VDI solution I am working on or a Firewall mechanism used in work via a change or project. One thing I know will feature regularly is my love of virtualisation, storage, backups & networking.

“Why?”

Running VMs and making them available. Day to day I am lucky enough to be part of an amazing team and culture in Novosco. We are an agile MSP headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland with a few other offices dotted around the UK and Ireland servicing everything from NHS Trusts to Housing Associations, Premiership Football clubs and more. I wanted to join Novosco because of what I could see from the outside a few years ago, on the inside, it’s been even better. Novosco really support engineers putting you through any certification you want to sit that is featured anywhere in the company’s product / tool set. They give us a test lab to play with technology, over 1 TB of RAM and enough cores to build something meaty, flash storage and proper SAS drives to boot, with 40gbit per host networking. Whilst this might not appeal to some, having a playground can be a gateway to deeper understanding and for me, that’s what it’s all about. Understanding, knowing and dare I say loving the technology I get exposed too, day in, day out. When you couple a great company, great people, great culture and engineers with passion, under a management team with real vision, the sky is the limit. I can honestly say for me personally, none of this would be possible without internal colleagues and the people who make the time to write articles, blogs, how to guides, forum answers etc etc etc.

“What do I do?”

My day job centres around providing solutions & support to our larger enterprise clients in London and further afield. Daily toolset & some of the technologies I am certified in include, in no particular order:

Virtualisation – VMware
Networking – Cisco / Huawei / MPLS
Storage – EMC / vSAN / Others
Backups & Replication – Veeam Availability / Zerto
Firewalls – Fortinet & Cisco ASA
MS Stack – AD and anything below or above up in the cloud

“Who cares?”

Honestly, I do not know, let’s see what happens. If my musings help in any way, and I hope they will, let me know, either way I’ll keep on rambling, feedback is as important here for me as it is anywhere else in my day job.

“Coffee?”

How good, is good coffee? It’s great!

Tag: Zerto

An Introduction to Cloud Field Day 14 #CFD14