In trying to keep up with my average of posting once a week that I have in my goals this quarter I wanted to do some quick coverage for Storage Field Day 19 which is taking place this week in California. I managed to catch most of the live stream action for both days so far. So, here are my top 5 takeaways from SFD19 day 1 that you might have missed and where to find the videos if you did.
1. Eastern Europe is teeming with engineering talent
The first company up on the list (Tiger Technology) was founded in Bulgaria. I have recently done a lot of work in this part of the world and it is amazing to see the top-quality developers, testers an automation engineers available in this part of the world. Alex Lefterov pointed out that growing up in a post-communist country helped fuel the innovation and growth of talent, I have to agree with this sentiment and perhaps it comes from having to improvise often because they just didn’t have access to the same information or equipment as the rest of the western world.
2. ActiveIQ all of the things
NetApp spent a good portion of the allotted time going over the new features of Active IQ and the recently rebranded Active IQ Unified Manager. They are doing some great work with AIOps and helping customers learn from community wisdom. Active IQ is also moving more towards guided remediation and problem solving so that when you encounter an issue the answer is already there for you and the commands/steps needed to resolve are just a click away.
3. StorageGRID continues to shine as hidden jewel in NetApp crown
Every time I get to see a presentation on StorageGRID I am impressed but the development that goes into this product. New all-flash nodes, load balancers, scaling/performance/feature improvements and much more. If you don’t know anything about StorageGRID or like me you haven’t kept up to speed with it recently, be sure to check out the videos. I’d like to shout out to @_krishaditya on a job well done, the presentations were succinct and demonstrated great knowledge of the products.
4. Large technology vendors are taking eSports and Live Streaming seriously
Eric Spanneut and Leah Schoeb presented a piece highlighting the great collaboration going on between Western Digital and AMD. This wasn’t what I expected from a Field Day event, but oh my, I was blown away by the content. They managed to cover two of my biggest passions, working in technology and gaming. The numbers presented around eSports and Live Streaming and the demands that gamers are placing on technology vendors in terms of performance was a refreshing change from the usual slides and it really is great to see this market segment being taken seriously.
5. Spinning Rust isn’t dead and shows no sign of slowing
“Capacity enterprise HDDs are the engine that is enabling data at scale in the world today” – Phil Bullinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Business Unit. Western Digital provided some great insights into how increasing development and technology for traditional drive technology is still relevant and will help to reduce data centre footprint as well as energy consumption. I think in the face of criticism of the data centre business around the world consuming higher and higher amounts of electricity, developments like this can only be beneficial.
Make sure you check out all the content and discussions from Storage Field Day 19, you can find the full event details here and all of the conversations over on twitter using hashtag #SFD19. I will take a deeper look at some of the individual discussion topics in future blog posts so stay tuned.
