Storage Field Day 15 – Introduction

Having attended the Storage Field Day 12 edition at the invitation of the chief organiser Stephen Foskett back in 2017, I was really looking forward to attending this popular event again. Luckily my wishes have been answered again this year where I’ve been invited again to attend the SFD15 with an exciting line up of various enterprise storage vendors. This post is a quick intro about the event and the schedule ahead.

SFD – Quick Introduction!

Storage Field Day is a part of the popular, invitees only, Tech Field Day series of events organised and hosted by Gestalt IT (GestaltIT.com). The genius idea behind the event is to bring together innovative technology solutions from various vendors (The “Sponsors”) who will be presenting their solutions live to a room full of independent technology bloggers and thought leaders (The “delegates”), chosen from around the world based on their knowledge, community profile and thought leadership, in order to get their independent thoughts (good or bad) of the said solutions. The event is also streamed live worldwide for anyone to tune in to and is often used by various technology start-ups to announce their arrival to the mainstream markets.

There are various different field day events organised by Gestalt IT such as Tech / Storage / Cloud / Mobility / Networking / Virtualisation / Unified Communications / Wirelesss Field Day events that take place throughout the year with respective technology vendor solutions showcased in each. It’s organised by the chief organiser Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) and has always been an extremely popular event amongst the vendors as it provides an ideal opportunity for them to present their new products and solutions to a number of thought leaders and community influencers from around the world and get their valuable thoughts & feedback. It is equally popular amongst the attending delegates who gets the opportunity, not only to witness brand new technology at times, but also be able to critique and express their valuable feedback in front of these vendors.

During each day, the delegates and the organisers (Steve along with few of the supporting crew members such as the camera crew) would travel to each of the participating vendors offices (often in the Silicon Valley) where the technology & business leaders would be presenting there’s solutions to the audience. Typically, this whole session is streamed live thanks to the SFD camera crew and each session is also recorded to be posted on to various video sharing sites for subsequent viewings. I would seriously recommend have a look at their YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSnTTyp4q7jMhwECxXzMAXQ/featured for past session recordings if you are a technology person with a keen interest in enterprise technology solutions.

SFD15 – Schedule & Vendor line-up

SFD15 is due to take place in the Silicon Valley between the 7-9th of March 2018. From what I understood, SFD15 has been a fiercely competitive event in terms of the sponsor slots by various vendors due to high popularity and I’ve noticed the participating vendor list changing few times up until now, presumably due to increasing competition. The list of vendors confirmed (as of today-17.02.2018) are as follows

  • Cohesity:    
    • Cohesity is a relatively new, secondary storage vendor that I’ve been keeping a close eye on for a while now. I know their offering and their value proposition fairly well and am looking forward to understanding what’s new and their future plans.
  • Hedvig:    
    • Hedvig is a Software Defined Storage company started about 5 years ago in the Silicon Valley by an ex engineer with distributed file system and database design experience at AWS and Facebook who invented Amazon DynamoDB & Cassandra. I’ve reviewed Hedvig’s technology quite closely in the past and have liked what I’ve seen. So, I’m very keen to see what they have to say this time around their latest offering and the future plans.
    • While I had come across these guys before, I didn’t know the details of their offering other than that they claim to be an (better) alternative typical converged and Hyper-Converged solutions out there. So looking forward to finding out a bit more about their offering.
    • This will likely be the Tegile offering that was procured by Wester Digital. Looking forward to this.
    • Huawei is the popular Chinese data center IT behemoth that is growing in popularity each year. Incidentally, Huawei is a vendor partner of my employer and have a growing presence in the UK public sector due to their lower costs on infrastructure. While they manufacture everything from servers to software Defined Networking controllers, I’d presume the focus of their session during SFD15 would be on their storage offering. I am personally not fully familiar with Huawei’s storage offerings so this could be a great opportunity for me to right that wrong.
  • IBM:
    • No introduction necessary for this one . Not sure what IBM storage solution they’ll be covering during SFD15
    • StarWind who is a HCI solution vendor, presented in the last SFD12 I attended and its good to see them come back to SFD15 again. Keen to get an updated view on things.
  • WEKA.IO:    
    • These guys claim to have the world’s fasted parallel file system and are totally new to me. So I am really looking forward to finding out the details of their offering and its value proposition.

My Plan

I will be travelling to San Jose from London Heathrow on the 6th with a view to catching up with this year’s delegates over the evening meal on the 6th which is always fun. There are some familiar faces from last years SFD12 as well as few new faces (to me) so looking forward to meeting these girls and boys. I am due to fly back to London on Monday the 12th and I expect to have some intimate knowledge of these solutions. I am aiming to provide some posts on most of the interesting solutions I come across to provide a deep dive and my independent thoughts on them during and after the event, which will all be published here on my blog.

If you are interested in attending a future TFD / SFD event, all the information you need to know can be found here at http://techfieldday.com/delegates/become-field-day-delegate/.

If you are interested in watching these sessions / presentations live, you can find the schedule and the live stream link information at http://techfieldday.com/event/sfd15/. I would seriously encourage you to watch the event live and do take part in the live questions as well.

 

SFD12 Posts

As mentioned above, I learnt a lot during the SFD12 participation last year about the storage industry in general as well about the direction of a number of storage vendors. If you are interested in finding out more, see my #SFD12 articles below

 

 

 

 

 

Chan

Technologist, lucky enough to be working for a very technical company. Views are my own and not those of my employer..!

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