CFD8 - Igneous Followup

July 20, 2020 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise, Conferences

Igneous Systems had a lot to prove at Cloud Field Day 8. They had to show the delegates where they fit in the larger IT landscape now that they aren’t a traditional storage vendor. Participation in Cloud Field Day meant they saw themselves as a player in the cloud arena. Cloud can still be a term that’s hard to define especially for traditional enterprise customers. Vendors have been known to bend definitions to suit their needs. Igneous seems to fit somewhere in between traditional on-premises and cloud. Igneous enables enterprise backup on-premises file data to the cloud service provider (CSP) of their choice.

NetApp Active IQ - A Logical Next Step in Maintenance

February 23, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Conferences

NetApp presented their latest in proactive maintenance technology, ActiveIQ at Tech Field Day 18 in Austin, TX. ActiveIQ is a blend of software and service that allows NetApp to review configurations and propose suggestions based on their extensive body of knowledge. To power the product, NetApp collects more than 10 trillion data points per month of information from customer’s systems, stores it in a massive data lake, and exposes that data to other systems within NetApp to look for trends. The tech vendor also uses a machine learning algorithm to mine customer data for issues and optimal configurations. It’s really quite promising stuff.

Addressing Public Cloud Storage Hurdles w/ SoftNAS

August 17, 2018 by Nathaniel Avery

In my past, I've worked with NetApp, Equallogic, EMC, and various other NAS/SAN devices. After working briefly with SoftNAS, I can say that anyone familiar with those types of systems will feel right at home. Think of the SoftNAS vm as a "controller" and the local cloud storage as "shelves." The layout and terminology should make sense to anyone with a storage background. That level of knowledge could be comforting to an organization making a transition to the public cloud.