tech field day

Day 2 of Cloud Field Day kicked off at Dell’s offices here in Santa Clara, which is a very nice Executive Briefing Center. It’s been a while since I’ve seen some Dell hardware, unfortunately I wasn’t able to get behind the glass to give these guys a hug. Dell started their presentation with Prateesh Sharma laying the groundwork for multi-cloud, and the important of a universal storage layer for companies who are trying to manage and operate across multiple environments.

You’ve likely heard stories and whispers of “on-prem” being sexy again, not that it ever wasn’t, right? But public cloud had a lot of promises, some of which it lives up to, some of which it doesn’t, and some of which it does but it’s just painfully expensive. If you’re considering a refresh of your on-prem solution, or are looking to move some or all workloads back to a solution you manage, its a great opportunity to revisit your requirements, and look at implementing an actual private cloud, rather than just a virtualisation platform which oh so many of us have seen and managed.

Cloud Field Day #19 kicked off with NeuroBlade, and I’m glad I had a coffee before hand, as data analytics is not my expertise, but I learned a lot in the session thanks to NeuroBlade and other delegates. “Revolutionizing Big Data Analytis with NeuroBlade’s SQL Processing Unit” NeuroBlade were founded in 2018, have over 120 employees, and $100m+ in capital funding. A key line they used during their funding round is they “Want to be the NVIDIA of Data Analytics”.

Most kubernetes clusters are running at 30% or less utilisation, which means there’s a lot of resource wastage out there in the wild, which translates to dollars being spent for no value. Platform9 want to help you save some money by tweaking the way you run your EKS clusters, and this same pattern could make its way to other managed kubernetes solutions in the future. Platform9 were founded in 2013 with a relatively clear mission: Democratize cloud computing.

Runecast were the last company I had the pleasure of being a delegate for at the Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018. I’ve written about Runecast on this blog before, and I really like who they are and what they do. Runecast is a proactive VMware management solution, delivered as a pre-packaged appliance, that aims to provide you with issue prevention, security compliance and log analytics for your VMware environment before any major outages occur.

DISCLAIMER: During VMworld 2018 US (Las Vegas), I was invited as a delegate to the Tech Field Day Extra (TFDx) event. I was not compensated in any way, my conference pass was complimentary as I was a speaker at the event and other expenses were covered by my employer, Parallo. I’m not required to write this blog post, I chose to do so of my own accord. This blog post is aimed to summarise the presentation that I was present for and also to provide some additional information about the company or solution presented on, which is all based on my opinion.

Well, that rolled around quickly. I remember booking the flights, accommodation and registration for VMware’s flagship VMworld event months ago and I’m now writing this from the plane about half way through the 27 hour journey from my home in Tasmania, Australia, to Las Vegas. This isn’t going to be a post on my recommendations, tips and tricks, or “how to attend if you aren’t attending”. There are lots of resources out there for this content and I urge you to go and read some of the blogs by others as there are some really great pointers!