Stephen Foskett has put the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day wagons back on the road again and has arranged another Tech Field Day for April this year.   I’ve been fortunate enough to have been asked to join a team of fellow tech bloggers to attend. This community event provides an excellent opportunity for independent bloggers to meet with both new and established ‘happening’ IT companies to gain a more in-depth knowledge of their products.

Product deep dive and roadmap presentations by both techies and managers at the company along with live demonstrations provides an excellent platform for the bloggers to further understand the company’s offerings.  This combined with the ability to ask any level of technical or business related type questions, however awkward, helps in giving the bloggers a real feel for the product’s good points and any shortcomings. 

From these sessions with the companies the bloggers end up with plenty of in-depth material (minus any marketing spin)  to generate a post if they so wish.  The nice thing I found from the last Tech Field Day is that there is no pressure what so ever to write about or cover a company that is visited.  But since almost all of the companies visited are doing some pretty cool and innovative things in the tech space it is hard not to be compelled to write and tell others of what’s been seen and learnt.

The following Tech bloggers have been confirmed as attending so far, with others to be announced soon:

• Carlo Costanzo, VMware Info
• Greg Ferro, Ethereal Mind and Gestalt IT
• Simon Long, The SLOG and Gestalt IT
• John Obeto, Absolutely Windows
• Devang Panchigar, Storage Nerve and Gestalt IT
• Bas Raayman, BasRaayman and Gestalt IT
• Simon Seagrave, TechHead
• Matt Simmons, Standalone Sysadmin

These Tech bloggers represent a good mixture of backgrounds and coverage in virtualization, storage, networking, Microsoft and Enterprise level IT.  The video below featuring VMware’s John Troyer and PR/Social Media Consultant, Sunshine Mugrabi gives a really good overview of what the Gestalt IT Field Day is all about.

Just a quick post to all my regular readers of TechHead. 

Apologies for the lack of posts over the past few weeks, things are rather hectic for me at the moment…    I finish my job in just over a week’s time so it’s been a mad rush trying to tie up loose ends before I leave.  Also, I have something rather exciting that I am currently working on which is taking a large amount of my spare time in the evenings and weekends.  Watch this space – news to follow!

In the meantime thanks for continuing to read TechHead and as always I appreciate your feedback and comments.

Simon

With the increase in popularity and awareness of cloud based services here’s an interesting company that offers large scale global storage solutions out in the cloud. I first heard of this San Diego based company called Nirvanix whilst attending the Tech Field Day late last year.

Via their globally disbursed and interconnected storage delivery network (SDN) nirvanix offers a number of offsite storage based services and solutions.  The SDN “intelligently stores, delivers and processes storage requests in the best network location, providing the optimal user experience”.  According to Nirvanix a true cloud based storage provider such as themselves must offer the following four key components:  Global virtualization, unlimited scalability, continuous availability and a usage based service. 

I had the opportunity to catch up with Nirvanix’s Product Manager, Peter Pistek to find out more about their products and service offerings.

The Nirvanix product that really caught my attention is the ‘CloudNAS’ which presents cloud based storage via a ‘mount point’ on a local server (physical or virtual) to an application, service or end user.  By using this service a company is provided with a global NAS solution which is accessible via CIFS, NFS, or FTP.  Data can be transferred between the globally disbursed sites via the SDN with the transfer of this data between nodes being securely encrypted through the use of AES 256-bit encryption.

This is all managed via the Nirvanix Management Portal (NMP) which provides a straight forward view into the service status, account features, usage and the costs.

It is quite refreshing to see a product that’s being marketed as a ‘cloud’ solution actually having, in my opinion, cloud-like qualities and functionality.  With all the marketing hype over the last couple of past years around ‘The Cloud’ we have seen plenty of half-baked supposed cloud solutions.  For me the CloudNas proves that moving data around globally via the cloud doesn’t have to be (at least not for the end user) a complex process.  No doubt in time more and more diverse cloud based offerings will come to market with the level of simplicity around the use and management seen in Nirvanix’s CloudNAS.

Many of you are probably already aware of the differences and workings of the RAID though I came across this site (AC & NC) which provides a nice clear overview tutorial on the RAID levels. It also outlines the pro’s and con’s of each of the RAID levels along with animations.  One to bookmark and bring out when explaining RAID to a colleague.