Cohesity – DataPlatform in the Cloud

Posted on by Josh De Jong

cohesityWhat separates vendors is focus and execution. In a crowded market, finding the right backup provider is no easy task. While each product has its pros and cons, finding the differentiator can be a daunting task. While Cohesity is relatively new to this space (founded in 2013), they have that focus and execution necessary to be a leader in the backup space.

But Cohesity is more than just backups. The Cohesity storage appliance not only handles your backup storage needs, but can also run your dev and test workloads. Cohesity is focused on your secondary storage needs. That secondary storage consists of any workloads or data that isn’t production. By avoiding the draw of being another primary storage vendor, Cohesity is listening to customers, learning their needs and creating a solution that can fit any size business.

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The Cohesity solution was built for a virtualized (VMware-only) environment. Connecting directly to your vCenter servers and pulling your inventory allowing administrators to create backup jobs and policies. While their start was in virtualization, there are still many physical workloads in the datacenter. Creating agents for physical Windows, Linux, and SQL server all backing up to the same storage system and with the same policies prove no workloads can’t be protected by Cohesity.

But wait, there’s more!

While data protection is important, that’s only a small portion of the Cohesity offering. Running these backups directly from the Cohesity storage arrays allows you to free up primary storage resources and (potential) bottlenecks when running multiple instances of the same VM on a single array. Leveraging the SSDs that come in each Cohesity node as a cache tier, testing software patches and deployments from your backed up production VMs means that your performance doesn’t suffer. And with a built in QoS engine your dev/test workloads don’t have to affect the speed of your backups.

Cohesity provides a scale-out solution, meaning as storage demand increases so can your secondary storage space. Operating under a single namespace, as new nodes are added, your space increases without needing to reconfigure jobs to point to a new array or manually re-striping data. Cohesity has customers that have scaled up to as much as 60 nodes with over a petabyte of storage.

To the cloud!

Policy-based backups and replication ensures that your data will be available. Cohesity has the ability to distribute data across the nodes in a cluster, replicate to clusters in another locations, and also replicate your data to a cloud provider in order to satisfy offsite backup requirements. The latest addition to the Cohesity software portfolio is the DataPlatform Cloud Edition. This gives you the ability to run Cohesity in the cloud.

DataPlatform CE is more than just replicating data to the cloud. Your VMs can be backed up to your on-premises cluster and that data can be replicated to your cloud-based array. From that cloud-based array, you can then clone virtual machines to a native cloud format. This means your servers can be run in the cloud in their native format and available to test or even run in the event of migrations or datacenter outages.

Many backup and data protection software vendors are doing replication to the cloud such as Veeam and Zerto. While the features isn’t new, its addition makes Cohesity a serious contender in this space. DataPlatform CE is available currently in tech preview in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, but Cohesity hopes to release it in the first half of 2017 with support for Azure as well as AWS.

Wrapping Up

Data protection and availability is never going to be exciting. Swapping tapes and deploying agents is tedious work. A fully integrated software solution that not only protects your data, but also helps solve the problem of data sprawl, a platform for developers to test against production data in an isolated environment and the ability to migrate workloads to the cloud. That’s about as exciting as it gets in data protection and that is just the tip of the (storage) iceberg.

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Take a look at posts by my fellow delegates from Tech Field Day 12 and watch the videos here.

First Look at Cohesity Cloud Edition
The Silent Threat of Dark Data
Cohesity Provides All of Your Secondary Storage Needs
Secondary Storage is Cohesity’s Primary Goal

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Disclaimer: During Tech Field Day 12, my expenses (flight, hotel, transportation) were paid for by Gestalt IT. Cohesity provided each delegate with a gift bag, but I am under no obligation to write about any of the presented content nor am I compensated for such writing.

VSAN – Compliance Status is Out of Date

Posted on by Josh De Jong

Occasionally the Compliance status of the performance service will go to the “out of date” status. This is not an alert that is thrown anywhere within vCenter. You will have to check this status by logging into the vSphere web client, locating your vCenter, choose the cluster, clicking on “Manage” then choosing “Health and Performance” under “Virtual SAN”
ComplianceStatus-a

As I have recently fixed this issue the above screenshot shows the “Compliant” status. Below are the steps to get to that point.

1. In the box for “Performance Service” click “Edit storage policy”
ComplianceStatus-01

2. If there is a storage policy available in the drop down, select it and click “OK”. This will apply that policy and perform the compliance check.
ComplianceStatus-02

For the lucky few where that works, that’s all you need to do. If the storage policy list is empty you’ll need to restart the vsanmgmtd service on each of the hosts.

3. Enable SSH on each of the hosts in the VSAN cluster and using an SSH client (like putty), SSH to a host and run the following command to restart the vsanmgmtd service (this is a non-impactful operation and should be able to be performed during production hours with no impact)
a. /etc/init.d/vsanmgmtd restart

4. Repeat that command on each of the hosts in the cluster until they have all restarted their services
ComplianceStatus-04

5. Wait 5 minutes and then check to see if you are able to select a storage policy for the performance service. If not, move on to step 6

6. Now we’ll need to restart the vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service on the vCenter server. This is also non-impactful and should be able to be performed in the middle of the day. If you’re using vCenter on windows, connect to the Windows server and restart the “Vmware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service”. If using VCSA (like this example) you’ll need to SSH to the VCSA and run the command below
a. Service vmware-sps restart

7. After the vmware-sps service restarts, log out of the web client and wait for 5 minutes while the storage profile service completes its restart.

8. Log back in to the web client, navigate to the vCenter server, click “Manage” then choose the “Storage Providers” tab
ComplianceStatus-08

9. Click the Synchronize Providers button to resync the state of the environment
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10. Wait another 5 minutes while these synchronize completes. After 5 minutes, navigate to the VSAN cluster in the web client. Click on “Manage” then choose “Settings” and locate “Health and Performance” under the “Virtual SAN” section
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11. In the Performance Service box, click the “Edit Storage Policy” button
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12. From the drop down list you should be able to select the appropriate VSAN storage policy and then click “OK”
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13. After this is selected the compliance status should change to “Compliant” and you should be all set.

So far these are the only steps that I have needed to follow in order to fix this issue. Let me know if there are any other fixes available.

Deploy VSAN Witness Appliance

Posted on by Josh De Jong

The VSAN Witness Host is a virtual appliance that is deployed into an existing vCenter server. When deploying a 2 node or stretched cluster, the witness appliance acts as a tie breaker to determine which node(s) are still available in the event the nodes lose communication with each other. The witness The witness is deployed just like any other virtual appliance, but will require access to the management network and the network you’ve designated as your VSAN network. This appliance must be run OUTSIDE your VSAN cluster. This means that you cannot add this host as a member of the existing VSAN cluster and you also should not run it as a virtual appliance inside your existing VSAN cluster.

1. Choose the cluster that will host the appliance. Click on “File” then “Deploy OVF Template”
step01

2. Browse to select the .OVA file and click “Next”
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3. Review the details of the appliance and click “Next”
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4. Review the license agreement and click “Accept” followed by “Next”
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5. Enter the name of the Witness Appliance and its location then click “Next”
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6. Choose the appropriate size of the appliance and click “Next”
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a. As this is a test, I’m choose the “Tiny” size. You can ignore the disk component requires for any size. As this is a virtual appliance, it will deploy the appropriately sized drives that will designated as SSD and spinning disl

7. Choose the provisioning type and click “Next”
step07
a. This is appliance is being deployed to a separate VSAN cluster than the one it will be acting as the witness for. This appliance can be deployed on shared storage, local storage, or another VSAN datastore.

8. Choose the appropriate networks for management and witness (VSAN). In this deployment, management lives on the “VM Network” and witness (VSAN) traffic is on the “VM-VSANnetwork”. This network is shared with the vMotion network and just needed an additional VM Portgroup created on each of the hosts in the cluster where this appliance is being deployed. Click “Next”
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9. Enter a root password for this appliance. Remember, this is a host that you will need to login to in order to administer so if there is a standard root password that you use it would be a good idea to use that here. Click “Next”
step09

10. Review the deployment settings and then click “Finish”
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11. Once deployed, you will need to configure the appliance like any other host. Power on the appliance and open the console, press F2 and login as root with the password you assigned in step 9
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12. Scroll to “Configure Management Network” and press “Enter”
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13. Ensure the Network Adapter assigned to your management network is “vmnic0”
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a. Set a VLAN (if necessary) for the management network, then assign your IPv4 and/or IPv6 settings for the management network to make it accessible on your network. Assigned DNS as needed as well. Press “ESC” and then press “Y” to configure settings and restart the management network
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14. Once the host can communicate on the network, add it as a new host in vCenter.
a. Remember that this host should not be part of your VSAN cluster or any other cluster. It should be a standalone host in your datacenter.

15. Select the host in the vCenter client and configure networking for it. Locate the “witnessSwitch” and click “Properties”
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16. Select the “witnessPg” and click “Edit”
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17. On the “IP Settings” tab, enter the IP and subnet mask for the VSAN traffic network. Click “OK” at the bottom”
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18. Once you have confirmed that network settings are successful, login to the vSphere web client and navigate to the VSAN cluster to be configured

19. Click the “Manage” tab, then choose “Fault Domains & Stretched Cluster” under “Virtual SAN”
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20. In the “Streteched Cluster” box click “Configure”
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21. Name the fault domains and place the hosts into the appropriate fault domain. This is a 2 node cluster with 1 host in each fault domain. Click “Next”
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22. Locate the VSAN witness appliance host that was added to this vcenter and click “Next”
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23. Choose the flash drive for and the HDD for cache and capacity and click “Next”
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24. Review the settings and click “Finish”
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25. Once completed, you will now see the status of the stretched cluster as “Enabled”, the preferred fault domain and the designated witness host.
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VSAN – Host Not Contributing Stats

Posted on by Josh De Jong

After an upgrade or maintenance on one or more of the nodes in a VSAN cluster one of the hosts can stop contributing performance stats. This is not a production down issue, but should be addressed to see the most up-to-date stats across all the nodes.

The fix for this is one of three things, but each of them involves turning off performance statistics on the cluster which will cause all historical performance stats to be removed. My hope is that VMware will fix this issue in an upcoming release because a loss of historical is not tolerable in all environments.

1. View the health of the VSAN by logging into the vCenter web client. Navigate to the appropriate vCenter and cluster, then click the “Monitor” tab, followed by “Virtual SAN” then click on “Health.” Expanded “Performance service” and click the warning for “All hosts contributing stats”
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2. At the bottom you will now see the list of hosts that are not contributing stats
step02

3. Now that we’ve identified the problem host, we need to disable VSAN performance service temporarily. Navigate to the “Manage” tab for this cluster then click on “Health and Performance” under “Virtual SAN”
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4. Click “Turn off” in the “Performance Service” box

a. Click “OK” to confirm stopping the service which will erase all existing performance data
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5. Confirm Perform Service has been disabled by refreshing the page
step05

6. SSH to the affected host (using putty or similar SSH client) we identified in step 2 (you may have to enable SSH on the host before you can connect).
step06

7. Run the command below to restart the VSAN management agent. This should have no production impact so it is safe to perform outside of a maintenance window.
a. /etc/init.d/vsanmgmtd restart
step07a

8. Once the service has been restarted, go back to the vCenter web client and the click the “Edit” button for the Performance Service box
step08

9. Select the appropriate storage policy from the drop down list, ensure the “Turn ON Virtual SAN performance service” box is checked and click “OK”
step09

10. Confirm that the performance service is turned on and reporting healthy
step10

11. Navigate back to the “Monitor” tab and then “Virtual SAN” clicking the on the “Health” section. Click “Retest” to verify that all hosts are contributing stats.
step11

If this does not fix the issue, you can restart the process, but this time instead of restarting the vsanmgmt service on the one node, do it on all of the nodes in the cluster. Once the services have been restarted across all nodes then restart the performance service and all nodes should be contributing stats.

I have also seen a case where restarting the service on all nodes didn’t fix the problem. In that scenario I was able to fix the problem by entering maintenance mode on the problem node and choose “full data migration” so all the data would be removed from the cluster. After that was complete I completely rebuilt the host from scratch (including wiping the disks claimed by VSAN) then moving it back into the cluster. I haven’t heard from VMware of any other ways to fix this issue.

Cohesity – Scale-Out Secondary Storage

Posted on by Josh De Jong

Backups are boring. No matter if you’re talking about swapping tapes, configuring backup jobs in your legacy agent-based  software, or spending another night restoring snapshots from your storage array; there’s just no way to make backups interesting. Cohesity aims to fix that. No, they won’t make backups sexy, but they are looking to add a bit more flash to the secondary storage market.

So what exactly is “secondary storage?” Secondary storage encompasses our backups, non-prod workloads, fileshares and the like. The secondary storage market is gaining visibility recently. With the flood of primary storage vendors, Cohesity could have been another “me-too” primary storage vendor, but they see the value in attacking an under-developed market.

The concept of Cohesity is simple. You can purchase the C2300 or C2500 models which offer 48TB or 96TB of storage respectively in each 4-node appliance (with a minimum of 3-nodes to start). Additional capactity can be added a single node at a time afterwards in 12TB or 24TB chunks depending on the model. Each node contains either 800GB or 1.6TB of flash for caching along with compute and memory. Cohesity claims they are infinitely scalable due to their distributed OASIS (Open Architecture for Scalable Intelligent Storage) architecture, though they’ve only tested up to 32 nodes at the time of this writing. Once your nodes are setup, you just point Cohesity at your vCenter Server and you now have visibility of your virtual machines.

Cohesity, leveraging VADP, is able to snapshot your configured VMs and begins ingesting all that data. The changes of these VMs are tracked (using CBT) so you’re not performing new full backups each time. All that is pretty standard in the backup world, so what sets Cohesity apart? That data is not just backed up, but it is available to actually use. Want to spin up one of these backed up VMs for testing? Space-efficient clones are created directly on the Cohesity appliance and are presented back to your ESXi hosts. Searching for a file to restore from one of these VMs? You can locate it right from the web interface and download the file without having to restore the entire VM.

The differentiator for Cohesity is not just how it scales or how simple it makes the backup process, but how it makes your backups useful. Enabling developers to access clones of your production systems to test deployments and hotfixes without impacting your production storage. Integrated QoS preventing your dev/test workloads from consuming all your resources and causing backup performance to suffer. Utilizing the onboard flash combined with global deduplication, performance of these workloads can mimic production without the cost of an all flash array.

An all-inclusive secondary storage appliance that provides visibility of data sprawl adds to the value. Often times, as production systems are backed up and cloned and cloned again, you lose sight of the origin of that data. Migrating data from one storage array to another you lose that deduplication and you’re now increasing capacity across systems to accommodate your storage footprint. By providing an all-in-one solution for your backups and dev/test workloads, you’re able to maximize your investment without the need for multiple arrays and storage targets.

The backup market is a crowded one. There are more feature rich backup software providers in the space, but many of them require the purchase of additional storage that doesn’t have the capabilities of what Cohesity provides. Having just released Version 1 in mid-October, Cohesity has a lot of capabilities in their software with what appears to be a great vision for the future. The product is still in need of refinement to simplify the process of searches, reporting, and scheduling, but the foundation of what the Cohesity team has built has me excited to see where they’ll be able to take their product.

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Watch all the videos from Cohesity at Storage Field Day 8 here.

Disclaimer: During Storage Field Day 8, my expenses (flight, hotel, etc) were paid for by Tech Field Day. I am under no obligation to write about any of the presented content nor am I compensated by any of the presenting companies for such writing.

Pure Storage – Enterprise Ready, Pure and Simple

Posted on by Josh De Jong

Disruption! Disk is dead! Flash forever!

When Pure Storage first came into the public eye they were loud, they were bold and everyone took notice. Whether you liked their marketing campaigns or their even louder marketing team, Pure marked the beginning of the flash revolution. They weren’t the first to do flash, they were just the first to convince us that all flash was right for our datacenter. If IOPs and low latency mattered, Pure was the vendor you needed.

With a recent IPO and new hardware platform (flasharray//m) there has been a lot going on with Pure Storage. While the announcement of their latest product was over 6 months ago (June 2015), my expectations for Pure are always high. The Tech Field Day delegates at Storage Field Day 8  got a chance to listen to what Pure Storage has been doing, their focus, and hopefully what was still to come.  This time around, however, I was left a little disappointed.

When a company who touts disruption as loud as Pure, you expect big things. Believe me, it’s not that what they’ve built isn’t impressive. A brand new, 3U dual-controller array built to eliminate single points of failure, maximize performance and display their orange logo as bright and loud as their messaging has always been is impressive. But that’s old news. This announcement feels like it was forever ago and we’re curious where Pure goes from here. What’s next for Pure?

Sadly, we don’t know. Roadmap and futures were off limits for this newly-public company. The feeling I get is that Pure is focusing on refinement, whether in their products or just in their messaging. Customers want visibility into their arrays. They want non-disruptive upgrades. They want health monitoring and alerting. They want that enterprise feeling companies like NetApp and EMC provide. Pure Storage’s focus right now is the enterprise and everything that Pure1 provides.

Pure1 is SaaS-based management and support of your Pure Storage arrays. Gone are the days of setting up management servers in each of your datacenters to manage and collect metrics of all your arrays. Pure1 allows you to login to a web interface and view statistics and alerts on all your arrays from a single portal. That’s one less server you’re forced to manage, update, and maintain to hold on to your historical data. Pure Storage arrays phone home all the important metrics (every 30 seconds) that matter so you have that single interface. New features can be delivered faster to all its customers with the collected data without the need to perform an update to your software.

Pure1 is being leveraged to open tickets on your behalf. Pure Storage said that roughly 70% of customer tickets are opened proactively by Pure1. Pure has worked at eliminating the “noise” of these alerts as well, focusing on root cause alerts as opposed to just all the alerts that may come from a cable or drive being pulled. These proactive tickets include bug fixes for issues that may come up in your environment based on your current configuration. I can recall a few times in my career where I’ve ran into a software bug on my storage array that the vendor was aware of, but never informed me I was susceptible to. This is the kind of information all customers want, but not all vendors provide.

Pure Storage has taken a non-disruptive everything approach to its software releases as well. While legacy vendors have left me reluctant to upgrade my arrays in the past, Pure Storage touted 91% customer adoption of its software within 8 months of release. Pure’s customers are trusting in its development, enough to even perform upgrades in the middle of the day while still serving production workloads. That is confidence and shows the capabilities of these arrays and Pure’s engineers. Non-disruptive no matter the operation.

Is the marketing machine that was Pure Storage dead? My hope and feeling is no. Pure is finding out who they are as $PSTG. This is a period of refinement and maturity for the 6-year-old company. We’ll have to wait and see what they’ll do next and I’m sure we’ll all take notice.

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Watch all the videos from Pure Storage at Storage Field Day 8 here.

Disclaimer: During Storage Field Day 8, my expenses (flight, hotel, etc) were paid for by Tech Field Day. I am under no obligation to write about any of the presented content nor am I compensated by any of the presenting companies for such writing.

 

 

 

NexGen Storage – The Future is Hybrid

Posted on by Josh De Jong

At Storage Field Day 8, the delegates got a sneak peak at what NexGen Storage was up to. With new product and patent announcements, there was a lot to be excited about for this hybrid array vendor.

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Hybrid storage is the future. But with the death of disk and living in an all-flash world, how can that be true? While disk isn’t dead yet, it feels like it’s dying. High IOPs, low latency, and consistent performance is what makes flash so desirable. When designing a modern datacenter today, I’d be unlikely to buy spinning disk. So how can hybrid be the future?

As the cost of flash continues to drop the dependency we have on spinning disk drops as well. When it comes to enterprise storage, why pay for a fading technology when flash is becoming more and more affordable? That’s not to say disk doesn’t have a place in the datacenter; it just means the use cases are beginning to diminish. Spinning disk is generally not a place where I want my production applications to run.

NexGen Storage has been in the hybrid array space for some time. After being founded in 2010, being purchased by Fusion-io in 2013 and then eventually being spun out as its own company earlier this year, NexGen Storage has continued to focus on its hybrid arrays. The engineering efforts and customer growth didn’t stop along the way. The NexGen team stayed focused on what it does best; fast storage with predictable performance.

With the rise of flash in the datacenter, why the focus on hyrbid? With NexGen, their hybrid arrays are not just flash cache in front of spinning disk. The approach of flash and RAM caching writes and/or reads makes sense as only your working set “needs” that high speed/low latency tier, but in the event your array was unable to predict the next blocks being requested by your application the performance of spinning disk sometimes isn’t enough. Their latest model, the N5-1500, is all flash with a hybrid approach.

While the cost of flash is dropping rapidly, it still is expensive. NexGen Storage is utilizing flash over the PCIe bus for it’s caching tier which is much more expensive than just regular SSD drives. The advantage of this approach is lower latency, higher throughput, but at a more reasonable cost as you’re not filling an array with all PCIe flash. The N5 all flash series is available in 15TB to 60TB raw capacity (in 15TB increments) with all sizes coming with 2.6TB of PCIe flash.

Why the same cache tier size? With its now patented dynamic QoS, NexGen Storage is able to deliver that consistent performance businesses need for their applications. The ability to prioritize workloads and assign pre-configured QoS policies allows you to purchase a do-everything array. In many of the smaller environments I’ve worked in, you don’t have the luxury of multiple storage arrays for production and dev/test. Often time, you are hoping that your non-critical workloads do not affect your mission-critical workloads. With automated throttling and prioritizing placement of your data, you’re able to ensure development never interferes with Tier 0.

The all-flash datacenter is here today and each all-flash vendor has a different approach. This hybrid all-flash approach is what sets NexGen Storage apart along with an all-inclusive software feature set. A fast array isn’t enough anymore; you need an array that has the intelligence to deliver the performance you’re expecting at all times. Combine that with VMware Virtual Volumes support, data reduction (deduplication and compression) along with array-based snapshots and replication (between all-flash and hybrid spinning disk arrays) and you have a solution built for the next generation.

Disclaimer: During Storage Field Day 8, my expenses (flight, hotel, etc) were paid for by Tech Field Day. I am under no obligation to write about any of the presented content nor am I compensated by any of the presenting companies for such writing.

Veeam v9 – New Feature Annoucements

Posted on by Josh De Jong

While the need for backups hasn’t changed, how you use these backups has. Not only that, the speed at which we can recover our data is changing as well. As the cost of downtime continues to grow, having to restore an entire server just to recover one file or a small number of files just won’t cut it. Your backup needs to be backup quickly and restore even faster.

The improvements in Veeam v9 are doing just that. Veeam has been introducing faster and faster ways to backup and restore (and limit the impact on production virtual machines during backups as well) for years and v9 is no exception. There are a few new options I want to touch on that are pain points I’ve experienced in my environments.

1. Backups from Snapmirror/Snapvault destinations.
As a former NetApp admin, I love the idea of minimizing the effect of backups on my virtual machines. By enabling backup from snapmirror destinations, you can get your VMs offsite using built in software on your NetApp array, and then create off-SAN backups that aren’t limited by your snapmirror rentention schedule due to space constraints.

2. Direct NFS Backup Mode
Direct SAN access has been in Veeam Backup & Replication forever, but backing up VMs on your NFS datastores was a different story. A proxied connection was required through an ESXi host to backup these VMs. In v9, a brand new NFS client was written by the engineers at Veeam to connect directly to your NFS volumes and backup VMs without additional host impact, latency, or speed constraints.

3. Per VM-backup File chain
As the size of your backup job grows, the managing of that file gets to be painful. As your backup repository begins to fill up you’re left having to migrate the entire backup file to a new repository. By creating a Per-VM backup file chain, one job can be created for all of your virtual machines, but each VM has its own file chain. This feature is especially useful with the next feature I’ll talk about.

4. Scale-out Backup Repository
Backup repository management has always been one of the largest pain points when managing Veeam backup jobs. I remember my first Veeam setup I was limited to 2TB LUNs on my backup server and I had to create 8 of them to store my backups. As backup jobs couldn’t span repositories, this meant I was creating individual jobs tied to repositories and then rebalancing as repositories began to fill. The Scale-out backup repository feature allows a virtual backup repository to be create on top of your current physical repositories. Now fewer jobs need to be created and you’re able to take advantage of all the space in each repository. Thanks to Luca Dell’Oca for clarifying that maintenance mode and evacuation are also supported. This mean if a repository needs to be taken down (due to SAN maintenance for example) it can be marked as maintenance mode and excluded from the repository during maintenance operations.

For me, these are the 3 big features I’m happy to see in Veeam v9. There are additional features such as explorers for Oracle, Active Directory (support for AD-integrated DNS and GPO restoration!), SQL Server and SharePoint. The entire list of new features can be found at the link below.

Click here for all the feature announcements.

VeeamON 2015

Posted on by Josh De Jong

As exciting as VMworld is each and every year, it appears to have lost its charm. Yes, it’s the largest gathering of virtualization people (my people) each and every year, but that is part of the problem. 20,000+ of my closest friends isn’t quite as intimate as it sounds. Oh, we’re close, but that’s more about proximity than the strength of our friendships.

The value of VMworld is the sessions, labs and networking opportunities. With sessions and labs being available after the conference ends, it’s important to maximize those networking opportunities as best you can. Trying to find someone in a crowd of 20,000 is difficult. If you’re not stalking your favorite virtualization professionals on Twitter you’ll likely miss them. Enter VeeamON.

This is the second year for VeeamON and my first year in attendance. Veeam, everyone’s favorite data protection & availability company (or at least mine), holds their annual gathering of data availability experts in Las Vegas (at the Aria hotel this year). What is normally just a function of our jobs is brought to the forefront in this conference. The size of VeeamON which has an expected attendance of 2500+ people will see many more opportunities to get one-on-one time with those in attendance.

VeeamON focuses on community, much like Veeam itself has done over the years. This dedication to educating and enabling the community is what has made Veeam Software successful and respected in the industry. Veeam is bringing out the vBrownbag crew for 19 sessions that will be available live during the conference as well. Its users and the community have helped shaped Veeam and built very passionate advocates.

With vendor sponsored sessions that consist of integration with the various aspects of the Veeam software features (such as Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots) as well as a focus on customer and user sessions that describe their use of Veeam solutions in their environment. That’s just the beginning. Other sessions talk about data protection as a whole and the concept of data availability in our modern datacenters. Being a Veeam user or customer isn’t required to walk away with new concepts, ideas and knowledge. Click here to view the agenda.

We’re past the point of just needing backups, we need our data readily available in many different and evolving scenarios. From backups, to disaster recovery, to sandboxes for testing, data availability gets reduced to just having a copy of your data. Veeam is pioneering the data availability movement and has the tools in place to bring data availability to the always-on enterprise. Above all else, Veeam is on your side.

Thoughts in the Airport

Posted on by Josh De Jong

Traveling is one of my least favorite things. I have never done well on flights, waiting to take off, sitting still for hours, and feeling trapped. That trapped feeling is worse when I’m stuck in the middle or window seat. If I’m not on aisle I don’t want to fly.

This time, however, it’s different. Sure, I’ve been to tech conferences before. I’ve been to a handful of VMworld’s, went to Cisco Live and a few smaller conferences as well. But Storage Field Day? This is my first time being selected as a delegate at a Tech Field Day event. As I sit in the airport I’m nervous for a completely different reason.

Tech Field Day events are filled with companies presenting their latest and greatest products and solutions. This is an event that skips the marketing and gets into the nitty gritty. The delegates (11 of us this time around) get to ask questions of the people who built these products and have a vast knowledge of their inner workings. Viewers watching the live stream can have their questions relayed to the presenters via Twitter and the #SFD8 hashtag so they gain a better understanding as well.

So why the nerves? Sitting alongside storage experts such as Howard Marks and Ray Lucchesi who run the GreyBeards on Storage podcast (which I subscribe to) and Scott D. Lowe who is an author, a blogger, a former CIO and someone is who well known and well respected in the industry. It just so happens that Howard and Scott have done a combined 36 Tech Field Day events. Alex Galbraith, Viper V.K, Jon Klaus, Dan Frith, Mark May, Enrico Signoretti, and Jarett Kulm are the remaining delegates who are also well known and respected as well. For a first timer like me, it doesn’t get much more intimidating.

That’s just the delegates, I haven’t even mentioned the presenters. We’ll be on-site at the Coho Data, Pure Storage, and Cohesity. With a recent IPO I’ll be curious to see what Pure will be showcasing and with their first GA release I’m interested in hearing more about Cohesity and where their product is at.

Violin Memory, Intel, INFINIDAT, Nimble Storage, Nexgen, Qumulo and Primary Data will also be presenting. With so little coming from Violin lately I’m curious what they’ve been up to (besides declaring that disk is dead). I’m also interested in where Nimble is at. With most of their competitors offering all flash solutions, Nimble is one of the last few hybrid-only vendors. Have they throw a bunch of SSD’s on their arrays and called it “All Flash” (ala NetApp) or are they working on something new?

As I sit in the airport at PDX waiting for my flight to arrive from Denver my nerves are about adding value to this event. Asking the questions and offering the perspective of a customer who has been responsible for deploying and administering storage over the last 7 years. Holding my own along side these storage industry experts and not letting myself get intimidated. This is out of my comfort zone, but I’m up for the challenge.