Dell Tech World 2022 was important for two reasons. First, this was the first Dell Tech World since the spin-off of VMware. Second this was one of the first major in person tech conferences since the start of the COVID pandemic.  

I didn’t make it out to Vegas this year but tuned in online, after all we are now in the era of flexibility and freedom. Attend any major conference, from anywhere and on any device or something like that.  

As a long time, VMware vExpert, Dell Partner and Technologist, keeping up to date with what is going on in the world of infrastructure is of high importance to me.  

There were several themes covering Dell Tech World 2022, these being flexible and hybrid working, multi-cloud, cyber protection or resilience and the power of data.  

During Michael Dell’s Monday keynote, he spoke about the on-prem / off-prem debate being over. He said that the future is in multi-cloud with data flowing seamlessly across.   

90% of customers already have workloads on-premises and in public clouds and 75% are using three or more clouds 

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

Dell wants to be the leader in multi-cloud and at the edge. He spoke about the rise in use cases such as IoT and highly automated environments requiring new edge computing solutions near the source of the data. This is an area Dell will be able to excel in due to their hardware offerings and close relationship with VMware despite the spin-off.  

10% of data today is processed outside of datacentres, but by 2025 75% of enterprise data will be processed at the edge.  

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

However due to this growth in data, Michael Dell explained that the attack surface will also be bigger for cyberattacks.  

Ransomware attacks are the #1 threat for most organisations and are occurring every 11 seconds. With an average cost of $13m per occurrence.   

Michael Dell – Dell Tech World 2022 Keynote 

Dell have been innovating in these spaces and desire to create an end-to-end integrated path. What really stood out for me at Dell Tech World was many of the big announcements were all about services or software. Dell, a well-known hardware giant is certainly investing a lot in these areas to be relevant in this multi-cloud as-a-service world.  

Central to this is Dell APEX, Dell’s as-a-Service portfolio. Michael Dell spoke about APEX being focused on business outcomes and being accessible to developers. APEX was announced last year at Dell Tech World as a companywide transformation to as-a-Service. Chuck Whitten spoke of the principles of APEX being simplicity, agility and control in the multi-cloud world.   

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Previously announced within the APEX portfolio was APEX Cloud Service with VMware Cloud and APEX Backup Services.  

At Dell Tech World ‘22 we saw the announcement of APEX Cyber Recovery Services with the promise of further APEX services to come including high-performance computing, machine learning operations, VDI and more.  

APEX Cyber Recovery Services is run and managed by Dell, offering a secure immutable cyber recovery vault for workload replication. Customers should be able to be reassured of their ability to recover from a cyberattack whilst benefiting from being able to offload the day-to-day tasks to Dell.  

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But the innovation towards multi-cloud didn’t end there. There were announcements from both the data protection and storage divisions further embracing integration with the public cloud.   

CyberSense for AWS – Uses adaptive analytics, machine learning and forensic tools to detect, diagnose and help with cyber recovery operations. Dell say this will allow you to diagnose and recover quickly within AWS.  

PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Azure – Available from the Azure marketplace next month, this will allow you to isolate and protect workloads from ransomware attacks. You will get an isolated data centre environment via an isolated recovery vault. Data is replicated from production with minimal access for data protection. When it comes to recovery you can recover on-premises or within Azure.  

Also demonstrated at the conference was Project Alpine. Project Alpine offers Software Defined Storage capabilities to expand Dell’s storage portfolio to the cloud. Demonstrated was the ability to connect storage from a PowerStore device to the public cloud. Google Cloud, Azure and AWS were shown on screen during the demo.  

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The final big announcement was regarding a partnership with Snowflake, a cloud data platform vendor. With this partnership users of Dell’s object storage will be able to move data to Snowflake’s cloud platform for analytics and warehouse capabilities. Secondly, you will be able to leverage snowflakes capabilities on-premises without the need to move the data. 

For me, Dell Tech World is a positive step in the right direction for Dell. They are wanting to maximise their capabilities and reach with their hardware solutions by embracing the public cloud with their software solutions and services capabilities. For me it now all comes down to the execution and how we see these solutions being delivered and utilised by the customers. I look forward to seeing the Project Alpine and the APEX solutions in action.  

This week saw the Juniper Networks 2021 global summit for analysts, influencers and the media. I have covered my thoughts on this event and Juniper’s strategy in my earlier blog post. In this blog post, I am going to cover the three key announcements from the summit. 

1. Juniper Support Intelligence

2. New Wi-Fi 6E Access Points

3. Juniper Mist IoT Assurance

Juniper Support Insights

Juniper Support Insights is a cloud-connected, AI-driven support platform for customers using Junos OS devices such as ACX. EX. MX, PTX, QFX and SRX.

With Juniper Support Insights, there is no need to replace or upgrade your device to get this functionality - it is already included. You can choose to connect your devices directly to the cloud, like the Mist AI connected devices, or alternatively, you can use a lightweight collector appliance. The collector is a hardware appliance that can support up to 20,000 devices with a single collector. I think many organisations will choose to opt for the collector in their secure environments.

Once connected to the cloud, Support Insights will give operations actionable insights into their network to allow them to be proactive in their maintenance. In addition, Support Insights will use the small amount of data collected about your devices to give insights regarding the following:

• Product data

• Contracts

• Machine learning

• Install base

• Service requests

• Knowledge base

• PBN’s

• SIRTS

• RMAs

• EOL/EOS

As Support Insights uses machine learning, the more devices that are connected to the cloud, the more accurate and relevant the insights that will be delivered. 

I like the fact that Support Insights is readily accessible without additional cost, upgrade or replacement of existing Junos products. It will undoubtedly help operations teams get better insights into their install base and hopefully assist them in moving from reactive to proactive support. Whilst Support Insights is a read-only freemium offering, at a cost, Juniper also has products that offer read and write interactions with the network, with solutions like Paragon Insights. 

Juniper Support Insights solution

Juniper Support Insights blog

AI-driven Wi-Fi 6E Access Points

The second announcement covered two new AI-driven Wi-Fi 6E access points. The two new access points leverage the Mist cloud and AI engine for rich insights, enhanced troubleshooting and optimisations. The two access points that were announced are both tri-band and quad radio with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy Support).

The AP45 access point offers Juniper’s patented virtual Bluetooth LE technology. This will be attractive to organisations that need enhanced location-based services.

Product webpage: Juniper Wireless Access Points and Edge

• Product datasheet: AP45 Datasheet

• Product datasheet: AP34 Datasheet

Juniper Mist IoT Assurance

The final announcement focused on the lifecycle of IoT devices on a wireless network, particularly those that lack the support for 802.1x (WPA3 Enterprise).

With IoT devices increasingly being added to our corporate networks and at scale within many networks, it's essential that this process is quick, easy - and importantly, secure. Unfortunately, many IoT devices aren’t enterprise-ready and will lack the necessary features to secure and isolate traffic, all resulting in security issues or configuration complexity. This is where IoT Assurance comes in.

IoT Assurance is a cloud-based service that leverages a Multiple Pre-Shared Key mechanism (MPSK) to easily onboard devices at scale, offering micro-segmentation of devices as well as traffic engineering and full policy management. IoT Assurance provides a full suite of access control functionality using MPSK or Private Pre-Shared Keys, all without relying on having a client MAC address available in advanced or a configured NAC device.

Once the devices are on board, IoT Assurance takes control of day two operations, including automatic PSK expiration in conjunction with automatic key rotation, making sure that keys are regularly rotated whilst ensuring there is no downtime. Some additional tools are integrated, such as the ability to monitor active device utilisation per PSK, a fully-featured API and the ability in the future to create self-provisioning portals that can be used for BYOD workflows.

IoT Assurance Datasheet

Final Thoughts

These announcements further build upon Juniper’s portfolio of products as well as their vision of experience-first networking. With tools like Support Assurance and IoT Assurance, admins can streamline workflows, take proactive actions, and deliver higher levels of reliability, security, and service to end-users.

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.

Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021

This week saw Juniper present an update on its vision, strategy and latest innovations at the company’s virtual global summit for analysts, influencers and the media. Leading up to this event, I have been lucky enough to meet a number of Juniper execs to understand first-hand its strategy, vision, and latest product offerings.

Juniper has a laser focus on experience-first networking. This is much more than a marketing spin on its products and this was clear throughout the summit and across the company’s product innovations. Experience-first networking for Juniper is all about simple operations for network admins and a superior end-user experience for IT users. Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a simple soul, and while I love enterprise technology, I firmly believe it doesn't need to be complicated. So this messaging and focus both sit well with me.

How is Juniper delivering experience-first networking?

Often when you hear terms like experience-first networking, you will think it is just about marketing spin on top of the same old products. It is clear with Juniper that it goes much deeper than this. It appears to all start with the 2019 acquisition of Mist Systems and particularly the AI offerings surrounding the Marvis technology. If you haven't seen Marvis in action, head over to Tech Field Day to learn more. During the summit there was a short demonstration of the Marvis technology in action, initially showing troubleshooting of a wired network where the root cause had been diagnosed as a faulty network cable. Secondly and most impressively to me, the technology was able to troubleshoot and pinpoint an end-user's issue with Microsoft Teams. These kinds of quick and straightforward troubleshooting abilities make a real difference to both the end-users and the IT teams, allowing them to focus more time on innovation and moving forward, rather than tackling business as usual issues.

The image below was discussed during the summit. It depicts logged support tickets over time and how they were resolved. The green portion shows the tickets resolved (and logged) without human intervention, and the red portion indicates tickets with human intervention. As you can see, with AI technology built into the systems and more nodes being added to improve intelligence, tickets are being resolved before IT even needs to intervene.

Juniper discussed that, moving forward, networking was about much more than speeds and feeds alone. Of course, speeds and feeds are still important, but now it's about delivering real business value - and for Juniper Networks as a software company, this is all about the experience.

What was announced?

Building on the experience-first networking approach and maintaining its leadership within its products, Juniper Networks announced three new offerings during the summit:

• Juniper Support Insights

  • Allows you to connect any Junos OS device securely to the cloud to offer AI-led insights to help operations proactively support the network.

    Juniper Support Insights solution

• Two new Wi-Fi 6E AI-powered Access Points

  • Leveraging the Mist AI technologies, these Wi-Fi 6E access points offer the latest Wi-Fi standards and are combined with technologies such as BLE, other location-based services and much more.

    Wireless Access Points and Edge | Juniper Networks

• IoT Assurance

  • With more and more IoT devices being added to corporate networks, it can often be a challenge to manage the lifecycles of these devices. Whilst some IoT devices will support 802.1X for onboarding, many more devices do not. IoT Assurance allows operations to manage this full lifecycle across all IoT devices using Private Pre-Shared Key (PPSK) technology.

    Delivering Better User and Network Operator Experiences with New Wi-Fi 6E APs and IoT Assurance Driven by Mist AI | Official Juniper Networks Blogs

I have expanded on these announcements in this blog post, but these products further help operations deliver a better experience to end-users, with better uptime, quick resolution to issues, better performance and in-built security.

Final Thoughts

I have been really impressed to hear and understand Juniper's vision, and importantly, how it plans to achieve it. Juniper has been on a journey to modernise its business, and the focus on software and innovation around AI results is a real differentiator that will matter to customers.

Personally, moving forward, I look forward to learning more about Marvis and seeing it in action for myself.

Here are two of my Doodles from the event. Please click them to see them in more detail.

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.

Today saw the start of Microsoft Ignite November 2021, this keynote focused on hybrid work with Microsoft 365. Jared Spataro Corporate VP of modern work spoke about the key elements and innovations regarding hybrid working.

Jared spoke about organisations requiring a digital fabric to successfully adopt hybrid ways of working, this is made up of communication, collaboration and creation.

Announced today was Microsoft Loop a new app acting as a collaborative canvas allowing you to bring multiple elements together for interactive collaboration.

Within Loop there are 3 core elements, Workspaces, Pages and Components. This is the evolution of fluid components and the elements can be copied from Loop into Teams, Outlook and more and importantly still remain live and interactive.

Read more about Loop here.

Next was ContextIQ, allowing users to get recommendations regarding content and resources directly in the editor to improve productivity and making it more simple to include the elements that matter where you need them.

Read more about Context IQ here.

Finally, I was pleased to see there will also be improvements to Teams webinars including virtual green room, structured Q&A as well as curated experiences allowing specific people and content to be shown within the webinar when required.

Read more about improvements to Teams Webinars here.

You can see my doodle summarising this session below.

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Today Pure Storage have announced three new offerings during their #PureLaunch event. Above you can see my doodle covering these announcements.

Announced was

• Pure Fusion

  • A SaaS Management layer that pools storage arrays into availability zones and automates complex tasks such as

    • Workload placements

    • Workload mobility

    • Fleet rebalancing

Find our more about Pure Fusion

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Portworx Data Services

• The first database as a service platform for kubernetes

• Allow developers to easily rollout stateful managed services such as DBs without vendor lock-in whilst ensuring all day two operations are taken care of including

  • Monitoring

  • Backups

  • HA

  • Disaster Recovery

  • Migration

  • Auto-scaling

  • Security

Find our more about Portworx Data Services

Pure1

• A cloud based data-management platform

• A single hub that is automated by the AI driven Pure1 virtual assistant

• Allowing you to optimise, streamline, analyse and empower your data services quickly and easily

Find out more about Pure1

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This week I have attended #TFD24 as a delegate, the first sponsor to present was Cisco leading with their IoT Solutions. Cisco demonstrated a wide range of IoT ready solutions including both data centre and rugged products for use in the field. During the presentation there was a full review of the IoT portfolio including switching, routing, embedded devices industrial WiFi and their full stack service Industrial Asset vision.

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There were a couple of areas that were of particular interest to me, the first being a discussion on the LoRaWAN architecture. LoRaWAN is a low-powered wide-area network technology that is well suited to IoT use cases. Whilst LoRaWAN is capable of only low data rates (300 bps - 5.5kbps) it is capable of distances up to 15km in rural circumstances and can offer a battery life for devices of up to 10 years! So if you need to track a herd of cattle in a field, or how full a set of bins are in a rural park an IoT solution utilising LoRaWAN might be the right solution for you.

The second interesting part was the Cisco Industrial Asset Vision solution. This was an end to end, customisationable but standardised and ready to deploy IoT solution, including sensors, gateways as well as a cloud-based dashboard to monitor, report and troubleshoot.

This solution will fit a wide amount of use cases due to the large array of sensors available and will be ideally suited to organisations that want an out of the box IoT solution to their business needs, rather than developing something specific from separate parts.

Here is my third and final doodle from the F5 NGINX Sprint 2.0 event that I have been attending with the Tech Field Day Delegates.

During the sessions the specialists at NGINX ran the journey of modernising enterprise applications incorporating the components with NGINX including, NGNIX, NGINX Plus, NGINX App Protect, NGINX Instance Manage, Contoller and much more

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I’ve enjoyed learning about NGINX and the NGINX portfolio during the Sprint 2.0 event. I hadn’t previously had much experience with NGINX, and now after Sprint 2.0, I understand how enterprise organisations are using NGINX’s open source applications and commercial applications to solve day two operational issues.

I think it is excellent for NGINX and their customers that there will be further investment and focus on open source products and engagement. This is clearly an area that attracts new customers through the developer community but then drives new customers to the commercial products when day 2 problems need to be solved by the operations team.

I was also particularly impressed by the F5 integration in the portfolio with technologies such as App Protect but as well as this there is claear delination between NGINX and F5 Big-IP with Big-IP focusing on traditional applications and NGINX on modern adaptable applications.

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As described in my earlier blog post I have been attending F5 NGINX Sprint this week, this blog post focuses on the second half of the initial day which looked at the announcements, commitments as well as a Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley.

During the first day of the conference, there were three commitments and three (and one bonus!) announcements.

These were as follows

Commitment 1

Increase open source development and encourage community contribution

Commitment 2

Continue to innovate the data plane of modern, cloud-native applications

Commitment 3

Create a clear and consistent open-source vs commercial demarcation

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Announcement 1

NGINX is joining forces with the Kubernetes community

Announcement 2

NGINX will release new open-source projects at every layer of the delivery stack

Announcement 3

NGINX Modern Apps Reference Architecture

Bonus Announcement

NGINX unveiled a new interactive community experience that is now arriving.

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Thoughts Regarding the Announcements and Commitments

The commitments and announcements were firmly focused on the community, whether that is the user community or the wider open source community. Learning about NGINX’s history it is clear that their commitment to open source and the community has been core to their business, now part of F5 they are wanting to renew this commitment and demonstrate how being part of F5 means they are able to dedicate more time, people and money to the community and open source programmes which undoubtedly would have been a concern for some after acquisition.

The Modern Apps Reference Architecture (MARA) is aimed to help people spin up a complete and fully operational microservices architecture quickly and easily. MARA integrates open source solutions from NGINX and partners that are pre-wired and preconfigured meaning it is fully production-ready. This means that DevOps teams can easily access MARA from the GitHub repo and deploy it in production with minimal frustration.

You can access the MARA GitHub Repo here.

Tech Field Day Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley

To finish the day I was lucky enough to be part of the Tech Field Day panel for the Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley. I highly recommend watching this session when available and I will update this post with the link. During this session, there were some great questions from the delegates looking at the technology, community, open-source commitment as well as the commercial model and why people should choose to opt for a paid commercial model at the appropriate time. I was particularly impressed with how NGINX has not only managed to appeal to the operation teams via their commercial offerings that meet day 2 needs around scale, performance and security as well as appealing to developers with the open-source offerings and community engagement.

I was particularly interested in the possibility of AI and ML services being developed in the future leveraging the position of the NGINX technologies in the data plane. They spoke about looking to leverage this position in the future in conjunction with AI and ML to offer, predictive analytics to help scale and grow or prevent issues but also to offer business insights regarding the customer journey based upon the insights they could see.

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You can re-watch the sessions from NGINX Sprint 2.0 and find out more about the NGINX technologies at https://www.nginx.com

With my fellow Tech Field Day delegates, we attended NGINX Sprint 2.0. Below is my first doodle from the first day's sessions.

This doodle covers the changing face of applications and the impact the Covid period has had on transformation. Some of the thoughts NGINX customers Audi and Blackrock had on why they selected NGINX for their modern applications. I particularly liked Blackrocks session that explored their R3SPs for application deployment and how NGINX met these. These were

Resilience

Scale

Security

Stability

Performance

Finally, the doodle shows the significant changes that NGINX has made to their platforms since the last sprint event.

As NGINX is relatively new to me, what impressed me was the ability for their products to support both developers and ops with modern application deployments, allowing scale, simplicity of deployment and flexibility alongside enhanced security thanks to the integrated F5 technologies.

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The below graphic shows the different components within the NGINX portfolio, these include

NGINX Plus - An all in one load balancer, content cache and web server

NGINX Controller - Manage load balancers, API gateways and service mesh deployments at scale

NGINX App Protect - Modern app security powered by F5 WAF technology running on NGINX Plus

NGINX Unit - Dynamic application server with a REST API driven configuration

NGINX Ingress Controller - Ingress load balancing on kubernetes platforms

NGINX Instance Manager - Configure, Scale and manage your open source and enterprise configurations across your business

NGINX Service Mesh - Secure service to service management of both north south and east west traffic in kubernetes environments

NGINX Amplify - Cloud hosts monitoring and statistical analysis for NGINX and NGINX Plus

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There are so many tips and tricks that we could share to ensure you make the most out of VMworld. Whilst these tips differ slightly than if the event were in person (where we would be telling you to wear comfortable shoes), below we have included our top tips to ensure you make the most out of this year's virtual event (and fingers crossed the last virtual one we have to attend).

If you have not yet registered for VMworld 2021 VMware’s Premier Multi-Cloud event - register now!

Once you have registered, take a look at all the amazing sessions and build your schedule!

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Book the time out!

The problem with a virtual event can be the temptation to tune in whilst you are still trying to keep up with business as usual! So our advice would be to treat it like an in-person event, get permission from your boss to attend and dedicate the time to it!

Think about what you want to achieve by attending the conference

Before picking your sessions, think about what you want to achieve by attending the conference. What projects are coming up at work, or what skills gaps do you or your organisation have that you can use your time attending VMworld to achieve? Maybe write yourself a shortlist of questions to answer with your attendance!

Build your agenda

Taking the above in mind, take the time before the event to look at the session catalogue and add the sessions to your agenda using the session builder. Without doing this, it can be overwhelming selecting which sessions to watch during the event due to the pure amount of content to choose from (like a child in a sweet shop).

Filter sessions in the session catalogue

With so many sessions and fantastic content, it can sometimes be difficult to filter through to find relevant information. Therefore, in the session catalogue, we recommend using the filters on the left of the page to filter by session type, product, track, topic, level and more. This will help you find the sessions that are relevant to you.

Get involved in the community

One of the best bits of VMworld is the community engagement throughout every aspect of the event, whether during a keynote, walking around the exhibition hall or during the events in the evening. This is definitely one of the key elements that we miss with events being virtual at the moment, but that isn't to say that the community feel isn't there. So get involved in the conversation on Twitter using #VMworld2021 and engage with the community, share your thoughts, opinions and of course, share others content to help promote their content too!

We will be joining the conference and sharing our thoughts with the community on Twitter, so follow us at VirtualisedReal and BizTechMeg!

Get comfortable and avoid the distractions

When the time has come for your to tune in for VMworld 2021, get comfortable (maybe tune in from your TV in the lounge!), bring your snacks, set your out of office, turn on do not disturb in Teams and tune in! We recommend taking notes during the sessions, but if that doesn't suit you, reserve time in your agenda to reflect on what you have learnt and note the actions you wish to take with this newfound knowledge!

We hope you find these tips useful and enjoy your virtual trip to VMworld 2021!

Register for VMworld 2021 now and build your schedule!!@

Directly following the launch of Scality ARTESCA the Tech Field Day delegates were asked to share their thoughts and opinions on the product.

Delegates Reflect: Tech Field Day Presents Scality and HPE - Gestalt IT

In the video below the delegates reflect on the following points

• What is ARTESCA?

• What is it about ARTESCA that Scality is doing right?

• What does ARTESCA do to appeal to developers?

• ARTESCA is built on a number of open-source tools, which should make it developer-friendly as well, right?

• ARTESCA isn’t just about storing and retrieving data thought, its about data management as well.

• What is our reaction to the launch of ARTESCA alongside HPE?

• Reflecting on the launch itself.

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Following the recent launch of Scality ARTESCA with Tech Field Day I have been investigating the architecture behind ARTESCA a little bit more.

If you would like to read more about the architecture behind Scality ARTESCA check out this whitepaper > https://go.scality.com/l/893901/2021-05-11/3zjqn/893901/1621255966fkouGUtc/artesca_wp_v4.pdf

Depicted within this doodle is the ARTESCA architecture which is able to be deployed in a single node configuration prior to scaling via multiple nodes to petabyte scale. ARTESCA runs within containers on Kubernetes (MetalK8’s today) and is accessed using the standard S3 protocol which makes it easy for developers to quickly and easily develop against whilst the UI, replication features and more will give IT operations confidence to manage through into production.

Initially, ARTESCA is exclusive with HPE for 6 months and is available with a wide variety of configurations, these include all-flash, hybrid and hard disk-based configurations to meet the needs of the individual workloads. There is also a 50TB starter licence available free of charge for you to try prior to scaling further. It is not yet known what will happen after the first 6 months but I assume it will be available as a software-only solution as well as continuing to be made available by HPE and maybe others.

Within ARTESCA there has been a lot of consideration made into the availability of data with local codes to protect against data loss from disk failure as well as parity stripes to protect against simultaneous disk failures, network repair codes for multi-node solutions and of course multiple replication options not only to ARTESCA but also to their RING product and cloud-based S3 storage.

ARTESCA is a really interesting solution for object storage requirements, it is software-based, leverages Kubernetes, has multiple configuration options to meet edge and core use cases and unites developers and operations by offering ease of adoption for developers via the use of the S3 protocol, Kubernetes architecture and full API and for operations, it is easy to manage and monitor, has full monitoring capabilities and is backed by HPE! What’s not to like!

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You are able to see my first doodle and blog post containing information about the launch of Scality ARTESCA here.

During the second half of the Scality ARTESCA launch we switched from the ActualTechMedia webcast and came over the the Tech Field Day portion. You are able to watch the videos once available here.

The Tech Field Day session started with a discussion led by James Governor and Joey D’Antoni focusing on dev-ops and the edge. There was much discussion around kubernetes and the need for object storage as well as the need to automate processes at the edge. We then saw a demonstration by Scality of the new ARTESCA UI. The UI seemed very mature offering you the ability to not only manage ARTESCA platforms but also Scality RING and other S3 compatible repositories such as AWS and Azure Blob.

Whilst in many cases theses systems will be managed and accessed via API’s by developers and then via DevOps automations I believe certainly at the edge there is a need for a fully featured UI to allow operational troubleshooting and maintenance.

One of the elements that was pleasing to see is that the ARTESCA UI allowed for visibility and reporting of the underlying infrastructure layers including Kubernetes and the HPE hardware status. I was also very impressed by the including analytics, including predicted analytics as well as the integrated object browser where you couldn’t only browse objects but add and edit meta data.

Please see above my doodle from the second part of the Scality ARTESCA launch and below some of the UI screenshots.

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You can learn more about Scality ARTESCA here >> SCALITY ARTESCA | scality

and you can see more from HPE on Scality here >> HPE Object Based Storage for Scality Solutions | HPE

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Yesterday Scality in collaboration with HPE launched their new ARTESCA Lightweight, cloud-native object storage product. The launch took place online with a collaboration between ActualTechMedia and Tech Field Day.

ARTESCA is designed for the core to the edge and offers a central point of management not just for your ARTESCA deployments but also for Scality RING and other compatible S3 storage technologies from the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure.

ARTESCA is software built upon Kubernetes to modern cloud-native design principles allowing ease of scale from initial deployments during development through to moving into production. ARTESCA offers dual-level data protection and disaster recovery with distributed erasure codes and local repair codes for durability and fast disk rebuilds alongside integrated geo-replication for DR. .

You can see my tech doodle covering the ActualTechMedia presentation above and watch this space for some more thoughts and doodles from the event.

You can learn more about Scality ARTESCA here >> SCALITY ARTESCA | scality

and you can see more from HPE on Scality here >> HPE Object Based Storage for Scality Solutions | HPE

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Here is my doodle from today's VMware’s Cloud event. Great content shared and good to see further maturity in VMware ‘s approach to the cloud.

Key elements

• VMware Cloud allows you to run traditional and modern applications in a standardised way across on-premises and public clouds

• With Tanzu developers can leverage a native set of APIs irrespective of the cloud where the application will run

• With Tanzu and vCloud Foundation you get a true Dev Sec Ops approach with intrinsic security and operations considered as part of the development process and not as an afterthought

• New VMware Cloud Universal licensing gives you a flexible way based upon credits to consume VMware Cloud irrespective of where you run the workloads, On-Premises or in AWS

• With VMware Cloud Universal you also get access to the Success 360 program for full support with your transformation journey as well as Cloud Console to centrally manage your licensing and monitor your workloads with vRealize integration

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Today Microsoft announced Viva, an Employee Experience Platform integrated right into Microsoft Teams.

Initially, Viva will contain four separate modules.

Viva Connections - Culture and Communication - Utilising SharePoint and Yammer

Viva Insights - Productivity and Well-Being - Utilising Insights

Viva Learning - Utilising content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, Your own content and content from leading providers

Viva Topics - Knowledge and Expertise utilising AI to and in-house experts to tag content with Topics to create your organisations own Wikipedia to be sure people can find the right information at the right time. Previously Project Cortex

For more information check out this the Microsoft VIva page here

Employee Experience & Engagement | Microsoft Viva

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Yesterday saw the launch of the new Poly Studio P series, a portfolio of video and audio devices aimed at giving individuals a professional set of tools to work successful irrespective to where they are working.

Included in the line-up was

• Poly Studio P5 - A 1080P Webcam

• Poly Studio P15 - A 4K webcam with combined speaker and microphone array

• Poly Studio P21 - A 21” USB monitor with integrated, speakers, microphone, vanity light and phone charger

Also announced was the new Poly Lens desktop application that gives users the ability to control their device including the settings whilst IT can leverage Poly Cloud

Below you will see a short video covering my initial thoughts

You can watch the full announcement that was live broadcast on Neil Fluester’s channel below.

Hammerspace presented on Day 3 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. See my doodle above covering their presentation. I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

Intel presented on Day 3 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Please see my doodle above covering their presentation . I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

Be sure to check out my previous doodles covering the Intel Storage Moment event late last year.