Next week I will fly to Boston to attend my first full Tech Field Day conference as a delegate.
Last year I was lucky enough to be invited to the smaller scale Tech Field Day Extra event at VMworld Europe and I really enjoyed the experience, so you can imagine my excitement when I received the invite from Stephen and Tom to join them at TFD14.
Not yet time to pack a bag, but definitely time to start doing some research on the three vendors that will present at TFD14: ClearSky Data, Turbonomic and Datrium.
Let’s start this TFD14 Preview Series from ClearSky Data: from what I understand ClearSky has a very unusual approach to Cloud Storage which is normally intended for secondary/object storage kind of use cases. ClearSky has developed an interesting architecture that allows for storing all your data in the cloud while not sacrificing the performance (and use cases) typical of primary storage – all of this going beyond the obvious caching technologies that have been around for some time. More »
Nimble Storage was founded in 2008 by Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari (both formerly at Data Domain) and the company delivered their first product to market in 2010 (they went out of stealth mode and announced the CS200 array at Tech Field Day 3 in 2010); since then Nimble Storage witnessed a rapid growth, counting now more than 9000 customers in 50 different countries. In the meanwhile the portfolio of products also grew and Nimble Storage now define themselves as an all-round “Storage Provider” for hypervisors and applications. Particularly notable is the network of Technology Alliances Nimble established with very diverse vendors like Cisco, Microsoft, Splunk, Oracle, Veeam, VMware, Citrix, Commvault and very recently Lenovo; this alone should say a lot about how versatile and interoperable Nimble solutions are. 
Paeesler is a German company founded in 1997 by Dirk Paeesler, who wanted to create an easy to deploy and operate network monitoring solution, having no idea that what was at the time a “one man show” would have become in 20 years a company with 150,000 deployments worldwide and a staff of 170 people based in different countries. Paessler is a quite peculiar company as it is completely independent and owned by its founders and staff. It is also interesting to note that PRTG, Paessler’s solution, is adopted by 70% of Fortune 100 companies worldwide and acknowledged in Gartner’s magic quadrant.