Brief but necessary intro: Tech Field Day recently held a two-day special event focused on Dell Technologies storage and compute/HCI solutions, specifically PowerStore, PowerMax and VxRail (with bonus content on APEX and CloudIQ). Most of the topics were relevant to VMware admins and architects as the interoperability of Dell’s solutions with the vSphere (and above) stack was a common theme that accompanied the audience for the whole duration of the event.
If you want to watch the many presentations and the very cool demos, all the videos are available as usual on the event page for your async consumption. In this post (or perhaps series?) I’d like to gather a few ideas and impressions I collected as a delegate. This by no means will be an extensive and detailed analysis as I will stick to what impressed me, bookmarking concepts for my own reference. If you want to dig deeper or check other specific topics I am not touching here, go ahead and check the online videos, the nice people at Tech Field Day will appreciate it!
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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.