In all the years I have been part of the technical community, I have not been part of a Tech Field Day event to date. That changed last week when I was able to sit in on Cloud Field Day 4 here at Cohesity HQ and we presented our unique cloud story.
While I was not the presenter, my blog will provide an outside-in view of the two-hour session. First and foremost, if you want to check out the presentation video, scroll down to the bottom and have a look. Also, I’ve included some of Stephen Foskett’s photos from the day.
We had a full panel of delegates show up early in the morning for breakfast. There was a bit of social interaction while we got the room setup and everyone ready to go.
The camera started rolling and our own Aaron Delp got things started by discussing “Cohesity at a Glance”.
Because it was CLOUD field day, some folks wanted to understand how Cohesity – which has been part of Storage Field Day in the past – was here specifically for cloud topics. Aaron did an outstanding job laying out the company overview, and differentiators for Cohesity. Aaron also stressed that the day would be made up of mostly live demos, which excited most of the folks in the room.
We're told that @Cohesity session will be 75% live demo so stick around. It's going to be fun! #CFD4 #vExpert #TechFieldDay
— Ather Beg (@AtherBeg) August 10, 2018
Next, a presentation by Sai Mukundan and Jon Hildebrand, who covered the topic of Cloud Adoption Trends.
Jon dove right into his familiar role as presenter – having previously been a Tech Field Day delegate – and demonstrated CloudArchive. The notion of long-term retention was not new to most people listening, but they liked many aspects of the product, especially the ability to archive to multiple clouds at once. Jon even showed off some PowerShell to automate the creation of the external cloud targets.
https://twitter.com/stingray92/status/1027943212617322496
Jon then moved into discussing the initial use for CloudSpin. However, the later demo would actually show this a little more in depth. Less than 40 minutes into the two-hour session, the feedback on Twitter was exceptional as folks tuned into the stream to see what Jon was presenting.
Next up: Sameer Nori and Dayanand Sharma took over to dive deeper into CloudSpin for Application Test and Development use cases. After a few slides, the demo showing a full migration of a Web and Database application to Amazon Web Services (AWS) was presented.
Data was also updated on the cloud version so attendees could be shown that the virtual machine was in fact no longer the same one. No smoke and mirrors for Cohesity! Once again, the delegates seemed to be impressed by this new Cohesity capability. Having been an administrator myself, I can agree completely with this tweet.
Would have made my life so much easier when I was a System admin. #CFD4 https://t.co/VrDUFkuGyZ
— Liselotte Foverskov (@LFoverskov) August 10, 2018
Moving on: Something that Adai Arumugum covered was very interesting indeed. I’ve worked personally with other cloud archive tools, and something that is not easy to do is move the data from one object store to another and maintain the archive job from the source.
Adai showed how Cohesity can continue running CloudArchive jobs, even if you migrate the data (using 3rd party tools) from one cloud provider to another. He also covered the fact Cohesity can do cloud-native backups with the Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition, which piqued some interest.
https://twitter.com/stingray92/status/1027952170623062016
Finally the session ended with the one and only Rawlinson Rivera bringing all the things they had seen together.
Rawlinson discussed the business use cases, and how Cohesity can directly impact business outcomes. He brought together the simplicity of the platform, the standardized UI across all versions, and the ways you can even leverage tools like vRealize Automation to build a complete policy.
APIs matter in infrastructure tools. The ability to consume capabilities from your tool of choice is huge. @Cohesity #CFD4
— Nathaniel Avery @ Google Next ‘24 (@nathaniel_avery) August 10, 2018
There were other standout tweets of the day. This was one of my favorites.
https://twitter.com/vDestination/status/1027998785941557248
I would encourage anyone that hasn’t seen the full video of Cohesity’s cloud presentation to check it out and learn about all these new capabilities. You can also find out more if you are heading to VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas later this month. Just swing by the Cohesity booth #1420 and come find me, or anyone else, to talk more about any of these topics.
Thanks to Stephen for coming to Cohesity HQ, all the delegates for engaged conversation, and all the presenters from Cohesity.
Cohesity at a Glance with Aaron Delp from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.
