product strategy Archives · Digital Sunshine Solutions

13Jun

By Gina MinksNo Comments

Tech for Evil Case Study: Clearview AI

You may have heard about Clearview AI in the news, especially around facial recognition. But who is this company, and what do they actually do? Setting the Stage First a bit of background to this post. Four years ago I published this post about Tech for Evil during the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In it, I gave a technical review of how law enforcement used drones and LRAD devices against peaceful protesters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0pnEZ6cen4 Weapons used against the peaceful pipeline protesters at Standing Rock Here we are, four years later. People have forgotten about Standing Rock, if they even heard about it when it happened. Now, we're in the midst of a global outcry against police violence against black people, that ironically is ...

What Can On-Premises Ops Teams Learn from Dev Processes?

6Mar

By Gina MinksNo Comments

product strategy

What Can On-Premises Ops Teams Learn from Dev Processes?

Disclaimer: I consult for RackN, but I was not asked to write this post (or paid to do so), and it did not go through an editorial cycle with them. The following represents my own words and opinions. Automation is a foundational pillar of digital transformation, but is it possible for on-premises ops teams to automate bare metal? Can ops teams adopt public cloud processes to advance on-premises processes? This post will define a few cloud infrastructure terms and discuss RackN Digital Rebar's latest announcement. Here are the RackN official announcement materials, if you'd like to skip to straight to that. Press ReleaseBlog PostNewStack post, VMblog post https://youtu.be/XI_7nM6wpxU On-Premises Ops Teams Are Still Important! One of the good things that came from develo...

Project Nautilus emerged as Dell’s Streaming Data Platform

22Feb

By Gina Minks1 Comment

product strategy

Project Nautilus emerged as Dell’s Streaming Data Platform

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 19. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions. Yesterday, Dell EMC's Project Nautilus emerged as Dell EMC's Streaming Data Platform. I wrote this post based on the presentation we were given at #SFD19, and decided to keep the Project Nautilus name throughout my report. I love it when presenters tell us what world they are coming from, and tie our shared past to new products. Ted Schachter started his career at Tandem doing real-time proce...

Taming Unstructured Data with Dell EMC Isilon

21Feb

By Gina MinksNo Comments

Tech Field Day, product strategy

Taming Unstructured Data with Dell EMC Isilon

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 19. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions. Taming Unstructured Data A common thread discussed by almost every vendor we visited was the issue of taming unstructured data. Vendors are building products that their customers can use to turn massive amounts of unstructured data into information. They all told us that their customers are demanding intelligent insights that are available anytime accessible anywhere. The groups from Dell EMC S...

Tiger Technology Brings the Cloud to You

11Feb

By Gina MinksNo Comments

Tech Field Day

Tiger Technology Brings the Cloud to You

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 19. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions. The first presentation of Storage Field Day 19 was Tiger Technology. They are a data management company that has been around since 2004, mainly providing solutions primarily for the media and entertainment industry. This industry is interesting to modern storage because of their application requirements, in particular video. These applications are usually mission critical, and require high b...

4Feb

By Gina MinksNo Comments

Tech Field Day, product strategy

Is storage still relevant?

Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley CA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer. I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views. Is storage still relevant in today's cloud and serverless environments? At Storage Field Day 19 we spent several hours with Western Digital, and heard from ten different presenters. Did they show us that storage is still relevant? Hardware Must Innovate for Software to Innovate I think the industry often forgets that software innovation is impossible without hardware innovation. We've seen some pretty amazing hardware innovations...

12Jan

By Gina MinksNo Comments

Tech Field Day, product strategy

Storage Field Day 19: Getting Back to My Roots

I’m excited that I have been invited to be a delegate at Storage Field Day 19. This is a little different than the Tech Field Day I attended in 2019, because the focus of all the presentations at this event is data storage. I am looking forward to this because I am a storage person. My career started as a Technical Trainer at EMC, I was a storage admin for a pharma company. I went back to EMC to develop technical training, I then went to work for Dell Storage, and then Inktank (a startup that provided services and support for Ceph). I guess you could say storage is in my blood, so Storage Field Day should be lots of fun. What to expect at Storage Field Day Here are the companies we’ll be visiting (in the order they will be presenting), and what I’m looking forward to hearing ...

11Dec

By Gina MinksNo Comments

Tech Field Day

NetApp Goes to the Cloud #TFD20

This post - NetApp Goes to the Cloud - is my review of materials presented at #TFD20. NetApp’s 1st presentation at #TFD20 was about NetApp's cloud strategy. I was very excited to see Nick Howell (aka @DatacenterDude), NetApp’s Global Field CTO for Cloud Data Services, there to greet us and kick things off. I’ve always known him to be knowledgeable, visionary, and a bit controversial. All of my favorite things! And I was psyched to see how he was going to frame his conversation. Infrastructure Admin’s Journey to the Cloud Nicks’ presentation was titled “OK, Now What?” An Infrastructure Admin’s Journey to the cloud. https://youtu.be/0937GkO9U5s He set up the history of things for datacenter admins, and how quickly they need use their existing skills to pivot if they’re g...

10Dec

By Gina Minks1 Comment

Tech Field Day

Tech Field Day from the Other Side

Last month I accomplished my dream of becoming a Tech Field Day delegate for #TFD20. Because I left my job at VMware in order to launch Digital Sunshine Solutions, I finally no longer work for a vendor and I qualify to be a delegate! This post is a reflection on the differences between being at a vendor and hosting Tech Field day and being a delegate. Tech Field Day history For those of you who don’t know, Tech Field Day is a roving event run by Stephen Foskett. 10 years ago, when we were all figuring out what blogging and podcasting meant to big tech companies, he had the vision to take influencers who were talking technically and strategically about products on their personal blogs and podcasts right to the vendors. This gave vendors the opportunity to explain the products and pr...

Cloud Migration: The only path to Digital Transformation?

3Dec

By Gina Minks1 Comment

product strategy

Cloud Migration: The only path to Digital Transformation?

As the end-of-year conference dust settles, it’s becoming clear that we’re finally experiencing the long-heralded digital transformation. We have cloud, we have hybrid cloud, we have edge, but the technologies have improved to the point that it’s possible now to choose how to implement what has become known as “the cloud”. As always, my question is what does this all mean for ops? The Amazon Web Service conference re:Invent is this week in Las Vegas. I’ll be there to chat with people, trying to figure out if what I think is happening matches the reality of what’s happening in organizations. As part of my prep, I wrote this blog post. It is meant to be a bit controversial. My end goal is to find the reality of our current situation, find ways to acknowledge the hype and with real ...