A Look at Broadcom’s Jericho3-Ai Ethernet Fabric: Schedules, Credits, and Cells

Broadcom has devised innovative mechanisms to tackle the issues facing the development of an Ethernet-based fabric supporting AI workloads, offering solutions to alleviate congestion, latency, and prevent dropped frames or packets. These methods, which include a scheduling framework, cells, and credits, have been showcased at Network Field Day 32, demonstrating how Broadcom creates an Ethernet fabric optimized for AI via its Jericho3-AI and Ramon ASICs. By creating a scheduled fabric and dividing Ethernet frames into equal-size cells, Broadcom minimizes tail latency and optimizes load balancing, enhancing the handling of AI and HPC workloads. Read more in this article for Packet Pushers written by Drew Conry-Murray.


Day Two Cloud 198: Modern Cloud Design Themes From CFD 17

Day Two Cloud’s Ned Bellavance, Ethan Banks, and Michael Levan highlight some key design themes at Cloud Field Day 17, hosted by Tech Field Day. These themes include platform engineering, data protection, disaster recovery, and the co-existence of old and new technologies in modern IT. Kubernetes’ growing status as the default platform choice was mentioned. Backup and disaster recovery solutions by HYCU, Zerto, and others bridge the gap between on-prem and cloud environments. Listen to this episode to learn more!


Anuta Networks Adds Synthetic Tests for On-Demand Network Performance Monitoring

Drew Conry-Murray gives his thoughts on the “sensible addition” of the active assurance capability of ATOM, the network automation and orchestration software from Anuta Networks. Check out the article on the Packet Pushers website.


Juniper Apstra Freeform Supports New Topologies, Protocols for Data Center Automation-With Caveats

At the most recent Networking Field Day, Juniper Networks announced their Apstra data center automation technology; Freeform. In this article, Drew Conry-Murray goes into detail on Freeform and what goal’s Apstra has with this new technology. Take a look here at Drew’s thoughts!


Day Two Cloud 157: Highlights of Cloud Field Day 14

Day Two Clouds host, Ned Bellavance, attended this past Cloud Field Day as a delegate! In his latest podcast, joined by Ethan Banks and Chris Hayner, they talk about presentations from WEKA, Alkira, and Morpheus Data. Check out their thoughts here!


An Overview of Cisco’s SecureX Device Insights

After seeing Cisco present at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US, Drew Conry-Murray writes about Cisco’s SecureX Extended Detection and Response Platform and it’s new SecureX Device Insights feature. Conry-Murray highlights SecureX Device Insights’ goal of answering security and network teams questions on asset tracking and report running as well as questions surrounding third-party information about devices on the network. Check out his thoughts on his website, Packet Pushers, and be sure to also check out all the videos from our event at Cisco Live this year!


Briefings in Brief 102: ZPE Systems Melds Universal CPE With Out-Of-Band Management

The Packet Pushers take on the Networking Field Day presentations by ZPE Systems in this podcast episode. Specifically, Drew Conry-Murray and Ed Horley attended the event as delegates, and use their experiences there to guide the conversation on ZTE. Take a listen to learn more!


Briefings in Brief 101: Juniper Wants to Wire Your Campus Fabric With Mist Cloud

Juniper Networks has announced a new wired campus fabric solution that uses EVPN VXLAN to create a fabric and ties into the Juniper Mist Cloud for automation and management. Drew Conry-Murray, a Networking Field Day delegate, dives into the details to the solution Juniper presented in September. Check out the podcast Drew and fellow delegate, Ed Horley, published!


Day Two Cloud 059: Cloud Field Day Wrap-Up

In this episode of Day Two Cloud, Ethan Banks breaks down the second day of presentations from Cloud Field Day with delegates Ned Bellavance and Adam Fisher. This was a packed day of presentation, featuring technical deep dives from Veeam, Zerto, Diamanti, Morpheus Data, and Aruba Networks. They dig into the background on each company, what they showed off at the event, and how significant each presentation was from their IT lens.


Network Break 288: Aruba ESP Senses Opportunity at the Edge; Intel Wrestles With New Chip Attacks

In this episode of Network Break, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss what they saw at the Networking Field Day Experience at Aruba Atmosphere Digital, where the company showed its Aruba Edge Services Platform. This brings together their wireless, wired, and SD-Branch portfolio and layers a new cloud-based AI service over the top. They discuss how this fits into the competitive landscape, and how it sets up Aruba for expanding this concept to the cloud.


Forget Transformation. Go for Digital Stability

Evangelists of digital transformation emphasize speed and change, something often anathema to infrastructure professionals. In the end though, both want the same thing, infrastructure that’s robust, resilient, and stable. In this post, Drew Conry-Murray looks at red Hat’s presentation from Cloud Field Day, who showed how with telemetry, automation, tooling, training, and processes, organizations can build infrastructure to support rapid change and innovation. In the end, this isn’t just a technology problem, people and process need to be part of this for it to work.


Aid Complex Troubleshooting With Distributed Tracing – Day Two Cloud Podcast Video

Distributed tracing is the dark art of tracking a transaction that passes through several microservices for troubleshooting purposes. Why was the transaction slow? Hard to say, especially when the failure is intermittent. Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks explain the problem and how SolarWinds Application Performance Monitoring suite is tackling it with Pingdom, Loggly, and AppOptics. Especially AppOptics, something they heard a lot about during SolarWinds’ Cloud Field Day presentation.


Moving Workloads With VMware HCX – Day Two Cloud Podcast Video

After hearing from VMware at Cloud Field Day, Ethan Banks and Ned Bellavance discuss moving VMware workloads with the VMware HCX. Do admins want this? Don’t they really want to move work between Kubernetes clusters instead? Or is that even the right question? It kind of was, but it kind of wasn’t. Kubernetes & containers are not simple drop-in replacements for VMware & virtual machines. Therefore, HCX has use cases, and they explain what they think they are.


Day Two Cloud 047: Highlights and Analysis From Cloud Field Day 7

In this episode of the Day Two Cloud podcast, Ethan Banks and Ned Bellavance discuss some of the presentations from Cloud Field Day. They looked at the big presentations from VMware, SolarWinds, and startup Pensando in the episode, specifically focusing on VMware Cloud on AWS, monitoring cloud performance with SolarWinds, and Pensando’s SmartNIC to offload a server’s network processing. Having two great hosts discussing the latest cloud goodness makes for a good podcast.


Automating Disaster Recovery Is Risky Business – Day Two Cloud Podcast Video

Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks think through VMware’s DRaaS offering, pondering the pros and cons of automation disaster recovery & business continuity. Sounds great, but are users testing regularly? What’s the failback process after the disaster is over? VMware went into detail during their Cloud Field Day presentation, and Ethan and Ned break it down in this episode of Day Two Cloud.


Build Your Network Apps on Pensando’s Cloud of SmartNICs – Day Two Cloud Video

Pensando Systems definitely made a big impression at Cloud Field Day. The company is a startup that threatens to be a juggernaut if past performance of the founders is any indicator of future results. Pensando’s made an ARM processor and paired it to a NIC and orchestration platform. Put the NIC in your servers and manage the NIC fleet centrally. Use the platform to create networking applications offloaded from the x86 CPU, all for less than a 30W power draw. Ethan Banks and Ned Bellavance discuss the implications of what they saw at the event, and who will be Pensando’s customers.


VMC on AWS Is More Cloud Like All the Time – Day Two Cloud Podcast Video

After hearing from VMware at Cloud Field Day, Ethan Banks and Ned Bellavance consider VMware Cloud on AWS now that a couple of years have gone by since the service launched. Is it really cloud yet, or just VMware in a colo alongside AWS? It’s really both. They dig into it on a recent episode of the Day Two Cloud Podcast. Be sure to check it out, watch VMware’s presentation from the event, and let us know what you thing!


Aruba Bridges 5G and Wi-Fi 6 With New Air Pass Feature

Aruba recently announced a new offering called Air Pass, which Drew Conry-Murray looks at in this post. Air Pass bridges 5G cellular networks with in-building WLANs to enable seamless hand-off between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 networks. This effectively allows carriers and enterprises to build seamless handoffs from cellular to WLAN for voice and data on devices. A key technical compontent of this handoff is Passpoint, a Wi-Fi Alliance developed standard to provide automatic authentication between the carrier and WLAN. Be sure to check out Aruba’s presentation from Mobility Field Day last year, where they dug into the specifics of Passpoint and how it operates in their devices and software.


Day Two Cloud 038: Making the Case for Third-Party Cloud Storage

Tech Field Day founder Stephen Foskett was recently a guest on the Day Two Cloud podcast. On the episode, he and Ned Bellavance discuss third-party cloud storage, and how it fits into a market with so many native options readily available. In the episode they discuss common enterprise use cases, and examines key issues including performance, data management, and operations.


What I Want in a Root Cause Analysis Tool

In this post from Ethan Banks, he outlines what he’s looking for in a root cause analysis tool. It’s something that despite hearing a lot about at events like Tech Field Day, he feels there isn’t a unified solution. Current tools are too specialized to serve broader infrastructure, which is after all designed to serve applications. Hopefully a solution will come to market soon to meet Ethan’s criteria.