Western Digital’s Data Vision at SFD18

At Storage Field Day, the delegates got a glimpse into some data storage innovations and how these will continue to evolve. VP of DCS Business, Narayan Venkat, describes how the data will flow, varying categories of data, and how Western Digital envisions the environment changing to allow for these new paradigms to happen. Data storage is a rapidly changing field, and Western Digital made a convincing case during Storage Field Day that they are prepared to meet whatever the needs of storage that enterprises will discover going forward.

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Western Digital's Data Vision at SFD18

Private and Secure Overlay Networking With Tempered AirWall

At Security Field Day, Justin Warren and the other virtual delegates got to hear from Tempered, who did an overview on their AirWall solution. This sets up a secure networking infrastructure that runs over the top of your existing IP-based network using the Host Identity Protocol. Justin is rather bullish on it, thinking that the future of enterprise networking will likely take a similar approach. Rather than throwing out the concepts of Ethernet and IP addresses that have defined networking for decades, but have recently become overstretched, Tempered’s AirWall takes an incremental approach to innovate on top of that. This allows you to use the infrastructure you already have, letting you add a secure network overlay with a low barrier to entry.

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Private and Secure Overlay Networking with Tempered AirWall

Red Hat OpenShift

Enrico Signoretti joined us as a delegate for our Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat event. For Enrico, rnterprises are quickly moving from an initial evaluation and exploration phase to extensive adoption of containers and microservices for all new applications under development. At the event, he saw how Red Hat is now uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between a rock-solid, open-source foundation already adopted by many enterprises across the world and the innovation introduced by containers and Kubernetes. All of this while mitigating the risk associated with the immaturity of the nascent Kubernetes platform. Be sure to check out his Executive Summary on OpenShift that includes a lot of what was presented at the event.

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Red Hat OpenShift

Managing Data Migration Challenges

Data migration is a thankless task that needs to be performed periodically during hardware refreshes, and of course, regularly to keep expensive storage systems tidy. Fortunately, for traditional block-based workloads, the introduction of technologies like server virtualization have taken most of the pain out of the process. However, migrating unstructured data still seems to represent a challenge. As a result, we see solutions from companies like Hammerspace and Komprise looking to both ease the process and take advantage of hybrid multi-cloud configurations. In this piece Chris Evans looks at what both companies presented at Storage Field Day to held meet this challenge.

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Managing Data Migration Challenges

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.

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

“Hey Juniper, How’s the Security State of My Network?”

In this post, Pieter-Jan Nefkens looks at how Juniper Networks is usingAI/ML on detecting anomalies or other weird behavior on your network. Based on what he saw at Security Field Day, this can help you a lot in gaining more visibility and control in your network. Pieter sees these kind of tools as vital for spotting odd one-off behavior that might go unnoticed, but could have big security implications. Ultimately these are tools to help admins sort through ever increasing loads of data. He’s aware that they aren’t perfect, and that human review of findings is probably still warranted for some time, but he likes what he saw from Juniper.

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"Hey Juniper, How's the security state of my network?"

Cloud Networking Architectures

In this post from Ivan Pepelnjak, he breaks down one of the realities of running virtual machines on cloud infrastructure. These VMs still look for an Ethernet interface. For many enterprise-focused platforms, this means simply emulating a physical Ethernet cable. This allows admins to not have to relearn their networking stack. But the cloud providers implemented virtual networking that can scale beyond a few hundred hosts, using smart NICs. At Cloud Field Day, Pensando showed how they are trying to bring that kind of scale to the enterprise with their own smart NIC. Ivan looks at their solution and how it can fit into the enterprise world.

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Cloud Networking Architectures

HashiCorp Consul Meshes Well With Modern Applications

At Cloud Field Day 6, HashiCorp presented that they are on a mission to help customers unlock the cloud operating model by addressing several key problem areas, including development, security, provisioning and networking. With its comprehensive vision for helping customers transition to a cloud operating model, and its emphasis on service-specific network security with Consul, HashiCorp is doing its part to make this vision a reality.

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HashiCorp Consul Meshes Well with Modern Applications

Extending ON-PREM to CLOUD With Google Cloud VMware Engine

Almost all companies have a desire to go to the cloud these days. But sometimes conventional lift and shift directly to the cloud is just not possible. But there’s a middle way: managed co-location in Google data centers! You heard me. They call it Google Cloud VMware Engine. In this video, Markus Leinonen breaks down what separates Google Cloud VMware Engine from other public cloud integrations, how it extends your on-premand why it might be the right fit for your organization. We’re glad Markus got some of his background for this video from VMware’s presentation at Cloud Field Day. Be sure to subscribe to his channel for some other great enterprise IT videos.

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Extending ON-PREM to CLOUD with Google Cloud VMware Engine

VMware Tanzu Portfolio

This report from Enrico Signoretti looks at VMware’s strategy with Tanzu. This brand represents VMware’s embrace of the Kubernetes ecosystem with a broad product portfolio encompassing core infrastructure as well as multi-cloud solutions. For Enrico, he sees VMware’s effort to build a foundation for mixed environments of virtualized and containerized applications in a multi-cloud scenario appealing to enterprises that are moving quickly to engage hybrid cloud infrastructures. Enrico got a deep dive on Tanzu at Cloud Field Day, so be sure to dig into the video after reading his report.

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VMware Tanzu Portfolio

Infrascale Provides Cloud-Based IT Resilience to the Masses

During Infrascale’s presentation at Storage Field Day 19, they discussed how the rise in capability and popularity of cloud computing has had the fortunate outcome of providing new tools and approaches to solving age-old problems. One such persistent pain point is that of disaster recovery. Infrascale has responded to this by providing a feature-rich platform for protecting against partial and full site failures using a combination of local and cloud resources.

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Infrascale Provides Cloud-Based IT Resilience to the Masses

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.

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Forget Transformation. Go For Digital Stability

Insightful Fabric Management With Cisco Network Insights

What is your network fabric trying to tell you? Are you missing out on important updates about the status of patches and updates? How can you learn more about what you need to accomplish? Tom Hollingsworth looks at Cisco Network Insights Advisor and how it can help you decipher what you need to be listening to. Cisco showed off NIA at Networking Field Day, and Tom sees it as a support tech dedicated to doing nothing but update you on what the latest issues are that could affect things and how you can mitigate or remove those problems. And for the times when you can do neither, NIA can help you get your ducks in a row when you need to call TAC.

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Insightful Fabric Management with Cisco Network Insights

I Want Network Integration, I’m Not Getting It

At Cloud Field Day, Alastair Cooke was interested in hearing from AWS and VMware about how they are approaching network connectivity and integration between the two. He’s not a fan of point solutions that function or are managed differently; they add up to more problems. While the two showed a lot of interesting integrations, ultimately he’d like to see VMware on AWS networking fully integrated with the AWS VPC network as an equal to VPC. For now, there are a collection of workable solutions involving virtual interfaces, VPNs, and proprietary network bridging (HCX).

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I Want Network Integration, I’m Not Getting It

Scalable Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Teams With VMware Bitfusion!

Using virtualization to use CPU resources more efficiently in IT is such a familiar concept, it’s hard to think of a time before it was commonplace. The same cannot be said for using GPU resources, which in many organizations still operates at a one node per one user experience. To address this, VMware acquired Bitfusion in 2019 and is now rolling out their tech into vSphere 7. This allows users to request GPU resources using the bitfusion command, which can then aggregate and distribute resources over the network. Christopher Kusek heard some of the initial details at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld 2019, and is excited to see them rolling out. He’s sees this as evidence of the maturation of ML and AI workloads in the enterprise, and Bitfusion will let organizations make best use of their existing GPU infrastructure.

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Scalable Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Teams with VMware Bitfusion!

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management – Bringing the Control Plane Back On-Premises

Bhavin Shah was trying to keep up with the announcements from Red Hat virtual summit and Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat. One thing that stood out in the new OpenShift Container Platform 4.4 was Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. This new control plane that helps you manage your OpenShift and/or your managed Kubernetes clusters running either On-Prem or in any of the major Public cloud platforms. This allows customers to deploy this control plane on any OpenShift Cluster, whether on-prem or in any of the public clouds. Red Hat ACM is currently in Tech Preview, so be sure to check out the full videos from Red Hat’s event to get all the details.

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Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management – Bringing the control plane back On-Premises

VMware Adds Distributed IPS/IDS to NSX

In this piece, Justin Warren looks at how VMware is adding security features to its networking efforts, something they recently highlighted at Security Field Day. Part of this involves adding intrusion detection/prevention to NSX. For Justin, support for groups and tags has been a vital inclusion. Groups allow admins to group objects together and set common rules against that group. Meanwhile tags let you add arbitrary attributes that follow an information scheme. Combined these two features can provide a way for admins to compliment their packet policies for security. Justin still thinks VMware needs to further operationalize these features to make them truly comprehensive for network security, but clearly the effort is being put into their platforms.

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VMware Adds Distributed IPS/IDS to NSX

Defeating Configuration Drift With Gluware

No two configurations are the same. Usually because they’ve been modified outside of recommended parameters. If you want to stop this from happening in your network, you need a tool that can detect the drift in your devices. Tom Hollingsworth examines Gluware and their presentation during Networking Field Day to see how they can help network admins keep your configs on track. Their drift tool takes a snapshot of the configuration of a device and allows you to quickly compare it with the state of the device later on. Tom admits to causing some network drift in his time, so he’s glad to see there’s a solution out there to help address it.

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Defeating Configuration Drift with Gluware

Rogue Device Detection Thanks to PathSolutions

How can you track down all the devices in your network that you don’t know about? How can you ensure they aren’t security risks or potential threat vectors? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at PathSolutions and their new TotalView Security Operations Manager and how it can help you figure out what’s hiding just out of plain sight. He got a deep dive from PathSolutions during Security Field Day, so once you check out Tom’s piece, be sure to check out their full presentation video.

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Rogue Device Detection Thanks To PathSolutions

PathSolutions Security Operations Manager Helps Humans Find Security Gremlins

At Security Field Day, PathSolutions did a deep dive into an extension to their TotalView product called Security Operations Manager. This is aimed at helping mid-market IT folks gain better situational awareness of what’s happening in their network. The idea is to help admins quickly orient themselves to what’s happening in the often messy and under-resourced world of mid-market IT, where IT generalists are the rule and security specialists often aren’t available. Justin Warren was a delegate at the event, and while he found that the UX for the solution could use an update, the focus and plain language focus of Security Operations Manager made it an interesting solution for its intended customers.

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PathSolutions Security Operations Manager Helps Humans Find Security Gremlins