A Week of Unexpected Expectedness With Forward Networks

In this post, Tom Hollingsworth reviews the Forward Networks presentation about a week in the life of a network engineer from a recent Networking Field Day and how their Network Query Engine can help you get a jump on those totally unexpected problems you’re expecting. For Tom, NQE is the resource network admins can talk to in order to find the information they have to have to make the right decisions. It’s like a network encyclopedia. And any resource that can cut down on time to resolve problems or troubleshoot issues means admins can spend less of their week working on unexpected issues and more time keeping things running smoothly so those issues don’t crop up.

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A Week of Unexpected Expectedness with Forward Networks

How VMware Marketplace Makes Simple to Deploy Vendors and Open Source Solutions

Raff Poltronieri joined us for his 7th full Field Day event with Cloud Field Day. At the event, he heard from VMware’s Product Marketing & Strategy Manager Nee Palaka, who led a deep dive on the VMware Marketplace. Raff really liked the potential of VMware Marketplace, which lets vendors reach VMware’s customer base, and also provides an opportunity for customers to use and install third party solutions plus open source products inside their VMware environments. He sees three main use cases for Marketplace, simplifying moving customers to the cloud, maximizing their investment in VMware’s platform, and ensuring developer flexibility.

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How VMware Marketplace makes simple to deploy vendors and open source solutions

VMware Cloud on AWS: Gaining Momentum and Maturity

Ather Beg is a fan of VMware Cloud on AWS, so he was glad that the company spent much of their recent Cloud Field Day presentation on the subject. As a delegate at the event, he got to hear about some of the exciting enhancements to VMware Cloud on AWS, including Elastic DRS Rapid Scale-Out and VMware Cloud Director Service for MSPs. The former let’s admins set Elastic RDS policy to configure a SDDC to scale-up quickly by adding up to 4 hosts at a time while reacting to a scale-out event, rather than timing out after two. The latter allows MSPs to use VMware Cloud on AWS as their multi-tenanted platform to serve customers. Overall a lot of interesting refinements to the service.

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VMware Cloud on AWS: Gaining Momentum and Maturity

SolarWinds Joins the Cloud APM Game

Justin Warren sees the market for cloud monitoring tools as both crowded and operating on unstable ground. He got to see how SolarWinds plans to differentiate itself in this field at Cloud Field Day, with their Application Performance Monitoring suite. This consists of AppOptics, Loggly, and Pingdom, three products that SolarWinds brought in through acquisitions over the years. Justin sees this as a a cloud-based version of SolarWinds’ existing Orion platform. Justin would like to see the APM suite have deeper integration with Orion, but he wonders if these are being kept as separate to not bog down APM with legacy solutions that may not be relevant to organizations in the future. Be sure to check out his article and dig into the full presentation video for all the details.

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SolarWinds Joins The Cloud APM Game

Hammerspace Wants to Be Your Cross-Cloud Data Platform

The challenge of data management is something organizations have struggled with for decades. Within the storage market, the race has been on to provide customers with a solution that helps ease the burden associated with data management within the data center and across clouds. At Cloud Field Day 6, Hammerspace presents the answer customers are looking for.

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Hammerspace Wants To Be Your Cross-Cloud Data Platform

Rapid Incident Reponse With PathSolutions Security Operations Manager

At Security Field Day, Rob Coote joined us as a delegate and was able to participate in a fantastic conversation with PathSolutions CTO Tim Titus, as he presented TotalView Security Operations Manager and its capabilities as a SecOps tool that can greatly improve awareness and response time to security events within a network. Investigating alerts can be tedious, and can take up a lot of time, only to find out in many cases that the alert was benign, and doesn’t require intervention. TotalView Security Operations Manager is a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) product designed to optimize event response, reduce wasted time on false positives, and provide a faster path to quarantine and remediation.

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Rapid Incident Reponse with PathSolutions Security Operations Manager

Gremlin Grappling With PathSolutions

For Becky Elliott, the ability of a network engineer to detect, troubleshoot, and respond to the inevitable network availability and performance issues borders on the preternatural. Having the right tools available can save not just time, but frustration for a lot of organizations to track down these issues. At Security Field Day, she got to hear from PathSolutions and get an overview of their TotalView Security Operations Manager. This has the ability to track down some security and networking gremlins in your network like unsecured protocols, unknown IOT devices, and unauthorized configuration changes. Becky really enjoys that all of these great capabilities are wrapped in a simple and clean UI.

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Gremlin Grappling with PathSolutions

HPE Nimble dHCI Bridges the Gap Between Converged and Hyperconverged

Hyperconverged solutions have done a great deal to simplify the way datacenter infrastructure is approached. However, these types of solutions do have their flaws, and they aren’t a good fit in every situation. HPE has recognized this and brought the best attributes of converged stacks and hyperconverged solutions to market in the form of HPE Nimble dHCI.

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HPE Nimble dHCI Bridges the Gap Between Converged and Hyperconverged

Network Field Day 22

Tony Efantis wrote up this piece looking back at Networking Field Day. An in-person event, Tony got to see first hand, not just the excellent presentations from a wide swath of networking companies, but to experience the community aspects that go on behind the scenes. We’re glad that Tony found the experience to be “magical”, and we’re happy that we’re able to keep the magic going with our virtual Field Day events too!

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Network Field Day 22

A Pragmatic Look Into PathSolutions Visibility Into SecOps!

We were thrilled to have PathSolutions present at our recent Security Field Day event. After speaking to the company’s Founder and CTO Tim Titus, Christopher Kusek was excited to be a delegate at the event and hear their technical deep dive. In this post, he gives an overview on the latest updates to their TotalView portfolio, including the Proactive Issue Resolution which holds a special place is Christopher’s heart after having tracked down a number of root cause issues the old fashioned way. He also digs into the Security Operations Manager functions, and looks at how PathSolutions offers not just security visibility, but also visibility into how you’re spending your budget across your infrastructure.

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A pragmatic look into PathSolutions visibility into SecOps!

Network Field Day 22 – DriveNets

Tony Efantis attended his first Networking Field Day event, and thought DriveNets really set a high bar with their kickoff presentation. They showed how they’ve created a horizontally scalable routing platform by completely disaggregating the software from the hardware. While that may sound like a like of buzzwords, Tony was happy to see DriveNets offered a truly unique approach to routing that really makes them stand out in an increasingly crowded market. While horizontal scale isn’t something that every organization needs, Tony sees it as a natural fit for service providers and cloud scalers where growth is rapid and seemingly never ending. DriveNets lets its customers add resources as needed in the form of adding nodes. Be sure to dig into his full piece for all his thoughts, then jump into DriveNets’ presentation video.

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Network Field Day 22 - DriveNets

Tom’s Virtual Corner at Cisco Live US 2020

Tom’s Corner at Cisco Live US have become an almost legendary part of Cisco Live US lore. If you’re ever met Tom, you know he’s a people person and love making connections, especially with networking folks. Just because in-person conferences are on hold for a while, doesn’t mean that Tom can’t bring it back. That’s why he’s doing Tom’s Virtual Corner at Cisco Live US 2020. Be sure to join Tom on Zoom any time during meeting running from about 8:00am PT through 1:00pm PT. Check out the post for how to get the invite and we’ll see you there!

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Tom’s Virtual Corner at Cisco Live US 2020

What Is APM and Why Should I Care?

In this piece, Chris Grundemann gives an overview of why application performance management matters in modern IT. As a hard-core infrastructure engineer, he appreciates the importance of getting visibility across infrastructure. But the reason that is so important is to get better indicators into application performance, which is the reason that the infrastructure exists in the first place. At Cloud Field Day, SolarWinds showed how their APM suite can help provide visibility to the application layer, even as backing infrastructure becomes more challenging with moves to the cloud.

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What is APM and why should I care?

Get Your Network Under Control With Gluware

Phil Gervasi has seen the rise of network automation, and thinks across IT the idea and practice has gone pretty mainstream. Of course, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a steep learning curve for organizations to embrace automation. But in practice, Phil hasn’t seen that as the primary thing stopping automation efforts, rather its the resources it takes to get automation going at scale that stalls many organizations. But he found that Gluware’s vendor-agnostic, pre-packaged automation platform is a good way to smooth out this process. At Networking Field Day, they showed how they can operate alongside homegrown automation initiatives, and with traditional local device management. But for Phil, the ability to bring their pre-built intelligence to the network can solve the problem of having to develop everything from scratch.

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Get Your Network Under Control with Gluware

VMC on AWS: 5 Reasons You Should Give a Damn!

Jason Benedicic was one of the delegates at our Security Field Day event last week and got to hear from VMware, and came away with a new appreciation for VMware Cloud on AWS. Much of the appeal comes from his experience refactoring applications, moving big monolithic apps to the cloud can be quite challenging. These are often tightly coupled with other infrastructure components, meaning moving to the cloud can be a very gradual process as you disentangle everything. VMware Cloud on AWS allows organizations to move the existing application and all its dependencies as-is to a familiar operating environment, as close the cloud as possible. Jason breaks down a lot of the concerns admins have with this approach, and thinks this is a viable solution for many organizations with legacy applications.

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VMC on AWS: 5 reasons you should give a damn!

MPLS + P4 = Pensando; But Does It Add Up?

Leading up to Cloud Field Day, Chris Grundemann was exceptionally excited about hearing from Pensando. Partly because he’s a bit of a neophile and they just came out of stealth. Also because what they are working he found really cool, adding P4 programming language support with hardware to provide software-defined, edge-accelerated, always-secure and visible, centrally managed platform that can run in any environment, all aimed the cloud! Combined with a prestigious founding team, Chris thinks they offer a truly innovative solution that while a niche use case for now, can be built out over time.

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MPLS + P4 = Pensando; But Does It Add Up?

Security Field Day

Security Field Day is the newest event in the Field Day family, but it’s consistently featured the mix of industry leading presenters and innovative startups the event series is known for. At our more recent Security Field Day, VMware took the stage. While the company is synonymous with its virtualization solutions, they also have an impressive security portfolio. During the event, they discussed VMware Service-defined Firewall, NSX Distributed IDS/IPS, using NSX Intelligence as a distributed analytics engine, and their Intelligent Web Application Firewall solution. It was a packed session, so be sure to check out the full video.

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Security Field DayNSX Distributed IDS/IPS

The Three Philosophies of SolarWinds APM

Application Performance Management often faces the thankless task of trying to monitor and manage increasingly complex applications. SolarWinds’ APM suite smartly views apps through three distinct philosophical lenses to provide IT will a full spectrum of visibility. In this post, Rich Stroffolino takes a look at the APM solutions SolarWinds presented at Cloud Field Day, including Loggly, Pingdom, and AppOptics. Each of these provides a key component to the overall suite, and while they do interoperate and feed into each other, they do so with a unique approach to the APM problem.

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The Three Philosophies of SolarWinds APM

Fixing the X86 Problem

Much like the IBM Mainframes that preceded it, the x86 architecture is getting long in the tooth. While still ubiquitous across enterprise and consumer devices, the once standard architecture is seeing competition at all sides, as performance scaling and process enhancements have slowed. Chris Evans highlight Persando’s presentation from Cloud Field Day as an example of this. They use an ARM-based SmartNIC that can be programmed with P4 to offload network functions workloads from x86 and realize substantial performance gains. Chris sees the further disaggregation of compute, networking and storage as a result of these kind of innovative offload solutions.

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Fixing the x86 Problem

Moving to Unstructured Data Stores

Words mean things. So when Chris Evans saw the storage industry turning away from object stores and embracing the term “unstructured data store,” he needed to see if there was any merit to the change in naming convention. For Chris, object storage as a term has some baggage, even if the technology born in the 90s is more relevant than ever. Object storage is often synonymous with low-cost, low-performance storage. With innovative companies like Vast Data using what is traditionally viewed as object storage for spreading data across hundreds or thousands of NVMe drives, if might just require new terminology to connote the change in use cases. Be sure to check out more about Vast Data with their recent Storage Field Day presentation.

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Moving to Unstructured Data Stores