Tech Field Day Coverage
Our delegate panel includes independent writers and thought leaders, and we collect their coverage of the event, Tech Field Day presentations, and sponsoring companies here.
Dell Power and the Challenge of Modernisation
In this post, Chris Evans looks at Dell EMC’s new storage portfolio, something they detailed during their Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio presentations. For Chris, it’s interesting to see the company moving on from it’s existing offerings, many of which have been around for decades, and come from the acquisition of EMC in 2016. The company has done a good job updating these solutions, but Chris sees consolidation and a clear roadmap as the key to their storage future. Both of these were on display at the event.
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Dell Power and the Challenge of Modernisation
Infrastructure Intelligence for SMEs
In this post, Security Field Day delegate Zoë Rose takes a look at a number of incidence response and security tools aimed at SMEs. These often have the same issues as larger organizations, but must face them with smaller staffs and budgets. Tools targeting these customers need to be particularly efficient to maximize both. Zoë takes a look at several solutions, TotalView by PathSolutions (who presented at Security Field Day, PRTG by Paessler (which has been featured at several Field Day events), and Solarwinds MSP RMM (no stranger to our events either). She lists the pros and cons of each solution, and its a great roundup to start your research.
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Infrastructure Intelligence for SMEs
Dell EMC PowerStore: TFDx Quick Take
Keith Townsend is reflecting back on what he saw at Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio in this video. This quick take on the Dell EMC PowerStore considers the hybrid device that converges a Mid-range (SMB) storage array with a VMware Cluster. For Keith, this might be a new category for storage, and a really important move for Dell EMC. Be sure to check out the full videos from the event for all the details.
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Dell EMC PowerStore: TFDx Quick Take
Meraki Health – Your Wireless User Watchguard
Troubleshooting is an inevitable part of IT, especially when it comes to wireless networking. As Kevin Blackburn points out in this piece, unfortunately, many organizations lack the staff to have 24/7 help or even large daytime staffs. At Tech Field Day Virtual Cisco Live Experience, he saw Meraki Health as a potential solution for this problem. This provides a health snapshot of all connected devices and shows where users might be experiencing performance issues. This information is stored in the cloud for 30 days, giving an additional way to get historical context to these issues, and help track down root causes to larger issues. Kevin was impressed to see this monitoring didn’t just stop at the wireless component, showing the experience from APs to switches and to backing application servers.
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Meraki Health - Your Wireless User Watchguard
Cisco SecureX – A Single Security Pane of Glass
Cisco is not unfamiliar to the world of network security solutions, but Kevin Blackburn thinks SecureX is a recognition that the company could do more from the standpoint of a consolidated security interface. Rather than being a tool that only works within the Cisco ecosystem, SecureX allows admins to take advantage of data from devices across your infrastructure. Cisco has a number of direct integrations with other vendors, as well as a general API that you can plug into. This really helps SecureX standout, not just from Cisco’s other security minded solutions, but within the industry at large. For Kevin, this allows you breakdown silos and get more visibility into possible security issues.
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Cisco SecureX - A Single Security Pane of Glass
The New Branch With Riverbed SD-WAN
What does your branch office look like? I’m sure the answer to that question is different than it was just six months ago. Tom Hollingsworth takes a look back at Riverbed’s presentation from Networking Field Day and how they have the right tools to make your new branch work just like it should.
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The New Branch with Riverbed SD-WAN
Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio – Day Two
Dealing with the ever increasing amounts of unstructured data is a challenge for every organization. That’s why Barry Coombs was excited to hear about Dell’s PowerScale solution at Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio. He was a delegate at the event, and not only go to hear all the deep dives on PowerScale, but created his unique visualized notes to compliment the presentation. In the notes, he looks at how using Dell’s OneFS provides its solutions with the scale modern organizations need, while also allowing for easily moving workloads to the cloud.
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Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio - Day Two
A Tale of Scale in Three Parts With Broadcom
Broadcom is one of the biggest suppliers for chips in the networking market? But how do they provide the chips you need to fit the services and operations you’re selling? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at their lineup and how they can scale in a variety of ways to fit the bill. The company showed off a lot of their solutions at Networking Field Day earlier this year, so be sure to get up to speed on this article before diving into their full video presentation.
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A Tale of Scale in Three Parts with Broadcom
Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio – Day One
Tech doodler extraordinaire Barry Coombs joined us as a delegate at Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio. If you want a truly unique way to see the information Dell presented about things like Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC PowerFlex, be sure to check out Barry’s notes. He cleverly captures images and notates them throughout the event, providing a highlight of the presentations in a visually compelling way. Check them out then be sure to watch all of Dell’s presentations.
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Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio - Day One
VMware Cloud on AWS: A Cost-Effective Platform for Disaster Recovery
In this piece, Cloud Field Day delegate Ather Beg breaks down how to use VMware Cloud on AWS for disaster recovery, based on what he heard from the company at the event. This is actually one of Ather’s best use cases for the service when looking at the total cost of ownership. Using VMware Cloud on AWS allows the constant footprint of DR to be reduced to the bare minimum as hosts that can be added on-demand within minutes when required.
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VMware Cloud on AWS: A Cost-Effective Platform for Disaster Recovery
Tech Field Day – Dell Technologies #PoweredUp Promo
Gina Rosenthal was excited to be a delegate at Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio. This was kind of return to the very start of her career,and touches on a number of important updates to Dell’s Power portfolio. They went into detail about a lot of exciting new solutions, so be sure to check out the full video of the event to stay up to date.
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Tech Field Day - Dell Technologies #PoweredUp Promo
Go Time With PathSolutions
How much time does it take before you know you’ve been breached? How much time do you spend figuring out what you need to know so you can respond appropriately? How many precious minutes are wasted gathering info from the four corners of your enterprise? What if you could have what you needed in just one minute? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at PathSolutions TotalView Security Operations Manager and how it is the perfect rapid response SIEM for the SMB. They went into detail about this at their recent Security Field Day presentation, so be sure to check out Tom’s piece before digging into the videos yourself.
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DellEMC and TechFieldDay Will Get Us #PoweredUp
Arjan Timmerman was one of the delegates that got to hear about the details of Dell’s Power portfolio at Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio. This included a look at the new PowerStore line, a unified storage offering with support for block, file and vVol capabilities. Dell was also scheduled to discuss PowerScale, which is designed to help organizations deal with the every increasing presence of unstructured data, designed to operate in the data center or on the edge. Arjan was really looking forward to learning more about this important piece for Dell at the event. He made a number of videos for TECHunplugged during the event, so be sure to check those out for his in-depth thoughts.
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DellEMC and TechFieldDay will get us #PoweredUp
Pensando Brings Cloud Scale to Networking, Storage, and Security Services
What could you do with specific hardware for tasks in your data center? Not just general purpose CPUs and GPUs but an actual suite of hardware and software designed to accelerate your workloads? Gestalt IT took a look at the Pensando presentation from Cloud Field Day and highlight how their integrated hardware and software stack might just be the answer to your cloud problems. Their Distributed Service Platform is a solution to not only offload tasks from compute, but add cloud-scale networking and storage services to help organizations achieve their dream of software-defined architecture.
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Pensando Brings Cloud Scale to Networking, Storage, and Security Services
Cloud Field Day 8 Prep – Daily Check-In for June 17, 2020
In this Daily Check-In video from Ned Bellavance, he digs into his homework ahead of seeing presentations at Cloud Field Day. He introduces his audience to the whole Field Day experience, and runs down the presenters to talk about what he expects to see. If you haven’t been checking out Ned’s daily check-in videos, be sure to subscribe to his channel for more!
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Cloud Field Day 8 Prep - Daily Check-in for June 17, 2020
Judges on Fire: Stephen Foskett, Organizer in Chief, Tech Field Day
The organizers of the Tech Trailblazers Awards started a new podcast called “Judges on Fire,” an intimate and enlightening way for listeners to get to know their award judges a little bit more. For the first episode, they spoke with Tech Field Day founder and organizer-in-chief, Stephen Foskett. They discussed how he went from being a Unix systems administrator out of college to starting Tech Field Day, how the event has adapted to life in a pandemic, and what are the best things to come out of the event.
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Judges on Fire: Stephen Foskett, Organizer in Chief, Tech Field Day
Juniper’s Active Network Defence Concept
Juniper Networks went into detail about their Advanced Threat Protection at Security Field Day. For Justin Warren, it took a little bit to start digging into what Juniper was showing, eventually understanding their machine-learning based threat detection approach. Justin sees this as potentially effective, but having to overcome a lot of negative preconceptions, dependent on making sure the system is smart enough at detection to be a tool rather than an annoyance to avoid. A lot of the success of Juniper’s Advanced Threat Protection will depend on organizations laying the groundwork to work well with it, something that Justin doesn’t think is commonly the case. That being said, he thinks the approach and overall goal are sound, and that perhaps organizations need lofty goals to reach for to ultimately get better.
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Juniper’s Active Network Defence Concept
Dell Technologies Simplifies Storage Automation With PowerTools
As a cloud-like, self-service experience for infrastructure consumers like software developers becomes expected, enterprise storage is under increased pressure to evolve. Slow, error-prone, manual storage tasks do not keep pace with the demands of these consumers or come close to meeting ease-of-use expectations that have been set by public cloud providers. In response to these realities, Dell has been wise to not only embrace automation across their storage portfolio but choose to integrate with the toolsets their customers actually use as presented by Dell EMC at Storage Field Day.
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Dell Technologies Simplifies Storage Automation with PowerTools
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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