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!

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VMC On AWS Is More Cloud Like All The Time - Day Two Cloud Podcast Video

Monitoring Application Performance From the Inside Out With Solarwinds AppOptics

Are you relying on old tools to monitor your modern applications? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at why you should examine the way you keep an eye on your applications and how your users experience them. At Cloud Field Day, he saw that this is where SolarWinds comes into play. They have spent a great deal of time creating the best tool to handle monitoring of your application from the inside out. Their AppOptics solution does more than just monitor the response time of your pages. It digs deep into the services that compose the application to find out what’s actually going on when users run complicated queries or connect to a node that is having some performance issues.

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Monitoring Application Performance from the Inside Out with Solarwinds AppOptics

Meet Field Day Delegate – Pieter-Jan Nefkens

We’re thrilled to welcome welcome Pieter-Jan Nefkens to the delegate ranks, as he’ll be joining us for Security Field Day for the first time. Pieter-Jan is a network consultant and owner of Nefkens Advies. He has also been a Cisco Champion since 2017. He sat down for an interview with Gesstalt IT, and provided some background into how he got his start in tech and security, as well as where he sees the industry going. Be sure to check it out before you see him in the Field Day presentations!

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Meet Field Day Delegate - Pieter-Jan Nefkens

Daily Check-In for May 4, 2020

Ned Bellavance has been checking in on his YouTube channel every weekday at 11am ET while we’re all working from home, and he recently talked about what he saw from OpenShift at Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat. He focuses on OpenShift Cluster Manager, which can be used as a SaaS service or deployed on-prem. He looks at how this fits into typical organizational uses of Kubernetes, where organizations might run into problems, and some of the advanced features available to on-prem deployments.

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Daily Check-in for May 4, 2020

One Tier to Replace Them All

Data centers often need to deploy and manage multiple types of storage devices to provide the needed performance and storage tiers. Meeting an organization’s storage capacity and storage performance requirements can be a juggling act with multiple storage devices. VAST Data’s Universal Storage Solution can simplify this complexity using a single device providing a single cost-effective Flash tier. Vast Data made a big splash showing this off at Storage Field Day, so be sure to dig into this article for background before watching their full presentation video.

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One Tier to Replace Them All

Meet Field Day Delegate – Ben Mason

We’re thrilled to have Ben Mason joining us as a delegate for Security Field Day. Ben is an Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP), a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE), and a CrowdStrike Certified Falcon Administrator (CCFA). In addition, he volunteers at the HART Homeless Animal Rescue Team of Maine. Be sure to check out his interview with Gestalt IT to get a little more background, and be sure to look out for him during all the Security Field Day live streams.

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Meet Field Day Delegate - Ben Mason

Cloud Field Day 7 – VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware is not an unfamiliar site at Field Day events, and most recently, they graced us with a presentation at Cloud Field Day. Ed Horley was a delegate for the event and got to hear a lot about VMware Cloud on AWS. For Ed, it seems like VMware has deftly navigated the often daunting challenges of adopting their established enterprise business model into the public cloud. The solution extends the ability to run cloud workloads to the scale and flexibility that AWS provides while also providing native hooks and features from AWS that extend what an enterprise can leverage from both VMware and AWS. It’s an impressive achievement that has a lot of value for organizations with deep VMware investments.

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Cloud Field Day 7 - VMware Cloud on AWS

The Programmability Voyage With Barefoot Networks

Hardware alone isn’t the key to longevity. We learned that lesson with the Voyager program. How do those lessons parallel with ASIC design today? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at the Barefoot Networks presentation from Networking Field Day 21. They extended this metaphor to their own use of software to extend their Tofino chips using the P4 programming language. While they might not see the same 50 year life span as the Voyager vessels, it’s an approach that can better adapt to business needs as they change over time.

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The Programmability Voyage with Barefoot Networks

RedHat (Virtual) Summit 2020

We were extremely proud to organize Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat, providing a virtual event in conjunction with Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience. This event focused on OpenShift, and provided an overview, deep dives into the latest updates, and answered all the delegate questions gathered around the (virtual) roundtable. We were thrilled to have delegates like Andrea Mauro join us for the event, and we can’t wait to see more of his thoughts on the presentations.

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RedHat (virtual) Summit 2020

(32) Daily Check-In for April 30, 2020

Ned Bellavance has been doing daily video check-ins while sheltering in place, and in this video he provides his thoughts on Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat. He was a delegate at the virtual event, and was impressed by both the breadth of talent and tech shown at the event. The overall focus was on OpenShift. In the video, Ned breaks down some of the major updates, why Red Hat pivoted OpenShift to Kubernetes, and what the implications are for IT and organizations.

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(32) Daily Check-in for April 30, 2020

My Journey Into Cloud Networking

Nicola Arnoldi shares his journey into cloud networking in this blog post. For Nicola, this isn’t a hard break into a brave new networking world, rather an extension of all that has come before. This started during network disaggregation planning while working at a large telco, but really accelerated as Nicola started getting comfortable with automation. He sees the hardest part for a lot of network engineers on this journey is being able to trust a lot of the cloud networking abstractions, rather than worrying about all the underlying specifics. We’re glad that Nicola’s conversations with Ivan Pepelnjak at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe a few years ago was considered a significant milestone on his journey with cloud networking.

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My journey into Cloud Networking

OpenShift TFDx Hot Take – What’s the Tipping Point for K8s?

To date, Keith Townsend hasn’t felt comfortable recommending OpenShift and Kubernetes to the typical enterprise he consults with. He got to get extensive time with the OpenShift team during our recent Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat, and finally got the firm response that he wanted the OpenShift is a PaaS solution in addition to a managed Kubernetes offering. Keith is still a Kubernetes skeptic, he still hasn’t heard the problem that Kubernetes has uniquely solved. But the clarification about OpenShift was well worth it for Keith.

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OpenShift TFDx Hot Take - What's the tipping point for K8s?

SolarWinds X Cloud Field Day 7

At Cloud Field Day, SolarWinds provided a comprehensive company product overview, APM technical history, and demo of the APM Suite. This post culls together all their great presentation videos, providing deep dives into AppOptics to improve application performance in Kubernetes, the latest with metrics and analytics, and more. Be sure to subscribe to the Tech Field Day YouTube channel to get all of our event videos in your feed.

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SolarWinds x Cloud Field Day 7

VDI as a Service Is Better Than VDI

One of the most familiar in-jokes among IT folks is declaring a new year to be “the year of VDI.” This joke usually elicits a droll smile or perhaps a barely noticeable wince. The reason it persists year after year is that it speaks to a larger truth, while VDI always seems like it’s about to go from a niche solution to mass market, it always somehow stays in its place. Enrico Signoretti heard from VMware at Cloud Field Day recently, and while he doesn’t think it will ever be the year of VDI, he does think that the time for VDI as a service might be here. While expense will always be an issue with the technology, VMware showed that the security benefits and ease of deployment can more than prove its worth.

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VDI as a Service is better than VDI

Marketplaces Are Changing the Way We Do Enterprise IT

Enrico Signoretti has been looking into the increasing importance of marketplaces for unstructured data management solutions. These allow IT to add functionalities to your infrastructure quickly, without having to go through a complex purchase, installation, and configuration process. Enrico got to see two examples of these at recent Field Day events. At Cloud Field Day, VMware showed off their marketplace for VMware Cloud on AWS, with another marketplace on display at Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat. With more mature technology, Enrico see marketplaces not just as the purview of cloud providers, but rather being extended to hybrid cloud platforms and eventually the private enterprise marketplace.

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Marketplaces Are Changing the Way We Do Enterprise IT

Hybrid Cloud Might Be the Right Solution for Data Analytics

With ever-expanding data sets and machine learning capabilities, organizations are exploring cloud solutions for access to resources not available in their on-premises datacenters. Hybrid cloud is becoming the de facto approach to cloud for many. Organizations wanting to take advantage of analytics for large data sets are finding it’s often simpler and more cost-effective to make use of cloud resources. NetApp’s Data Availability-as-a-Service solution provides a simple method for using hybrid cloud to provide access to those resources. It was designed with the IT non-expert in mind. Thanks to a deep dive at Storage Field Day, this post breaks down all the details.

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Hybrid Cloud Might Be the Right Solution for Data Analytics

NGINX Meshes Well With Others

What is a service mesh and how does it help containers? That’s exactly what NGINX went into during their recent Networking Field Day presentation. Tom Hollingsworth wades into the issue in this blog post. As a networking guy, Tom has had to adapt as the data center has changed over the years. The idea of a service mesh was one of the more recent concepts that Tom had to grapple with, and NGINX did a really great job during their presentation laying out what it is, and why it’s so important for the future of networking.

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NGINX Meshes Well With Others

Zerto 8.0: Realizing Storage Modernization and Cost Savings With VMware Virtual Volumes

Zerto’s 8.0 release of its IT Resilience Platform is a major release for the company. We were lucky enough to get an in-depth look at it during Tech Field Day. It includes support for the latest in software-defined storage with VMware vVols support, the ability to treat multi-VM applications as a cohesive unit for purposes of continuous data protection and replication, as well as support for an any-to-any replication approach. Be sure to check out their full videos from the event to get all the details.

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Zerto 8.0: Realizing Storage Modernization and Cost Savings with VMware Virtual Volumes

Just Google It: Three Is the Magic Number in the Cloud!

Zerto recently provided a deep dive into the latest updates on Zerto 8 at Tech Field Day. As part of the release, Zerto announced a partnership with Google, now offering the Zerto IT Resilience Platform on Google’s VMware-as-a-Service. This allows organizations to deploy Zerto’s data resiliency platform as a software-only solution, without having to retrain or abandon existing workflows, all while getting high performance on Google’s Cloud. The partnership establishes relationships with all three major public cloud providers, and helps to fully realize Zerto’s already impressive cloud capabilities.

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Just Google It: Three is the Magic Number in the Cloud!

Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform – Cisco’s Kubernetes Service?

In this post, Max Mortillaro shares some of his thoughts from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. Max has been to the event a number of times, and knew that HyperFlex updates would more than likely be on the table. At the event, Cisco shared encouraging news about the evolution of HyperFlex called HXAP, or HyperFlex Application Platform. The HCI solution is now capable of supporting container-based application modernization initiatives. He digs into why organizations might want containers on top of hyperconverged infrastructure, and who could benefit from the HXAP approach.

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Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform – Cisco’s Kubernetes Service?