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.
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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(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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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?
Cloud Field Day 7 (#CFD7): A Heads-Up
We were lucky to have Ather Beg joins us as a delegate for Cloud Field Day. He always brings keen insight and extensive industry experience to offer a truly unique voice around the delegate table, virtual or otherwise. In this post, he gives a look at each of the presenters and why their session may be of interest to a wider audience. There was VMware, no stranger to Field Day, doing two sessions on their VMware Cloud on AWS solution. He was also interested in Stellus’ key-value store approach to storage to provide exceptional performance using protocols like NFS. There was also a presentation from SolarWinds, as well as a look into the Pensando Distributed Services Platform. Be sure to check out all the presentation videos to get to speed with the latest from the event.
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Cloud Field Day 7 (#CFD7): A Heads-Up
Exorcising Network Ghosts With VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer
Is your networking haunted? Or do you feel like problems are happening and you can’t find them? Who you gonna call? Tom Hollingsworth looks at how VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer can help you bust the ghosts that haunt your network and prove that the problems are floating around somewhere else. While definitely a spooky topic, luckily Tom found VMware’s presentation from Networking Field Day to be anything but.
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Exorcising Network Ghosts with VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer
Tune in for Tech Field Day Virtual With Red Hat on April 29
We’re thrilled to be able to present Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat on April 29th! This will focus on Red Hat OpenShift and follow on the announcements from the virtual Red Hat Summit. Red Hat has a whole day of excellent presentations in store, from an overview of their portfolio and strategy, to Kubernetes multi-cloud management, networking, and more. Be sure to mark you calendar and catch the entire live stream!
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Tune in for Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat on April 29
Cloud Field Day 7 – All Virtual but Still a Tech Field Day Event in Every Way
While staying home in light of the COVID-19 pandemic means we can’t host in-person Field Day events, we’re glad to see such a strong positive response to our virtual events. Ed Horley joined us as a delegate for Cloud Field Day, and while he missed being able to hang out with his fellow delegates, all the classic Cloud Field Day hallmarks were still there. The event featured in-depth technical content and created meaningful conversations between the delegates and presenters. If you missed any of the sessions, be sure to check out the full videos on our YouTube channel!
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Cloud Field Day 7 - All virtual but still a Tech Field Day event in every way
Managing Massive Media
Chris Evans looks at the state of throughput for mechanical hard drives in this post. While spinning disks may be seen as a legacy technology by some, they are still used widely across many industries and applications. The problem comes when looking at random access to these, and the physical limitations imposed by how they operate. In this regard, random read performance has barely nudged for hard drives in over a decade. Western Digital discussed how they were trying to address these issues at Storage Field Day, and how they are using things like zoned hard drives to also help alleviate future concerns with increasingly dense SSDs. Because many of these approaches require a degree of application support, Chris think both system manufacturers and software-defined storage developers will have to take these approaches into consideration.
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Hardware Offloads, Not Everything Is X86
Alastair Cooke takes a look at why x86 isn’t the only option anymore for organizations looking to solve computing problems. This trend has been going on for a while, with GPUs finding new roles handling highly parallelized workloads in ML and AI. But he also highlights how NGD Systems is putting ARM cores inside SSDs to provide computation storage. He’s also looking forward to hearing about the Pensando Distributed Services Card at Cloud Field Day, which appears to offer hardware offloading for software-defined edge services, aimed at telcos. We can’t wait to hear what he thinks of their presentation!
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Hardware Offloads, Not Everything Is x86
Gluware
At Networking Field Day, Jeff Fry got to hear from Gluware who discussed how the provide a solution to keep network configurations in compliance with the desired state. After the presentation, he tried out there Intelligent Network Automation Test Drive. He found it to be an effective way to overcome some of the hurdles in the current state of network automation, helping to mitigate both vendor specific automation tools, and the skills gap between CLI proficient network engineers and those that employs scripts. Jeff thinks a lot of organizations should give Gluware a look, as they have tools for deployment to audit, to security, and beyond.
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Coming Together During COVID-19, With Stephen Foskett of Gestalt IT
Tech Field Day founder and organizer Stephen Foskett appeared on Live Now to discuss how technology companies and events are adapting to the current COVID-19 self-isolating landscape. He finds the industry is dividing into two camps: those that are scaling back on events and other efforts as they get up to speed, and other that are already used to working remotely and operating at full speed. It’s an interesting discussion in how IT as a whole is reacting to this unprecedented situation.
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Coming Together During COVID-19, with Stephen Foskett of Gestalt IT