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.
New Features With NSX-T 3.0 – Federation and Kubernetes on vSphere
Mariusz Kaczorek heard a lot from VMware at the most recent Tech Field Day event. In this post, he breaks down the latest features and updates for NSX-T 3.0. This includes a number of important updates, with networking support for vSphere with Kubernetes and cloud-scale networking with NSX-T Federation. With Mariusz, with NSX-v set to end support in 2022, NSX-T 3.0 offers a promising replacement with better load balancing, multi-site networking and security across various platforms.
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New features with NSX-T 3.0 - Federation and Kubernetes on vSphere
Meet Field Day Delegate – Glenda Canfield
For Tech Field Day events, we pride ourselves on trying to include new voices into our delegate pool. This is vital to not only bring in the latest technical expertise to ask incisive questions of our presenting companies, but also to provide new perspectives around the delegate table, virtual or otherwise. Our latest Tech Field Day event saw Glenda Canfield join us for the first time. Be sure to check out her recent interview with Gestalt IT. They dig into how she got her start in IT, what she does in her spare time, and what she’d be working on if she wasn’t in IT. We can’t wait to hear from Glenda at more events in the future.
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Meet Field Day Delegate - Glenda Canfield
Dell EMC SmartFabric Director- Weaving a Tapestry of Green
Are you ready to build your digital transformation project? Need a new network to make it work? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at Dell EMC SmartFabric Director and how it can help you building out your next new project. He got to hear about SmartFabric Director at Networking Field Day, and thinks that it shows Dell EMC is on the right track for large existing infrastructures that are looking to make leaps toward digital transformation initiatives to get a handle on how to make that happen.
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Dell EMC SmartFabric Director- Weaving a Tapestry of Green
vSphere 7 and Kubernetes – Should Customers Wait?
On this video from Keith Townsend, he talks with CTO Dose co-host Joep Piscaer about vSphere 7 and his impressions of the Kubernetes integration. Project Tanzu Grid is the updated branding for Project Pacific. They break down if VMware’s initial release lived up to the not inconsiderable hype. They also discuss if customers should be quick to latch onto Tanzu, or wait for further development. Watch as Keith and Joep recap their impressions from VMware’s Tech Field Day presentation.
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vSphere 7 and Kubernetes - Should Customers Wait?
Meet Field Day Delegate – Jason Beshara
Jason Beshara is joining us for Tech Field Day Roundtable with Aruba! He is a Solution Architect with a demonstrated history of working with and designing advanced RF solutions. Jason is skilled in wireless LAN design and troubleshooting within enterprise, healthcare, education, LPV and heavy industrial verticals. Be sure to check out this interview with Gestalt IT to see how Jason got started in IT, where he sees the industry going in the near future, what he does outside of IT, and more. It’s great to get a well rounded understanding of new delegates to our events. It makes seeing them around the table and hearing their questions all the more illuminating.
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Meet Field Day Delegate - Jason Beshara
What’s New in Zerto 8.0
At Tech Field Day Mariusz Kaczorek got to hear the latest updates from Zerto. The company showed off the latest features of Zerto 8.0, their latest release of their Zerto IT Resilience Platform. This adds a number of key features to the platform. On the cloud side, Zerto 8.0 adds Continuous Data Protection to Google Cloud as well as cloud backup with AWS Storage Gateway. On the storage side, the release now supports VMware vVols. Combined with many other feature enhancements, Mariusz sees Zerto as offering a compelling platform-agonostic platform to protect your data across hybrid and multi cloud environments.
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vSphere 7 and Kubernetes – CTO Advisor Episode 118
In this CTO Dose Keith Townsend is joined by co-host Joep Piscaer to discuss vSphere 7 and his impressions of the Kubernetes integration, something Keith got to hear about in depth at Tech Field day . They discussed Project Tanzu Grid as the updated branding for Project Pacific, VMware’s effort to integrate Kubernetes into vSphere. They look at if VMware’s initial release lived up to the hype, and whether customers should adopt it right away, or wait for further development.
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vSphere 7 and Kubernetes - CTO Advisor Episode 118
Broadcom Processors Are Blazingly Fast
Evan Mintzer attended Networking Field Day earlier this year and got to hear from Broadcom. As one of the most prominent merchant silicon companies across the networking stack, it’s not surprising that Evan was interested in what they had to say. Their presentation focused on their network processor silicon, and was complex enough that Evan had to rewatch it to make sure it understood it all. They did a deep dive on their processor architecture, which allows for truly impressive speeds, supporting a switch at up to 25.6Tbps using a Tomahawk4 processor. Be sure to check out the videos to get up to speed on their latest and greatest.
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Broadcom Processors are Blazingly Fast
SD-WAN and Technical Debt
At a recent discussion with delegates at Networking Field Day, Tom Hollingsworth wondered why SD-WAN startups have been able to be so aggressive with innovating in the space, while established networking companies have struggled to keep up. This is endemic of the technical debt a lot of larger organizations carry. He considers something like Cisco’s IWAN, in many ways a precursor to modern SD-WAN. This ended up being complicated and hard to deploy because of many of the technology decisions that Cisco made years ago, resulting in both a software and hardware supply chain constraints on IWAN. Compare this to a startup, like the recent Networking Field Day presenter CloudGenix, who could design a solution around a desired functionality, rather than with a set of constraints inherited as technical debt. This SD-WAN example is just one way of looking at the role of technical debt in product development for large organizations.
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Cloud Field Day 7 – Who Will Be Presenting?
Alastair Cooke will be joining us virtually for Cloud Field Day later in April. Instead of the jetlag that comes from crossing an ocean to usually be at an event, he’ll instead be up early to join the other delegates for the presentations. Though a virtual event, he’s looking forward to the same in-depth technical presentations, the opportunity to ask direct questions to the presenters, and the great conversations with the other delegates. In this post, he runs down what he’s looking forward to from each of the presenters. This includes a mix of Field Day stalwarts like Aruba, VMware, and Solarwinds, with newer companies to the event series, like Stellus and Pensando. Be sure to mark your calendar to join the live stream to watch the event along with Alastair.
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Cloud Field Day 7 – Who will be presenting?
For Big Switch, Cloud Isn’t a Location – It’s a Design Principle
For organizations that have begun to transition to the cloud, it has become apparent how straightforward it is to consume compute and storage services. Things that used to take days to provision are now accomplished in a number of clicks, or are transparently configured with no interaction required from the user at all. The fact that workloads are able to communicate with each other, or can be restricted from communicating, with equal ease is just as welcome. Tom Hollingsworth looks at how Big Switch Networks is enabling this, based on their presentation from Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World 2019.
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For Big Switch, Cloud Isn’t a Location – It’s a Design Principle
Cisco’s Service Provider Powerful Trio
At Tech Field Day Extra a Cisco Live Europe, David Penaloza Seijas got to hear details about Cisco’s plans for custom silicon. This came in the form of a new ASIC, focused on meeting the needs of service providers. For David, this seemed like natural focus for the company. He breaks down how this integrates into the Cisco 8000 series routers, what kind of features customers should expect, and how it fits into Cisco’s broader ambitions for IOS XR. Overall David is bullish on the approach, and suggests it’s never been a better time to learn some Linux!
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Cisco’s Service Provider Powerful trio
Hot Take Zerto 8.0 Tech Field Day 21
Keith Townsend recently made a video looking at what Zerto presented at Tech Field Day. In it, he focuses on how Zerto can help solve a common anxiety when testing disaster recovery, contaminating production data with DR and then having to roll back. Their platform introduces a logging feature, which replicates the whole VM state. With the configuration tools built into the feature, it makes it really powerful to keep the application state consistent. This logging feature also allows for the logs to provide extremely granular visibility for data protection. Be sure to check out Keith’s video to get his full hot take, then dive into their presentation video.
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Hot Take Zerto 8.0 Tech Field Day 21
The Definition of Secondary Storage Is Evolving – as Is Cohesity
The challenge of data management is nothing new, and the Enterprise Storage market has responded at both ends of the spectrum by providing mature, high performance solutions for primary datasets, and lower-cost archival solutions for less important bulk data. But many businesses are discovering a capability gap when attempting to store secondary data that falls into the “everything else” category. For this reason, Cohesity has begun to leverage its core capabilities to attack new problems as customer requirements, and the definition of secondary storage, continue to evolve. At Storage Field Day, the company showed off DataPlatform, which solves a set of challenges not addressed by high-end primary storage or low-cost archival storage. This provides a unified approach for storage of secondary data across both on-premises and cloud environments.
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The Definition of Secondary Storage is Evolving – As is Cohesity
Voices in Data Storage – Episode 36: A Conversation With Anand Babu Periasamy and Jonathon Symonds on MinIO
On a recent Voices in Data Storage podcast episode, host Enrico Signoretti interviewed the CEO and co-founder of MinIO, AB Periasamy, as well as their CMO Jonathan Symonds. Enrico recently got to hear in-depth on their technology and solutions at Storage Field Day. In the interview they discuss how MinIO’s high-performance, software-defined, distributed object storage server and client fit into the overall storage market, as well as AB Periasamy’s history with open-source software.
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Google Cloud VMware Engine – Hot Take
The former CloudSimple team presented at Tech Field Day 21 on the recently rebranded Google Cloud VMware Engine (GVE). What is it? How is it different than VMware Cloud on AWS? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Keith Townsend got to learn all about it during our recent virtual Tech Field Day event. While not going into competitive solutions specifically, they did outline how GVE differentiates in the landscape. This takes the VMware Cloud Foundation based, which allows any cloud provider to take any VMware components to offer a managed VCS service. Google of course offers their considerable scale on top of this. Keith breaks down how this compares to the other major public clouds.
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Google Cloud VMware Engine - Hot Take
Itential – The Network Glue You Need
How can you ensure your automation project doesn’t fall apart when you need to interface with APIs? Have you considered using the right glue to tie it all together? Tom Hollingsworth looks back at Itential’s presentation from Networking Field Day and how they are the glue you need to make automation happen. The company was founded to manage all the automation issues facing organizations today, by creating a standard interface to deal with the surfeit of API languages out there. Their Itential Automation Platform works with third-parties to build connectors that interface with the applications and devices on your network.
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Itential - The Network Glue You Need
How We Overcame the Challenges and Developed a Fully Distributed Network Operating System
This post from DriveNets’ Amir Krayden builds upon a previous post, where they looked at the challenges of developing their own fully distributed network operating system from scratch. This touches on a lot of what Amir discussed during the company’s recent presentation at Networking Field Day. By building a networking OS that is built for scale, service growth and orchestration, they’re able to base router architecture the the web scale native to the cloud. This piece digs into how the company solved the not inconsiderable challenges they faced.
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How We Overcame the Challenges and Developed a Fully Distributed Network Operating System
Dell EMC Isilon Is an Emmy Winner!
It’s not uncommon for presenters at Field Day events to win awards within the industry. We’re proud that our events feature the most influential and innovative companies in IT, so it’s not surprising to see that recognized. But it’s not often that we see one win an Emmy! That’s what Dell EMC’s Isilon did, winning a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for early development of hierarchical storage management systems. Chin-Fah Heoh has been familiar with Isilon’s OneFS for a long time. He has respect for the platform for offering a real true clustered, scale-out file system that has proved it’s value over its life. He details the history of the platform, and how the company showed at Storage Field Day how they’re supporting running OneFS in the cloud.
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Dell EMC Isilon is an Emmy winner!
Tech Field Day
It’s always great to have an iconic company like VMware present at Tech Field Day. With a diverse array of solutions that have important places throughout the data center, it’s important for the Field Day community to keep up to date on the latest, and communicate directly with their team. At their recent Tech Field Day presentation, VMware did deep dives on VMware Cloud Foundation 4, vRealize Network Insight, Kubernetes integration of VMware NSX, and more. Be sure to check out their full presentation video for all the latest.
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