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.
The Power of Communities – An Interview With David Penaloza Seijas
Your community defines who you are. But for some, the community is defined by who they are as well. In this video, Tom Hollingsworth interviews David Peneloza Seijas and discusses his role in Cisco Live, Cisco Champions, and Tech Field Day. The passion that David has for this community shines through the entire interview, and Tom really found him to be a beacon for new members to latch on to. David is definitely a champion that Tom wants to try to emulate with his own work in the Tech Field Day community.
Read More:
The Power of Communities - An Interview with David Penaloza Seijas
My View on Riverbed’s SD-WAN Solution
Evan Mintzer was definitely familiar with Riverbed prior to visiting the company as part of Networking Field Day. But it had been over a year since he worked with their solutions every day, so he was interested to hear their latest updates. One of the things that caught his eye during the event was a section by Chief Architect Vincent Berk. He detailed a new capability in Riverbed’s SD-WAN portfolio, that provides visibility into the network including when problems occur. This kind of continuous network monitoring is a vital addition to the Riverbed tool belt for Evan.
Read More:
My view on Riverbed’s SD-WAN Solution
It’s Time for YOU to Get Wise About CBRS
Lee Badman breaks down the latest in mobility, doing a deep dive on the importance of Citizens Broadband Radio Service. Lee first heard about the potential of unlicensed spectrum back in 2015 at Wireless Field Day, in a session led by Dave Wright, now the President of the CBRS Alliance. The FCC recently announced that 150MHz in the 3.5 GHz spectrum was open for applications to use. This opens the door to a whole new avenue for mobility, including the possibility of private LTE networks. While Wi-Fi 6 and 5G get a lot of marketing hype, CBRS might be just as important.
Read More:
It’s Time for YOU to Get Wise About CBRS
Fast Friday – Networking Field Day 22 Thoughts
Tom Hollinsworth is a traveling man, organizing Networking Field Day and then heading out to RSA Conference in the same month. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t updating his blog. In this post, he shares a few short takes on networking, including how startups have the flexibility to not be tied to technical debt, the difficulties of product integration, why we haven’t solved the Wi-Fi registration problem, and why looking at CLI through the lens of nostalgia covers up the reality of modern network complexity. If you’re not subscribed to Tom’s blog, you’re missing out!
Read More:
Fast Friday – Networking Field Day 22 Thoughts
Networking Field Day
It was great to have VMware present at our most recent Networking Field Day. At the event, they provided updates on a number of vital networking solutions within their portfolio. This included updates to NSX to provide improved networking and security for containers, which at scale can be challenging to manage otherwise. Check out their video demo of NSX container networking for Red Hat OpenShift 4.3 for more specifics. They also dived into NSX Advanced Load Balancer which is based on tech acquired with Avi Networks, and did several sessions on NSX analytical and intelligence capabilities. Much like NSX itself, their presentation covered a lot of ground, so be sure to watch the videos to get caught up on their latest.
Read More:
Expect Radical Change to Traditionally Conservative Telco Industry Over Next Three Years, Finds Heavy Reading Survey
DriveNets presented for the first time at our recent Networking Field Day event, and was a great additional to the Field Day family of presenters. In this press release, they share the result of a recent survey looking into the future of service provider networking. The survey found that typical vendor lock-in is on the decline, with service providers increasingly pursuing a disaggregated approach to build networks, similar to how hyperscalers operate. Be sure to check out their recent Networking Field Day presentation videos to learn about their offerings in this increasingly important space.
Read More:
Veritas Resilency Platform (VRP)
Mariusz Kaczorek used Veritas’ presentation at Cloud Field Day to provide some background for this post, looking into Veritas Resiliency Platform. This solution helps to maintain business uptime across private, public, and hybrid clouds, with support for VMware and Hyper-V and recovery of VMs to Azure, AWS or vCloud Director. In the post, Mariusz provides an architectural overview, reviews the interface for VRB, and looks at who it’s targeted at. Be sure to check out the post then dive into the full presentation video.
Read More:
Veritas Resilency Platform (VRP)
097: GreyBeards Talk Open Source S3 Object Store With AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO
Keith Townsend and Ray Lucchesi published an interview with MinIO CEO Anand Babu Periasamy. Ray got to hear from him and the rest of the MinIO team recently at Storage Field Day. MinIO offers a fully open source AWS S3 compatible object store that you can run anywhere, something particularly timely as more organizations turn to them. This allows customers to turn away from costly cloud object stores, and deploy in their own data centers for better economics at scale. They discuss how the company is developing features to match Amazon S3, and dig into the tech in the interview.
Read More:
097: GreyBeards talk open source S3 object store with AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO
VMware to Acquire Nyansa for WAN Network Analytics
VMware recently announced it intends to buy Nyansa for an undisclosed sum. We’ve had both companies present at Field Day events, and we can’t wait to see what they can create together post-acquisition. In this post, Seeking Alpha’s Donovan Jones looks at the financial impact of the deal, and how the move is part of VMware’s strategy to provide enterprises with an end-to-end solution as they demand integrated and simplified capabilities in an increasingly complex environment. Be sure to check out our video coverage of both companies to get up to speed on the tech so you can judge for yourself.
Read More:
VMware To Acquire Nyansa For WAN Network Analytics
Western Digital, Composable Infrastructure, Hyperscalers, and You
Western Digital had an impressive presentation at Storage Field Day, showing the breadth of offerings from the iconic storage media company. At the event, their Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing Scott Hamilton dived into how NVMe over Fabrics solves a lot of the storage problems required to operate at the very largest scale, and enables interesting new models like composable infrastructure. For Dan Frith, composable infrastructure right now seems eager to cater to the needs of hyperscalers. But far from making Western Digital’s presentation uninteresting, their continued investment and refinement of the approach means that when enterprises want to move to that approach, the storage ecosystem will be ready for them.
Read More:
Western Digital, Composable Infrastructure, Hyperscalers, And You
Why a Change of Mindset in the IoT Space Is Needed
Dominik Pickhardt thinks that the mentality around IoT security needs to change. He’s seen conversations more concerned about the concept of safety, rather than security conversations, with an all too common site of all IoT devices on one flat L2 networking. At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020, Dominik and the other delegates got to hear from the Cisco IoT Group and what they are doing to address the challenges. They showed how their new Cyber Vision solution is adding critical visibility to the IoT security picture. Cyber Vision understands protocols used in industrial settings and automatically builds an inventory of devices that includes running software versions. This creates a topography of what devices are talking to each other in an easy to understand interface.
Read More:
Why a change of mindset in the IoT space is needed
Does SPB Mean “Secure Path Bridging”?
The spanning tree protocol, or SPB, never really went away. But the landscape it was built to work in changed radically. Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at where SPB is now and discusses how the new steward, Extreme Networks, is positioning SPB to secure IoT and more in the data center and campus. He got to hear a deep dive on this during Networking Field Day. Get the background from Tom’s post, then be sure to dig into all of their video coverage from the event.
Read More:
Does SPB Mean "Secure Path Bridging"?
CloudGenix to Share Best Practices for Creating Modern, Cloud-Delivered Branch Office Infrastructure at Networking Field Day 22 on Feb. 12
We really enjoyed having CloudGenix present at Networking Field Day at our most recent event. They discussed their approach to deploying SD-WAN with the delegates. Their customers have often tried SD-WAN deployments in the past, but CloudGenix discussed how they are able to offer true cloud-scale without being encumbered by legacy networking approaches. If you missed the live stream of their presentation, you can always catch it later on our YouTube channel. We keep a full catalog of all our presenters available to watch on-demand.
Read More:
Storage Field Day 19–Western Digital
At their recent Storage Field Day presentation, Western Digital led with a startling estimate. They project that by 2023, 103 zetabytes worth of IoT data will be produced. This is to say nothing of the ever increasing video and other data constantly being generated. Much of their presentation was how Western Digital was working to provide ever increasing storage densities across all mediums. It was not lost on Joey D’Antoni during the event that a lot of this work seemed to be driven by demand from hyperscalers, who will increasingly carry the growth of stored data. Developments with multi-actuator drives and zoned storage were shown to be key in how Western Digital will provide for the industries storage needs in the future.
Read More:
Storage Field Day 19–Western Digital
Stellus Is Doing Something With All That Machine Data
It’s always great when events like Storage Field Day can help bring new companies to light and assist with their launch. Stellus Technologies recently came out of stealth at Storage Field Day, and definitely made an impression on our delegates. They built a solution to answer what they saw as the problem of exponential growth of unstructured data, combined with the massively increased size of data sources themselves. Quite simply, file systems developed for the age of spinning disk weren’t meeting current needs. Their Stellus Data Platform was designed to provide native parallelism, scale, and consistency, while letting organizations scale performance and capacity independently. They do this with a Key-Value-over-NVMe Fabrics architecture, that Dan thinks has major implications as organization adopt ever increasing drive capacities. We can’t wait to hear more from this exciting startup!
Read More:
Stellus Is Doing Something With All That Machine Data
Answers at Your Fingertips With Forward Networks
After hearing again from Forward Networks at Networking Field Day, Tom Hollingsworth considers the implications of their Network Query Engine in this post. This effectively provides a way to ask the network for the answers by looking into the database of network configuration. This is vitally needed to provide reliability for critical cloud services, rather they relying on the old model of each networking standing as an island of configuration settings just waiting to cause unforeseen interactions. As network’s grow more complex at ever increasing rates, Forward Network approach lets admins find meaningful answers and solve this configuration conundrum.
Read More:
Answers at Your Fingertips with Forward Networks
Stellus Delivers Scale-Out Storage With NVMe & KV Tech
Chris Evans got to hear from Stellus Technologies at Storage Field Day. It’s always great to hear from new and exciting companies at Field Day events, and Stellus was no exception. They showed off their Stellus Data Platform, which offers a scale-out architecture of multiple Data Manager nodes and Key-value Store nodes, connected through a shared network fabric. Chris sees value in their approach as the key-value nodes take care of any specific tasks that need to be performed in managing physical media, meaning that in the future new media can be dropped in without further consideration from IT, as long as Stellus knows how to use it efficiently.
Read More:
Stellus delivers scale-out storage with NVMe & KV tech
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro are covering a lot of the announcements and presentations from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in their video series with TECHunplugged. In this video, they dig into Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. This is an impressive new addition to the management interface used for HyperFlex and UCS. Both of them thought it was a really interesting announcement. This lets an admin hook almost everything in a data center into Intersight, that can be used for monitoring and capacity tool for the entire environment.
Read More:
TECHunplugged Videocast - Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With a Chance of Scale Out
Dell EMC’s Isilon storage solution has been in the industry for a while, providing capacity and performance scaling to meet the needs of petabyte scale organizations. In this piece, Dan Frith digs into the platforms latest updates, which he heard at Storage Field Day earlier this year. In the post, he looks at how Isilon’s OneFS file system is designed to provide non-disruptive scaling for organizations, and can run either in your data center or directly on a public cloud. The latter is a key new addition for Dan, who sees this having major implications for organizations looking to shift workloads to the cloud, providing features those customers depend on that aren’t available natively on public cloud platforms. Isilon is particularly popular for media and entertainment workloads, which often aren’t optimized for the cloud. This capability opens up whole new possibilities without having to abandon existing workflows and tools.
Read More:
Dell EMC Isilon – Cloudy With A Chance Of Scale Out
TechUnplugged VideoCast: CiscoLive Barcelona HyperFlex Application Platform
The TECHunplugged crew was about in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 and got to hear about HyperFlex Application Platform. In this video, Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro discuss the evolution of HyperFlex as Cisco’s HCI solution, something Max has been following for a number of years. HXAP is a standalone add-on running on top of HyperFlex which gives the ability to run containers. This complete new cluster builds on top of a Linux KVM environment with a Kubernetes environment. They dig into how this fits into the overall container landscape and the implications for organizations in the video.
Read More:
TechUnplugged VideoCast: CiscoLive Barcelona HyperFlex Application Platform