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.

Illumio Launches Supercluster Technology

In this press release, Illumio announced the availability of their PCE Supercluster for real time a dependency mapping and micro-segmenetation. Of course, if you watched their presentation from Networking Field Day late last year, you would have seen a truly impressive demo from Illumio showing off the full capabilities of this new solution. This is designed to provide real time visibility across the data center and the cloud, giving you centralized security controls, all at scale.

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Illumio Launches Supercluster Technology

Should Cisco reinvent itself? Thoughts ahead of Cisco Live Europe 2019

Max Mortillaro will be attending Cisco Live Europe, and is looking forward to attending Tech Field Day Extra sessions at the event. In past years, he’s focused on Cisco Hyperflex, but this year he has a different focus. He’ll be looking to get more details on Cisco’s strategy this year, especially compared to some of the renewed competitors in their markets.

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Should Cisco reinvent itself? Thoughts ahead of Cisco Live Europe 2019

Cisco Champion 2019

We’re happy to see that Al Rasheed was accepted as a Cisco Champion for 2019. In this post, he directly sites the influence of attending Networking Field Day for this accomplishment. We’re just glad Al was able to attend the event, and we’re hoping to see him back in 2019.

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Cisco Champion 2019

Building More Factors For Security with Cisco Duo

Cisco was one of the companies that presented at our inaugural Security Field Day event in December. Tom Hollingsworth breaks down what he saw at the event from Cisco Duo, their authentication platform. This provides intelligent multifactor authentication. It does this by not assuming endpoints are secure, enforcing the latest firmware, and supporting geofencing and time zone awareness. This allows you to build policy enforcement into your 2FA from the ground up.

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Building More Factors For Security with Cisco Duo

Will Cisco Viptela continue to be one of the Leaders in SD-WAN ?

Orhan Ergun looks at Cisco’s SD-WAN efforts, which since acquiring Viptela in 2017 have been recognized by Gartner as Leaders in their Magic Quadrant. For Orhan, the strength of Cisco’s approach to SD-WAN is allowing it to run directly on IOS-based devices, bringing in new features with software updates. He also digs deep into the feature parity with other SD-WAN solutions, and the overall value proposition for enterprises.

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Will Cisco Viptela continue to be one of the Leaders in SD-WAN ?

Why Innovation, Risk, and Curves make for the best careers

In this post, Justin Paul considers the fact that the rapid change of technology means that virtually no one in IT is going to be doing the same job for their entire careers. To that effect, he looks at how markets change from early adopters and innovators, and uses that to show when it might be time to look to change your career to catch the next way. Keeping up on new technology can be daunting, and he suggested Tech Field Day presentation videos as a great way to stay informed. We agree!

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Why Innovation, Risk, and Curves make for the best careers

2018 was a good and busy year ! Things I have done during the last year

Year in review posts are always a good time to take stock of accomplishments. Orhan Ergun took a look at 2018 and found he had a really busy year. For starters, he made the decision to open a company in Turkey. Other highlights included seeing students and friends pass their CCDE practical exam. In October, we were lucky to have Orhan attend Networking Field Day, where he got to hear from a variety of companies in the industry. We hope his 2019 is just as eventful!

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2018 was a good and busy year ! Things I have done during the last year

Packets Never Lie…

Al Rasheed heard from Riverbed during Networking Field Day late last year. The company had a wide ranging presentation showing what they now offer in their WAN optimization and SD-WAN portfolio. This included an extensive SD-WAN Q&A session, demos from Brandon Carroll, and a look at SteelCentral Aternity and Steelhead SD. It was a lot of information, so be sure to check out the video from the presentation.

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Packets Never Lie…

Stuck in Traffic – Micro-segmentation

It stinks that J Wolfgang Goerlich gets stuck in traffic so much, but the silver lining is that he creates more great IT videos. In this one, he’s discussing micro-segmentation, which is crucial for organizations that need more and more granular security controls. This effectively segments and firewalling around an individual hosts. At Security Field Day, he got to hear from VMware is approaching this with NSX.

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Stuck in Traffic - Micro-segmentation

Apstra in a whiteboard

Marina Ferreira got to hear from Apstra at Networking Field Day late last year. But what impressed her the most wasn’t what she heard, but what she saw, specifically the excellent whiteboard session by Carly Stoughton. She outlined how Apstra went from their reference AOS architecture and have expanded it to provide intent-based networking, analytics and more. Check out the whiteboard and the full presentation video to catch up yourself.

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Apstra in a whiteboard

Stuck in Traffic – Doug Engelbart

Even though J Wolfgang Goerlich is stuck in traffic, that doesn’t mean he can’t put together some great security content. In this video, he considers the influence of Doug Engelbart, and how we can use collective intelligence to augment cyber security practices, particularly with automation. At Security Field Day, he saw Cisco take this approach with Cisco Threat Response.

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Stuck in Traffic - Doug Engelbart

Operating your Network with Intent-Based Networking

Apstra has done a series of blog posts following up on their recent Networking Field Day presentation, digging in a little deeper and providing some further context. In this post, Raghavendra Rachamadugu focuses on the importance of intent-based analytics that Apstra offers through AOS. While getting shiny charts of your network are nice, as the sheer amount of data grows, having a general analytic view will often obscure small but critical problems. Raghavendra gives a very precise definition of intent-based analytics, and explains how Apstra implements it.

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Operating your Network with Intent-Based Networking

Tech Field Day: Day 1

Paul Snyder was one of the delegates invited to the inaugural Security Field Day earlier this month. This was his first time at a Field Day event, he found it to be one of the best professional experiences he’s ever had. He found the event separates itself from others in the industry, because the delegates have total candor and freedom to express how they truly feel about the presenting companies. Maintaining this independence is critical for maintaining constructive dialogues.

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Tech Field Day: Day 1

INFINIDAT Neutrix Cloud 2.0

Andrea Mauro gives an overview of Neutrix Cloud, a sovereign public cloud storage service offered by Infinidat. While this can be integrated with Infinidat’s Infinibox on-premises storage, it fundamentally provides file systems and block volumes across all the major public clouds, using a unified set of APIs across them all. Since seeing the solution at Storage Field Day earlier this year, Infinidat has added a number of features, including a web GUI, cross-regional replication, and integration with Amazon Voice Services.

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INFINIDAT Neutrix Cloud 2.0

Some Random Thoughts From Security Field Day

Tom Hollingsworth just finished up the inaugural Security Field Day. As the organizer, Tom has some unique perspective, getting an inside look at both the presenting companies and delegates. I’m sure we’ll see a lot of takeaways from the event, but these initial thoughts by Tom are an interesting look at security from a more IT generalist perspective. The big thing here is that security isn’t about tools, it’s about embracing a way of thinking, and realizing that failure is a likely outcome over time.

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Some Random Thoughts From Security Field Day

Voices in Data Storage – Episode 3: A Conversation with Leo Leung of Oracle

In this episode of Voices in Data Storage, Enrico Signoretti spoke with Leo Leung, Oracle’s Senior Director of Product & Strategy for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. They discussed how Oracle’s cloud offerings have really impressed, specifically their presentation at Tech Field Day earlier this year. This isn’t simply a play to have traditional Oracle legacy apps in the cloud, but a play to offer high performance instances for cloud native applications.

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Voices in Data Storage – Episode 3: A Conversation with Leo Leung of Oracle

Hopeful with a Dash of Skepticism: Cisco 9800 Wireless Controllers

Phil Gervasi is still haunted by memories of the Cisco 5760 Wireless LAN Controller. So it was with that in mind that he looks at Cisco’s new WLCs they presented at Networking Field Day, the 9300 and 9800 series. Phil thinks these can be successful due to their IOS-XE programmability and their ability to be deployed in racks or in the cloud as virtual appliances. Phil doesn’t think Cisco is repeating the issues of the 5760, and wants to start building them out in a lab soon.

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Hopeful with a Dash of Skepticism: Cisco 9800 Wireless Controllers

Apstra’s NFD19 Experience: Part 2

Carly Stoughton reviews what she presented on for Apstra at Networking Field Day last month. This presentation started with a architectural overview of Apstra Operating System. She then went on to show how AOS Server provides pre-built building blocks, allowing you to build out a data center is AOS in under six minutes. All of this can be customized and configured to fit an organizations needs.

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Apstra’s NFD19 Experience: Part 2

Elastifile Cloud File Service Now Available on Google Cloud

Chris Evans looks at the significance of Elastifile now offering a managed scale-out file service for Google Cloud, calling it nothing less than a coup for the company. He goes into the background on Elastifile’s Cloud File Service, which he first saw at Storage Field Day in 2017. By being a native first-party service with GCP, Elastifile gets the benefits of using native APIs, have billing done through Google, and have Google manage their scaling. Having native integration on GCP makes Elastifile “a winner” for Chris.

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Elastifile Cloud File Service Now Available on Google Cloud

Kentik Adds Value, Gets Cloudy

Kentik is no stranger to Networking Field Day, and recently did a presentation at our event last month. Pete Welcher was a delegate at the event and shares his thoughts on what he saw from them in this post. They showed off their cloud-based big data approach to analyzing flow data from internal sources and the cloud. Kentik is now able to ingest AWS and GCP flow records, with support for Azure coming in 2019. Pete was impressed by the amount of data this agentless approach can obtain.

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Kentik Adds Value, Gets Cloudy