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.
Apstra’s NFD19 Experience: Part 1
Carly Stoughton has presented at a few Tech Field Day events, but Networking Field Day earlier this month was the first time the delegates got to see her present for Apstra. Using her whiteboard prowess, she was able to showcase Apstra AOS and how it enables organizations to embrace intent across automation and analytics.
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Apstra’s NFD19 Experience: Part 1
Western Digital Redefines DRAM Caching
Chris Evans digis into Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC ME200. This is a solution to extend server DRAM using caching into byte-addressable NAND. Chris does a great job of giving this a technical overview, and considering if this will find a welcoming market, or simply cover up Western Digital’s lack of a true storage-class memory solution. He also highlights similar efforts to use NAND as a memory cache, specifically citing Diablo Technologies’ Memory1 solution, which he saw back in 2016 at a Tech Field Day event.
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Western Digital Redefines DRAM Caching
Riverbed Showcases SD-WAN Enhancements at Network Field Day 19
Riverbed presented at Networking Field Day earlier this year, being no stranger to the event. To get their perspective on it, be sure to read former-delegate Brandon Carroll’s post on the Riverbed blog. They introduced their SD-WAN 2.0 to the delegates, in conjunction with SteelHead SD. This delivers SD-WAN with a robust feature set to provide security and flexibility without sacrificing performance. Make sure to watch their presentation video to see Brandon give a full demo.
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Riverbed Showcases SD-WAN Enhancements at Network Field Day 19
Riverbed Enhanced SD-WAN
Pete Welcher returned for his fifth Networking Field Day last month, and it looks like he didn’t leave disappointed. In this post, he looks at what Riverbed presented at the event. They presented on their SD-WAN solution. Given the crowded field, Pete was interested to see how they differentiated themselves. They did this with a solid GUI and robust feature set, with an emphasis on digital experience and performance. He also shows how Riverbed’s history with WAN optimization naturally extends into SD-WAN.
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Disaster Recovery and Cyber Attacks
Enrico Signoretti doesn’t just think about fire, floods, and tornadoes when he considers IT disasters. But Enrico puts Cyber-Attacks in the same category. Luckily he saw an interesting presentation from Dell EMC’s Data Protection team at Tech Field Day this October. They showed how they use Data Domain appliances in conjunction with software from Index Engines to proactively detect anomalies. Enrico was impressed how this is independent from backup software, giving you a better chance to recover operations quickly.
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Disaster Recovery and Cyber Attacks
Meet Wayne McFarkus
Al Rasheed heard a deep dive from Silver Peak at Networking Field Day earlier this year. They have a unique approach to their SD-WAN solution, positioning it not just as software-defined, but rather self-driving. What stood out in their presentation was how their solution takes a business driven approach to networking, making it work for the needs of the business rather than the other way around. Al runs through everything the company showed at the event. Be sure to read it before watching their complete presentation video.
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BiB 057: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Wants Your Workloads
On this episode of the Briefings in Brief podcast, Ethan Banks runs down what he heard from Oracle Cloud at Tech Field Day last month. This goes far beyond just being a platform for enterprises to run Oracle applications. Instead, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has slowly worked its way to feature parity with the public cloud big boys.
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BiB 057: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Wants Your Workloads
Cohesity Technology Update – Helios
Pietro Piutti follows up on some of his previous Cohesity posts, with a deep dive into the company’s cloud-specific features that he saw at Cloud Field Day earlier this year. He specifically highlights Helios, Cohesity’s SaaS-based unified Global Management system for all their Secondary Data and Applications. This is designed to be a Simple, Smart and, most importantly, Proactive solution.
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Cohesity Technology Update – Helios
I’m Too Sexy For My Shirt
Al Rasheed was one of the delegates invited to attend Networking Field Day earlier this month. At the event, he heard a presentation from Illumio. The company was an early pioneer in micro-segmentation, something increasingly important to reduce surface area on the ever increasing incidents of data center exploits. Al was impressed how they can bring increased visibility, particularly for application dependencies. Overall, he found that Illumio “killed it” during their presentation.
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Intent Based Networking , Is it the next big thing ?
This post by Orhan Ergun does a great job of providing background on Intent-Based Networking, why it’s getting so much buzz, and what some of the tradeoff can potentially be. This sets up his thoughts from Networking Field Day presentation from Apstra, a startup active in this space for a few years and who have started to innovate into the Intent-Based Analytics world as well. Orhan certainly found their presentation impressive, especially compared to other competitive solutions.
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Intent Based Networking , Is it the next big thing ?
Cisco Aggressively Ups Its SD-WAN Game
Cisco spent the bulk of their Networking Field Day presentation discussing recent updates to SD-WAN. Pete Welcher digs into the presentation in this blog post. For Pete, the big news of the presentation was Cisco bringing improved security to SD-WAN, with firewalls and other security features now included with Viptela SD-WAN. Pete sees this as the key to broadening SD-WAN into more diverse designs and topologies.
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Cisco Aggressively Ups Its SD-WAN Game
DNS Is A Chump!
Al Rasheed was one of the delegates at our Networking Field Day event last week, and got to hear from BlueCat Networks. The company provides enterprise DNS solutions to provide visibility, an automation framework, and agility without compromising on security.
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76: GreyBeards talk backup content, GDPR and cyber security with Jim McGann, VP Mkt & Bus. Dev., Index Engines
In this episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast, Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks talked with Jim McGann, VP Marketing and Business Development at Index Engines. Jim presented at Dell EMC’s session at Tech Field Day last month. They discussed the company’s CyberSense solution, along with GDPR and indexing backups.
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Oracle Cloud
As Oracle continues to expand into the public cloud market, they have to change a lot of minds along the way. At Tech Field Day, it seems like they got their message heard by Erik Ableson, who described the session as a “wake up call.” For Erik, what struck him is how Oracle Cloud is positioned to work well with existing enterprise workloads and cloud-native ones. While there are elements that are a managed service, their cloud offerings stand apart and should be of interest to anyone in the market.
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Hammerspace at Tech Field Day 17
It’s always exciting when a company comes out of stealth at a Tech Field Day event. That’s what Erik Ableson got to see at Tech Field Day last month, when Hammerspace went live to the world. The presented their data-as-a-service solution in an interesting way, defining the most important part of a file system as the metadata expression of the files that exist in a particular context. Hammerspace separates the shared file metadata from the file access path, allowing them to provide a single namespace regardless of where the data actually is. Erik sees them as having the potential to move unstructured data managed out of the world of scripting and into advanced policy management.
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Hammerspace at Tech Field Day 17
Exciting SD-WAN Updates From Riverbed
Kevin Blackburn was along as a delegate at Networking Field Day last week. At the event, he got to hear the latest updates on SD-WAN from Riverbed. SD-WAN is a great tool for routing connections between disparate locations in the enterprise. Riverbed demonstrated how their solution allows this to scale to large networks by seamlessly managing the overlay and underlay with a unified approach. Kevin was also impressed by Riverbed’s new subscription model pricing, as well as their overall ease of use.
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Exciting SD-WAN Updates From Riverbed
Disrupting DDI @ Networking Field Day (In Tweets)
BlueCat Networks shared a blog post detailing their team’s experience as a first time Tech Field Day presenter. The company broke down how they are innovating on the traditional query and answer nature of DNS. The delegates were impressed how BlueCat offers DNS, DHCP, IPAM services combined into a single source of truth. They then showed how this can have major implications for network automation.
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Disrupting DDI @ Networking Field Day (In Tweets)
The Recap: Kentik at Networking Field Day 19
Michelle Kincaid with Kentik wrote up a blog post detailing the companies recent presentation at Networking Field Day. The company is no stranger to the event, and it’s always great to hear their latest and greatest. The presentation updated the delegates on how Kentik is expanding the capabilities of their network monitoring by adding features for cloud infrastructure, service providers, and automation.
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The Recap: Kentik at Networking Field Day 19
Cisco Catalyst 9800 WLC – The Most Flexible WLC Yet
Kevin Blackburn breaks down the release of Cisco’s new Catalyst 9800 series wireless LAN controller. Kevin is impressed that this isn’t a single appliance, but a true platform that can run in the cloud, on a switch, or on an on-premises appliance. The Catalyst 9800 series WLC are all based on IOS-XE code, providing modularity and flexibility. Cisco presented on this at Networking Field Day earlier this month, so be sure to check out their full video for a deep dive.
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Cisco Catalyst 9800 WLC - The Most Flexible WLC Yet
Hammerspace – Unstructured Data Anywhere
Adam Fisher was one of the delegates at Tech Field Day last month, and got to hear from Hammerspace as they came out of stealth. They are a new player in the emerging Data as a Service market, and offer a solution that decouples data from the underlying storage. This removes this as a concern for the consumer, who interacts with data via a global namespace. Adam gets into the detail and breaks down the components in this piece.
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