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.
Routers Getting Routered – Silver Peak SD-WAN
At Networking Field Day last month, Silver Peak made the argument that their SD-WAN appliances should replace routers in an enterprise deployment. As a delegate at the event, Orhan Ergun was impressed by their Unity Orchestrator SD-WAN controller, which provided a single tool for statistics , advanced reporting, configuration and maintenance. That combined with a very flexible feature set and zero-touch provisioning made Orhan think Silver Peak won’t have a problem fulfilling their router replacement promise.
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Routers Getting Routered - Silver Peak SD-WAN
BiB 067: Custom APIs For Business Logic With BlueCat Gateway
Ethan Banks posted a new episodes of the Briefings in Brief podcast highlighting BlueCat Networks, which he saw at Networking Field Day last month. This episode highlight BlueCat Gateway, a way for businesses to make custom APIs specific to their business for BlueCat’s DDI platform. This lives as an easy to deploy Docker image, with a community-driven GitHub repository to share successful workflows. For Ethan, this kind of community engagement is critical for success of an API-driven solution.
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BiB 067: Custom APIs For Business Logic With BlueCat Gateway
Automating the Mundane with Silver Peak
Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at what Silver Peak presented at Networking Field Day. The SD-WAN company doesn’t just stop at basic SDN automation. SDN has long been used for automatic VLAN provisioning for ports, but Silver Peak showed how their automation can handle even more mundane tasks, like an RMA process. This takes it off the plate of admin busy work, and frees up productivity.
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Automating the Mundane with Silver Peak
DNS: More Than Just Name Resolution
Kevin Blackburn was a delegate at Networking Field Day last month, and clearly was intrigued by what he heard from BlueCat Networks. During their presentation, the company showed how DNS can be more than simple name resolution. This involves using it for threat protection and utilizing as a store of a single source of networking truth. For Kevin, this was some next-level DNS.
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DNS: More Than Just Name Resolution
Apstra’s Intent-Based Networking
Pete Welcher continues his excellent look at the presentations from Networking Field Day last month, focusing on Apstra in this post. As Pete points out, the company was ahead of the curve, trumpeting Intent-Based Networking before it became a buzz word. He reviews their vendor-neutral approach, and how quickly the company demonstrated deploying and configuring AOS.
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Apstra's Intent-Based Networking
When Is It Not Always DNS?
During their recent Networking Field Day presentation, BlueCat Networks posited that DNS is unreliable because it was never designed to actually be reliable. Tom Hollingsworth looks at the security implications of this, and the merits of BlueCat’s unified DNS, DHCP and IPAM platform.
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BiB 064: Is Riverbed’s SD-WAN Product Too Late To Matter?
Ethan Banks hosted another episode of Briefings in Brief, looking at the Networking Field Day presentation from Riverbed. The presentation focused on Riverbed’s was on their SD-WAN solution. With a rich legacy in the WAN optimization market, Ethan thinks the company is well poised to transition customers to these SD-WAN solutions. He also looks at how their SteelHead SD and SteelConnect SDI appliances fit within their portfolio.
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BiB 064: Is Riverbed's SD-WAN Product Too Late To Matter?
Silver Peak is Serious about SD-WAN
Silver Peak’s presentation at Networking Field Day last month got Pete Welcher thinking. He thinks the company made a well timed jump from WAN appliances to SD-WAN, with their Unity EdgeConnect being their unified SD-WAN offering. Their presentation made the case for replacing traditional WAN routers with SD-WAN devices. Pete looks at some of the technical benefits and drawbacks to that approach.
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Silver Peak is Serious about SD-WAN
Meet the Security Field Day Delegates: Paul Snyder
In preparation for their presentation at Security Field Day next week, Aruba’s Jamie Easley wrote up a post to get to know one of the delegates for the event, Paul Snyder. They discussed how Paul got into IT security, what the industry can do to attract more security professionals, and what are some of the overlooked security issues in modern enterprises.
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Meet the Security Field Day Delegates: Paul Snyder
BiB 063: Can An SD-WAN Device Replace A WAN Router?
On this episode of Briefings in Brief, Ethan Banks looks at what Silver Peak presented at Networking Field Day last month. The SD-WAN company focused their Field Day presentation on how their solutions can be replacements for conventional WAN routers. Ethan looks at if WAN routers are the ancient devices Silver Peak presented, and if an SD-WAN device is a suitable replacement.
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BiB 063: Can An SD-WAN Device Replace A WAN Router?
MPLS for the masses: The need for simplicity and standardization, at least in networking (The wheel has already been invented)
Nicola Modena found a kindred spirit when he heard Apstra present at Networking Field Day last month. Both share an appreciation for removing the superfluous and using the right tools and in the right way. Their Apstra Operating System was made to create and manage multivendor Clos IP Fabrics. As part of this, Apstra included a number of standard configuration models that fit within this ethos. After talking to Apstra, while their customers are at liberty to modify these configuration, the vast majority leave them in their essential state.
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NetApp Data Fabric: A la Hybrid Cloud! – An update from NetApp Insight 2018
Chan Ekanayake attending Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018, and in this post shares his thoughts on NetApp’s announcements around Data Fabric. At Insight, the company showed how Data Fabric is moving beyond simply being a hybrid cloud solution. Now Data Fabric can provide data portibility across across Edge to Core to Cloud platforms. NetApp also extended the data services available to Data Fabric solutions. Chan thinks the strategy for NetApp is sound, the devil will be in continuing to execute. But he sees NetApp’s willingness to invest and differentiate with software will only serve to their advantage going forward.
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NetApp Data Fabric: A la Hybrid Cloud! – An update from NetApp Insight 2018
BiB 062: Globally Scalable Microsegmentation With Illumio
Ethan Banks posted a recent Briefings in Brief episode discussing what was presented by Illumio at Networking Field Day last month. This marked Illumio’s return to the event, and they used their presentation to highlight their Policy Compute Engine Supercluster. This provides a a cluster of Policy Compute Engines, which can be used for massive scale that would otherwise choke a single controller. Ethan was impressed the company did a live demo showing the Supercluster in action with 225K workloads across three AWS regions. Make sure you check out their demo yourself with our full video coverage.
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BiB 062: Globally Scalable Microsegmentation With Illumio
Illumio PCE Supercluster Launch: Behind the Scenes
Illumio returned to Networking Field Day earlier this week, with the launch of PCE Supercluster, providing centralized policy management and global application visibility at scale. In this video, the team takes a look at what went into planning that announcement, including organizing a quarter million workloads demo.
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Illumio PCE Supercluster Launch: Behind the Scenes
BiB 061: Understanding DriveScale Composer Architecture
The Briefing in Brief podcast from Packet Pushers is a great way to stay up to date on the latest company-specific news in a really concise package. In this edition, Ethan Banks looks at what DriveScale presented about at Tech Field Day, specifically the DriveScale Composer. This allows organizations to compose any compute to any disk or flash, in a scalable way. This is all RESTful API driven, allowing you to compose your infrastructure, but stopping short of being an application orchestrator. All of this with full multi-tenant support, and designed to insure data integrity in the event of an outage.
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BiB 061: Understanding DriveScale Composer Architecture
BlueCat: DNS, DDI + Visibility and Workflow Automation
In this post, Pete Welcher continues his excellent look at the presenters from Networking Field Day earlier this month. Looking at BlueCat Networks, he thought they made an interesting case for their managed DNS and IPAM address management solution. Though DNS and DDI can be seen as somewhat commodified, BlueCat argued that DNS provides network visibility, while DDI can serve as a single source of truth. Both are seen as vital for business workflow automation.
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BlueCat: DNS, DDI + Visibility and Workflow Automation
Meet the Security Field Day Delegates: Ethan Banks
Ahead of their presentation at Security Field Day in December, Aruba’s Jamie Easley sat down for an interview with delegate Ethan Banks. Ethan is no stranger to the Field Day event series, but we’re excited to have him along for our inaugural Security Field Day. In the interview, they discuss what is new with Packet Pushers, the role of AI in security, and favorite memes.
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Meet the Security Field Day Delegates: Ethan Banks
The Need for Security Field Day
The Tech Field Day event series has always tried to present a comprehensive view of enterprise IT. Our more specialized Field Day events were created to provider a deeper dive into the most important areas. We started with IT mainstays like storage and networking, but in recent years have added cloud and mobility-focused events to the calendar as those have become vital to modern IT. In 2018, we’re launching Security Field Day. Tom Hollingsworth makes the case why this has never been more vital in this post.
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The Need for Security Field Day
Oracle Cloud with SLA?
Yusuf Emre Özensoy attended Tech Field Day earlier this year, his first time as a delegate at the event. He got to see a great presentation from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, who made a great case why the industry needs another cloud provider. Oracle Cloud differentiates itself by offering a large number of bare metal cloud instances as well as integration of the K8S engine for containers.
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Illumio: Micro-Segmentation via the Endpoint
Pete Welcher has seen a number of Networking Field Day presentations. That;s why it’s impressive when he says that Illumio’s recent presentation may have had one the best demos the event has ever seen! They showed how their newly announced PCE SuperCluster can provide automated leveraging of endpoints, rather than dedicated firewalls, to provide uniform micro-segmentation onsite or in the cloud. Make sure to watch the demo for yourself with our comprehensive event video coverage.
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