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.

Tech Field Day Culture and Values

Alastair Cooke is out in Austin for Tech Field Day this week. He’s no stranger to the events, so he shares some of his personal rules and best practices to get the most out of the event. We’re looking forward to seeing what he thinks of the presentations this time around.

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Tech Field Day Culture and Values

Holistic full stack monitoring with Uila

Andrea Mauro originally heard of Uila at Tech Field Day last year. He’s been following the company’s holistic full stack monitoring and visualization since then. In this post, he shares some updates the company has released since that presentation.

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Holistic full stack monitoring with Uila

My dilemma of stateful storage marriage

Chin-Fah Heoh has been thinking about stateful data in stateful storage containers and how they would interact with distributed applications containers and functions-as-a-service. This led to a consideration of what a distributed data systems would look like, wherein the idea of a “data center” seems like an oxymoron. He’s seen some past Storage Field Day companies offer pieces on how to get to a distributed data system. Chin-Fah will be at Storage Field Day next month, and looks forward to seeing how Hedvig and WekaIO will offer more pieces to this puzzle.

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My dilemma of stateful storage marriage

Storage Field Day 15 – Introduction

We’re looking forward to having Chan Ekanayake return for his second Storage Field Day in Silicon Valley next month. In this preview of the event, he looks at what he expects from each of the presenting companies. He’ll be seeing some familiar Storage Field Day delegates, and meeting many new ones as well. Make sure to follow Chan’s posts after the event to see what he thought of the presenters.

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Storage Field Day 15 – Introduction

Tech Field Day 2017: An Enthusiastic Retrospective

When Nikki Schnupp joined the Tech Field Day team, she was greeted with two events back to back within a week of starting. Much like a delegate at the event, she drank from the IT firehose, learning about the personalities and technology as presented. It was a singular experience. Make sure to check out her entire look back in this piece.

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Tech Field Day 2017: An Enthusiastic Retrospective

Converged Infrastructure died a long time ago, right?

Should converged infrastructure have died a long time ago? Keith Townsend discusses on this CTO Advisor video, in light of the release of the Dell EMC VxBlock 1000. He argues that while CI might not be the hot new trend in IT, lots of customers still want and need it, especially in cases where applications aren’t certified to run on HCI. Keith is excited to hear more from Dell EMC on this at Tech Field Day next week.

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Converged Infrastructure died a long time ago, right?

Juniper Woos The Enterprise With New Products

In this post, Drew Conry-Murray details the new offerings from Juniper Networks around multicloud networking. This comes from Drew’s most recent experience as a delegate at Networking Field Day last month.

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Juniper Woos The Enterprise With New Products

Looking Through the (Cloud)Lense with Ixia

Paul Woodward got a look at Ixia at Tech Field Day last September. They presented on their CloudLense visibility solution, which solves some of the limitations of monitoring data in hybrid or public cloud workloads. CloudLense does this by using containers or agents to collect, categorize, and surface the most relevant packet and infrastructure information. Paul really likes that it can also be used to gain visibility into containers as well.

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Looking Through the (Cloud)Lense with Ixia

Always serendipitous Storage Field Days

We’re thrilled to have Chin-Fah Heoh returning for his fourth Storage Field Day event this March. In this post, he writes about how coming to the events has led to many serendipitous encounters and experiences have occurred as a result of attending, like getting a look at disruptive high performance multicloud technology from Elastifile. With a combination of new and veteran companies at this coming Storage Field Day, we can’t wait to see what his next bit of serendipity will be!

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Always serendipitous Storage Field Days

Gigamon (and Splunk and Phantom) at NFD16

In this piece, Terry Slattery shares his thoughts on what he saw from Gigamon at Networking Field Day this past November. The company presented with partners Splunk and Phantom, and showcased how their traditional packet broker and visibility products can be used for overall network security. Terry thought their central premise of the impossibility of total intrusion prevention was reasonable. Instead the company’s Defender Lifecycle Model showcases how the company is working with partners to use big data and machine learning to make the most of the packet information collected.

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Gigamon (and Splunk and Phantom) at NFD16

The Winds of Change From January

Tom Hollingsworth had a whirlwind last two weeks of January, leading both Networking Field Day in Silicon Valley and Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe from Barcelona. In this post, he begins to organize his thoughts on the two events, including the state of Cisco turning away from hardware, the death of the CLI in 2018, as well as the continuing importance of containers and automation.

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The Winds of Change From January

Strategy Series: How do you view outside of your network?

In this piece, Nick Buraglio looks at the struggles many network administrators have in getting visibility outside of the network they directly control. This is vital for being able to answer the dreaded “the internet is slow” question, and understand the user experience. He shares a recent presentation from ThousandEyes from Networking Field Day last month, which showed their approach to the visibility challenge.

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Strategy Series: How do you view outside of your network?

Bringing DevOps To Routing – Cisco XR

Larry Smith got his first deep dive into Cisco XR at Networking Field Day last month. This is Cisco’s Linux-based OS that adds application and configuration management to their platforms. This piece looks at how native and Docker application hosting works on XR, as well as how it supports ZTP and iPXE.

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Bringing DevOps To Routing - Cisco XR

How to fit an Elephant into a small car to transport it over the Networkautobahn

Load balancing across multiple WAN uplinks is a fairly common SD-WAN capability. At Networking Field Day last month, Dominik Pickhardt heard from VMware’s VeloCloud about something more challenging. They demonstrated how they can handle so-called “elephant flows”, which is when you have one large session that can’t be easily distributed.

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How to fit an Elephant into a small car to transport it over the Networkautobahn

BiB 029: Cisco At NFD17 – Automation, Telemetry & Intent

In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss what they heard from Cisco during their Networking Field Day presentation last month. Like much of the networking world, Cisco focused on how they are bringing intent, automation, and telemetry into their ecosystem.

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BiB 029: Cisco At NFD17 - Automation, Telemetry & Intent

BiB 028: VMware NSX At NFD17 – SD-WAN & Security

In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss what they saw from VMware’s NSX team at Networking Field Day last month. They touch on the company’s update on VeloCloud post-acquisition, NSX-T features, and a look at the latest version of vSphere.

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BiB 028: VMware NSX At NFD17 - SD-WAN & Security

BiB 027: Juniper Networks At NFD17 – A Platform Emerges

In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss the presentation from Juniper Networks at last month’s Networking Field Day. The company demoed their analytics platform AppFormix, clarified the divergence of Contrail from OpenContrail, and discussed the adoption of the P4 language across a variety of hardware.

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BiB 027: Juniper Networks At NFD17 - A Platform Emerges

BiB 30: Mellanox, Ixia & Cumulus At NFD17 – VXLAN & Whitebox

In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss what they saw from Mellanox, Ixia and, Cumulus Networks at Networking Field Day last month. Mellanox reviewed their switch portfolio, which can run a third-party OS like Cumulus Networks’ Cumulus Linux network OS. Ixia showed off IxNetwork, their flagship testing suite.

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BiB 30: Mellanox, Ixia & Cumulus At NFD17 - VXLAN & Whitebox

Rubrik Acquires Datos IO – Backup Wars Looming?

In this piece, Chris Evans shares his thoughts on Rubrik’s recent acquisition of Datos IO. This makes sense as a way for the company to grab an early leader in the NoSQL backup market, and increases their overall backup capability surface area. Overall he sees this down the line of providing another way for Rubrik to transition from backup into an overall data management company.

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Rubrik Acquires Datos IO - Backup Wars Looming?

Networking is Finally Catching Up

Phil Gervasi reflects on why servers have been managed programmatically for years, but not networks. From what he saw at Networking Field Day last month, that’s about to change. Phil cites Extreme Networks as standing out with providing a means for greater agility and efficiency in programming networks.

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Networking is Finally Catching Up