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.
Pluribus Networks… Wait, where are we again?
Although he had followed the company for a while, Chris Marget appreciated an update on Pluribus Networks at Networking Field Day. While he appreciated the company’s use of Solaris to back Netvisor switching OS, the introduction of Netvisor on Linux is a welcome addition. It allows you to manage network devices using specific protocols through a single device via their Netvisor Fabric. One of the other standouts was Pluribus Networks’ “fantastic telemetry and flow analytics capabilities”.
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Pluribus Networks... Wait, where are we again?
Accelerite salvages good tech from bad execution: A CloudPlatform story
Joep Piscaer reviews how Accelerite acquired CloudStack and turned it into a key component to their overall cloud offering. This includes Rovius, their Managed CloudPlatform offering, with CloudPlatform serving as a Apache CloudStack based Cloud Orchestration platform in a box. Joep thinks it’s an interesting approach to acquire yesterday’s tech and applying it successfully to today’s problems.
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Accelerite salvages good tech from bad execution: A CloudPlatform story
X-IO Announces ISE 900 Series G4
X-IO released their ISE 900 Series G4, an upgraded all-flash array. The new product packages in ISE hardware and software features, an now adds individual hot-swappable drives and Performance-Optimized Deduplication. Dan Frith finds it a compelling product, and appreciates X-IO positioning it as offering a feature rich AFA for a good price.
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X-IO Announces ISE 900 Series G4
Preserving and managing intent using Apstra AOS
Apstra’s AOS is a platform to allow network engineers to design a network based around an intended purpose or function, rather than muddling with an existing architecture who’s original intent can only be guessed. Amy Arnold points out that AOS simply isn’t a tool for building an initial configuration, but also a way for making revisions in a controlled manner, while documenting intent. This takes intent out of the realm of a network engineers thoughts, and forces it to be explicitly stated in a single source of truth.
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Preserving and managing intent using Apstra AOS
CloudStack, the platform with nine lives, gets another one courtesy of Accelerite
Ben Kepes takes a look at the history of CloudStack, which was acquired by Accelerite and renamed to Rovius Cloud. Even though OpenStack appeared to be an ersatz competitor to CloudStack, but lagged in adoption due to investors and vendor adoption. Ben was impressed that Rovius remains server, storage, an hypervisor agnostic, allowing organizations to federate on-premises resources with public clouds including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
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CloudStack, the platform with nine lives, gets another one courtesy of Accelerite
Cisco Intersight – A Transformative Evolution
At Networking Field Day, Cisco presented on release of Project Starship, now called Intersight. This is a cloud-based systems management platform to manage Cisco UCS and HyperFlex within one interface. All of this is designed with security in mind, while leveraging actionable intelligence from their customer base.
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Cisco Intersight – A Transformative Evolution
Tech Field Day 15 Preview: Ixia
Keith Townsend gives a preview of what to expect from Ixia at Tech Field Day this week. The company has a wide portfolio, including Network Hardware Testing, Security and Network Visualization. Keith focuses on the last two in the preview, which are of vital importance to any modern enterprise. He isn’t overly familiar with Ixia’s offering, so he expects a deep dive during the presentation.
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Tech Field Day 15 Preview: Ixia
Paessler’s PRTG Even Monitors The Weather
Scott McDermott got to hear from Paessler at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US this year. He had evaluated their PRTG monitoring solution before, but got a new appreciation of it from their presentation. PRTG supports a vast array of sensor, with up to 5,000 per VM supported. These can be typical metrics, but also support unusual metrics, like fan speed and even weather conditions. Scott was definitely impressed by the versatility.
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Paessler's PRTG Even Monitors The Weather
TFD15 Primer: Skyport Systems
Skyport Systems is drawing a lot of interest from our Tech Field Day delegates. Matt Crape will see them present next week and wrote up a preview of what to expect. Skyport essentially offers a highly scrutinized environment for workloads to run via a hardware appliance in your rack. Infrastructure security is first and foremost for Skyport Systems. Matt wants to hear more about how migration of VMs will work with the solution, as Skyport uses the Xen hypervisor. He’ll get his fill during their presentation this week.
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Techfield Day 15 Preview: DataCore
DataCore presents at their first Tech Field Day this week. Keith Townsend digs into their background a little bit to give some context prior to their presentation. The company offers a virtual SAN solution, and Keith wants to know how they will differentiate from competitors like vSAN, Nutanix and HPE SimpliVity. While the market may be crowded, Keith sees room for as long as a company can eke out more performance from the underlying storage. DataCore does this via parallel I/O, which has benefits for analytics workloads specifically.
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Techfield Day 15 Preview: DataCore
Cloud Field Day2: Integrating with ServiceNow
Lino Telera gives an in-depth overview of what ServiceNow presented at Cloud Field Day last month. The company offers dedicated PaaS for enterprise customers, focused on providing integration of disparate legacy systems. He really appreciates that the company gives organizations the ability to sandbox POCs without pushing sales in their Developer Program. Lino even played around with it using a basic Jakarta instance.
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Cloud Field Day2: Integrating with ServiceNow
NFD16 day one – Arista
Arista’s Networking Field Day presentation definitely struck a chord with many delegates. Gian Paolo Boarina is no exception. In this post, he highlights some of the topics covered, including EOS programmability, Network Automation, Telemetry, and Routing Architecture Transformations. Gian sees Arista really differentiating from competitors with their approach to programmability and telemetry, with the latter offering a clear, fast, easy to use GUI.
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KEMP Presented Some Interesting Features at NFD16
KEMP Technologies presented at Networking Field Day last week, and Chris Marget shares his thoughts on what he saw. The three features that stood out were the new ability to use KEMP’s UI to manage non-KEMP load balancers, easy service migrations between KEMP instances via vMotion, and their unique licensing model. Chris digs deeper into each, so make sure to read the full post!
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KEMP Presented Some Interesting Features at NFD16
Tech Field Day 15 Preview: Skyport Systems
Tech Field Day is coming up, and Keith Townsend previews Skyport Systems, a return presenter from Networking Field Day in 2016. The company offers of HCI solution on a zero-trust model, meaning the network, application, computing, and user layers share no level of trust between them. Skyport also offers a way to wrap existing applications to take advantage of the security features unique to their architecture. Keith is curious to learn more of how Skyport manages this disruptive change in infrastructure within organizations. Make sure to follow along on the live stream this week to learn more too!
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Tech Field Day 15 Preview: Skyport Systems
Networking Field Day 16 Summary
Derik Winkworth shares Apstra’s reflections on their Networking Field Day presentation. At their second event, Apstra focused on how their AOS platform can be applied to developer roles to enable true intent-based networking. Make sure to watch both of their presentations to get up to date on the exciting possibilities.
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Networking Field Day 16 Summary
NFD16 – Gigamon and Splunk (with a Dash of Phantom)
At Gigamon’s Networking Field Day presentation last week, the emphasis was on how hard security is in the modern data center. The company showed how with their platform and partners like Splunk and Phantom, they can radically simplify this process and bring true visibility to your network traffic.
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NFD16 – Gigamon and Splunk (with a Dash of Phantom)
TFD15 Primer: Scale Computing
Preparing for Tech Field Day next week, Matt Crape put together a preview of Scale Computing. Matt sees why the company has found success in the HCI SMB market. They offer the novelty of relatively upfront pricing and package their HCI without excessive licensing costs. Matt’s interested to hear an update on how they plan to tackle other markets, as well as respond to other companies moving into their traditional SMB strength.
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Kingston – NVMe Overview at VMworld 2017 – Tech Field Day Extra
It was great to hear from Kingston Technology at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld. They presented extensively on NVMe, including their DCP1000 PCIe card capable of 1.25 million read IOPS. Roger Lund shares their slide deck from the event.
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Kingston – NVMe Overview at VMworld 2017 – Tech Field Day Extra
Ravello expanding HVX platform to bare metal
Mike Preston shares his thoughts on the announcement of Ravello on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. He first saw Ravello prior to their acquisition by Oracle, at Virtualization Field Day in 2015. He’s glad to see the solution getting support after the acquisition. With this release, Ravello can run VMs on Oracle Cloud with hardware support, including running their HVX hypervisor on bare metal. Mike ran some benchmarks and saw impressive initial performance with this offering.
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Ravello expanding HVX platform to bare metal
Pluribus Networks Netvisor & Adaptive Cloud Fabric @ VMworld 2017 – Tech Field Day Extra
Roger Lund shares some thoughts on the presentation from Pluribus Networks at Networking Field Day last week. Make sure to checkout the slide deck from the presentation, and see how Roger thinks Pluribus can pivot into the wider SDN world with their Adaptive Cloud Fabric.
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Pluribus Networks Netvisor & Adaptive Cloud Fabric @ VMworld 2017 – Tech Field Day Extra