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.
3 things infrastructure pros need to know about nested virtualization on Google Cloud
Keith Townsend reviews Google’s announce support for nested virtualization, which lets you run a hypervisor within a hypervisor. Keith outlines why this would be needed, and uses an example from Scale Computing running HC3 for disaster recovery inside Google Cloud as a use case. Keith saw this from Scale at Tech Field Day last week, be sure to check out the video of the announcement for more details.
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3 things infrastructure pros need to know about nested virtualization on Google Cloud
Cisco Gives SP Customers Programability Features in IOS-XR
At Tech Field Day last week Brandon Carroll found that Cisco has made big strides in network programmability with their IOS-XR using OpenConfig. Instead of forcing customers into using Cisco Works, Brandon thinks this could open up network programmability to a new market.
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Cisco Gives SP Customers Programability Features in IOS-XR
The Gravity of Mathematics: Summary of Tech Field Day at SDC 2017
For decades, technology companies made sustained investments in pure mathematical research. In this post, Dr. Rachel Traylor outlines how mathematical research had very real impacts on the development of storage. This includes queuing theory, information theory, statistical process control, error correction codes. She makes the case that it would be a mistake for modern storage companies to not continue this investment.
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The Gravity of Mathematics: Summary of Tech Field Day at SDC 2017
Commentary: Returning to Fundamentals in Tech
Dr. Rachel Traylor joined Tech Field Day as a delegate last week. Hearing from the presenting companies, she was struck at the difference in approaches between mathematicians and engineers. The former are much more deliberative before proclaiming a solution, whereas the latter often don’t worry about a solid foundation before moving to a solution. In SkyPort Systems, Dr. Traylor found a company bucking this trend, building their solution from the ground up to embrace security principals on a zero-trust model.
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Commentary: Returning to Fundamentals in Tech
Meeting of the Tech Minds – Tech Field Day at Riverbed
Michael Sheehan of Riverbed gives a preview of their Tech Field Day presentation. They focused on how their SteelFusion and SteelConnection solutions can help centrally manage the modern distributed enterprise without losing any business agility. They particularly focused on applications for edge locations. Make sure to watch their full video coverage for a technical deep dive.
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Meeting of the Tech Minds - Tech Field Day at Riverbed
Intent-Based Networking: What is it?
Apstra’s Sasha Ratkovic posts about what exactly is intent-based networking, based on their recent presentation from Networking Field Day. He reviews why organizations should be motivated to implement IBN, defines what Apstra specifically means by “intent”, and outlines how such an adoption can fundamentally lead to more agility and availability for your network.
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Intent-Based Networking: What is it?
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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