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.
What’s New in Networking: Docker at TFD12
Pete Welcher got a look at Docker’s plans to improve their networking from their presentation at Networking Field Day last November. Pete is still trying to wrap his head around what containers mean for networking. But in this post, he raises some prescient concerns. With the proliferation of containers and micro-services, he sees a world with the network getting even chattier, as container-based app components “pass the buck” to other components to actually get work done. It’s an interesting concern, and it’ll be interesting to see how this is addressed and hopefully resolved.
Read More:
What’s New in Networking: Docker at TFD12
Open19 Brings a new build paradigm to HyperScale Buildouts
At Storage Field Day, Excelero gave some of their presentation time to Open19, an project from LinkedIn to standardize and speed data center deployment. Using a Lego like approach to speed plugin time, their technical specifications allow for delivery of a rack of components in as little as two hours, down from an estimated eight. While this approach might not fit data centers with a lot of legacy equipment, Matt seems to like it for new build outs. Make sure to check out Matt’s piece and their video from the event for more specifics.
Read More:
Open19 Brings a new build paradigm to HyperScale Buildouts
Excelero achieves amazing stats at #SFD12
Matt Leib got to see Excelero’s debut at Storage Field Day last month. It’s a presentation that’s gotten a lot of the delegates excited, and Matt is certainly no exception. Their storage solution allows you to access disks in a storage array via their own RDDA, essentially NVME over Fabric. This makes the overhead for disk access negligible. Using commodity networking, this essentially allows the NVMe drives to effortlessly scale. The company demoed getting millions of Iops with minimal latency on hardware costing less than $15,000. Matt summed the presentation up by calling it “[a]stounding technology”.
Read More:
Excelero achieves amazing stats at #SFD12
VMWare NSX Distributed Firewall
At Networking Field Day earlier this month, Kevin Blackburn was introduced to the idea of a VMware distributed firewall. He thinks it’s a perfect example of how their NSX platform can bring additional value to your network by eliminating a lot of the need to physically segment it. Kevin sees NSX as making the network easier to manage, without ceding any control over its operation.
Read More:
VMWare NSX Distributed Firewall
My DockerCon 2017 Day #1
Cormac Hogan attended DockerCon for the first year as purely an attendee, no being tied into an presentations or other events. He found the keynote from Docker CEO Ben Golub and Docker founder Solomon Hykes to be interesting, keying in on the significant announcements. These include the ability for multi-stage builds, to separate build environments from runtimes, as well as LinuxKit, which lets you run a containerized Linux subsystem on any OS. He also enjoyed hearing from Portworx, who presented at Tech Field Day Extra during the event. Check out our video coverage from the event to get more details on their virtualized storage layer for containers.
Read More:
VMware NSX Unplugged: Networking Field Day
Networking Field Day compared to MTV’s “Unplugged” series? Hey, we’ll take it! Roger Fortier with VMware shared the videos from the event, and found the focused discussions and more relaxed atmosphere led to some truly unique moments. Make sure to check out all of VMware’s presentation, they were able to go really in-depth on their NSX Network Virtualization and Security platform.
Read More:
VMware NSX Unplugged: Networking Field Day
SNIA: Avoiding tail latency by failing IO operations on purpose
At Storage Field Day last month, Jon Klaus saw a presentation from SNIA, where they talked about tail latency. These are tiny spikes in latency, 2-10x longer than higher. These can have big impacts, effecting up to 2% of all IO, which is magnified when seen at a hyperscale level. Smaller organizations might simply over provision to lower overall latency so that these spikes still fall within acceptable ranges, but at scale this approach isn’t practical. SNIA presented several ways to overcome tail latency, and Jon shares his thoughts on what he saw.
Read More:
SNIA: Avoiding tail latency by failing IO operations on purpose
DockerCon 2017 Keynote: Is the Enterprise listening?
After listening to the DockerCon Keynote, John White wrote up his thoughts on if what he saw indicated greater adoption for Docker in the enterprise. The best use case John saw was security, and the ability to quickly build in numerous compliance requirements, and to have them easily verified in operation. And the new ability to run Linux containers on any platform prevents a technological turf war before it can prevent mass adoption. John has one lingering and poignant question: where does VMware fit into Docker’s plans going forward?
Read More:
DockerCon 2017 Keynote: Is the Enterprise listening?
Step by Step – Instalace Solarwinds Virtualization Manager
Karel Novak wrote up a piece reviewing how to install the SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, after seeing it at Tech Field Day in February. The original is in Czech, but we’ve provided the Google Translate versions for our monolingual readers. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/2ogA0nY/
Read More:
Step by Step – Instalace Solarwinds Virtualization Manager
SD-WAN: Redundancy and Optimization
Kevin Blackburn saw a presentation from TELoIP at Networking Field Day earlier this month, and used the presentation as a jumping off point for talking about SD-WAN. TELoIP presented their VINO SD-WAN and SD-Internet solutions during the event. In a lot of ways, the end result of a lot of SD-WAN solutions remains the same, but each company goes about doing it in substantively different ways, which may have different appeal among organizations. For TELoIP, they emphasized using all available internet circuits into a logical bundle of network connections.
Read More:
SD-WAN: Redundancy and Optimization
Lions and snakes – a quick review of Turbonomic
Raff Poltronieri gives a preview of Turbonomic, ahead of their presentation at Tech Field Day next month. Raff initially became familiar with the company when tasked by a client to find something that could replace VMware vROPS. After some research, he found their solution offered the best price to quality ratio. Raff sees it as a valuable tool for one-man IT shops that need to automate and autotune their infrastructure.
Read More:
Lions and snakes – a quick review of Turbonomic
There’s a new cluster filesystem on the block, Elastifile
Elastifile debuted their new file system at Storage Field Day last month, and Ray Lucchesi wrote up his thoughts. It’s designed to support thousands of nodes, exabytes of capacity, and infinite numbers of files, in an effort to make a better cluster file system. It was in development since 2013, and offers some impressive features, including compression, deduplication, and cloud storage tiering. It only caches metadata, and maintains consistency thanks to key-value consensus based algorithm called Bizur. Ray’s not sure how it’ll perform in terms of marketshare going forward, but thinks it shows a lot of great backend engineering to offer a competitive file system right out of the gate.
Read More:
There’s a new cluster filesystem on the block, Elastifile
Programmable ASICs on Software Gone Wild
At Tech Field Day Extra with Cisco Live Europe, Ivan Pepelnjak sat down with Peter Jones, principal engineer at Cisco, for his Software Gone Wild podcast. In their wide-ranging discussion, they talk about why startups fail and NPUs vs ASICs. They then dig into a deeper discussion on the substantive differences and use cases for both. Overall it’s an interesting episode and well worth a listen.
Read More:
Programmable ASICs on Software Gone Wild
Do We Really Need SSL Decryption?
Brandon Carroll doesn’t mince words. He thinks passing SSL traffic through the firewall without decrypting is akin to walking into “a war with a gun thats half loaded”. To that end, he was impressed with what he saw from Gigamon at Networking Field Day earlier this month. Their GigaSECURE Network Visibility Platform serves as a trusted man-in-the-middle to handle decryption, and to flag traffic that can’t be verified as secure.
Read More:
Do We Really Need SSL Decryption?
PNDA provides scalable and reactive network analytics
Tony Mattke looks at what he saw from PNDA. This is a project from the Linux Foundation, recently open sourced by Cisco. It serves as a platform for network analytics across data centers. PNDA sees this as vital for organizations with large volume high velocity data, something they see as vital for areas like the Internet of Things. Tony was really impressed by PNDA’s data assurance as well, which allows you to make sure everything is received and processed on every step of the data’s path across the network. Overall, Tony found PNDA further evidence that open source networking is alive and well!
Read More:
PNDA provides scalable and reactive network analytics
SSL Decryption for Increased Network Visibility
Kevin Blackburn wrote up his thoughts on Gigamon’s presentation at Networking Field Day this month. They focused their presentation on GigaSECURE, their security visibility platform that allows for inline SSL decryption. They do this with by operating a sanctioned man in the middle capture. This is vital for giving administrators the visibility into traffic needed to ensure secure practice. Kevin’s only concern was in how Gigamon’s trusted certificate were handled, which may lead to a manual process of adding these to devices they can’t be automatically pushed to. But with a predicated 80% of traffic being encrypted in the near future, the tradeoff may well be worth it to gain visibility.
Read More:
SSL Decryption for Increased Network Visibility
To SD-WAN or Not to SD-WAN — and How?
Pete Welcher has been seeing a lot of competing SD-WAN solutions, including a lot from presentations at past Networking Field Day events. He runs down how to determine if these solutions are ideal for your operations. First, if you’re heavily investing in a lot of Cisco routers, just use IWAN. But for organizations with equipment coming to end of life or need ease of deployment without much more needed than routing and QoS, SD-WAN is worth a look. Make sure to read Pete’s piece for all the details.
Read More:
To SD-WAN or Not to SD-WAN — and How?
Networking Field Day #15: Enhanced Visibility into SSL/TLS Traffic
Jai Balasubramaniyan, Director of Security Product Management at Gigamon, gives a written overview of what Gigamon presented at Networking Field Day earlier this month. He was really impressed by the number and type of questions, and the substantive discussion that evolved during the course of the presentation. They reviewed their GigaSECURE platform, which features industry leading security visibility, including inline SSL decryption. Check out their full video coverage from the event, and look for more presentation from them at Cloud Field Day, July 27-28, and Networking Field Day, September 13-15.
Read More:
Networking Field Day #15: Enhanced Visibility into SSL/TLS Traffic
Nimble’s InfoSight – An #SFD12 Follow-up
Matt Leib reviews what he saw from Nimble Storage at last month’s Storage Field Day. He goes into what he really liked about their InfoSight solution. This allows collect information across environments and send it to a secure collective database. This allows you to quickly cross reference anomalies across environments to better diagnose problems. Overall, Matt came away really impressed.
Read More:
Nimble’s InfoSight – An #SFD12 Follow-up
Who is IP Infusion and Why Have You Never Heard of Them?
Brandon Carroll takes a look at IP Infusion, who presented at Networking Field Day earlier this month. The company has been around since 1999, and you may already be more familiar with their networking OS, ZebOS, than the company itself. That may largely be because of their OEM focus, but Brandon found their excited presentation quite interesting. They’ve recently thrown their hat in the disaggregation ring by offering OcNOS, a white box switch OS, and VirNOS, a virtual network OS. You may not have heard of them before, but they are definitely a company worth your interest.
Read More: