An Interview with Josh @EuroBrew at #TFD13

At Tech Field Day earlier this month, Alastair Cooke managed to steal a few minutes with Josh De Jong for a quick interview. They talk about how to approach learning throughout the changing technological landscape of IT. This is made more important by the fact that the cost of traditional training is often hard to come by when working for SMBs. It’s a really great conversation and food for thought for any IT professional.

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An Interview with Josh @EuroBrew at #TFD13

Backups are Important, Recovery is Essential

Thom Greene has long been impressed with Veeam for virtualization backup. Now the company has offerings for bare metal machines. Veeam Agent for Linux and Veeam Agent for Windows bring a lot of the features of their virtualization backup and recovery to this market gap. The feature Thom thought really stood out was their support for road warrior laptops, called “endpoint protection for mobile users”. If your laptop is not connected to your network drive during your scheduled backup, this feature will quietly sync changes as soon as it becomes available. As you would expect from Veeam, the Agents are extremely capable, and easy to setup.

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Backups are Important, Recovery is Essential

VxRail – One Year Later

VxRail has been on the market for about a year, and Sean Thulin got an update from Dell EMC about the HCI solution at Tech Field Day. So far, sales of VxRail have been strong, with major revisions even in the first year. Sean thinks that’s a good sign that Dell EMC is really listening to consumers. Unfortunately, the company had to admit that this lead to a dearth of professional services, creating a bit of a backlog for some customers. Sean is excited to see the next iteration of VxRail which will have options heavy on NVMe and NVDIMMs.

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VxRail – One Year Later

Cisco’s Wireless Partnership With Apple

Ethan Banks got an update from Cisco on their partnership with Apple, previously announced at Cisco Live US 2016. Cisco went into detail about their framework to allow for application prioritization from Apple devices across the network. This is done by a white list, and developers providing QoS marks on specific packets. They also revealed improved roaming support between access points, reducing the time of switching between to from 0.5-0.7 seconds to sub-50ms. Overall, Ethan found these both to be laudable efforts from Cisco.

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Cisco's Wireless Partnership With Apple

Caffeine for the Tech Brain: TFDx at CLEUR this Wednesday

Lauren Friedman previews what she’s excited to see at Tech Field Day Extra. She really enjoys the atmosphere of TFD presentations, from the in-depth technical discussions, to the poignant questions from the delegates. We hope she enjoyed the live streams, and remember, we’re posting full videos of the sessions too!

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Caffeine for the Tech Brain: TFDx at CLEUR this Wednesday

Storage Field Day 12: storage drop bears reunited!

Storage Field Day is coming up in March, and we’re excited to have Jon Klaus returning! He wrote up a great preview of some of the companies he’s excited to see. Jon found the presenting companies to be a good mix of returning ones he’s interesting in catching up with, and new ones that will be presenting new products and solutions. It should be a great event, so make sure to check out our comprehensive video coverage, both live and after SFD!

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Storage Field Day 12: storage drop bears reunited!

On-Premises Serverless

Alastair Cooke looks at what is required to adopt serverless architecture in your data center. While services like AWS Lambda provide this for the public cloud, it isn’t as evident how to do this on-premises. Alastair breaks this down really clearly, essentially for serverless operation, you need to be able to quickly spin up and coordinate containers in response to external triggers. He quickly gives an overview of offerings from IBM and Iron.io that provide Functions as a Service. But Platform9 offers a managed serverless platform on top of an existing managed cloud environment. Their Fission solution (currently in alpha) essentially offers a managed serverless platform on top of the managed Kubernetes platform. This gives you the scale of Platform9 as a cloud provider, but you can have all of your containers on-premises. It’s a really interesting approach to the problem.

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On-Premises Serverless

StorMagic SvSAN – Scalable Virtual HA Storage for the Masses

Sean Thulin looks at StorMagic’s SvSAN solution, as seen at Tech Field Day earlier this month. As a virtual storage solution that sits inside your existing VM infrastructure, it’s already interesting. But Sean thought SvSAN really shined by being extremely lightweight, requiring only 1 vCPU, 1GB of RAM and only 2 nodes initially. It can also be used to help protect against large scale location failures, with mirroring that can operate on low bandwidth and even the most humble hardware requirements. StorMagic looks to have a solution that’s powerful but only needs lightweight requirements.

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StorMagic SvSAN – Scalable Virtual HA Storage for the Masses

Introduction to SD-WAN

So you’ve heard about SD-WAN, but you still have some questions? Eyvonne Sharp made a video just for you. In this introduction, she lays out what the requirements of a complete SD-WAN solution are. Once you’ve got the fundamentals down, she includes links to some specific company implementations from Networking Field Day!

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Introduction to SD-WAN

From the Beginning, Getting Started with SolarWinds

After hearing about them for a while, and seeing them present at Tech Field Day earlier this month, Alastair Cooke decided to try out what SolarWinds has to offer. The first challenge was to figure out what from their impressive catalogue to try first. After some research, Alastair decided on their Server and Application Monitor (SAM), which includes the Orion integration framework. After the install and initial setup, SAM was already giving useful notifications about domain controller memory and packet loss. Alastair is looking forward to using SAM with the Virtualization Manager from SolarWinds in his home lab to see how effective the combination can be.

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From the Beginning, Getting Started with SolarWinds

Manage hybrid cloud with Platform9 solution

Andrea Mauro takes a look at Platform9’s hybrid cloud management solution. He originally got a look at this during Tech Field Day earlier this month. With their SaaS management platform, you can go live with a private cloud OpenStack deployment in about five minutes. From their, Platform9’s support takes care of management across the entire deployment. It looks like a great way to avoid the common headaches often seen in the private cloud!

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Manage hybrid cloud with Platform9 solution

Storage Field Day (#SFD12) – A quick intro!

Chan Ekanayake is ready to come out to Silicon Valley for Storage Field Day! We’re excited to have him along as a first time delegate. He’ll be hearing from some of the most interesting companies in storage today. Remember to check back for live coverage all throughout the event, March 8-10!

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Storage Field Day (#SFD12) – A quick intro!

OpenFlow – Basic Concepts and Theory

In this post, David Varnum goes over some of the fundamental concepts of OpenFlow. He goes as far back as to distinguish the control plane from the data plane. David then goes into great detail about OpenFlow’s design and features. What inspired this deep dive into OpenFlow? At Networking Field Day in November, David saw a presentation from NEC on their ProgrammableFlow controller, a SDN product that uses the OpenFlow protocol. David found it “wildly impressive”, and wanted to get a better understanding of the protocol.

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OpenFlow – Basic Concepts and Theory

Dell EMC: When Two Hearts Beat As One

Rich Stroffolino takes a look at Dell EMC’s update on VxRail from Tech Field Day this month. For him, it was an interesting look at the process of merging two large companies together. As far as VxRail goes, the company has been met with a lot of sales success, but was also upfront on what they needed to improve on. Overall, Rich found that VxRail hasn’t lost any of its focus by merging with Dell’s PowerEdge team. Indeed, the expanded hardware offerings now make it an even more enticing HCI solution.

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Dell EMC: When Two Hearts Beat As One

Ixia Vision ONE – Tap the Planet

Tony Mattke wrote up his review for Ixia’s Vision ONE solution, which he saw at Networking Field Day in November. Ixia may have a long history in the load testing market, but for Tony, they represent a new entry into the network packet broker market. Vision ONE is Ixia’s solution to the problem of not knowing if you monitoring tools are accurately capturing network traffic. Tony really liked that this all can be configured within a simple UI, calling it “an easy to use toolset with some seriously capability”. Sounds impressive!

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Ixia Vision ONE - Tap the Planet

Nyansa’s Comparative Analytics

Rich Stroffolino reviews Nyansa’s networking monitoring solution from Networking Field Day last month. He was really impressed how the solution allowed you to measure not just objective measures like latency, speed, and packet loss, but also compare performance among similar network configurations. In a crowded networking monitoring space, it’s a key differentiator that really allows Nyansa to stand out.

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Nyansa's Comparative Analytics

Cisco live! 2017 in Berlin, Germany — I am back again

We can’t wait to see Peter Engelen at Cisco Live Europe for a Tech Field Day Extra event! He’s excited to meet some old colleagues and get to know some delegates for the first time. Check back for live video from the event, with full coverage soon after!

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Cisco live! 2017 in Berlin, Germany — I am back again

Forward Networks – A forward approach to formal verification

Tony Mattke reviews what he saw from Forward Networks at Networking Field Day in November. It’s been a little bit since their presentation, but Tony is still excited when thinking about the implications of formally verifying a network. He wants to see it in testing in the real world before passing final judgement, but the capabilities as described at NFD “should be making you drool”.

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Forward Networks – A forward approach to formal verification

IoT Puts On-Premises Back on the Agenda

In this piece, Alastair Cooke takes a look at the state of storage as we enter the age of IoT. For Alastair, he thinks projects of central object stores being inundated with tons of IoT data miss the point. Instead he sees compute moving close to the edge to be closer to the source of the data, only sending on composites of the gross data tonnage to the data center. As part of this, he thinks Robin System’s software HCI solution has the right approach. It simplified containerization on whatever servers and storage are available, giving enterprises the flexibility and simplicity to move compute closer to the edge.

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IoT Puts On-Premises Back on the Agenda

Barefoot Networks looks to redefine ASIC in network device design with its Tofino chip

Barefoot Networks gave details about their programmable Tofino chip for switches at Networking Field Day. Keith Townsend gave the presentation videos a look, and thinks they could have a big impact on the networking space. The immediate value is that the programmability should allow for new services to be integrated into switches on a much tighter release window. But more importantly, whitebox vendors could customize switches to individual clients, with hyperscale deployments like Facebook only need a very specific subset of functions to prioritize on performance. And unlike programmable x86 processors in switches, there’s no sacrifice in performance, with Barefoot claiming Tofino can manage 6.5 Tbps.

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Barefoot Networks looks to redefine ASIC in network device design with its Tofino chip