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.
Uila, the art of visualization
Andrea Mauro got a look at Uila’s data center monitoring solution at Tech Field Day earlier this month. Overall, he think that while it has similarities to other SaaS based monitoring solution, it differentiates in key ways. For one, while Uila generally operates it in the cloud, it can be setup as an on-prem solution. It’s also flexible enough to not just monitor infrastructure, but down to the application level. All of this is wrapped in their excellent visualization engine. Andrea goes into the technical detail of how this is accomplished, but overall he seemed impressed!
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Uila, the art of visualization
TFD13 Recap – New Veeam Agents and VeeamON
We were thrilled to have Rebecca Fitzhugh for her first Tech Field Day earlier this month. In her first post after the event, Rebecca takes a look at what Veeam presented. They debuted their recovery agents for Windows and Linux, and she came away impressed. These allow for quick recovery on either a volume or file level, with support for recovery to Hyper-V on the Windows variant. Best of all, they’re available to test out for free!
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TFD13 Recap – New Veeam Agents and VeeamON
SD-WAN from VeloCloud
Peter Welcher reviews what he saw from VeloCloud at Networking Field Day in November. He came away impressed with the company. In a space that’s increasingly crowded by players with a legacy in WAN optimization, VeloCloud distinguishes itself. Peter was particularly impressed by their support for service chaining and partnerships with virtualized firewall vendors. Overall, Peter sees what VeloCloud is doing as proof that SD-WAN has carved out a definite use case in the enterprise.
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The Road to Root Cause
Work in IT for any length of time, and the dreaded “why is anything slow” question inevitably rears its head. It’s a loaded question, almost impossible to directly answer in that moment, and invariably happens at a bad time. Thom Greene thinks Uila might have a solution to quickly get some answers. Their Virtual Smart Tap provides unified metrics that give you a look into packet flows within virtual machines. They do this by having the Tap sit on each ESXi host and perform deep packet inspection. Thom was definintely impressed by how Uila visualizes this information in their dashboard. It makes it an ideal tool to quickly identify system slow down issues.
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ZeroStack Adds Learning To Their Automated Infrastructure
ZeroStack demoed their “self-driving” cloud at Tech Field Day last week. Ethan Banks gave it a look and came away impressed. He doesn’t see this as a VMware replacement right now, but the current tools and roadmap the company outlined certainly could make it tempting in a refresh cycle or two. Despite using the buzzwords of “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence” to describe their automation, Ethan saw it as a good way to automate a lot of the typical production tedium.
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ZeroStack Adds Learning To Their Automated Infrastructure
Whitebox networking – coming soon to an edge near you?
Whitebox networking was a hot topic at Networking Field Day last month. Kevin Myers wrote up a nice summery of what he saw on it. He starts with a brief history, then goes into an interesting application, using whiteboxes outside the data center as edge devices. Big Switch was positioning them that way in their presentation, and the implications of Barefoot Networks also saw them positioning whiteboxes for outside the data center. It’s an interesting trend.
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Whitebox networking – coming soon to an edge near you?
Tech Field Day 13 – personal experience, photos and many links
Andreas Lesslhumer recounts his experience at Tech Field Day last week in Austin. Overall, he found the time seemed to fly, filled with thoughtful conversations, networking with peers, and delicious Texas brisket. Plus, he got to checkoff an item from his bucket list: the delegates were driven around town in a stretch Hummer! He really enjoyed that most of the companies had trials or sandboxed versions of their solutions ready to start testing during their presentations. Overall it sounds like he had a great time in Austin. It was a pleasure to have him there too!
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Tech Field Day 13 - personal experience, photos and many links
Riverbed SD-WAN – The Simplicity of Automation in SDN
Do network engineers need to be programmers too? Greg Ferro thinks this doesn’t always need to be the case, especially with SD-WAN solutions like he saw from Riverbed at Networking Field Day. They demoed the ability to push security rule across the entire WAN with a few simple steps, making it far easier for engineers to actually manage their networks. It’s a really great insight into the exciting implications SD-WAN and Riverbed can have on the entire IT networking space.
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Riverbed SD-WAN - The Simplicity of Automation in SDN
Anuta Networks NCX: Overcoming Skepticism
Chris Marget thought he knew how the networking world worked. Getting various network vendors to play nice with each other required more art than science while editing a text configuration file. It took years of painful experience to be able to do this well. Then Chris saw Anuta Networks present their multi-vendor NCX orchestration, and changed his tune. Anuta claims it can work well between a lengthy list of vendors. They do this by not trying to make all features available, but to focus on a core set that will be useful to network engineers. Chris definitely liked what he saw at Tech Field Day.
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Anuta Networks NCX: Overcoming Skepticism
Time to Geek Out – Tech Field Day Veeam Style
Clint Wyckoff wrote up a post in his anticipation of his presentation with Veeam at Tech Field Day last week. Make sure you check out the full video coverage of their presentation, including their demo of various Veeam Agents for backup and recovery, as well as the Veeam Availability Platform!
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Time to Geek Out – Tech Field Day Veeam Style
Robin Systems at Tech Field Day Feb 1-3, 2017
Robin Systems presented at Tech Field Day, and they shared their excitement on their blog. Make sure to check out the video coverage after the event to rewatch all of the specifics of their unique application-aware infrastructure.
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Robin Systems at Tech Field Day Feb 1-3, 2017
Big Switch Networks Extends VMware Visibility, Adds Mesosphere Support
Big Switch Networks presented an vast array of products at Networking Field Day last month. Drew Conry-Murray was there, and he wrote up a look at their Big Cloud Fabric, the company’s SDN software for data centers. In its 4.0 version, Big Cloud now supports vSAN storage in vSphere, continuing the solutions tight VMware integration. It also supports a variety of orchestration platforms, including OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere. In this new version, Big Cloud Fabric continues to refine and fill out its offering.
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Big Switch Networks Extends VMware Visibility, Adds Mesosphere Support
Tech Field Day “Lucky” 13 – A Preview
The Tech Field Day team is excited to have Dell EMC back for another great Tech Field Day presentation! They published a preview of what they’ll be presenting to the delegates. This includes VxRail, Data Analytics, OEM strategy, and a tour of the Modular Data Center. We’re excited to see it all unfold, so make sure to check back for the live stream, or full videos after the event!
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Tech Field Day "Lucky" 13 - A Preview
Follow Tech Field Day 13 live
Andrea Mauro is in Austin for Tech Field Day. He published a blog post previewing the schedule of events. Check it out for the embedded live video, and for links to more of Andrea’s great enterprise IT coverage!
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ASIC Programmability from Barefoot Networks
Barefoot Networks presented their fully programmable Tofino switch at Networking Field Day last month. It left an impression on a lot of our delegates, including Aaron Conaway. He came away impressed that Tofino is the opposite of a fixed-function ASIC. By being fully programmable, the switch is essentially a blank slate, that can be completely reprogrammed in a software update taking 50ms. The other implication is that the switch can insert tracking information natively to your traffic, all while maintaining high performance. It’s a total rethink on how a switch can behave. This may put the burden of providing features to the switch OS makers, but it still turns a switch from something fixed in stone to a dynamic part of your network.
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ASIC Programmability from Barefoot Networks
Deploy StorMagic datastore with vCenter
Andrea Mauro gives a walkthrough on how to setup a shared datastore from previously deployed VSAs. He does this via the StorMagic integration plugin. There are more than a few steps, but Andrea makes the walkthrough easy to follow. This may take a few minutes to setup, but once done, you’ll have shared storage usable as a normal vSphere block datastore.
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Deploy StorMagic datastore with vCenter
How Tech Field Day influenced me in 2016
Max Mortillaro reflects back on what he’s learned from Tech Field Day events in 2016. It was a really eventful year for him, and he found a lot of value both personally and professionally with the events. Overall, he loves the emersion the event allows. They provide in-depth technical discussions with likeminded colleagues. It’s a community of enterprise IT goodness, and it was a pleasure to have Max at the events.
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How Tech Field Day influenced me in 2016
Deploy StorMagic VSA with vCenter
StorMagic presented at Tech Field Day last week. Andrea Mauro was one of the invited delegates, and before the event, he wrote a series of posts about their solution. In this one, we walks through deploying a StorMagic VSA directly from vCenter. To see what they announced at Tech Field Day, be sure to check out our full video coverage.
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Deploy StorMagic VSA with vCenter
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Dell EMC
Tech Field Day is coming up in Austin this week, and Thom Greene wrote about what he’s looking forward to from Dell EMC. He’s excited to learn more about their VxRail hyperconverged solution. Hyperconverged Infrastructure is a crowded space, but Dell EMC thinks VxRail differentiates by being built from the ground up with VMware’s SDDC packages in mind. Of course with the size of a company like Dell EMC, you’ll have to tune into the live stream to see what exactly they’ll be presenting. We can’t wait!
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Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Dell EMC
Silver Peak’s End-to-End SD-WAN
There’s a lot of agreement in the enterprise about what is wanted out of an SD-WAN solution, but a lot of different ways of getting there. Rich Stroffolino looks at a solution from Silver Peak. Instead of using deep packet inspection, the company uses it’s end-to-end network control to derive their analytics. This allows for an understanding of network traffic from the very first packet, which allows the SD-WAN to be more secure and efficient. It’s a really interesting spin on this booming technology.
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