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.
Docker? On Windows? Yep!
Jon Hildebrand uses the native Windows support for Docker to talk about the sea change Microsoft has experienced recently. Once synonymous with lock-in, the company is now meeting their customers and developers where they are, rather than forcing a change in behavior. Jon is particularly excited to see the two different versions of Windows available to Docker images. Of the two, the Nano Server versions seems the more intriguing, as it strips out most legacy support for a truly lean instance.
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Secondary Storage is Cohesity’s Primary Goal
It says something about Cohesity that they’ve energized a lot of Tech Field Day delegates. After all, their solution is about secondary storage, which might ordinarily be relegated to an afterthought. But Tim Smith appreciates their focus. He puts in succinctly at the end of his piece: All too often, vendors forget that not all data is created equal, and thus should not be treated equally. It’s a really great point and one that Cohesity takes to heart. Their hardware and storage platforms are designed from the ground up to address the specific needs of secondary storage. This encompasses not just backups, but all data not actively used in production. It’s a huge swath of data that’s just waiting to be property leveraged. Tim thinks Cohesity has developed a way to do this.
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Secondary Storage is Cohesity's Primary Goal
Can Teridion Really Boost Internet Throughput?
John Herbert invokes a little Morpheus voice to talk about Teridion. They want to make internet transit faster. Sounds easy right? Doesn’t SD-WAN already do this? John points out that SD-WAN simply lays software over the public internet to replace previously private circuits. But the actual speed can be changed by every service provider in that route. Simply prioritizing by the least amount of service provider hops doesn’t mean it’ll actually be faster. Teridion claims that they have a solution to increase throughput by 5 to 20 times more than current internet speeds, just by accounting for this. They do this by having traffic routed through their Teridion Global Cloud Network, which has servers spread through numerous locations and SPs. They pull latency and speed info constantly to make create an optimized route for traffic. This could be very valuable to any SaaS company.
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Can Teridion Really Boost Internet Throughput?
Getting Object Storage Ready for the Enterprise – Scality Briefing Note
W. Curtis Preston was at Storage Field Day in October with Scality to hear about their latest and greatest. In this blog post, he reviews what Scality is offering in their Ring 6.4 release. It offers built in encryption with a third-party key management system included. Curtis thinks this is a much better solution for an object storage company, instead of trying to invent their own key management. It also includes a number of AWS integrations, as well as chargebacks and health checks. Additionally Scality also released an open-source S3 server that runs in a Docker container. This can be used to test how well apps can write to S3 storage. Object storage in the data center has always required some hoops to jump through, and Scality looks to have some offerings to smooth this out quite a bit.
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Getting Object Storage Ready for the Enterprise – Scality Briefing Note
Generating Maps of Your Traffic
For a network engineer, it sometimes feels impossible to avoid traceroute. Tim Miller thinks it can be a valuable tool to see where traffic is getting dropped, but it’s not without its issues. He’s highlighted some other solutions in previous posts, but the one he’s looking at today is SolarWinds. Their NetPath tool has gone from a lab toy to an official feature of their Network Performance Monitor solution in a little under a year. Tim finds it a really impressive tool. Even though it requires Windows-based polling appliances in a network, a Linux guy like Tim can still be tempted. It gives historical information layer on top of what you would find with a traceroute, and adds multipathing. Overall, Tim sees this as a very practical tool to help disentangle issues in increasingly complex networks.
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Generating Maps of Your Traffic
Introduction to StackStorm
Automation is east, but autonomy is hard. Matt Oswalt thinks the answer to making it a little easier is event-driven automation. This allows an engineer to eliminate the weakest part of any system, human error. Instead, by setting up automation event conditions ahead of time, the system can step in when needed. Matt goes through how StackStorm makes this happen. StackStorm has a wide range of support, and a number of different sensors and triggers to make this kind of setup possible.
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On Network Blindness
Notable beard accomplisher and Apstra systems engineer Derick Winkworth shares some thoughts about network blindness. He compares it to face blindness, where people can see all the individual components, but cannot recognize them together. In much the same way, many network engineers build automation into their systems, without recognizing what the purpose of that network is, suffer from that same kind of affliction. Apstra developed with Apstra Operating System in response to this. It provides an abstraction over hardware to create networks with intentionality. The benefit of this is that it allows you to built a network around what you want to do, not change your behaviors based on the network. Derick gets into the nuts in bolts in the piece, but conceptually, its a refreshing take. If you enjoy the piece, make sure to check out all of Apstra’s videos from Networking Field Day.
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Year in Review – 2016
The year is rapidly winding down, and as 2016 comes to a close, Dustin Beare gives it a look back. It’s a year that found him welcome a new son into the world, attend Networking Field Day, get a promotion at work, and pass his CCIE written exam. It’s a really great look back at how in just a year, a lot of things can change. Dustin clearly put in a lot of hard work to change the course of his career. It was a pleasure to have him as a delegate.
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Cohesity – DataPlatform in the Cloud
Josh De Jong takes a look at what Cohesity presented at Tech Field Day. While still a relatively new company, Josh thinks they have an interesting solution for secondary storage. This includes not just backup, but all data that isn’t in active production. Cohesity can eliminate a lot of storage bottlenecks by moving test/dev instances off of primary storage, and use their SSD based cache to speed up the process. Josh also liked Cohesity’s DataPlatform CE, which can back up your VMs in cloud native formats. Overall, while not all of their feautures are novel to the platform, they seem to have a robust solution for secondary storage.
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Cohesity – DataPlatform in the Cloud
Pets, Cattle and Cabbage, oh my! DriveScale Brings Scale-Out to Tech Field Day 12
Gene Banman, CEO of DriveScale, put up a blog post reviewing the company’s Tech Field Day presentation last month. Overall, the event generated a lot of social media buzz around their disaggregated storage solution. Make sure to check out all the great posts from our delegates for their takes on what DriveScale presented, as well as the other presenting companies at the event.
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Pets, Cattle and Cabbage, oh my! DriveScale Brings Scale-Out to Tech Field Day 12
Netwrix Adds Support For Office 365, Oracle To Audit User Permissions
Drew Conry-Murray gives you an update on the latest 8.5 release of Netwrix Auditor. Auditor offers the ability to track and configure users and administrator permissions for various business services. The 8.5 update now supports Oracle databases and Microsoft cloud services. Drew thinks of this as operation vegetables: maybe not your favorite, but essential for healthy operations.
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Netwrix Adds Support For Office 365, Oracle To Audit User Permissions
Ixia Works Out Its Network Trust Issues
Rich Stroffolino looks at what Ixia presented at Networking Field Day last month. Their product portfolio is pretty packed, but focused around network visibility. The presentation have Rich a new appreciation for the problem. Ixia has a comprehensive system of network probes and packet brokers to ensure zero-packet loss for monitoring solutions. Overall it’s an impressive offering.
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Ixia Works Out Its Network Trust Issues
Capture, Filter, See – Ixia Vision ONE
Ixia is a company some may not associate with network packet brokers, but that changed when they acquired Anue Systems in 2012. Ethan Banks wrote up his impressions on this based on what he saw at Networking Field Day in November. He seemed particularly impressed by their Ixia Vision ONE visibility tool. Sure it has all the features you could want, but for Ethan the most important part was that it was easy to get working right away. With the increasing complexity of networks, raw capability simply isn’t enough. Ixia differentiates itself with it’s ease of use here.
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Capture, Filter, See - Ixia Vision ONE
Enterprise Focused SD-WAN with Viptela
Rich Stroffolino looks at what Viptela presented at Networking Field Day last month. Overall, he found there approach interesting. Instead of being service provider focused for SD-WAN, Viptela designed their solution specifically for the enterprise. This allows them to address a lot of business needs directly. One of these is for multi-tenant locations, where SD-WAN can separate traffic without having to install a whole separate infrastructure. Overall, the approach opened up Rich’s ideas of what SD-WAN can do.
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Enterprise Focused SD-WAN with Viptela
Startup Radar: ZeroStack Streamlines OpenStack For Private Clouds
Drew Conry-Murray gives a look at what ZeroStack is providing. Simply put, they’re offering an OpenStack based private cloud software solution that’s easy to deploy and configure. ZeroStack supports both their own 2U units, or servers that an organization has in house. Overall, Drew thinks the market for these kind of solutions is still open enough for ZeroStack to really make an impact. Perhaps the biggest appeal, ZeroStack is saying you don’t need to be an OpenStack expert to operate their solution. That certainly lowers the barrier to entry for a lot of enterprise customers.
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Startup Radar: ZeroStack Streamlines OpenStack For Private Clouds
Trust But Verify: Lossless End-To-End Visibility from Ixia
Phil Gervasi looked at Ixia’s “Trust But Verify” approach to network monitoring. It’s an interesting approach, most other solutions simply assume that network traffic is being received by monitoring tools. Ixia goes beyond this. Instead of relying on SPAN ports, which drop traffic when a switch is overloaded, they use a series of packet brokers and network taps to make sure lossless data is being received by your monitoring solution. That’s right, Ixia proposes to not lose a single packet in doing this. That’s a tall order, check out Phil’s piece to see how Ixia is pulling it off.
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Trust But Verify: Lossless End-To-End Visibility from Ixia
Kindred Healthcare Highlights Viptela SD-WAN Benefits
Jordan Martin was impressed to hear Kindred Healthcare praise the benefits of SD-WAN with Viptela. For one, they were seeing cost reduction of 25% at their largest sites after the switch. He really appreciates that Viptela seems to be customer focused first. This is a really great real world study on how Viptela’s SD-WAN solution can make a difference.
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Kindred Healthcare Highlights Viptela SD-WAN Benefits
Time to bring back the middleman
Tim Smith reconsiders the idea of a middleman. The term hardly has a positive connotation, generally a derogatory term for someone imposed by bureaucracy. But with DriveScale, Tim sees something different. He sees their disaggregated approach to hardware as liberating storage from compute, particularly useful for scaling Hadoop clusters. Overall, he seems pretty bullish on their agile solution.
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Time to bring back the middleman
Container Hardening with Docker Bench for Security
Security for virtual machines has some well established protocols. But as containers continue to infiltrate the data center, what are the best security practices? Docker released a behemoth security documents, but at over 200 pages, not a lot of IT professionals have the time to ingest it in a timely fashion. Luckily, James Green wrote up a little walkthrough on how to run their “Docker Bench of Security” tool. This reviews your Docker configuration for common security holes, and is a must for any Docker deployments. James breaks down how to install, run, and interpret the tool and its findings.
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Container Hardening with Docker Bench for Security
Forward Thinkers, Forward Networks
Rob Coote shares his impressions from what he saw with Forward Networks at Networking Field Day last month. He really highlights how Forward’s software modeling of network performance could impact, not just the performance of the network, but the worth routines of network engineers. By effectively giving you a network lab to tinker with in software, their solution theoretically eliminates the “wait-and-see” approach to changes in a network. Rob really hopes they are able to move their solution beyond just monitoring to remediation. But he makes a really great point on the very human impact Forward Networks could have.
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