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.
Networking Field Day 14 Kicks Off
Justin Cohen is excited for Networking Field Day! The event kicks off this morning and Justin made sure to share the schedule with all of his followers. Make sure you check out the live stream, or the YouTube and Vimeo content we’ll have up soon after the event. It’s three straight days of fascinating presentations from the most exciting companies in enterprise networking!
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Networking Field Day 14 Kicks Off
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: StorMagic
In the run up to Tech Field Day, starting February 1st, Thom Greene has been doing some great preview posts. In his latest, he gives a look at StorMagic. In the crowded software defined storage field, Thom sees StorMagic differentiating in meaningful ways. For one, they can run across multiple platforms, refreshing in the increasing hyperconverged world where there’s a lot of product lock-in. He also likes their support for high latency connections. He’s looking forward to finding out what’s new with the company at Tech Field Day!
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Tech Field Day 13 Preview: StorMagic
Network Field Day 14 and the Best Community Ever!
We’re thrilled to have Eyvonne Sharp as a delegate for her first Networking Field Day! She really appreciates the community the events have created. It’s great to hear that it’s not only a helpful group of people, but one that she genuinely enjoys engaging with. It’s also a welcoming group, so when you’re watching the Networking Field Day livestream, make sure to ask questions on Twitter with #NFD14. Between the delegates and the staff, we’ll get some answers!
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Network Field Day 14 and the Best Community Ever!
Building Data Storage With Containers
The state of containers in enterprise IT continues to expand. As it does, the importance of addressing storage for these stateless constructs becomes more important. Chris Evans reviews why addressing container storage is essential, and some of the solutions out there. This includes offerings from StorageOS, Portworx, and Scality. Ethan sees containers continuing the trend started with hyperconverged infrastructure, the blurring of storage and application.
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Building Data Storage With Containers
Zerostack for a cloud managed datacenter
Raff Poltronieri put together a walkthrough of ZeroStack’s current private cloud platform. Overall, he liked that the UI is easy to understand, while still supporting some powerful configuration options. Raff thinks it might be easier to manage than a typical AWS UI. We’ll see what ZeroStack has in store for us at Tech Field Day in Austin, coming up in February.
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Zerostack for a cloud managed datacenter
NFD13: SolarWinds Presents Its New NetPath Tool
I don’t want to put words into Peter Welcher’s mouth. But in his post about SolarWinds’ NetPath tool, he straight up says, “[i]t turns out, I was very impressed with the new NetPath tool!” Not a lot of room for ambiguity there! SolarWinds presented at Networking Field Day this past November, and spent the entire session going over NetPath. Peter really enjoyed the presentation, not just for what NetPath could do, but also learning the journey SolarWinds took to refine and develop the tool.
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NFD13: SolarWinds Presents Its New NetPath Tool
Tech Field Day 13 Line-up and more #TFD13 with Veeam, Uila & more
Tech Field Day is coming up in February, and Andreas Lesslhumer is excited! He posted a preview on his blog. Andreas joined us for his first Tech Field Day in Boston last year and was “blown away” by the experience. We’re happy he’s back for another one, and can’t wait to see what he thinks of all the presenting companies this time around!
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Tech Field Day 13 Line-up and more #TFD13 with Veeam, Uila & more
What Capabilities are Needed for a Startup Storage Company?
Eric Shanks seems impressed by StorageOS. The company presented at Tech Field Day this past November, and presented their distributed container storage solution. While their idea is fascinating in itself, their storage controller is itself a 40MB container image, Eric really likes how feature rich it is. While other products that have been on the market longer still have a long roadmap to implement a lot of enterprise essential features, StorageOS seems a lot more fully baked. Impressive considering they haven’t been offering a commercial product for very long!
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What Capabilities are Needed for a Startup Storage Company?
ZeroStack and the Complex Cloud Conundrum
In an age where everything from WAN to security is being defined by software in the enterprise, have we reached the saturation point? Rich Stroffolino thinks there’s one big part of the enterprise left, the data center itself. He takes a look at what ZeroStack will be doing to make a self-driving cloud environment possible. They’ll be releasing their full solution in February, but it’s a fascinating preview.
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ZeroStack and the Complex Cloud Conundrum
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Uila
As enterprise tools become increasingly virtualized, it gets harder to properly visualize performance systematically. Visibility radically decreases, leaving the prospective engineer in a veritable blackhole. That’s why Thom Greene is excited to dig into Uila’s presentation at Tech Field Day, coming up in February. Their solution drills down the virtual network, identifying traffic on the application level. This allows users to have a visualized map of performance between applications in real time. As workloads become increasingly virtualized, a solution like Uila’s is vital to let you know what is going on.
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Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Uila
Backups suck, rubrik does not
John White knows the pain of being a backup engineer. At an old job, the problems came down to two simple issues, software and hardware. You know, minor issues. Seeing what Rubrik presented at Tech Field Day in November, John likes what they offer as a solution for local backups. Built on the back of their Atlas file system with a clean graphical user interface, John thinks it offers a compelling package for any organization that can’t do backups with a service provider.
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2016 between container, hyper-convergence, cloud and bigdata
Did you bite a poison apple and fall into a deep sleep for most of 2016? Then Lino Telera has the catchup post for you. He has a comprehensive look at what transpired in tech last year. He starts by touching on the consumer space, with a move to portability and lower power requirements. He then moves on to cover the major moves from VMware, the implications of cloud native applications, the state of SAN in the enterprise, containerization, and the Internet of Things. If you were in a mystical sleep for the year, you might want to check on some of the other news, but Lino has you covered for enterprise tech!
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2016 between container, hyper-convergence, cloud and bigdata
ThousandEyes – Mean Time to Innocence in minutes
Justin Cohen saw ThousandEyes present at Networking Field Day in August, but wanted to test out their solution before passing judgement. So after mulling on it for a while, what was his verdict? Essentially, it has to be seen to be believed. ThousandEyes differentiates in network monitoring by combining agents within your network with their SaaS model of sensors from all over the Internet. This allows engineers to not just trace a path forward to an endpoint, but also work backwards. Combined with great visualization, they’re able to pinpoint causes outside of an enterprise network, allowing users to save time chasing their tail. Add in flexible licensing, and Justin thinks it’s a great tool to let you drill down to root network slow down problems!
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ThousandEyes – Mean Time to Innocence in minutes
Cohesity – a secondary storage leader in the making?
Max Mortillaro reviews what he saw from Cohesity at Tech Field Day this past November. He really seems to think their holistic focus on secondary storage could provide for major cost savings in an enterprise. Their dedupe abilities seem to really be able to reduce your secondary storage data footprint. With 80% of storage coming from disparate secondary sources, Cohesity seems designed to wrangle it all in one manageable interface.
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Cohesity - a secondary storage leader in the making?
See in the Fog with Ixia CloudLens
David Varnum draws a great analogy. In a lot of ways, flying through cloud and managing cloud infrastructure and applications are similar. Both don’t seem to bad to navigate from the outside, but once inside, you lose perspective. This requires both a pilot and systems engineer to have precise instrumentation to properly navigate where they want to go. With Ixia’s CloudLens, David sees someone finally providing that instrumentation.
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See in the Fog with Ixia CloudLens
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Zerostack
Tech Field Day is coming up in February, and Thom Greene is excited to hear from ZeroStack. He likes how they take advantage of some of OpenStack’s abilities, while still maintaining a lot of the cost effective advantages of on-premises setups. They host user interface and daily operations in the cloud, with everything else managed in Zblock, their hyperconverged platform. We’ll see what they present at Tech Field Day.
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Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Zerostack
Bringing 2017 To Everyone
Tom Hollingsworth had a busy 2016. He wrote a small book, ran a Networking Field Day event, and worked with the community to encourage them to write their thoughts. For 2017, he plans to be even busier. As he continues to lead Networking Field Day events, he’s diving deep into the technical knowledge base. Plus, he plans on attending Cisco Live, Interop, and Open Networking Summit. On top of that, look for lots of writing from Tom in 2017. Looks like it’ll be a busy year ahead!
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January Events: Networking Field Day 14, Viptela, TWiT.tv
Greg Ferro wrote up a rundown of his events for January, and first on his list is Networking Field Day! He finds it an extremely efficient use of time, packed with the most exciting companies in enterprise networking. Hard to believe this is the fourteenth Networking Field Day, and we’re glad that Greg will be in attendance!
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January Events: Networking Field Day 14, Viptela, TWiT.tv
Using Sensors for Client-side Wi-Fi Troubleshooting
In this piece, Drew Lentz makes a great point about wireless networks. It’s not just about what’s going on behind that access point. That’s only half the network. True, it’s the more controllable and orderly part, so it’s natural to focus on it. But the other half is on the client-side. The devices that connect to the wireless network may be hard to predict, but making sure end-users are getting a productive experience is the whole point of the network. With that in mind, Drew profiles two approaches. A more hardware agnostic approach from NetBeez, which provides a Linux agent that talks to their dashboard to report analytics. It’s an interesting solution that doesn’t require lock in to any particular networking hardware setup. Cape Networks takes the opposite approach, providing an all-in-one hardware package that includes cellular connectivity, allowing you to set it up with just power. Both provide ways to see what’s happening from the client-side, and give you a complete picture of a wireless network.
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Using Sensors for Client-side Wi-Fi Troubleshooting
Tech Field Day 13!
Thom Greene shares his experience of requesting to be a delegate to Tech Field. He’ll be coming to our event in Austin, and he’s excited to learn more about Zerostack, Robin, and Uila. He’s also happy to have received some holiday peanut brittle. The Tech Field Day delegate perks are truly unique!
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