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.
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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Forward Thinkers, Forward Networks
Dreaming of SCM but living with NVDIMMs…
Ray Lucchesi give a look into a rather unique and developing part of enterprise storage: NonVolatile RAM. He walks through the history of the format, and how it has evolved to its current iteration. He finds that the current state has fairly developed hardware, but the software to take advantage of it is still developing. In some ways, it parallels where flash storage was when it first emerged as an affordable option.
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Dreaming of SCM but living with NVDIMMs…
Is Everything Pay-as-You-Go?
Eric Shanks reviews the solution he saw from Igneous Systems. He’s intrigued by what they are offering on a technical level. Overall, he considers if what they are offering is so much pay-as-you-go, or if they simply offering forward looking provisioning. Regardless, it’s well worth the read for Eric’s thoughts.
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Drive and Rack Scale Storage Architectures
Big data storage problems getting you down? Never fear! James Green put together a video highlighting two companies from last month’s Tech Field Day that are presenting solutions. Igneous offers an array of nanoservers equipped drives, making each network addressable. James also highlights DriveScale’s take on managing big data with their rack adapter to address a pool of JPOD storage. It’s a really great comparison between the two approaches!
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Drive and Rack Scale Storage Architectures
Get all the Docker talks from Tech Field Day 12
Docker was one of our presenters for Tech Field Day last month. We were really excited to hear about their latest and greatest. They’ve shared all of the videos from the event on their blog, along with some of the excited reaction. It was great to have Docker at TFD!
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Get all the Docker talks from Tech Field Day 12
The Quest for Verification with Forward Networks
Forward Networks gave a presentation fresh out of stealth mode at Networking Field Day, and it certainly made an impression with Rich Stroffolino. He outlines how the company is doing their network monitoring. They model all possible places a packet can go on a network in a constantly updating software model. This allows you to not only react when problems occur, but also for better planning and provisioning, since you can model traffic very accurately in the software model. We’ll wait to see how their solution gets deployed in an actual enterprise, but on a theoretical level it’s fascinating.
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The Quest for Verification with Forward Networks
Docker is the New Twitter
Rich Stroffolino has an interesting hypothesis here. He sees Docker in a very similar situation to Twitter circa 2011. It’s an extremely popular product, but with an ecosystem of support companies that extend it’s inherent functionality. Twitter decided to subsume more and more of this into what it natively provided, edging out the companies that once complimented it. Will Docker follow the same path? Rich points out why some of their situations are a little different as well.
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DriveScale is a new kid on the block with a very seasoned past
DriveScale clearly had the right idea for their Tech Field Day presentation. They led off listing the pedigree of the founding and senior staff, including a deep history with Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and green technology. It certainly made an impact on John White. From there the company laid out their ambitions: give enterprises the configuration flexibility to scale out horizontally in the datacenter. They do this with a 10GbE network adapter to pool a JBOD of storage to traditional pizza box servers with CPU and RAM. This allows storage to be a totally separate concern for scale. John also liked their strategy of initially targeting Hadoop as a primary use case. It’s not a huge market, but definitely one they could become well known within, given the strength of their solution.
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DriveScale is a new kid on the block with a very seasoned past
Forward Networks – go ahead, break it
Amy Arnold laments the plight of the network engineer. The agonize over network design, try to come up with every conceivable failover scenario, and then deal with the consequences. Some have the aid of a lab to help test their configuration, most don’t. That’s why what Forward Networks presented at Networking Field Day was so interesting. It allows for you to model over your network in software, and then break it in every conceivable way. Forward’s model shows every a packet can possibly go, allowing the engineer to see exactly how a scenario will play out. She was justifiably concerned about how their product will be priced going forward, but otherwise it seems like a valuable tool in the engineer’s arsenal.
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Forward Networks – go ahead, break it
Cloud Storage? In my DC? Yes please! Enter Igneous
John White reviews what he saw from Igneous Systems at Tech Field Day last month. Overall, while cloud storage in your datacenter isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, he likes the approach that Igneous is taking. He particularly calls out the RatioPerfect Architecture, which puts compute on each drive. This eliminates a lot of I/O bottlenecks. John found the price competitive, especially compared to AWS. Add in the latency benefits on on-site storage, and Igneous has a compelling solution.
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