Your community defines who you are. But for some, the community is defined by who they are as well. In this video, Tom Hollingsworth interviews David Peneloza Seijas and discusses his role in Cisco Live, Cisco Champions, and Tech Field Day. The passion that David has for this community shines through the entire interview, and Tom really found him to be a beacon for new members to latch on to. David is definitely a champion that Tom wants to try to emulate with his own work in the Tech Field Day community.
Why a Change of Mindset in the IoT Space Is Needed
Dominik Pickhardt thinks that the mentality around IoT security needs to change. He’s seen conversations more concerned about the concept of safety, rather than security conversations, with an all too common site of all IoT devices on one flat L2 networking. At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020, Dominik and the other delegates got to hear from the Cisco IoT Group and what they are doing to address the challenges. They showed how their new Cyber Vision solution is adding critical visibility to the IoT security picture. Cyber Vision understands protocols used in industrial settings and automatically builds an inventory of devices that includes running software versions. This creates a topography of what devices are talking to each other in an easy to understand interface.
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro are covering a lot of the announcements and presentations from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in their video series with TECHunplugged. In this video, they dig into Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. This is an impressive new addition to the management interface used for HyperFlex and UCS. Both of them thought it was a really interesting announcement. This lets an admin hook almost everything in a data center into Intersight, that can be used for monitoring and capacity tool for the entire environment.
TechUnplugged VideoCast: CiscoLive Barcelona HyperFlex Application Platform
The TECHunplugged crew was about in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 and got to hear about HyperFlex Application Platform. In this video, Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro discuss the evolution of HyperFlex as Cisco’s HCI solution, something Max has been following for a number of years. HXAP is a standalone add-on running on top of HyperFlex which gives the ability to run containers. This complete new cluster builds on top of a Linux KVM environment with a Kubernetes environment. They dig into how this fits into the overall container landscape and the implications for organizations in the video.
Meraki Is Almost an Enterprise Solution
In the past, Tom Hollingsworth has not thought that Meraki was an appropriate wireless solution for the enterprise. But that perception seems to be shifting after hearing an update from them at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. They showed off how they are now adding in easier scaling with things like integrating rule groups into their firewall platform, something that’s critical for enterprise scale deployments. They are also testing native IPv6 support, which is a key signal to Tom they are serious about the enterprise. It’s a feature SMB’s generally don’t generally care about, but has been supported on Cisco’s IOS for years. Tom has been following the company for years, and thinks this signals they are almost ready to be a true enterprise-class solution.
Cisco Live Europe 2020 – Introduction and Expectations
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro from the TECHunplugged crew were delegates at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. They recorded a slate of videos breaking down their favorite announcements and most important parts of the event. They break down Cisco UCS and HyperFlex updates, innovation around Industrial IoT, as well as overall Data Center and Security announcements. Be sure to watch them all, then dive into the full video coverage we have on our YouTube page.
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Threat Response
At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020, Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro got to hear from the Cisco Threat Response team. They enjoyed seeing Cisco ability to dive into threats to your networking environment as they are being monitored, and how this is integrated into a further online knowledge base to better educate about emerging threats. With security teams traditionally understaffed, Cisco Threat Response is vital to gather together all the threats facing your organization in a manageable interface and provide further context for how this will continue to impact your organization. It’s not a traditional metrics-based dashboard, but an excellent way to get a security overview.
TECHunplugged at Cisco Live Barcelona 2020 – Introduction
In this video Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman talk about Cisco Live in Barcelona 2020. They talk about Tech Field Day Extra, Cisco in general, HyperFlex, UCS and IoT. They discuss why the appreciate the unique access events like Tech Field Day Extra provide. During busy industry shows like Cisco Live, it’s one thing to hear all the announcements live. But Tech Field Day Extra provides access to experts on the announcements, and often hosts sessions going into technical deep dives on the latest technology.
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco UCS Updates at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in Barcelona
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro of the TECHunplugged crew cover what they saw from Cisco UCS at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. This x86 server infrastructure has been around for a decade, and at the event, Cisco announced updates to the latest Intel processors, as well as adding in support for the AMD Rome platform, providing up to 64 cores on a processor. This processor competition coming to Cisco UCS can only spell good things for customers down the road. UCS Gen 5 also adds new support for NVMe, adds novel blade designs, and still providing GPU dense options. In the words of Arjan, Cisco is “doing something special with UCS.”
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Live Barcelona – No Love for Single Panes of Glass
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro were in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. In this video, they dig into why the single pane of glass seems to be the goal of many companies in IT, but why it can actually add to complexity for actual IT operators. They saw some companies presenting multiple panes of glass, each with specific functions, but ultimately adding to sprawl. With organizations that use solutions across a number of vendors, a single pane of glass tied to one company still requires moving to different tools. They discuss how to possibly create an “ideal” single pane of glass that taps into the API driven enterprise, and what they heard from Cisco Workload Optimizer in moving closer to that future.
Cisco Live Europe Reactions | Gestalt IT Rundown: January 29, 2020
Tom Hollingsworth was out in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. As if organizing an international event wasn’t enough, he also co-hosted the Gestalt IT Rundown. This gave him an opportunity to give his live impressions of the show on their live stream. While the show didn’t have an headline product announcements that stuck out to Tom, he did think it gave a lot of interesting indicators about how Cisco is evolving their business and technology.
Captivating Wireless Connectivity With Cisco OpenRoaming
Authenticating to wireless networks should be fast and easy. But this often runs afoul of the traditional trade off between security and ease-of-use. In order to make that work, you need to build out the infrastructure to make it happen. Tom Hollingsworth takes a quick look at how Cisco is using their OpenRoaming technology to do just that, which the company presented at Mobility Field Day.
Really Late Company Christmas Shopping
As he packed for Cisco Live Barcelona, our own Tom Hollingsworth noticed something of a post-Christmas shopping spree among tech companies this year. VMware VeloCloud bought Nyansa, Arista is buying Big Switch Networks, and Tom thinks more is on the way. What’s behind this Q1 shopping spree? Tom isn’t sure!
Cisco Champion 2020
Field Day delegate Al Rasheed is excited to be named Cisco Champion for 2020 and wrote this post to thank all those who helped him achieve this, including us here at Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. He attributes Cisco’s notice to his participation in Networking Field Day 19 in 2018 and Cisco Live Europe last year. We couldn’t be happier to watch as people like Al achieve their dreams!
Heavy Networking 491: Real-Life Segment Routing & PCE
Segment routing has been a familiar topic at Networking Field Day over the years. The Packet Pushers Heavy Networking podcast recently looked at the topic, digging into the latest evolution of carrier networks. Nick Buraglio was a guest on the podcast and definitely drew on his experience from the Segment Routing Field Day Roundtable during the discussion. While the technology has certainly matured over the past three years, these kinds of discussions are great for getting people up to speed, sparking a deeper interest in specialized topics, and getting to know the prominent voices in the space. Be sure to check out the episode.
Container-Based WAN Monitoring
Container-based WAN monitoring might just sounds like some IT marketing buzzword BINGO, but Pete Welcher makes the argument that it’s a vital part of a networking toolkit. Rather than traditional monitoring tools that look at metrics that indicate what a user actually excperiences on the network, companies like ThousandEyes and Netbeez user container-based monitoring to actually probe the network from the client side without needing additional hardware, able to run in contianers on a Catalyst 9000 switch, for example.
Heavy Networking 491: Real-Life Segment Routing & PCE
Back in 2016, Nick Buraglio participated in our Segment Routing Field Day Roundtable, discussing the impact the tech would have on carrier networks. On this episode of Packet Pusher’s Heavy Networking, Nick and Ethan Banks go deep into similar topics like SR-MPLS, SRv6, and PCE, as well as traffic engineering.
The Importance of User Interfaces in IT Infrastructure Management
Enrico Signoretti looks at the importance of user interface in this piece, something that in an age dominated by automation and APIs is often forgotten. He looks at the different approaches to UI on display at a recent Tech Field Day event.
Mastering the Art of Data Visualization
Data management and visualization are hot topics in IT today, but sometimes the terms can get muddied. After returning from Tech Field Day, Max Mortillaro breaks down what qualifies as visualization, how this relates to a good user interface, and more.
How Do You Provision a 500-Switch Network in a Few Days?
One of the interesting aspects of a IT event the scale of Cisco Live is that it has its own unique set of IT challenges. During a behind the scenes tour during Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US 2019, Ivan Pepelnjak got to ask how they created the network for the event in such a short amount of time. What he found was that provisioning a large campus network in a few days is easy and reliable as long as you do your homework and keep things as simple as possible.