Ethan Banks hosted another episode of Briefings in Brief, looking at the Networking Field Day presentation from Riverbed. The presentation focused on Riverbed’s was on their SD-WAN solution. With a rich legacy in the WAN optimization market, Ethan thinks the company is well poised to transition customers to these SD-WAN solutions. He also looks at how their SteelHead SD and SteelConnect SDI appliances fit within their portfolio.
BiB 063: Can An SD-WAN Device Replace A WAN Router?
On this episode of Briefings in Brief, Ethan Banks looks at what Silver Peak presented at Networking Field Day last month. The SD-WAN company focused their Field Day presentation on how their solutions can be replacements for conventional WAN routers. Ethan looks at if WAN routers are the ancient devices Silver Peak presented, and if an SD-WAN device is a suitable replacement.
BiB 062: Globally Scalable Microsegmentation With Illumio
Ethan Banks posted a recent Briefings in Brief episode discussing what was presented by Illumio at Networking Field Day last month. This marked Illumio’s return to the event, and they used their presentation to highlight their Policy Compute Engine Supercluster. This provides a a cluster of Policy Compute Engines, which can be used for massive scale that would otherwise choke a single controller. Ethan was impressed the company did a live demo showing the Supercluster in action with 225K workloads across three AWS regions. Make sure you check out their demo yourself with our full video coverage.
BiB 061: Understanding DriveScale Composer Architecture
The Briefing in Brief podcast from Packet Pushers is a great way to stay up to date on the latest company-specific news in a really concise package. In this edition, Ethan Banks looks at what DriveScale presented about at Tech Field Day, specifically the DriveScale Composer. This allows organizations to compose any compute to any disk or flash, in a scalable way. This is all RESTful API driven, allowing you to compose your infrastructure, but stopping short of being an application orchestrator. All of this with full multi-tenant support, and designed to insure data integrity in the event of an outage.
Meet the Security Field Day Delegates: Ethan Banks
Ahead of their presentation at Security Field Day in December, Aruba’s Jamie Easley sat down for an interview with delegate Ethan Banks. Ethan is no stranger to the Field Day event series, but we’re excited to have him along for our inaugural Security Field Day. In the interview, they discuss what is new with Packet Pushers, the role of AI in security, and favorite memes.
BiB 060: Focus On Your Data & Not Where It’s Stored With HammerSpace
This episode of the Briefings in Brief podcast looks at what Hammerspace presented at Tech Field Day earlier this year. Ethan Banks was there as a delegate, and saw the company come out of stealth. They provide a solution that creates a single namespace of data regardless of where it is stored, making it a true data-as-a-service offering.
BiB 059: Recover From Cyber Attacks & Ransomware With Dell EMC
In this latest installment of the Briefings in Brief podcast, Ethan Banks runs down what he heard from Dell EMC at their latest Tech Field Day presentation. They focused on their Cyber Recovery 18.1, which is designed specifically to meet the needs of recovering for a cyber attack. This is designed to allow for speedier recovery of massive datasets and maintain operations better than traditional backup and recovery or DR.
BiB 057: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Wants Your Workloads
On this episode of the Briefings in Brief podcast, Ethan Banks runs down what he heard from Oracle Cloud at Tech Field Day last month. This goes far beyond just being a platform for enterprises to run Oracle applications. Instead, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has slowly worked its way to feature parity with the public cloud big boys.
Cisco ACI Cloud APIC: Fast, Cheap, Good. You Can’t Have All Three.
Inspired by Cisco’s presentation at Tech Field Day last month, Ethan Banks uses the classic “fast, cheap, good: pick 2” device for considering running Cisco ACI in the cloud. By moving this switching management plane from on-prem to Cloud APIC, Ethan doesn’t see a performance bottleneck since this will all be in cloud-native constructs. Ultimately cost may be the issue for some organizations.
BiB007: Kentik Network Peering & Capacity Planning
On a recent episode of the Briefings in Brief podcast, Ethan Banks looks back at what he saw from Kentik at Networking Field Day last month. This includes a discussion of their full resolution network analytics, with a specific application for peering and service providers.
BiB009: Pluribus Insight Analytics Platform
On an episode of the Briefings in Brief podcast, Ethan Banks discusses what he saw from Pluribus Networks at Networking Field Day last month. This includes not only their switching portfolio, but their Insight Analytics platform.
The Aruba 8400 Integrated Network Analytics & Automated Root Cause Analysis
Ethan Banks has a colorful way to describe the process of root cause analysis. “When goat sacrifices fail, deep human knowledge of a snowflake system’s specifics is required to sort through data, decide what is symptomatic as opposed to causal, and filter the information down to the root cause.” Luckily Aruba Networks’ 8400 chassis switch comes with a built in analytics engine as part of their base license. Ethan takes a look at how this specifically works on the switch and how it can be used to automate remediation as well.
The Aruba 8400 ArubaOS-CX Network Operating System
In this next installment looking at the Aruba Networks 8400 chassis switch, Ethan Banks looks how the switch interacts with ArubaOS-CX. The OS is highly programmable, supporting a well documented API in addition to a modular web GUI. Ethan takes a look at the extensibility offered by the system, the importance of the Linux kernal to the OS, and its design for resiliency.
The Aruba 8400 Hardware Highlights
In part two of his look at the Aruba 8400 chassis switch, Ethan Banks digs into the hardware of the device. The 8400 is built with redundancy in mind, which fits in with its campus core market. Aruba has designed it to offer a vaunted “carrier class” availability, with a service life to match. Ethan breaks down the unique ASIC used in the switch and digs into some speeds and feeds.
The Aruba 8400 Chassis Switch. Yes, But Why?
For those that have been around networking for more than a little bit, switches are often hard to get excited about. When Ethan Banks found out that Aruba Networks would be announcing a new chassis switch, he was initially demurred by the seemingly innocuous product . But after attending their announcement, his mind was racing with the possibilities for this new piece of hardware. So much so that this is part one in an article series going into a deep dive of all its capabilities.
Network Break 148: HPE, Big Switch Partner; Brocade Spins Out SDN Startup
In this episode of the Network Break podcast, the Packet Pushers talk about much of this week’s IT news including HPE and Big Switch teaming up in the data center, Google’s routing initiative Espresso, Brocade spining out its OpenDaylight SDN controller to a startup, Aruba revealing more details of its brand new core switch, and more. Ethan Banks expands specifically on Aruba, as he just saw them present at a Networking Field Day Extra event.
Accelerite’s Rovius Readies Your Hybrid Cloud
Writing about Accelerite’s Cloud Field Day presentation on their product, Rovius, Ethan Banks has very mixed feelings. He is a huge fan of how easy to use Rovius is and how easy Rovius makes it to consume a variety of clouds, but he is worried how it will function in complex failure scenarios. Ethan knows these issues are on Accelerite’s minds and hopes that they will prove themselves in the near future.
Nirmata’s Cloudy Control-Plane Is The Catalyst For Container Calm
Ethan Banks saw a presentation from Nirmata recently at Cloud Field Day. Here, he recaps Nirmata’s product, customer base, and everything else you would like to know about the company. Ethan also says that Nirmata “is in the right place at the right time” with their orchestrator of orchestrator product, especially as ease of use and speed of application deployment become critical to businesses.
Personal Transformation
Inspired by his time at Cloud Field Day, Ethan Banks compares the journey of companies like Gigamon re-tooling themselves and their products for the cloud to the transition that individuals will have to make as well as cloud becomes more pervasive. He says that people need to learn the public cloud environment and start to swap out their hardware revenue for revenue made with the cloud instead.
Understanding HPE Nimble Storage’s Cloud Volumes
Ethan Banks writes about HPE Nimble Storage’s Cloud Volumes, which they presented about at Cloud Field Day. Cloud Volumes are a cloud storage product focused on helping enterprises move their business applications to the cloud. Ethan sees the idea behind Cloud Volumes, but worries that it is a short-term product filling a gap that enterprises will eventually be able to bridge themselves, and therefore will not be particularly profitable for HPE.
