At Tech Field Day, Google Cloud highlighted Google VMware Engine (GVE), a subscription-based service offering that brings VMware to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google Cloud VMware Engine (GVE) comes to the market to help enterprises migrate, extend, and enhance their VMware workloads using Google Cloud. Dedicated, hyperconverged hardware comes with many benefits, including guaranteed performance, and simplified security and compliance. But, one of the key differentiators is that unlike many cloud offerings, GVE comes with the freedom to install and configure third-party software so that businesses can migrate their workloads without disrupting their existing tooling.
Meet Field Day Delegate – Neil Anderson
Neil Anderson is coming to Cloud Field Day! This will be Neil’s first event as a delegate and we are looking forward to what he brings to the table. From high school dropout to successful IT professional, trainer, and consultant, Neil thrives on making technology easy to understand and seeing students have that ‘lightbulb moment’. Be sure to read his interview with Gestalt IT to get to know more of his background, then see him and the rest of the delegates during the event.
Meet Field Day Delegate – Jim Jones
We always love to see new delegates join us for events, it helps bring fresh perspectives and energy for the presentations, and allows companies to hear from up and coming minds in IT. Jim Jones will join us for Cloud Field Day, and sat down for an interview with Gestalt IT to learn more about him. They dig into how he first got into technology, what new skills he’s developing, his career challenges, and what he’d do if he wasn’t working in IT. Check it out before you see Jim during the events to get a little background.
The New Branch With Riverbed SD-WAN
What does your branch office look like? I’m sure the answer to that question is different than it was just six months ago. Tom Hollingsworth takes a look back at Riverbed’s presentation from Networking Field Day and how they have the right tools to make your new branch work just like it should.
A Tale of Scale in Three Parts With Broadcom
Broadcom is one of the biggest suppliers for chips in the networking market? But how do they provide the chips you need to fit the services and operations you’re selling? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at their lineup and how they can scale in a variety of ways to fit the bill. The company showed off a lot of their solutions at Networking Field Day earlier this year, so be sure to get up to speed on this article before diving into their full video presentation.
Go Time With PathSolutions
How much time does it take before you know you’ve been breached? How much time do you spend figuring out what you need to know so you can respond appropriately? How many precious minutes are wasted gathering info from the four corners of your enterprise? What if you could have what you needed in just one minute? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at PathSolutions TotalView Security Operations Manager and how it is the perfect rapid response SIEM for the SMB. They went into detail about this at their recent Security Field Day presentation, so be sure to check out Tom’s piece before digging into the videos yourself.
Pensando Brings Cloud Scale to Networking, Storage, and Security Services
What could you do with specific hardware for tasks in your data center? Not just general purpose CPUs and GPUs but an actual suite of hardware and software designed to accelerate your workloads? Gestalt IT took a look at the Pensando presentation from Cloud Field Day and highlight how their integrated hardware and software stack might just be the answer to your cloud problems. Their Distributed Service Platform is a solution to not only offload tasks from compute, but add cloud-scale networking and storage services to help organizations achieve their dream of software-defined architecture.
Dell Technologies Simplifies Storage Automation With PowerTools
As a cloud-like, self-service experience for infrastructure consumers like software developers becomes expected, enterprise storage is under increased pressure to evolve. Slow, error-prone, manual storage tasks do not keep pace with the demands of these consumers or come close to meeting ease-of-use expectations that have been set by public cloud providers. In response to these realities, Dell has been wise to not only embrace automation across their storage portfolio but choose to integrate with the toolsets their customers actually use as presented by Dell EMC at Storage Field Day.
Western Digital’s Data Vision at SFD18
At Storage Field Day, the delegates got a glimpse into some data storage innovations and how these will continue to evolve. VP of DCS Business, Narayan Venkat, describes how the data will flow, varying categories of data, and how Western Digital envisions the environment changing to allow for these new paradigms to happen. Data storage is a rapidly changing field, and Western Digital made a convincing case during Storage Field Day that they are prepared to meet whatever the needs of storage that enterprises will discover going forward.
HashiCorp Consul Meshes Well With Modern Applications
At Cloud Field Day 6, HashiCorp presented that they are on a mission to help customers unlock the cloud operating model by addressing several key problem areas, including development, security, provisioning and networking. With its comprehensive vision for helping customers transition to a cloud operating model, and its emphasis on service-specific network security with Consul, HashiCorp is doing its part to make this vision a reality.
Infrascale Provides Cloud-Based IT Resilience to the Masses
During Infrascale’s presentation at Storage Field Day 19, they discussed how the rise in capability and popularity of cloud computing has had the fortunate outcome of providing new tools and approaches to solving age-old problems. One such persistent pain point is that of disaster recovery. Infrascale has responded to this by providing a feature-rich platform for protecting against partial and full site failures using a combination of local and cloud resources.
Insightful Fabric Management With Cisco Network Insights
What is your network fabric trying to tell you? Are you missing out on important updates about the status of patches and updates? How can you learn more about what you need to accomplish? Tom Hollingsworth looks at Cisco Network Insights Advisor and how it can help you decipher what you need to be listening to. Cisco showed off NIA at Networking Field Day, and Tom sees it as a support tech dedicated to doing nothing but update you on what the latest issues are that could affect things and how you can mitigate or remove those problems. And for the times when you can do neither, NIA can help you get your ducks in a row when you need to call TAC.
Defeating Configuration Drift With Gluware
No two configurations are the same. Usually because they’ve been modified outside of recommended parameters. If you want to stop this from happening in your network, you need a tool that can detect the drift in your devices. Tom Hollingsworth examines Gluware and their presentation during Networking Field Day to see how they can help network admins keep your configs on track. Their drift tool takes a snapshot of the configuration of a device and allows you to quickly compare it with the state of the device later on. Tom admits to causing some network drift in his time, so he’s glad to see there’s a solution out there to help address it.
Rogue Device Detection Thanks to PathSolutions
How can you track down all the devices in your network that you don’t know about? How can you ensure they aren’t security risks or potential threat vectors? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at PathSolutions and their new TotalView Security Operations Manager and how it can help you figure out what’s hiding just out of plain sight. He got a deep dive from PathSolutions during Security Field Day, so once you check out Tom’s piece, be sure to check out their full presentation video.
A Week of Unexpected Expectedness With Forward Networks
In this post, Tom Hollingsworth reviews the Forward Networks presentation about a week in the life of a network engineer from a recent Networking Field Day and how their Network Query Engine can help you get a jump on those totally unexpected problems you’re expecting. For Tom, NQE is the resource network admins can talk to in order to find the information they have to have to make the right decisions. It’s like a network encyclopedia. And any resource that can cut down on time to resolve problems or troubleshoot issues means admins can spend less of their week working on unexpected issues and more time keeping things running smoothly so those issues don’t crop up.
Hammerspace Wants to Be Your Cross-Cloud Data Platform
The challenge of data management is something organizations have struggled with for decades. Within the storage market, the race has been on to provide customers with a solution that helps ease the burden associated with data management within the data center and across clouds. At Cloud Field Day 6, Hammerspace presents the answer customers are looking for.
HPE Nimble dHCI Bridges the Gap Between Converged and Hyperconverged
Hyperconverged solutions have done a great deal to simplify the way datacenter infrastructure is approached. However, these types of solutions do have their flaws, and they aren’t a good fit in every situation. HPE has recognized this and brought the best attributes of converged stacks and hyperconverged solutions to market in the form of HPE Nimble dHCI.
The Three Philosophies of SolarWinds APM
Application Performance Management often faces the thankless task of trying to monitor and manage increasingly complex applications. SolarWinds’ APM suite smartly views apps through three distinct philosophical lenses to provide IT will a full spectrum of visibility. In this post, Rich Stroffolino takes a look at the APM solutions SolarWinds presented at Cloud Field Day, including Loggly, Pingdom, and AppOptics. Each of these provides a key component to the overall suite, and while they do interoperate and feed into each other, they do so with a unique approach to the APM problem.
Reviewed HPE InfoSight Is a Force-Multiplier for IT Operations
Infrastructure complexity is becoming an issue that impedes ongoing operations, and solution vendors have a role to play in addressing this problem. In addition, it’s no longer good enough to just produce infrastructure solutions that do not have awareness of the rest of the stack. This piece looks at Tech Field Exclusive with HPE Storage how HPE is meeting these challenges with InfoSight, which they acquired with Nimble Storage a few years ago.
Leaving Legacy Behind to Build Better Networks With DriveNets
How do you build a network operating system today that has none of the technical baggage from years past? Can we ever really leave behind the technologies of yesteryear? Tom Hollingsworth reviews the DriveNets Network Operating System and how it modernizes a platform that needs to leave the legacy behind. He got a deep dive on it at Networking Field Day, where they did an architectural over, and showed how they built it from the ground up with microservices in mind.