Tony Bradley joined us as a new delegate at Security Field Day. Aside from a big family and plenty of pets, Tony has been a CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) since 2002 and was awarded Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for 11 consecutive years! Be sure to check out this recent interview with Gestalt IT to get to know him better. They talk about how he got started in tech and security, what challenges he’s seeing in security, and how he manages work-life balance.
Pensando Places Programmability First
Programming hardware isn’t easy. Unless you start out with the idea that you’re going to use a language that is easy to adapt to your needs. Tom Hollingsworth looks at the decisions made by Pensando to leverage P4 to extend its platform to adapt to the future needs of its customers. After hearing from the company at Cloud Field Day, Tom sees Pensando in the early stages of making something big, and the power of P4 will make the sky the limit. Their platform is currently shipping with NetApp and HPE systems and likely to see wider adoption, especially in cloud providers.
Riverbed Wasn’t Built in a Day
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Riverbed’s network security posture. At a recent Tech Field Day presentation, the company gave an overview of how they are addressing the increasingly complex world of security, and used the metaphor of the Roman Empire to frame their response. History buff Rich Stroffolino was fascinated by that framing, and breaks down the implication in this piece.
Ensuring Code Quality With Arista
Are you having issues with code quality? Do you feel like things keep getting worse when you install the latest patch? Maybe the process behind the scenes is broken. Perhaps you need to look at what a good example of code development looks like. Tom Hollingsworth reviews the process from Arista after their presentation at Networking Field Day.
Monitoring Application Performance From the Inside Out With Solarwinds AppOptics
Are you relying on old tools to monitor your modern applications? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at why you should examine the way you keep an eye on your applications and how your users experience them. At Cloud Field Day, he saw that this is where SolarWinds comes into play. They have spent a great deal of time creating the best tool to handle monitoring of your application from the inside out. Their AppOptics solution does more than just monitor the response time of your pages. It digs deep into the services that compose the application to find out what’s actually going on when users run complicated queries or connect to a node that is having some performance issues.
Meet Field Day Delegate – Pieter-Jan Nefkens
We’re thrilled to welcome welcome Pieter-Jan Nefkens to the delegate ranks, as he’ll be joining us for Security Field Day for the first time. Pieter-Jan is a network consultant and owner of Nefkens Advies. He has also been a Cisco Champion since 2017. He sat down for an interview with Gesstalt IT, and provided some background into how he got his start in tech and security, as well as where he sees the industry going. Be sure to check it out before you see him in the Field Day presentations!
One Tier to Replace Them All
Data centers often need to deploy and manage multiple types of storage devices to provide the needed performance and storage tiers. Meeting an organization’s storage capacity and storage performance requirements can be a juggling act with multiple storage devices. VAST Data’s Universal Storage Solution can simplify this complexity using a single device providing a single cost-effective Flash tier. Vast Data made a big splash showing this off at Storage Field Day, so be sure to dig into this article for background before watching their full presentation video.
Meet Field Day Delegate – Ben Mason
We’re thrilled to have Ben Mason joining us as a delegate for Security Field Day. Ben is an Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP), a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE), and a CrowdStrike Certified Falcon Administrator (CCFA). In addition, he volunteers at the HART Homeless Animal Rescue Team of Maine. Be sure to check out his interview with Gestalt IT to get a little more background, and be sure to look out for him during all the Security Field Day live streams.
Hybrid Cloud Might Be the Right Solution for Data Analytics
With ever-expanding data sets and machine learning capabilities, organizations are exploring cloud solutions for access to resources not available in their on-premises datacenters. Hybrid cloud is becoming the de facto approach to cloud for many. Organizations wanting to take advantage of analytics for large data sets are finding it’s often simpler and more cost-effective to make use of cloud resources. NetApp’s Data Availability-as-a-Service solution provides a simple method for using hybrid cloud to provide access to those resources. It was designed with the IT non-expert in mind. Thanks to a deep dive at Storage Field Day, this post breaks down all the details.
NGINX Meshes Well With Others
What is a service mesh and how does it help containers? That’s exactly what NGINX went into during their recent Networking Field Day presentation. Tom Hollingsworth wades into the issue in this blog post. As a networking guy, Tom has had to adapt as the data center has changed over the years. The idea of a service mesh was one of the more recent concepts that Tom had to grapple with, and NGINX did a really great job during their presentation laying out what it is, and why it’s so important for the future of networking.
Exorcising Network Ghosts With VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer
Is your networking haunted? Or do you feel like problems are happening and you can’t find them? Who you gonna call? Tom Hollingsworth looks at how VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer can help you bust the ghosts that haunt your network and prove that the problems are floating around somewhere else. While definitely a spooky topic, luckily Tom found VMware’s presentation from Networking Field Day to be anything but.
What Is Data Resilience?
At Tech Field Day, Zerto gave the delegates on overview of their data resilience platform, before updating them on the latest and greatest with their Zerto 8.0 release. For Rich Stroffolino, this idea of data resilience is the key to Zerto’s success. Instead of keeping things like disaster recovery and data protection as separate teams, Zerto made a compelling case why it’s all part of the same resilience story for any organization. They showed how their solution is certainly capable of dealing with disaster recovery events, but also designed to handle operational recovery, for the every day disasters that can still have a big impact. This approach is wrapped around an elegantly simple approach based around their continuously updated journal to power all their services.
A Measure of Automation With Juniper Networks
You may be automating all the things, but are you verifying and measuring the outcomes of your automation? You need to be sure before you move forward on your journey. Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at Juniper Networks Contrail Insights and how it can help you make sure you’re automating the right things. Juniper did a deep dive on Contrail Insights at Networking Field Day, showing how a journey to automation is a matter steps. For Tom, Contrail Insights might not be the most exciting step in that journey, but arguably one of the most important.
Cloud Rich Updates in Zerto 8.0
Is the cloud a part of your data protection strategy? Or are you hoping that your box of backup tapes can swim? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at the latest updates from Zerto in their 8.0 software release, especially those that focus on the cloud. He got to hear about them from our Tech Field Day coverage, where Zerto did a deep dive on their platform and latest release. Protecting data with the cloud isn’t an emerging use case anymore, it needs to be a vital part of any businesses data resiliency plans. Zerto 8.0 building a lot of features and sophistication to make that possible.
Meet Field Day Delegate – Glenda Canfield
For Tech Field Day events, we pride ourselves on trying to include new voices into our delegate pool. This is vital to not only bring in the latest technical expertise to ask incisive questions of our presenting companies, but also to provide new perspectives around the delegate table, virtual or otherwise. Our latest Tech Field Day event saw Glenda Canfield join us for the first time. Be sure to check out her recent interview with Gestalt IT. They dig into how she got her start in IT, what she does in her spare time, and what she’d be working on if she wasn’t in IT. We can’t wait to hear from Glenda at more events in the future.
Dell EMC SmartFabric Director- Weaving a Tapestry of Green
Are you ready to build your digital transformation project? Need a new network to make it work? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at Dell EMC SmartFabric Director and how it can help you building out your next new project. He got to hear about SmartFabric Director at Networking Field Day, and thinks that it shows Dell EMC is on the right track for large existing infrastructures that are looking to make leaps toward digital transformation initiatives to get a handle on how to make that happen.
Meet Field Day Delegate – Jason Beshara
Jason Beshara is joining us for Tech Field Day Roundtable with Aruba! He is a Solution Architect with a demonstrated history of working with and designing advanced RF solutions. Jason is skilled in wireless LAN design and troubleshooting within enterprise, healthcare, education, LPV and heavy industrial verticals. Be sure to check out this interview with Gestalt IT to see how Jason got started in IT, where he sees the industry going in the near future, what he does outside of IT, and more. It’s great to get a well rounded understanding of new delegates to our events. It makes seeing them around the table and hearing their questions all the more illuminating.
For Big Switch, Cloud Isn’t a Location – It’s a Design Principle
For organizations that have begun to transition to the cloud, it has become apparent how straightforward it is to consume compute and storage services. Things that used to take days to provision are now accomplished in a number of clicks, or are transparently configured with no interaction required from the user at all. The fact that workloads are able to communicate with each other, or can be restricted from communicating, with equal ease is just as welcome. Tom Hollingsworth looks at how Big Switch Networks is enabling this, based on their presentation from Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World 2019.
The Definition of Secondary Storage Is Evolving – as Is Cohesity
The challenge of data management is nothing new, and the Enterprise Storage market has responded at both ends of the spectrum by providing mature, high performance solutions for primary datasets, and lower-cost archival solutions for less important bulk data. But many businesses are discovering a capability gap when attempting to store secondary data that falls into the “everything else” category. For this reason, Cohesity has begun to leverage its core capabilities to attack new problems as customer requirements, and the definition of secondary storage, continue to evolve. At Storage Field Day, the company showed off DataPlatform, which solves a set of challenges not addressed by high-end primary storage or low-cost archival storage. This provides a unified approach for storage of secondary data across both on-premises and cloud environments.