Inspired by recent solutions seen at Tech Field Day presentations, Rich Stroffolino and Dr. Rachel Traylor discuss what actually is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. They break down how having an algorithm doesn’t equal machine learning, and how to spot when marketing overreaches with the terms.
Orchestration From the Top Versus Automation From the Bottom
Extreme Networks and Juniper Networks made an impression with Tom Hollingsworth after Networking Field Day in January. For him, the Extreme Networks showed why they lead the way in their bottom-up approach to automation. He then breaks down how Juniper distinguishes themselves with their top-down orchestration tooling.
Tech Field Day 2017: An Enthusiastic Retrospective
When Nikki Schnupp joined the Tech Field Day team, she was greeted with two events back to back within a week of starting. Much like a delegate at the event, she drank from the IT firehose, learning about the personalities and technology as presented. It was a singular experience. Make sure to check out her entire look back in this piece.
Going Faster with 400Gbps Ethernet and Andy Bechtolsheim
How will we get to the 400Gbps Ethernet future? Tom Hollingsworth heard a talk from Arista Networks’ Andy Bechtolsheim at Networking Field Day on the topic. The talk delved into the challenges, politics, and opportunities of 400Gbps.
Getting to Know IP Infusion
Rich Stroffolino takes a look at IP Infusion. The company has been around since 1999, commercializing the founders’ previous work on GNU Zebra in the form of ZebOS. Rich reviews how the company has pivoted to now provide a network operating systems for white box vendors and virtualized environments.
Architecting Container Direction with Nirmata
Containers may have a lot of advantages. But when it comes to using Kubernetes to orchestrate them, complexity starts to become a substantial issue for organizations. Tom Hollingsworth looks at Nirmata’s presentation from Cloud Field Day as a way to address this. They offer an orchestration layer on top of Kubernetes, that lets organizations spent more time working on their business intent, and less time learning configuration.
Keeping An Eye On Containers with Ixia CloudLens
Containers have a number of benefits in modern IT, but monitoring them can quickly become problematic. Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at Ixia’s CloudLens solution, a container monitoring solution built into a container! This allows it to be highly portable and easily configured with other containers for monitoring.
Unmasking Bad Actors with Gigamon
After seeing their presentation from Networking Field Day earlier this year, Tom Hollingsworth reviews Gigamon’s solutions for giving visibility back to your network. They do this via SSL Decryption, which can detect anomalies from a variety of sources. Tom also addresses potential privacy concerns of this approach in the piece.
Dedicated Wireless Troubleshooting Doesn’t Have To Break The Bank
Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at Mojo Networks’ unique approach to wireless analytics in this piece. This is achieved by adding a third radio to each AP to assist with monitoring and analytics. Tom thinks this is an ideal solution to get an ear on traffic without interfering with peak speeds.
A Conversation with Congruity360 COO Mark Shirman
At Commvault GO 2017, Stephen Foskett sat down to interview Congruity360’s COO Mark Shirman. They discussed the company’s managed services portfolio, business model, and new data center.
Commvault GO – Space and Time
Nikki Schnupp shares her thoughts before attending Commvault GO 2017. She reflects on how the show and company revolve around the ideas of space and time, finding the balance between the two to bring efficiency to data management.
Commvault GO 2017 Keynote Live Blog!
If you’re catching up on all the great content coming out of Commvault GO from last week, a good place to start is the Gestalt IT live blog from their keynotes. Stephen Foskett ran down all the major speeches and announcements.
Pluribus Networks Is the Definition of “Software Defined”
Tom Hollingsworth looks at how the value of software-defined networking can drive your network forward with Pluribus Networks. For Tom, SDN is about making the hardware less important than what running on top of it. Pluribus showed how their SDN platform can still provide differentiation on newer hardware.
E Tu Pluribus Networks UNUM?
Pluribus Network gave a brief overview of their analytics platform at last month’s Networking Field Day. Rich Stroffolino was impressed that this capability is baked in at the kernel level, which allows for enabling the analytics services without sacrificing performance.
Looking at Commvault GO 2017
The 2nd annual Commvault GO conference takes place in Washington DC November 6-8. Rich Stroffolino takes a look at the speakers, sessions, and other highlights announced. The conference may be new, but seems laser focused on the company’s data management vision.
MoSMB, Less Problems
MoSMB from Ryussi offers a proprietary SMB3 alternative to SAMBA for Linux and Unix systems. Rich Stroffolino looks at it’s feature set and why this may be the sweet spot for many NAS vendors looking for something more robust than SAMBA.
SNIA Hops on DePop with Hyperscalers
SNIA presented at Storage Field Day, discussing how hyperscalers are effecting the storage industry as a whole. These businesses command so much storage that they can exert direct feature requests to component makers due to their unique scale. Rich Stroffolino looks at the effects of low percentage tail latency on application performance, and the DePop standard that was developed to address it.
OpenFaaS: Serverless for Containers Made Easy
Rich Stroffolino takes a look at what the OpenFaaS project presented at Tech Field Day Extra from DockerCon EU 2017. The project provides a framework to easily implement serverless functions in a container framework. The project now includes support for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes, and creator Alex Ellis even provides walkthroughs on how to roll your own cluster using Raspberry Pis.
The Aruba 8400 Switch is the Future of Enterprise Core Switching
In his look at Aruba Networks’ 8400 chassis switch, David Varnum sees it opening “a frontier to new ways we interact with core switching hardware.” The switch has all the speeds and feeds you could want in a modern piece of hardware, but David sees it shining with its ArubaOS-CX. Aruba developed the OS to be database-driven, leverage Linux, fully programmable, resilient, and supportable. Combined with an analytics engine built into the base license of the switch, David found it an impressive offering from Aruba.