Infrascale Helps SMBs Fight Off the Scourge of Ransomware

In the latest post on his blog, Justin Warren writes that Cloud Field Day 8 presenter Infrascale has an effective tool to help your network be prepared for a possible ransomware attack. As a delegate, Justin got to see Infrascale present on their ransomware protection and cloud backup options and knew that this protection is something that plenty of administrators need. Check out Infrascale’s presentation on Ransomware Protection and their Cloud Backup on the Tech Field Day Website!


Morpheus Spends Well With Others

Delegate Justin Warren is a huge fan of a feature highlighted by Morpheus Data at their Cloud Field Day 8 appearance: the budgeting feature. While others might find it boring, Justin explains in his latest blog post that their budgeting feature helps users see what things will actually cost, not just what they might cost. When it comes to technology, administrators need to plan carefully to ensure they can come in on time and not too far over budget, and Morpheus Data is helping them do that. Justin thinks they’ve come a long way since he first saw them at Cloud Field Day 3, and thinks that you should check them out! Check out Justin’s post and the presentations from Morpheus Data on our website.


Periodic Disclosure, August 2020

Justin Warren is a veteran delegate of Tech Field Day and we were excited to bring him back for our latest Cloud Field Day! Although the pandemic has interrupted many things, he is still working to give us a peek into his life with his latest disclosure post. We always look forward hearing from Justin, and hope to have him back at another Tech Field Day event soon!


Diamanti and State Management in Kubernetes

Justin Warren has been keeping a close eye on Diamanti since 2016 and had the chance to watch them present at Cloud Field day earlier this year. Justin was impressed with Diamanti and their software that makes Kubernetes more accessible and easier to manage. Check out Diamanti’s presentations from Cloud Field Day on our website and be sure to check out Justin’s blog as well!


Veeam’s SaaS Pricing Estimator

Justin Warren writes about a unique aspect of Veeam’s latest Cloud Field day presentations. Justin, a delegate at the last Cloud Field Day, writes that the Veeam SaaS Pricing Estimator is helpful and convenient tool designed with the user in mind. By empowering their users with more information, Veeam is allowing them to be better prepared for the future. Check out the Veeam Cloud Field Day presentations on our website!


Juniper’s Active Network Defence Concept

Juniper Networks went into detail about their Advanced Threat Protection at Security Field Day. For Justin Warren, it took a little bit to start digging into what Juniper was showing, eventually understanding their machine-learning based threat detection approach. Justin sees this as potentially effective, but having to overcome a lot of negative preconceptions, dependent on making sure the system is smart enough at detection to be a tool rather than an annoyance to avoid. A lot of the success of Juniper’s Advanced Threat Protection will depend on organizations laying the groundwork to work well with it, something that Justin doesn’t think is commonly the case. That being said, he thinks the approach and overall goal are sound, and that perhaps organizations need lofty goals to reach for to ultimately get better.


Private and Secure Overlay Networking With Tempered AirWall

At Security Field Day, Justin Warren and the other virtual delegates got to hear from Tempered, who did an overview on their AirWall solution. This sets up a secure networking infrastructure that runs over the top of your existing IP-based network using the Host Identity Protocol. Justin is rather bullish on it, thinking that the future of enterprise networking will likely take a similar approach. Rather than throwing out the concepts of Ethernet and IP addresses that have defined networking for decades, but have recently become overstretched, Tempered’s AirWall takes an incremental approach to innovate on top of that. This allows you to use the infrastructure you already have, letting you add a secure network overlay with a low barrier to entry.


VMware Adds Distributed IPS/IDS to NSX

In this piece, Justin Warren looks at how VMware is adding security features to its networking efforts, something they recently highlighted at Security Field Day. Part of this involves adding intrusion detection/prevention to NSX. For Justin, support for groups and tags has been a vital inclusion. Groups allow admins to group objects together and set common rules against that group. Meanwhile tags let you add arbitrary attributes that follow an information scheme. Combined these two features can provide a way for admins to compliment their packet policies for security. Justin still thinks VMware needs to further operationalize these features to make them truly comprehensive for network security, but clearly the effort is being put into their platforms.


PathSolutions Security Operations Manager Helps Humans Find Security Gremlins

At Security Field Day, PathSolutions did a deep dive into an extension to their TotalView product called Security Operations Manager. This is aimed at helping mid-market IT folks gain better situational awareness of what’s happening in their network. The idea is to help admins quickly orient themselves to what’s happening in the often messy and under-resourced world of mid-market IT, where IT generalists are the rule and security specialists often aren’t available. Justin Warren was a delegate at the event, and while he found that the UX for the solution could use an update, the focus and plain language focus of Security Operations Manager made it an interesting solution for its intended customers.


SolarWinds Joins the Cloud APM Game

Justin Warren sees the market for cloud monitoring tools as both crowded and operating on unstable ground. He got to see how SolarWinds plans to differentiate itself in this field at Cloud Field Day, with their Application Performance Monitoring suite. This consists of AppOptics, Loggly, and Pingdom, three products that SolarWinds brought in through acquisitions over the years. Justin sees this as a a cloud-based version of SolarWinds’ existing Orion platform. Justin would like to see the APM suite have deeper integration with Orion, but he wonders if these are being kept as separate to not bog down APM with legacy solutions that may not be relevant to organizations in the future. Be sure to check out his article and dig into the full presentation video for all the details.


Pensando Expands What SmartNIC Offloads Can Do

For Justin Warren, he found Pensando’s presentation at Cloud Field Day to be impressive on a technical level. They’ve developed an ARM-based chip that is programmable using the P4 network programming language. This is used in a SmartNIC called a Distributed Services Card that you install in your server to offload various network functions from the general-purpose CPU. This has the potential to offer huge performance benefits on network functions, but Justin sees this as limited to larger cloud providers and the infrastructure that supports it. Justin has questions about the actual size of the market for this solution, and how much it will cost, but was definitely impressed by the technology and team behind Persando.


DR to VMware Cloud on AWS With Site Recovery Manager

In this piece, Justin Warren considers how VMware has really embraced cloud in a big way. After some attempts at building their own cloud, VMware can concentrate on what it does well, which is providing a familiar management environment for enterprises to manage complexity at scale. This approach shows in what Justin saw at Cloud Field Day with VMware Site Recovery, which uses vSphere replication on VMware on AWS to move VMs from one cluster to another.


VMware Makes Kubernetes Even More So With Tanzu

In this post, Justin Warren considers how VMware has gone about integrating Kubernetes into its establishing management platforms, something he heard all about at Cloud Field Day. This is an inherently complex task, if for no other reason than the Kubernetes landscape is still changing and updating rapidly. Any kind of integration would seemingly have to take that on as well. For Justin, a lot of the strength of VMware’s position with virtualization is that it is a known quantity that organizations have a continuing investment with over time. Adding in Kubernetes with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid doesn’t strictly play to that strength. For Justin, the key will be for VMware to simplify the solution over time as it learns how customers actually use Kubernetes.


Disclosure: Pure Accelerate 2019

It’s always a privilege to have Justin Warren as a delegate at an event, and it was great to see him at Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019. In this post, Justin runs down just about everything that happened during the event. Be sure to check out all of our video coverage from the event to stay up to date on the technical details!


Leaving the Ecuador Open | Gestalt IT Rundown, September 18, 2019

This week on the Gestalt IT Rundown, Stephen Foskett and Ken Nalbone are joined by Justin Warren live from Pure Accelerate. They talked about all the big news from the event and what you can see from the Tech Field Day Exclusive presentations.


Commvault Buys Hedvig for $225 Million to Take on Secondary Startups

In this post, Justin Warren gives another look at Commvault’s recent acquisition of Hedvig. Both companies are familiar to the Tech Field Day audience, having presented at past events. Justin thinks the acquisition provides a great exit for Hedvig on the business front. Whether it will pay off for Commvault will depend on how well it integrates Hedvig’s exciting software-defined storage platform.


Disclosure: VMworld 2019

Justin Warren went to VMworld US 2019 this year, and he’s a familiar face at the event. It was great to have him as a delegate for our Tech Field Day Extra presentations as well. Be sure to check out our YouTube channel to get all of the video content from the event.


NetApp Active IQ Adds Machine Learning to Autosupport

Talking about Machine Learning at a Field Day event and there probably will be some calls of buzzword BINGO. But when a use of the technology actually stands out and impresses the delegates, it’s worth paying attention. That’s what Justin Warren is talking about in this piece about NetApp’s presentation. He breaks down what NetApp is doing with Active IQ. This essentially takes the 400 terabytes of telemetry data collected by the company, and applies sophisticated analysis to better help storage administrators. It might not offer the grandiose claims of other ML and AI technology, but for Justin, being a little humble means NetApp’s approach probably works a lot better.


Datera Shows the Value of Data in Use

Justin Warren saw something unique from Datera’s presentation at Tech Field Day last month. For him, it was particularly useful because it focused on the cost of change. Datera’s storage solution focused on lowering that cost of change, allowing for greater experimentation and innovation by organizations.


Monitoring Customer Data With Machine Learning

Justin Warren wrote up this piece looking at how IT companies are using machine learning to better monitor customer data. He specifically cites HPE’s InfoSight and NetApp’s Active IQ interesting examples, the latter of which he saw at Tech Field Day last month. He notes that collecting and processing information across customers allows Active IQ to notice systemic issues earlier.