In this episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown, Rich Stroffolino and Tom Hollingsworth breakdown the recent acquisition of Silver Peak by HPE. The SD-WAN company will be integrated into HPE’s Aruba business unit. Tom and Rich have seen Silver Peak at Networking and Cloud Field Day events in the past, and are well versed in their portfolio. They see the acquisition as a further bolstering of HPE’s ambitions with Aruba. We can’t wait to see the first fruits of this exciting acquisition.
Why Did VMware Buy Datrium? | Gestalt IT Rundown: July 8, 2020
In this episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown, Tom Hollingsworth and Rich Stroffolino discussed the recent acquisition of Datrium by VMware. This was positioned as a DRaaS play for VMware’s cloud offerings, helping to refine their overall DR strategy. Rich found it interesting that Datrium had been billing themselves as a HCI vendor, to have them acquired for DR assets.
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.
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.
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.
Cisco Live Europe Reactions | Gestalt IT Rundown: January 29, 2020
Tom Hollingsworth was out in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. As if organizing an international event wasn’t enough, he also co-hosted the Gestalt IT Rundown. This gave him an opportunity to give his live impressions of the show on their live stream. While the show didn’t have an headline product announcements that stuck out to Tom, he did think it gave a lot of interesting indicators about how Cisco is evolving their business and technology.
NetApp Provides Insights for Women in Tech
Ahead of NetApp Insight 2018, Rich Stroffolino previews what should be one of the more interesting session at the event, the Women In Technology Panel. Now in its sixth annual iteration, this session brings together women from NetApp and other prominent IT companies to discuss the topic.
NetApp Speaks Volumes
Rich Stroffolino looks forward to NetApp Insight, looking at how the company has continued their transition from a storage company to a data company. Part of this strategy comes from Cloud Volumes, and the newly announced NetApp Kubernetes Service.
The Possibilities of Commvault GO
Rich Stroffolino gives a preview of what to expect from Commvault GO. The conference invites attendees to “Picture the Possibilities.” For Rich, what makes these kind of customer conferences important are the dozens of training sessions during the events, to turn those possibilities into reality.
NetApp Acquires StackPointCloud
Rich Stroffolino outlines how NetApp’s recent acquisition of StackPointCloud compliments what they presented at Cloud Field Day earlier this year. Their Cloud Volumes service now naturally rolls into a larger managed Kubernetes play.
ARM Servers and End Times | Gestalt IT Rundown: September 19, 2018
Rich Stroffolino and Tom Hollingsworth discuss the news coming out of Mobility Field Day last week on the latest Gestalt IT Rundown. This includes a look at what Arista Networks is doing with the assets from Mojo Networks, as well as NETSCOUT’s business divestment of their monitoring tools portfolio.
Getting Out From Under the Policy Boulder with Juniper’s Contrail Policy Framework
Rich Stroffolino looks at Juniper Networks Contrail and how it can be used to scale policy management across hybrid networks. He first saw this at their Networking Field Day presentation earlier this year.
Looking at the Internet with ThousandEyes
Rich Stroffolino wrote up an overview of ThousandEyes, based on their presentation at Networking Field Day earlier this year. The company provides an innovative approach for monitoring SaaS app performance. Instead of limiting monitoring to traffic within an organization, they provide a framework to monitor the Internet itself as a network.
Droplet Computing: Living La Vida Legacy
Many organizations can’t shed mission critical legacy apps that require obsolete OS’s and hardware. Rich Stroffolino outlines how Droplet Computing’s application containerization could make that problem a thing of the past. Their company launch at Cloud Field Day definitely left an impression.
Traditional is the New Legacy
After hearing from Droplet Computing at Cloud Field Day, Rich Stroffolino asks the question: Are traditional apps the new legacy? He sees the term legacy falling out of usage for being too deterministic, and sees traditional gaining traction because it’s more descriptive.
Cape Networks Acquired by HPE
Rich Stroffolino breaks down the implications of HPE acquiring Cape Networks. Make sure to watch their recent Mobility Field Day presentation to get a handle on the tech HPE is acquiring. Adding some robust client-side sensors to their portfolio makes for an interesting addition to Aruba.
ML, AI, and Marketing: A Conversation with Dr. Rachel Traylor
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.
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.
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.
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.
