Greg Ferro is no stranger to Tech Field Day events. In this post, he uses his considerable event experience to offer some advice to future presenting companies. He addresses everything from knowing your audience, to how to approach demos, and building a company story over the course of two hours.
Anuta NCX: An Orchestration Platform For Networks
Drew Conry-Murray shares his thoughts on Anuta’s NCX solution, which he saw first hand at Networking Field Day in January. NCX is an orchestration platform designed to simplify a lot of networking drudgery. To do this, high-level models are constructed with Yang, which are then translated into specific device instructions when called upon. It even does device discovery to automatically understand which versioning and configuration on network devices. Key to this, Anuta has a wide list of hardware and software partners NCX supports.
SD-WAN Series Part 3: Silver Peak EdgeConnect
Eyvonne Sharp continues her excellent video series looking at SD-WAN. This time she’s talking about Silver Peak, who presented at Networking Field Day last month. Notably, due to their end-to-end control, Silver Peak is able to identify applications based on the very first packet received.
SD-WAN Series Part 2: Riverbed SteelConnect
Eyvonne Sharp posted a second video in a series on SD-WAN. This time, she goes into her thoughts on Riverbed’s SteelConnect. She sees this as an elegant implementation, integrating the SD-WAN assets from Ocedo into their existing WAN optimization portfolio. Eyvonne was also really impressed by their policy configuration tools, which have simple on-off switches and allow for easy rollback. It’s a great look at the product, and we can’t wait to see more in the series!
Nyansa Measures Network Performance Using Mobile Devices As Sensors
Drew Conry-Murray shares his thoughts on Nyansa, who presented at Networking Field Day last month. The company has an interesting approach to analytics, they use measure user experience by using mobile device endpoints as sensors, effectively turning any phone, laptop or tablet into a sensor. These on-prem metrics are then sent to Nyansa’s cloud for further analytics and to establish baseline network performance. This can be used to easily assess problems when they deviate from these baselines, and also let you see how performance of your network stacks up to others in your vertical.
Introduction to SD-WAN
So you’ve heard about SD-WAN, but you still have some questions? Eyvonne Sharp made a video just for you. In this introduction, she lays out what the requirements of a complete SD-WAN solution are. Once you’ve got the fundamentals down, she includes links to some specific company implementations from Networking Field Day!
Nyansa’s Comparative Analytics
Rich Stroffolino reviews Nyansa’s networking monitoring solution from Networking Field Day last month. He was really impressed how the solution allowed you to measure not just objective measures like latency, speed, and packet loss, but also compare performance among similar network configurations. In a crowded networking monitoring space, it’s a key differentiator that really allows Nyansa to stand out.
Riverbed SD-WAN – The Simplicity of Automation in SDN
Do network engineers need to be programmers too? Greg Ferro thinks this doesn’t always need to be the case, especially with SD-WAN solutions like he saw from Riverbed at Networking Field Day. They demoed the ability to push security rule across the entire WAN with a few simple steps, making it far easier for engineers to actually manage their networks. It’s a really great insight into the exciting implications SD-WAN and Riverbed can have on the entire IT networking space.
Anuta Networks NCX: Overcoming Skepticism
Chris Marget thought he knew how the networking world worked. Getting various network vendors to play nice with each other required more art than science while editing a text configuration file. It took years of painful experience to be able to do this well. Then Chris saw Anuta Networks present their multi-vendor NCX orchestration, and changed his tune. Anuta claims it can work well between a lengthy list of vendors. They do this by not trying to make all features available, but to focus on a core set that will be useful to network engineers. Chris definitely liked what he saw at Tech Field Day.
Big Switch Networks Extends VMware Visibility, Adds Mesosphere Support
Big Switch Networks presented an vast array of products at Networking Field Day last month. Drew Conry-Murray was there, and he wrote up a look at their Big Cloud Fabric, the company’s SDN software for data centers. In its 4.0 version, Big Cloud now supports vSAN storage in vSphere, continuing the solutions tight VMware integration. It also supports a variety of orchestration platforms, including OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere. In this new version, Big Cloud Fabric continues to refine and fill out its offering.
Silver Peak’s End-to-End SD-WAN
There’s a lot of agreement in the enterprise about what is wanted out of an SD-WAN solution, but a lot of different ways of getting there. Rich Stroffolino looks at a solution from Silver Peak. Instead of using deep packet inspection, the company uses it’s end-to-end network control to derive their analytics. This allows for an understanding of network traffic from the very first packet, which allows the SD-WAN to be more secure and efficient. It’s a really interesting spin on this booming technology.
Simplify SD-WAN with Riverbed
At Networking Field Day last week, Rich Stroffolino came away impressed with Riverbed. Their SD-WAN solution is based around making things as simple as possible. They showed in real time how to get an SD-WAN site online with just a few simple clicks and an IP address. All of this is while still providing comprehensive policy based tools to make it easy to give specific apps, users and locations the correct priority. Their guiding principle is that a network exists to move a packet from one place to another, how it’s managed should be as simple as possible. As Riverbed said in their presentation, “you can either make the sausage or enjoy the sausage.”
Sorting Through SD-WAN
The SD-WAN landscape can be a little tough to navigate. While the basic idea is easy enough to understand, every company out there seems to have their own implementation and market focus. Tom Hollingsworth thinks the moment of SD-WAN maturity is finally upon us. If anything, Tom thinks there might not be any more room for differentiation for new companies. Overall though, the space is really exciting, as it can only get easier to deploy and extend. 2017 may indeed be the year of SD-WAN!
DDoS Detection with Big Switch Networks
DDoS attacks made major headlines in 2016. Even when not heard about publicly, they can be costly for businesses as the disrupt operations and mission critical services. At Networking Field Day last week, Big Switch Networks outlined their DDoS detection platform, called the BigSecure Architecture. Rich Stroffolino looks at this architecture as taking the ordinarily linear chain of security from the public internet to the data center, and adds a variety of countermeasures to loop in and detect malformed traffic caused by a DDoS attack. The ultimate goal is to always allow legitimate traffic in, and to coordinate with mitigation solutions once an attack is detected.
Getting Full Resolution with Kentik Detect
At Networking Field Day last week, Kentik introduced their network monitoring solution, Kentik Detect. Rich Stroffolino came away impressed with it. The company is dedicated to make sure you always are able to get a full resolution view of what is going on with the network, instead of replying on inaccurate samples or composites. This dedication led them to develop a completely new engine, backed by a new database design, to make sure all streaming information is logged at incredibly efficient speeds.
