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.
Cisco Champion 2020
Field Day delegate Al Rasheed is excited to be named Cisco Champion for 2020 and wrote this post to thank all those who helped him achieve this, including us here at Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. He attributes Cisco’s notice to his participation in Networking Field Day 19 in 2018 and Cisco Live Europe last year. We couldn’t be happier to watch as people like Al achieve their dreams!
Network Neighborhood: Corporate Communications and the IT Community With Dana Iskoldski
In this episode of Network Neighborhood, Ethan Banks talks with Dana Iskoldski, Corporate Communications Manager at BlueCat Networks. Ethan heard extensively from BlueCat at Networking Field Day last year. This time they dive deep into the role of corporate communications in tech.
Drive Your Own Demo With Riverbed
As the organizer of Networking Field Day, and a former delegate himself, Tom Hollingsworth has seen his fair share of demos at our events. At last month’s event, Riverbed really stood out with how they presented their demo section. They opted for a “hands-on” demo, discussing with the delegates as they interacted with the product in real time. For Tom, it can be a risk proposition, but he thinks the benefits of seeing how people learn and build muscle memory in the application far out weights the potential pitfalls.
Making Way for the New With Cisco
Planning to maintain code can be tricky. Tom Hollingsworth points out in this piece, sometimes code is quickly made irrelevant with bygone platforms while others, like COBOL, seemingly stick around forever. Maintaining your own code is challenging enough, but companies like Cisco have to deal with code from numerous acquisitions over time. After maintaining AireOS code for some time, Cisco is now finding ways to migrate to a more modern approach with modular IOS WLC code. Tom is impressed with this approach and think its a model of dealing with similar issues in the future.
Kentik and the Negative Roadmap
Tom Hollingsworth is the organizer of Networking Field Day, but he’s always a delegate at heart. In this post, he digs into what Kentik presented at the event last month. He was impressed with what Kentik had planned on their roadmap. But even more impressive was the company explicitly stating what they were not going to be getting into. This helps alleviate some of the concerns of feature creep that seem to happen with any solution over time. For Tom, this open perspective into their thought process can only spell good things going forward for Kentik.
Level Up Your NetOps With Apstra
Phil Gervasi found Apstra’s presentation at Networking Field Day late last year to be interesting. The company broke down what it means by Intent-Based Networking, defining four distinct levels. Apstra claimed that most IBN companies are offering just basic automation or perhaps a single source of truth. But the company outlined how they want to move beyond that and get to a truly self-operating network.
Cisco SD-WAN: On-Ramp to the Cloud
Phil Gervasi always has his radar up to detect marketing FUD from IT companies. But at Networking Field Day last year, a lot of what he heard from Cisco about SD-WAN rang true. The category is hardly new, and Cisco’s acquisition of Viptela is 2017 validated it as an area of focus for the company. For Cisco, they tie mass SD-WAN adoption to cloud adoption, with an overall theme of how to on-ramp to and manage a multi-cloud topology. Phil runs through what they presented and how it enables that for organizations.
Visual Networking At It’s Finest with Apstra
Apstra is no stranger to Networking Field Day, and it was great to see the company present at our most recent event in November. Tom Hollingsworth organized the event, and got a first hand look at the latest from this innovative company. What stood out for Tom this time was the key work Apstra is doing in network visualization. The advent of intent-based networking means that operators now have direct visibility into all devices in their control zones. Apstra not only innovates in their area of intent, but finding ways to visualize and break down this information into meaningful insights.
The Power of a Great Demo with Illumio
It’s one thing to have a great Tech Field Day presentation, filled with technical overviews, architectural deep dives, and a killer slide deck. But putting together a great demo is a different beast. Tom Hollingsworth got to see a demo from Illumio at Networking Field Day last year that definitely left an impression. They showed off their new PCE Supercluster, and simulated a truly impressive amount of real workloads to truly show off its capabilities.
The Flux Reactor
Al Rasheed wrote up his thoughts on Kentik’s presentation from Networking Field Day late last year. The company offers full resolution of network traffic, with the goal of providing network administrators enriched data that’s easy to understand. They’ve found use cases with network performance, congestion, security, DDOS detection and forensics. Al was particularly impressed by some of the tools Kentik provides for service providers, which enriches data from multiple sources via API and pairs it with routing table data live.
Illumio Launches Supercluster Technology
In this press release, Illumio announced the availability of their PCE Supercluster for real time a dependency mapping and micro-segmenetation. Of course, if you watched their presentation from Networking Field Day late last year, you would have seen a truly impressive demo from Illumio showing off the full capabilities of this new solution. This is designed to provide real time visibility across the data center and the cloud, giving you centralized security controls, all at scale.
Cisco Champion 2019
We’re happy to see that Al Rasheed was accepted as a Cisco Champion for 2019. In this post, he directly sites the influence of attending Networking Field Day for this accomplishment. We’re just glad Al was able to attend the event, and we’re hoping to see him back in 2019.
Will Cisco Viptela continue to be one of the Leaders in SD-WAN ?
Orhan Ergun looks at Cisco’s SD-WAN efforts, which since acquiring Viptela in 2017 have been recognized by Gartner as Leaders in their Magic Quadrant. For Orhan, the strength of Cisco’s approach to SD-WAN is allowing it to run directly on IOS-based devices, bringing in new features with software updates. He also digs deep into the feature parity with other SD-WAN solutions, and the overall value proposition for enterprises.
2018 was a good and busy year ! Things I have done during the last year
Year in review posts are always a good time to take stock of accomplishments. Orhan Ergun took a look at 2018 and found he had a really busy year. For starters, he made the decision to open a company in Turkey. Other highlights included seeing students and friends pass their CCDE practical exam. In October, we were lucky to have Orhan attend Networking Field Day, where he got to hear from a variety of companies in the industry. We hope his 2019 is just as eventful!
Packets Never Lie…
Al Rasheed heard from Riverbed during Networking Field Day late last year. The company had a wide ranging presentation showing what they now offer in their WAN optimization and SD-WAN portfolio. This included an extensive SD-WAN Q&A session, demos from Brandon Carroll, and a look at SteelCentral Aternity and Steelhead SD. It was a lot of information, so be sure to check out the video from the presentation.
Apstra in a whiteboard
Marina Ferreira got to hear from Apstra at Networking Field Day late last year. But what impressed her the most wasn’t what she heard, but what she saw, specifically the excellent whiteboard session by Carly Stoughton. She outlined how Apstra went from their reference AOS architecture and have expanded it to provide intent-based networking, analytics and more. Check out the whiteboard and the full presentation video to catch up yourself.
Operating your Network with Intent-Based Networking
Apstra has done a series of blog posts following up on their recent Networking Field Day presentation, digging in a little deeper and providing some further context. In this post, Raghavendra Rachamadugu focuses on the importance of intent-based analytics that Apstra offers through AOS. While getting shiny charts of your network are nice, as the sheer amount of data grows, having a general analytic view will often obscure small but critical problems. Raghavendra gives a very precise definition of intent-based analytics, and explains how Apstra implements it.
Hopeful with a Dash of Skepticism: Cisco 9800 Wireless Controllers
Phil Gervasi is still haunted by memories of the Cisco 5760 Wireless LAN Controller. So it was with that in mind that he looks at Cisco’s new WLCs they presented at Networking Field Day, the 9300 and 9800 series. Phil thinks these can be successful due to their IOS-XE programmability and their ability to be deployed in racks or in the cloud as virtual appliances. Phil doesn’t think Cisco is repeating the issues of the 5760, and wants to start building them out in a lab soon.
Apstra’s NFD19 Experience: Part 2
Carly Stoughton reviews what she presented on for Apstra at Networking Field Day last month. This presentation started with a architectural overview of Apstra Operating System. She then went on to show how AOS Server provides pre-built building blocks, allowing you to build out a data center is AOS in under six minutes. All of this can be customized and configured to fit an organizations needs.
