On this episode of Briefings in Brief, Ethan Banks looks at what Silver Peak presented at Networking Field Day last month. The SD-WAN company focused their Field Day presentation on how their solutions can be replacements for conventional WAN routers. Ethan looks at if WAN routers are the ancient devices Silver Peak presented, and if an SD-WAN device is a suitable replacement.
BiB 062: Globally Scalable Microsegmentation With Illumio
Ethan Banks posted a recent Briefings in Brief episode discussing what was presented by Illumio at Networking Field Day last month. This marked Illumio’s return to the event, and they used their presentation to highlight their Policy Compute Engine Supercluster. This provides a a cluster of Policy Compute Engines, which can be used for massive scale that would otherwise choke a single controller. Ethan was impressed the company did a live demo showing the Supercluster in action with 225K workloads across three AWS regions. Make sure you check out their demo yourself with our full video coverage.
BiB 061: Understanding DriveScale Composer Architecture
The Briefing in Brief podcast from Packet Pushers is a great way to stay up to date on the latest company-specific news in a really concise package. In this edition, Ethan Banks looks at what DriveScale presented about at Tech Field Day, specifically the DriveScale Composer. This allows organizations to compose any compute to any disk or flash, in a scalable way. This is all RESTful API driven, allowing you to compose your infrastructure, but stopping short of being an application orchestrator. All of this with full multi-tenant support, and designed to insure data integrity in the event of an outage.
BiB 060: Focus On Your Data & Not Where It’s Stored With HammerSpace
This episode of the Briefings in Brief podcast looks at what Hammerspace presented at Tech Field Day earlier this year. Ethan Banks was there as a delegate, and saw the company come out of stealth. They provide a solution that creates a single namespace of data regardless of where it is stored, making it a true data-as-a-service offering.
BiB 059: Recover From Cyber Attacks & Ransomware With Dell EMC
In this latest installment of the Briefings in Brief podcast, Ethan Banks runs down what he heard from Dell EMC at their latest Tech Field Day presentation. They focused on their Cyber Recovery 18.1, which is designed specifically to meet the needs of recovering for a cyber attack. This is designed to allow for speedier recovery of massive datasets and maintain operations better than traditional backup and recovery or DR.
BiB 057: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Wants Your Workloads
On this episode of the Briefings in Brief podcast, Ethan Banks runs down what he heard from Oracle Cloud at Tech Field Day last month. This goes far beyond just being a platform for enterprises to run Oracle applications. Instead, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has slowly worked its way to feature parity with the public cloud big boys.
Cisco ACI Cloud APIC: Fast, Cheap, Good. You Can’t Have All Three.
Inspired by Cisco’s presentation at Tech Field Day last month, Ethan Banks uses the classic “fast, cheap, good: pick 2” device for considering running Cisco ACI in the cloud. By moving this switching management plane from on-prem to Cloud APIC, Ethan doesn’t see a performance bottleneck since this will all be in cloud-native constructs. Ultimately cost may be the issue for some organizations.
Mist Enhances Machine Learning Capabilities To Improve WLAN Performance, Troubleshooting
Drew Conry-Murray wrote up what Mist Systems presented on at Mobility Field Day this week. He looks at how the company uses a large number of data points per AP to feed information to their AI-driven infrastructure. Key to this is the refinement of Marvis, the company virtual network assistant. The company showed how they are working to allow admins to interact and resolve issues with Marvis using natural language recognition.
Network Break 194: Amazon Spooks Switch Vendors; Big Switch Brings VPCs On Prem
On the Packet Pushers’ Network Break podcast, Greg Ferro features Networking Field Day 18 presenting sponsor Big Switch and their new software designed to enable VPC-like networking in private data centers.
BiB 48: Gluware at Network Field Day 18
Greg Ferro talks Gluware after their Networking Field Day 18 presentation, describing the company as an automation engine that works well in a brownfield network because it is multi-vendor, multi-technology, and works with existing tools like the CLI. Greg is also excited by, and goes on to describe, a Campus demo where Gluware showed the dot1x template being applied to ports as needed.
Some Things I Learned About VeloCloud SD-WAN
Greg Farrow was surprised by what he learned about SD-WAN from VeloCloud’s presentation at Networking Field Day. The surprises included features that look an awful lot like intent-based networking, as well as PCI DSS compliant. It clearly was an eye opening presentation.
Considering The Future Of Juniper’s Contrail And OpenContrail/Tungsten
Greg Farro runs down the implecations of OpenContrail moving from a more Juniper Networks controlled open source project to the Linux Foundation. To accompany this change, OpenContrail is being rebranded to Tungsten Fabric. Greg compares this to what he saw of Juniper’s main Contrail platform, which continues to add features specifically for the enterprise market to make it viable in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.
OpenContrail & dNOS Join The Linux Foundation, Get New Names
Drew Conry-Murray highlights the addition of two projects to the Linux Foundation, OpenContrail and dNOS. Drew got to hear about developments on OpenContrail at Networking Field Day from Juniper Networks, which is an open source derivation of their proprietary Contrail software. Drew isn’t sure if either project will become a major disruptor in the enterprise networking space, but he thinks the increasing move to open sourcing these projects will lead to “breaking the stranglehold of legacy vendors on how networks are built and operated.”
Juniper Woos The Enterprise With New Products
In this post, Drew Conry-Murray details the new offerings from Juniper Networks around multicloud networking. This comes from Drew’s most recent experience as a delegate at Networking Field Day last month.
BiB 029: Cisco At NFD17 – Automation, Telemetry & Intent
In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss what they heard from Cisco during their Networking Field Day presentation last month. Like much of the networking world, Cisco focused on how they are bringing intent, automation, and telemetry into their ecosystem.
BiB 028: VMware NSX At NFD17 – SD-WAN & Security
In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss what they saw from VMware’s NSX team at Networking Field Day last month. They touch on the company’s update on VeloCloud post-acquisition, NSX-T features, and a look at the latest version of vSphere.
BiB 027: Juniper Networks At NFD17 – A Platform Emerges
In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss the presentation from Juniper Networks at last month’s Networking Field Day. The company demoed their analytics platform AppFormix, clarified the divergence of Contrail from OpenContrail, and discussed the adoption of the P4 language across a variety of hardware.
BiB 30: Mellanox, Ixia & Cumulus At NFD17 – VXLAN & Whitebox
In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Drew Conry-Murray and Greg Ferro discuss what they saw from Mellanox, Ixia and, Cumulus Networks at Networking Field Day last month. Mellanox reviewed their switch portfolio, which can run a third-party OS like Cumulus Networks’ Cumulus Linux network OS. Ixia showed off IxNetwork, their flagship testing suite.
BiB 26: Extreme Networks At NFD17 – Composing Workflows For Mean Time To Payrise
Greg Ferro and Drew Conry-Murray posted a Briefings in Brief episode on what they saw from Extreme Networks at Networking Field Day last week. They focus on their presentation reviewing their automation efforts with StackStorm and Workflow Composer. Once you listen to the episode, be sure the checkout the full video of Extreme Networks presentation for yourself.
BiB 25: ThousandEyes At NFD17 – Expanding Into User Experience
Greg Ferro and Drew Conry-Murray posted a Briefings in Brief episode based on what they saw from ThousandEyes at Networking Field Day last week. They look at how the company is moving away from being strictly a visibility company, and more into monitoring overall customer experience with their internet as a network approach.
