In this blog, the author outlines his takeaways from a presentation by startup AirVine at Network Field Day 23, which covered their product WaveTunnel. WaveTunnel is a 60 GHz wireless solution offering a quick building backbone without extensive cabling, boasting the ability to transmit through non-metallic walls, including brick and concrete. Its self-organizing network, decentralized intelligence, high-speed phased array antennas, and resilience make it an innovative and cost-effective option, particularly for older or historical buildings.
Network Field Day 23 Overview, or Throw Out Your Net Management Tools, They’re Obsolete!
There is a network management revolution going on, and legacy systems are no longer going to cut it. Airvine, Apstra, Arista, Boradcom, Catchpoint, Cisco, Intel, IP Fabric, Juniper Networks and PathSolutions came together at Network Field Day 23 to showcase how each of their products is making waves in the network management space. Peter Welcher, Network Field Day 23 delegate and tech expert came to the conclusion that it is time to modernize company’s network management tools, or die, based on what he saw at the event.
Network Field Day 23: IP Fabric
IP Fabric’s Automated Network Assurance Platform, presented at Network Field Day 23, is designed to analyze data and spit out discrepancies in a vendor and domain-agnostic way. The system is designed to retrieve and store data and allow it to be accessible across enterprise teams and silos, providing better visibility into the network and better data accessibility, according to Peter Welcher, a Network Field Day 23 delegate and 20-year CCIE who loves network design. His blog takes a look at IP Fabric and what it could do for a company.
Tech Field Day 21: Google’s VMware Managed Service
The LinkedIn explores Google Cloud’s new VMware Engine, as presented at Tech Field Day 21. The VMware Engine runs on high-performance hardware with 100 Gbps networking, and offers benefits like seamless migration, easy scaling, Rapid innovation, and self-service experiences. The author praises the offering’s ease of provisioning, its lift-and-shift capabilities, and its integration with other Google Cloud services, while noting that operational responsibilities like backup & DR, and monitoring would still be customer-responsibilities.
Networking Field Day 23 Is Coming!
Pete Welcher posts some of his thoughts on the most recent announcements for the upcoming Networking Field Day! Pete writes that he is very much looking forward to being a delegate at our jam-packed four day event. In this post, he writes specifically about our two most recently announced presenters: AirVine and IP Fabric! Pete is excited to see them up close and personal in the coming weeks, and so are we!
Tech Field Day 21: VMware Presents on Many Topics
Pete Welcher, a delegate at Tech Field Day in March, was impressed with VMware’s fast-paced and informational presentations. He writes about VMware’s jam-packed presentations including their focus on automation and orchestration of the datacenter in the cloud. We’re grateful for Pete’s time as a delegate and his recaps of event content from our Tech Field Day events! To check out VMware’s presentations, head on over to our website.
Tech Field Day 21: Zerto Saves the Data
Pete Welcher first heard of Zerto from friends a few years ago, and in March he was able to see them up close and personal at Tech Field Day. In his latest post, Pete outlines the features Zerto offers that he finds particularly impressive including continuous journaling and short RPO. With backup staying current down to almost the second, Pete writes that Zerto has gotten his attention. Check out Pete’s post and review of Zerto’s Tech Field Day presentations!
Looking Forward to Network Field Day 23
Pete Welcher posted about our September Networking Field Day event over on LinkedIn. He’s looking forward to the event overall, but the highlight of this article are his thoughts about the presenting companies. He mentions Arista, Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto, which he calls “four of the top five” networking companies. He’s also keen on seeing Apstra, Broadcom, Catchpoint, Intel, PathSolutions, and VMware, though the latter is not able to present at this event this time.
Better Late Than Never: Tech Field Day 21 Summary
Pete Welcher was one of the delegates at Tech Field Day earlier this year. Pete writes that he was impressed with all three presenters at Tech Field Day (Zerto, Google Cloud, and VMware) and writes about how each brought their own unique perspective in his event summary. We’re thankful for his participation in Tech Field Day and for his recap, even if it is later than he had planned!
Container-Based WAN Monitoring
Container-based WAN monitoring might just sounds like some IT marketing buzzword BINGO, but Pete Welcher makes the argument that it’s a vital part of a networking toolkit. Rather than traditional monitoring tools that look at metrics that indicate what a user actually excperiences on the network, companies like ThousandEyes and Netbeez user container-based monitoring to actually probe the network from the client side without needing additional hardware, able to run in contianers on a Catalyst 9000 switch, for example.
Kentik Adds Value, Gets Cloudy
Kentik is no stranger to Networking Field Day, and recently did a presentation at our event last month. Pete Welcher was a delegate at the event and shares his thoughts on what he saw from them in this post. They showed off their cloud-based big data approach to analyzing flow data from internal sources and the cloud. Kentik is now able to ingest AWS and GCP flow records, with support for Azure coming in 2019. Pete was impressed by the amount of data this agentless approach can obtain.
Apstra’s Intent-Based Networking
Pete Welcher continues his excellent look at the presentations from Networking Field Day last month, focusing on Apstra in this post. As Pete points out, the company was ahead of the curve, trumpeting Intent-Based Networking before it became a buzz word. He reviews their vendor-neutral approach, and how quickly the company demonstrated deploying and configuring AOS.
Silver Peak is Serious about SD-WAN
Silver Peak’s presentation at Networking Field Day last month got Pete Welcher thinking. He thinks the company made a well timed jump from WAN appliances to SD-WAN, with their Unity EdgeConnect being their unified SD-WAN offering. Their presentation made the case for replacing traditional WAN routers with SD-WAN devices. Pete looks at some of the technical benefits and drawbacks to that approach.
BlueCat: DNS, DDI + Visibility and Workflow Automation
In this post, Pete Welcher continues his excellent look at the presenters from Networking Field Day earlier this month. Looking at BlueCat Networks, he thought they made an interesting case for their managed DNS and IPAM address management solution. Though DNS and DDI can be seen as somewhat commodified, BlueCat argued that DNS provides network visibility, while DDI can serve as a single source of truth. Both are seen as vital for business workflow automation.
Illumio: Micro-Segmentation via the Endpoint
Pete Welcher has seen a number of Networking Field Day presentations. That;s why it’s impressive when he says that Illumio’s recent presentation may have had one the best demos the event has ever seen! They showed how their newly announced PCE SuperCluster can provide automated leveraging of endpoints, rather than dedicated firewalls, to provide uniform micro-segmentation onsite or in the cloud. Make sure to watch the demo for yourself with our comprehensive event video coverage.
Riverbed Enhanced SD-WAN
Pete Welcher returned for his fifth Networking Field Day last month, and it looks like he didn’t leave disappointed. In this post, he looks at what Riverbed presented at the event. They presented on their SD-WAN solution. Given the crowded field, Pete was interested to see how they differentiated themselves. They did this with a solid GUI and robust feature set, with an emphasis on digital experience and performance. He also shows how Riverbed’s history with WAN optimization naturally extends into SD-WAN.
Cisco Aggressively Ups Its SD-WAN Game
Cisco spent the bulk of their Networking Field Day presentation discussing recent updates to SD-WAN. Pete Welcher digs into the presentation in this blog post. For Pete, the big news of the presentation was Cisco bringing improved security to SD-WAN, with firewalls and other security features now included with Viptela SD-WAN. Pete sees this as the key to broadening SD-WAN into more diverse designs and topologies.
Improving Network Management Tools
In this post, Pete Welcher considers how to improve network management tools. The problem with these is that they are often sold to customers without any consideration for their use-cases and needs. He considers some of the path tracing tools he saw from SolarWinds at Networking Field Day as a great way to frame that information, and suggests that other network management tools would do well to adopt that methodology for other metrics.
Spotlight on Cisco Tetration and Cisco Intersight at NFD16
At the last Networking Field Day event, Pete Welcher and the rest of the delegates got to hear from Cisco. They presented on the latest updates on Tetration, as well as debutted Intersight, formerly known as Project Starship. In this post, Pete liked the updates he saw from Tetration, particular the emphasis on using it as a tool for security alerts and mitigation. As far as Intersight, Pete liked Cisco’s emphasis on platform security, but thinks the company will need to work for a while to earn customer trust of its management-as-a-service model.
