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.
NFD16: Automating Arista Networks
Pete Welcher shares his thoughts on Arista’s Networking Field Day appearance from last year. He reviews the company’s presentations on streaming telemetry, extensive programmability, and changes in routing architecture.
Keep Load Balanced With KEMP Technologies
Pete Welcher wasn’t familiar with KEMP Technologies prior to their presentation at Networking Field Day earlier this year. But after hearing their presentation, he found them to have some interesting ideas with an impressive portfolio of server load balancer solutions. He summerizes some of the notable features, and how using their SLB might provide a more consistent experience with hybrid deployments.
Veriflow at NFD16: Continuous Network Verification
Veriflow presented at Networking Field Day earlier this year, demonstrating their formal verification of enterprise networks. Pete Welcher considers how this enables for continuous checking of network state, and enables intent-based features for network engineers.
Pluribus Networks at NFD16
Pete Welcher wrote up his post to wrap his mind around where Pluribus Networks falls in the fabric management market. The company differentiates itself with a controller-less design running their Netvisor OS on whitebox switches. Pete liked their framework of managing a fabric as one large switch, rather than many individual devices.
Apstra: Networking by Intent
Pete Welcher got to see more from Apstra at last month’s Networking Field Day. The company is pushing back on other companies jumping on the intent-based networking bandwagon, calling it “intent washing”. Pete remains impressed that the company clearly defines what they mean by intent, remain firmly hardware agnostic, and approaching their intent fabric as a single managed entity. This presentation focused on how developers can use Apstra’s intent-based features, which impressed Pete with the versatility for a number of different network roles.
Kentik Finds Truth in the Traffic
Pete Welcher did his homework before seeing Kentik’s presentation at Networking Field Day last month. He watched their prior presentations and was familiar with the company’s offerings. After all that, the company managed to impress Pete with their latest appearance. Read the full post for his detailed impression, but overall, Pete liked that Kentik allows for quick usability with built-in queries and reports, with actual anomaly detection, rapid reporting, and data collection across appliance silos.
Looking Forward to Networking Field Day 16
Networking Field Day is coming up next week, and we’re happy to have Pete Welcher returning as a delegate. He’s getting to revisit a company he saw at a previous event, Apstra and their intent-driven networking solution. Overall, Pete is looking forward to the presentations and talking to his fellow delegates.
