Beating the Alert Burnout With Forescout XDR

In this article, Sulagna Saha explores how Forescout’s XDR solution helps alleviate the alert fatigue burden faced by security operations centers (SOCs). By filtering out the noise and only delivering actionable notifications, Forescout XDR reduces the overwhelming volume of alerts faced by SOC teams, enabling them to focus on real threats. With its multi-vendor approach and ability to ingest and analyze data from various sources, Forescout XDR provides accurate detections and low false positives, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of security staff.


Edge Computing – Reality or Myth?

With all the talk about edge computing lately, including our forthcoming Edge Field Day event, Chris Evans takes a look at the space. Recalling Field Day presentations by Dell and Scale Computing, Chris considers the hardware, software, application, and data requirements for edge deployment. Learn more by reading his article as well as the recent posts by Stephen Foskett at Gestalt IT, and tune in for Edge Field Day in February!


Making Money in Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Chris Evans joined us as a delegate at Tech Field Day in 2011, where he saw Nutanix, and in 2019, where he saw Scale Computing. In this post for Architecting IT, Chris analyzes the benefits and advancements of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), looking at Scale Computing’s growth and noting Nutanix’s success. For more of his thoughts, check out this blog!


Riverbed Wasn’t Built in a Day

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Riverbed’s network security posture. At a recent Tech Field Day presentation, the company gave an overview of how they are addressing the increasingly complex world of security, and used the metaphor of the Roman Empire to frame their response. History buff Rich Stroffolino was fascinated by that framing, and breaks down the implication in this piece.


Scale Computing on the Edge With HE150

Chris Evans has been following Scale Computing since they presented at Storage Field Day all the way back in 2014. At their recent Tech Field Day presentation, they went into detail about their HE150 edge solution, which packs all the power of an HCI node into a single Intel NUC. While diminutive in size, Chris found them to offer an incredibly compelling value package. These are low cost, low power, low footprint solutions that are perfect for a number of edge deployments. But just as key is the software and networking to keep everything running smoothly, something that Scale’s HC3 software makes easy through their GUI or APIs. At $5,000 for a 3-node solution, Chris sees this as a perfect option to meet any any non-data center requirement.


Voices in Data Storage- Episode 32: A Conversation With Veeam

In this episode of Voices in Data Storage, Enrico Signoretti speaks to two Senior Global Technologist from Veeam, Anthony Spiteri and Michael Cade about data protection across physical and virtual data storage in the age of ransomware. They also dig into some of their presentation from Tech Field Day last year, which dealt with data integration APIs. This was designed to be agnostic for their customers, without dictating what particular piece of software or hardware their customers must use. For Veeam, it’s always about flexibility of choice. Be sure to listen to the entire conversation in their podcast feed and check out Veeam’s Tech Field Day presentation video.


Scale Computing’s Edge-To-Enterprise HCI

The engineers at Scale Computing have been optimizing KVM into smaller and smaller footprints since 2010. Still, their recent presentation at Tech Field Day caused quite a stir, showing off their HC3 hyperconverged solution running on an Intel NUC. Steve McDowell took notice of all the buzz from the storage industry in his Twitter feed. He finds the HC3 fits in well with Scale’s overall focus on HCI. While other competitors in the space have scaled to other use cases, Scale keeps delivering easily managed and deployed solutions whose intrinsic simplicity works to reduce IT OpEx. For Steve, this makes Scale ideally suited to offer compelling edge computing solutions just as the enterprise need is exploding.


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.


Worth Reading: Understanding Scale Computing HC3 Edge Fabric

Ivan Pepelnjak shares a great piece looking at Scale Computing HC3 Edge Fabric, something the company talked about during their recent Tech Field Day presentation. While Ivan doesn’t think its a once size fits all solution, he thinks it makes perfect sense in small environments.


Vendor Briefing: Scale Computing Edge Solution

Alastair Cooke has been watching Scale Computing in the industry for a number of years now, and has seen an impressive evolution in the company. They have been gradually moving from solutions aimed at budget-conscious small businesses to a scalable solution for distributed enterprises. This change has been built on innovative multi-cluster management and scaling down the required minimums for deploying at a site. Their most recent announced was the HC150,, a HCI appliance built on an Intel NUC. Be sure to check out all their Tech Field Day presentation videos for a technical deep dive on all their innovations.


Scale Computing Makes Big Announcement About Small HE150

Scale Computing recently made some big news with some very small edge services. Their HE150 offers a full hyper-converged infrastructure appliance in an Intel NUC package. Dan Frith digs into how they are able to fit so much into a small package in this post. Be sure to check out their full archive of Field Day presentation videos for even more deep dives.


NetApp Goes to the Cloud

NetApp highlighted many of their cloud offerings at Tech Field Day late last year. Gina Rosenthal was a delegate at the event, and thinks that they have the right team and attitude to make multi-cloud a reality for their customers. The key focus for NetApp was making it easy to get customers to the cloud, which fits with their approach of shepherding traditional operations teams into the new cloud native era.


Tech Field Day From the Other Side

Gina Rosenthal has long enjoyed Tech Field Day events, but previously only from the vendor perspective. This past Tech Field Day event saw Gina join us as an independent delegate for the first time, something she found much more challenging! Read all about her experience in this post.


What I Want in a Root Cause Analysis Tool

In this post from Ethan Banks, he outlines what he’s looking for in a root cause analysis tool. It’s something that despite hearing a lot about at events like Tech Field Day, he feels there isn’t a unified solution. Current tools are too specialized to serve broader infrastructure, which is after all designed to serve applications. Hopefully a solution will come to market soon to meet Ethan’s criteria.


Understanding Scale Computing HC3 Edge Fabric

Edge computing is an exciting area in IT, and at Tech Field Day Scale Computing did a deep dive on their HC3 Edge Fabric. This is designed for smaller edge environments where the need for resiliency also needs to fit into a budget. Ethan Banks digs into how Scale is able to offer a cluster of compute on a single switch.


Veeam Availability Suite: Scale-Out Backup Repository, Enhanced NAS Backup and (Soon) CDP!

Veeam used the time at their recent Tech Field Day presentation to show off some new features for their Backup and Recovery suite. Jon Klaus was at the event and gives his thoughts on the new improvements in this post.


NetApp Fabric Orchestrator, One More Step in the Right Direction

Enrico Signoretti has watched NetApp realize their Data Fabric strategy over the last few years, as the company shifted from traditional storage to hybrid cloud data management. He heard the company present on their Fabric Orchestrator at Tech Field Day, and this seems to be the next evolution of that vision, enabling seamless application and data mobility across on-premises and public cloud infrastructure.


BIB 084 Keysight Ixia Visibility and Testing

Ixia took a different approach to their recent Tech Field Day presentation. They talked about the current state of networking threats and the events that you are protecting against. In this episode of Briefings in Brief, Greg Ferro gives a little more background to get you up to speed on their offerings.


BiB083 – Forescout – Visibility for Segmentation

On this episode of Briefings in Brief, Greg Ferro takes a look at Forescout, a company that has been around for a decade but never before coming to Greg’s attention. If you want to get up to speed, Greg does a great job of breaking down the key features of this Network Access Control company. After you listen, be sure to watch their recent Tech Field Day presentation.


Ransomware and Response Done Right

In this post, Ixia’s Jason Lackey looks at recent Ransomware attacks and the security challenges they present to organizations. At Tech Field Day, Ixia provided insight into the latest from the world of malware, ransomware and mining. Be sure to check out their presentation to get up to date insights on this persistent threat.