The Independent IT Influencer Event
Event: Networking Field Day 35
Appearance: Intel Presents at Networking Field Day 35
Company: Intel
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Personnel: Cody McCain
See a demo on how Intel’s IPUs can be used to enhance AI inference. See how east/west load balancing can be expedited through IPU technology and can enhance HA needs for AI workloads.
Event: Networking Field Day 35
Appearance: Intel Presents at Networking Field Day 35
Company: Intel
Video Links:
Personnel: Cody McCain
See a demo on how Intel’s IPU can be used in a cloud native use case. Watch Intel IPUs running on RHEL 9.4 and Red Hat OpenShift accelerate workloads and optimize communications for chaining network functions.
Event: Networking Field Day 35
Appearance: Intel Presents at Networking Field Day 35
Company: Intel
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Personnel: Yadong Li
Learn how Falcon provides a reliable and low latency hardware transport for RDMA messages and NVMe commands in cloud scale lossy fabrics. Also learn how Falcon meets the requirements of critical workloads, HPC, AI/ML, and storage networking.
Event: Networking Field Day 35
Appearance: Intel Presents at Networking Field Day 35
Company: Intel
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Personnel: Thomas Scheibe
Learn how Intel is using Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) to optimize cloud workloads and how IPU deployments add value with ISVs, Comms Service Providers, and others. See the design of the Intel IPU and learn more about the growing ecosystem of partners that are enabling the technology to advance AI workloads and more.
Event: Networking Field Day 35
Appearance: Hedgehog Presents at Networking Field Day 35
Company: Hedgehog
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Personnel: Mike Dvorkin, Sergei Lukianov
In this video, see a demonstration using the Hedgehog API for a day’s work. They get under the hood with an inspection API to show how Hedgehog implements multi-tenant isolation, and proves that it works. Included are discussions specifically around VPCs, quality of service (QoS) considerations, and future plans for the platform and features that will be included in upcoming milestones.
Event: Networking Field Day 35
Appearance: Hedgehog Presents at Networking Field Day 35
Company: Hedgehog
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Personnel: Mike Dvorkin, Sergei Lukianov
Follow along as Hedgehog describes a day in the life of a user. Mike will describe provisioning isolated tenants with Hedgehog Virtual Private Cloud services, peering VPCs internally, and peering VPCs externally. Also included is a demonstration of the provisioning capabilities for users that are implementing Hedgehog features for various workloads.
Event: Networking Field Day 35
Appearance: Hedgehog Presents at Networking Field Day 35
Company: Hedgehog
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Personnel: Marc Austin
In this session, learn about Hedgehog’s ideal customer profile. Hedgehog is designed for cloud operations teams who grew up with AWS, but don’t have the same network certifications as the NFD delegate panel. See how Hedgehog is bridging the gap between on-prem networking and cloud concepts while also reducing overall costs through standard industry platforms.
Event: Networking Field Day Exclusive at HPE Discover
Appearance: HPE Aruba Networking Presents at HPE Discover 2024
Company: HPE Aruba Networking
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Personnel: Tom Hollingsworth
Join the Networking Field Day Exclusive delegates at HPE Discover and Aruba Atmosphere as they discuss the latest technologies announced during the event. This video includes discussions around Aruba Central, Wi-Fi 7, and AI. The delegates debate the accuracy of collected data and the best ways to utilize this information for planning deployments and rollouts. They also look at new hardware features and prognosticate about the future of wireless in the enterprise.
Event: Networking Field Day Exclusive at HPE Discover
Appearance: HPE Aruba Networking Presents at HPE Discover 2024
Company: HPE Aruba Networking
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Personnel: Jose Tellado, Seelan Manavalan
Join us for an exclusive, in-depth view of next-gen Central AI/ML innovations that provide unparalleled insights and help augment resource-strapped teams. HPE Aruba Networking Product Management and AI Data Science leadership walk you through several advancements such as generative AI/LLM applications, ML-driven IoT security, AI-powered optimization recommendations, application observability, baselining of network KPIs and more. Also included is a demo and interactive Q&A.
Event: Networking Field Day Exclusive at HPE Discover
Appearance: HPE Aruba Networking Presents at HPE Discover 2024
Company: HPE Aruba Networking
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Personnel: Josh Schmelzle, Madani Adjali, Sachin Ganu
Get the inside scoop on HPE Aruba Networking ‘s Wi-Fi deployment here at Discover and hear learnings of our journey enabling 6 GHz in a 2.4/5 GHz world. Learn how HPE Aruba Networking delivers more than just Wi-Fi connectivity with our new Wi-Fi 7 AP – up to 30% more channel flexibility with patented Ultra tri-band Filtering, sub-1 meter precision self-locationing, zero trust security to the edge, and doubling down on IoT integration.
Event: Networking Field Day Exclusive at HPE Discover
Appearance: HPE Aruba Networking Presents at HPE Discover 2024
Company: HPE Aruba Networking
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Personnel: Ram Krishnan, Scott Koster, Yash Nagaraju
Explore how HPE Aruba Networking delivers robust defense mechanisms against cyber threats across the entire network for unmanaged and managed devices, including IoT. Discover how HPE Aruba Networking CX switching solutions include built-in Zero Trust capabilities with AI-powered visibility, application-based policy, and micro-segmentation. Experience seamless protection enabled by SD-WAN augmented with SWG (Secure Web Gateway), shielding all network devices and accelerating SASE adoption.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Oxide Computer Company Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Oxide Computer Company
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Personnel: Travis Haymore
Travis demonstrates the Oxide console and deploys multiple virtual machines (utilizing Terraform). He covers silos, images, projects, and instances as well.
Travis Haymore from Oxide Computer Company presented a detailed demonstration of their console and virtual machine (VM) provisioning capabilities during Cloud Field Day 20. He began by providing an overview of their co-location environment, specifically highlighting a rack deployed in the CoreSite data center in Milpitas. This rack serves multiple purposes, including internal use, customer demos, and evaluations. Haymore introduced the concept of “silos” as a means of achieving multi-tenancy, where resources such as CPU, memory, and storage are logically and cryptographically separated. Each silo has a distinct API endpoint, ensuring a clear demarcation between different users or customers.
In his demo, Haymore showcased the process of creating and managing projects within a silo. Projects act as logical containers for different efforts within an organization, allowing for varied configurations and user privileges. He demonstrated how to create a new project, manage instances, disks, snapshots, and images, and configure virtual private clouds (VPCs) and floating IPs. Using the UI, he provisioned a VM by selecting the necessary resources and an operating system image, in this case, Ubuntu. He emphasized the ease of passing SSH keys via Cloud-Init for immediate access to the instances, which is particularly useful for teams needing quick and secure access.
Haymore also touched on more advanced configurations, such as attaching external storage and managing network interfaces. He highlighted the flexibility of the system, noting that while many customers prefer using the API, CLI, or Terraform provider for automation, the UI remains a useful tool for less sophisticated users. The demo concluded with an example of using Terraform to automate the provisioning of multiple instances, demonstrating the system’s responsiveness and ease of use. Haymore also discussed the future potential for expanding storage and memory within the rack, and the possibility of integrating different hardware profiles to meet specific needs, emphasizing Oxide’s commitment to flexibility and scalability in their cloud computing solutions.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Oxide Computer Company Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Oxide Computer Company
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Personnel: Steve Tuck
Steve Tuck discusses some of Oxide’s key customer segments, across federal, financial, and cloud SaaS players.
Steve Tuck, co-founder and CEO of Oxide Computer Company, presented at Cloud Field Day 20, focusing on the diverse customer segments that are leveraging Oxide’s solutions. These segments include federal agencies, financial services, and cloud SaaS companies, each with unique needs and challenges. For instance, federal agencies are undergoing initiatives like the Digital First Public Experience, which aims to digitize a significant portion of government documents. These agencies often deal with on-premises IT infrastructures, and the introduction of Oxide’s cloud computing appliances has allowed them to streamline operations significantly. For example, tasks that once took months can now be accomplished in hours, leading to increased efficiency and effectiveness in handling projects.
In the federal space, Oxide’s solutions have been particularly transformative. One federal agency shared an anecdote about how their highly skilled security engineers were spending 60% of their time on tasks like VMware license management and BIOS updates instead of focusing on critical security projects. By deploying Oxide’s appliances, these engineers could redirect their efforts towards more impactful work, thereby increasing the agency’s overall productivity. The deployment process itself has been straightforward, with Oxide racks integrating seamlessly into existing environments and providing enhanced telemetry and visibility. This has been especially beneficial for networking teams, who can now quickly identify and resolve issues, leading to a smoother and more efficient operation.
Cloud SaaS companies and financial services firms are also finding significant value in Oxide’s offerings. For cloud SaaS companies, the ability to extend their platforms beyond the public cloud to reach more data and provide better performance has been a game-changer. For example, an e-commerce company using Oxide’s solutions can reduce latency and improve customer experience by deploying their platform closer to customer assets. Similarly, financial services firms are moving away from DIY infrastructure to focus on building financial products, leveraging Oxide’s API-driven, cloud-like operations to simplify their IT environments. Overall, Oxide’s solutions are enabling these organizations to achieve greater efficiency, transparency, and performance, making it an attractive option across various industries.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Oxide Computer Company Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Oxide Computer Company
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Personnel: Bryan Cantrill
Oxide offers the values that hyperscaler infrastructure offers, but on prem. This is in sharp contrast to existing on prem solutions, which is cobbled commodity infrastructure from disparate vendors – a result of market capture, not innovation. By codesigning like the hyperscalers, Oxide offers a rack-scale system it takes complete responsibility for – a system that is robustly supportable/debuggable, and open-source.
Oxide Computer Company, co-founded by Bryan Cantrill, aims to deliver the robust infrastructure benefits of hyperscalers but for on-premises environments. Unlike traditional on-prem solutions that rely on pieced-together components from various vendors, Oxide’s approach involves a holistic co-design of hardware and software, similar to hyperscalers like Google and Amazon. This co-design allows Oxide to offer a rack-scale system that is highly supportable, debuggable, and built on open-source principles. Cantrill emphasizes that this integrated approach solves many of the inefficiencies and complexities that have historically plagued on-prem systems, which often require significant manual intervention and suffer from poor inter-vendor integration.
Reflecting on the evolution of computing infrastructure, Cantrill notes that the initial on-prem era required extensive manual setup and maintenance. The rise of cloud computing in the mid-2000s, facilitated by advancements in internet ubiquity, open-source software, and commodity hardware, allowed hyperscalers to innovate rapidly. However, this led to a divide where only hyperscalers could leverage modern, efficient infrastructure, leaving traditional on-prem systems outdated and inefficient. Oxide aims to bridge this gap by offering on-prem solutions that bring the same level of efficiency and innovation found in hyperscaler environments, but with the added benefits of ownership, compliance, and localized control.
Oxide’s unique value proposition lies in its ability to offer a fully integrated system where both hardware and software are designed to work seamlessly together. This integration not only enhances performance and reliability but also simplifies support and troubleshooting. Cantrill highlights that Oxide’s commitment to transparency, open-source development, and deep partnerships with suppliers enables them to solve complex supply chain issues and deliver a resilient product. By focusing on engineering rigor and first principles, Oxide ensures that their systems are not only high-performing but also highly supportable, providing a delightful customer experience. This approach allows Oxide to meet the needs of enterprises that require the flexibility and control of on-prem solutions without sacrificing the innovations and efficiencies of modern cloud infrastructure.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Oxide Computer Company Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Oxide Computer Company
Video Links:
Personnel: Steve Tuck
The Oxide Cloud Computer is a vertically integrated platform built at rack-scale for efficiency and operational benefits, with a control plane for elasticity and multi-tenancy, and with networking built in.
The Oxide Cloud Computer is a vertically integrated platform designed to bring the efficiencies and operational benefits of hyperscale cloud infrastructure to on-premises environments. Unlike traditional enterprise IT setups, which require piecing together hardware from various vendors and dealing with integration and maintenance complexities, Oxide offers a rack-scale solution that integrates hardware, software, and networking from the ground up. This approach is inspired by the design principles of cloud hyperscalers, who have moved away from the “kit car” approach of assembling individual servers and instead build at the rack level for better density, energy efficiency, and operational simplicity.
A key feature of the Oxide Cloud Computer is its focus on an API-first mentality, which simplifies automation and management tasks. By building their own switch and incorporating a fully programmable network stack using P4, Oxide ensures that the entire system is optimized for performance and observability. This allows for advanced features like delay-driven multipath routing, which constantly optimizes packet paths based on real-time latency data. Furthermore, the system’s hardware and software are co-designed to work seamlessly together, enabling capabilities such as dynamic power orchestration and power capping, which are crucial for managing energy efficiency and addressing power constraints in data centers.
The Oxide Cloud Computer also emphasizes ease of use and scalability. The system features blind-mate server sleds that can be easily added or replaced without the need for complex cabling, reducing the time and effort required to scale up capacity. This design allows for quick deployment and minimizes downtime, enabling developers to be productive within hours of installation. Additionally, the platform includes an elastic storage service and a set of networking and security services akin to those found in public clouds, providing a familiar and powerful environment for developers. By offering a CapEx model with a support subscription for updates and maintenance, Oxide aims to deliver a cost-effective and long-lasting solution for on-premises cloud computing.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Oxide Computer Company Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Oxide Computer Company
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Personnel: Steve Tuck
The Oxide founders experienced the challenges of managing on prem cloud infrastructure firsthand – their pains alchemized into Oxide. The team consists of leading technologists specialized across the stack (from companies like Sun, Meta, Amazon, Google, etc.).
Oxide Computer Company was founded in 2019 by Steve Tuck and Bryan Cantrill, who previously worked together at Joyent, a cloud computing company. Their mission is to bring the benefits of cloud computing architecture, such as elastic infrastructure services and API-driven automation, to on-premises environments. They believe that cloud computing should not be limited to public clouds but should be ubiquitous, available to enterprises that still maintain significant IT infrastructure outside the public cloud. The founders’ experience at companies like Dell and Sun Microsystems informed their understanding of the challenges and inefficiencies in the current market, leading them to create a solution that integrates hardware and software into a unified product.
The team at Oxide is composed of top-tier technologists from various leading companies such as Sun, Meta, Amazon, and Google, covering the entire stack from hardware to software. This diverse expertise allows Oxide to take a holistic approach to designing their cloud computer, ensuring that every layer is optimized and integrated seamlessly. The company has embraced a remote-first model, which has enabled them to attract talent from around the world, including experts from the GE medical team and other specialized fields. This diverse and highly skilled team is the nucleus of Oxide, driving their ambitious goal of revolutionizing on-premises cloud computing.
Oxide’s focus is on the large enterprise and cloud SaaS markets, with significant interest from the federal sector and financial services. These sectors require the automation and developer tooling provided by cloud-native architectures but need to maintain control over their data and applications due to security, latency, and regulatory requirements. Oxide’s transparent approach, including sharing their software on GitHub and discussing their journey on the “Oxide and Friends” podcast, reflects their commitment to openness and innovation. Their partnerships with key suppliers, like Sanyo Denki, have enabled them to co-design high-efficiency systems, further enhancing their products’ performance and reliability.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Google Cloud Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Google Cloud
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Personnel: Bobby Allen
Wrapping up the Cloud Field Day 20 presentation by Google Cloud, Bobby Allen emphasized the importance of innovation in the realm of cloud computing. He pointed out that innovation happens at the intersection of where the model lives and where the application runs, highlighting the significance of both components. Allen referenced various Google Cloud tools presented during this day-long session such as Vertex, GKE, and Cloud Run, and demonstrated through examples how these tools can be leveraged to build generative AI applications. He stressed the flexibility and adaptability of these tools depending on the specific needs and stages of a project, suggesting that different iterations and combinations can be used simultaneously to optimize outcomes.
Allen also discussed the broader implications of leveraging AI within different layers of the platform and the software development lifecycle (SDLC). He reinforced the idea that AI itself is not the end goal but a means to enhance and transform existing processes and applications. By showcasing tools like Cloud Assist and Code Assist along with AI-centric platforms, he illustrated how these technologies can be integrated to provide substantial improvements. The emphasis was on Google Cloud’s role as a transformation partner rather than just a technology provider, offering numerous options that avoid technical debt and allow for flexible decision-making.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Google Cloud Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Google Cloud
Video Links:
Personnel: Brandon Royal
Brandon Royal, a Product Manager at Google Cloud, describes how Kubernetes can be leveraged for AI applications, particularly focusing on model training and serving. He begins by emphasizing the growing importance of generative AI across many organizations, highlighting that Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) provides a robust platform for integrating AI into products and services. The platform is designed to handle the increasing complexity and scale of AI models, which demand high efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Royal mentions that GKE, often referred to as the operating system of Google’s AI hypercomputer, orchestrates workloads across storage, compute, and networking to deliver optimal price performance.
Royal addresses the challenges of scaling AI workloads, noting that model sizes are growing and pushing the limits of infrastructure. To tackle these challenges, GKE offers several optimizations, such as dynamic workload scheduling and container preloading, which enhance the efficiency and utilization of AI resources like CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs. He introduces the concept of “good put,” a metric for measuring machine learning productivity, which includes scheduling good put, runtime good put, and program good put. These metrics help ensure that resources are utilized effectively, minimizing idle time and maximizing forward progress in model training. Royal also highlights the importance of leveraging open-source frameworks like Ray and Kubeflow, which integrate seamlessly with GKE to provide a comprehensive AI development and deployment environment.
The presentation includes a demo showcasing the optimization capabilities of GKE. Royal demonstrates how container preloading and persistent volume claims can significantly reduce the time required to deploy AI models. By preloading container images and sharing model weights across instances, GKE can cut down deployment times from several minutes to mere seconds. This optimization is crucial for large-scale AI deployments, where efficiency and speed are paramount. Royal concludes by encouraging the audience to explore the resources and tutorials available for building AI platforms on GKE, emphasizing that these optimizations can provide a competitive edge in the fast-evolving field of AI.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Google Cloud Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Google Cloud
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Personnel: Lisa Shen
In this presentation, Lisa Shen, a product manager at Google Cloud, introduces Cloud Run, Google Cloud’s serverless runtime platform, and discusses its integration with generative AI (GenAI) applications. Cloud Run simplifies the deployment and scaling of modern workloads by removing the overhead of infrastructure management. Built on container technology, it offers flexibility, portability, and cost-saving benefits, as users only pay when their code is running. Shen highlights two primary resources within Cloud Run: services for HTTP endpoints and jobs for executing tasks to completion, making it suitable for various use cases, including web applications and batch data processing.
Shen provides examples of companies like L’Oreal and Ford that have adopted Cloud Run to modernize their infrastructure and accelerate innovation. L’Oreal, for instance, used Cloud Run to implement a GenAI service for its employees, resulting in the rapid launch of L’Oreal GPT. Similarly, Ford transitioned to a Cloud Run-first approach to enhance scalability and reliability in vehicle design and manufacturing. These examples illustrate Cloud Run’s ability to improve developer velocity, reduce costs, and simplify application deployment, making it an attractive option for both cloud-native and traditional enterprises.
The presentation includes a demonstration of building a GenAI application using Cloud Run and Vertex AI. Shen explains how Cloud Run can handle various architectural components of GenAI applications, such as serving and orchestration, data ingestion, and quality evaluation. The demo showcases the process of deploying a web-based application that queries Cloud Run release notes, highlighting the ease of use and efficiency of Cloud Run in handling such tasks. Shen emphasizes that while Cloud Run is primarily for serving and orchestrating applications, more complex tasks like model fine-tuning and heavy lifting are better suited for Vertex AI or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The session concludes with a discussion on managing costs and scaling with Cloud Run, ensuring that users can deploy applications efficiently without unexpected expenses.
Event: Cloud Field Day 20
Appearance: Google Cloud Presents at Cloud Field Day 20
Company: Google Cloud
Video Links:
Personnel: Neama Dadkhahnikoo
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform is built on a rich history of innovation and enterprise readiness, offering an integrated AI-optimized portfolio. The platform leverages Google’s groundbreaking technologies such as TPUs and the transformer architecture, which have been instrumental in the development of large language models (LLMs) like Gemini. Gemini stands out for its multimodal capabilities, allowing it to process and reason across text, images, audio, and video simultaneously. This multimodal approach enables advanced functionalities like identifying specific moments in a video or understanding complex prompts that combine text and images. The platform also emphasizes flexibility and choice, providing options for different model sizes and prompting windows to match various use cases and cost considerations.
The presentation highlighted the practical applications of Vertex AI through several demos. One notable example demonstrated the model’s ability to process a 44-minute video and accurately identify a specific scene based on a text prompt, showcasing its capability to handle long context understanding. Another demo illustrated the use of a multimodal prompt, where a simple doodle was used to locate a corresponding scene in the video. These examples underscore the potential of Vertex AI in real-world scenarios, such as customer service chatbots, sports highlight identification, and even complex tasks like code transformation and financial document analysis. The platform’s ability to cache context and perform batch processing further enhances its efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Vertex AI also focuses on enterprise readiness, ensuring data security, governance, and compliance. The platform provides tools for model evaluation, monitoring, and customization, allowing enterprises to tailor models to their specific needs while protecting their data. Features like grounding APIs help ensure the accuracy of model outputs by linking responses to verified data sources, addressing concerns about AI-generated content’s reliability. Additionally, the platform supports various levels of coding expertise, from no-code to full-code, making it accessible to a wide range of users. With its comprehensive suite of tools and emphasis on security and flexibility, Vertex AI positions itself as a robust solution for enterprises looking to leverage AI for diverse applications.
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