RG Nets rXg on the Control Plane with Clint Kennedy

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: RG Nets Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: RG Nets

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Personnel: Alek Murray, Clint Kennedy

The RG Nets rXg automates myriad access and subscriber services, including NAC with multiple PSK & 802.1X authentication, subscriber self service and provisioning, PMS and billing integration, LBS, NAT and more. Complex subscriber services can be configured and delivered by non-IT staff through intuitive portals.

In the presentation by Clint Kennedy and Alek Murray from RG Nets at Networking Field Day 33, the focus was on the control plane functionalities of their rXg platform. The rXg is designed to automate a wide array of access and subscriber services, such as network access control (NAC) with multiple pre-shared keys (PSK) and 802.1X authentication, subscriber self-service and provisioning, integration with property management systems (PMS) and billing, as well as location-based services (LBS). The control plane handles clustering and subscriber provisioning, allowing non-technical staff to manage complex subscriber services through intuitive portals. The platform supports both data and management planes, which will be discussed in future sessions.

One of the key features demonstrated was subscriber self-provisioning, where users can connect to the network, select billing plans, and manage their own credentials. This is particularly useful in environments such as hotels, multi-dwelling units (MDUs), convention centers, and airports. The system also supports sponsored guest workflows, allowing enterprise networks to manage guest access efficiently. The front office manager interface simplifies network management for non-technical staff, enabling them to perform tasks such as reconnecting rooms, changing billing plans, and providing refunds. Additionally, the conference portal allows event planners to manage wired and wireless infrastructure dynamically, including creating SSIDs and configuring network settings on demand.

The presentation also highlighted the flexibility and security of the rXg platform, which supports multiple pre-shared keys and 802.1X authentication with full LDAP and RADIUS integration. This allows for secure network access even for devices that do not support 802.1X. The platform’s integration with property management systems enables seamless connectivity for users based on room numbers or loyalty numbers, reducing the need for IT intervention. Enhanced location-based services provide real-time mapping and tracking capabilities, useful in large venues like malls or hospitals. The platform’s ability to manage various vendor equipment through APIs, SNMP, and shell commands further underscores its versatility and robustness in handling diverse networking environments.


RG Nets rXg Multi-Services Edge Gateway Overview

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: RG Nets Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: RG Nets

Video Links:

Personnel: Clint Kennedy

The RG Nets rXg is a sophisticated multi-services edge gateway. It provides everything from routing to secure NAC to virtual broadband gateways, and so many services in-between. See an overview of the platform in this video.

Clint Kennedy from RG Nets presented an overview of the rXg Multi-Services Edge Gateway at Networking Field Day 33. RG Nets, a company founded by network engineers, has been profitable for 16 years without VC backing and has about 8,000 global deployments. Their rXg platform integrates multiple network services into a single system, simplifying deployment and management. This solution is suitable for various verticals, including large public venues, hospitality, education, and service providers.

The rXg platform consolidates services like routing, DNS, DHCP, network access control, subscriber management, and more into one operating system, reducing the need for multiple specialized devices. This integration enables easier scaling and deployment, especially in demanding environments like large airports, stadiums, and higher education institutions.

Kennedy emphasized the platform’s API-driven architecture, role-based access control, and clustering capabilities, which allow for high availability and scalability. The platform supports both symmetric and asymmetric clustering, enabling horizontal and vertical scaling. Additionally, RG Nets offers robust management, data plane, and control plane separation, ensuring efficient traffic handling and service delivery.

The presentation also highlighted the platform’s ability to handle complex scenarios like space-time triggers for location-based services, UPnP with CGNAT, and fair share queuing algorithms for bandwidth management. Kennedy assured that the platform’s updates could be managed with minimal disruption, maintaining data plane traffic during upgrades.


Extending a Unified Common Policy from Campus to Branch and Harsh Environments with Cisco

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: Cisco Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Alex Burger

As more devices connect to the network, it’s crucial to have a unified policy solution that minimizes policy drift and extends micro-segmentation across the organization. In this session, you will learn how Cisco Meraki’s Adaptive Policy utilizes a common policy approach to deliver seamless security and network visibility across your campus, branch, and edge environments. This scalable approach is IP agnostic, sharing context and enforcement of micro-segmentation in the dataplane, allowing for the granular control of network access and communication across your environment. Learn how Adaptive Policy seamlessly integrates Cisco’s TrustSec across the Meraki full-stack (from wired, wireless, to security) through an easy-to-deploy, design, and operate solution.


Power More Possibilities with the New Cisco Meraki Switches

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: Cisco Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Brennan Martin

Meraki Switching is bringing more bandwidth and more power to more spaces. Introducing the evolution of the Cisco switching experience with two new versatile lineups: The MS130 series brings cost-effective multiGig to the access layer and for the first time brings rugged Meraki Switching to hot, cold, and tight spaces. Next, the seamless zero-touch provisioning experience of Meraki joins Catalyst switches for the first of many unified hardware experiences with the Catalyst Meraki 9300 series.


Graphiant Cloud Gateway Services with OCI and Jumbo Frames Demo

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: Graphiant Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: Graphiant

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Personnel: Arsalan Mustafa Khan

Are security and throughput bottlenecks impeding your cloud deployments? Accessing the Cloud should be as easy as accessing your Data Centers. In this session, we’ll show Cloud Connectivity with Jumbo Frames and how to leverage this to accelerate your cloud workloads.


Graphiant Gateway Service with Arsalan Khan

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: Graphiant Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: Graphiant

Video Links:

Personnel: Arsalan Mustafa Khan

Arsalan Khan, Director Technical Marketing, discusses the Graphiant Gateway Service and how it provides private connectivity to the public cloud, any to any connectivity due to the Stateless Core, and routing protocol support.


A Technical Solution Deep Dive on the Graphiant Network Edge Service

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: Graphiant Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: Graphiant

Video Links:

Personnel: Arsalan Mustafa Khan

Arsalan Mustafa Khan, Director Technical Marketing, discusses Graphiant’s Network Edge Service offering; a network service that simplifies enterprise WAN connectivity. As part of the presentation, Arsalan will provide an overview of the architecture, the Graphiant Stateless Core, and the Graphiant Gateway Service.


The Graphiant Service and Use Cases

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: Graphiant Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: Graphiant

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Personnel: Ali Shaikh

Ali goes into quick detail over the Graphiant Service architecture, the Portal and the Graphiant Stateless Core. He touches on 3 different use cases and the cities within the Graphiant network.


Graphiant Introduction and The Rise of the Business Internet

Event: Networking Field Day 33

Appearance: Graphiant Presents at Networking Field Day 33

Company: Graphiant

Video Links:

Personnel: Ali Shaikh

Graphiant is a network edge service company in the wide-area networking space. Graphiant was created to use a protocol-based approach to the challenges and limitations faced by MPLS and SDWAN networks. In this presentation, Chief Product Officer, Ali Shaikh reintroduces Graphiant and outlines the history of networking, the changing landscape leading to the rise of the Business Internet, what this modern solution in the modern digital landscape looks like, and the use cases customers need solved.


Leveraging Fortinet FortiWeb and FortiSOAR for Enhanced Cybersecurity

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: Fortinet Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: Fortinet

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Personnel: Aidan Walden, Julian Petersohn, Srija Allam

Julian Petersohn and Srija Allam demonstrate Fortinet’s FortiWeb and FortiSOAR’s in this interactive demonstration. Beginning with an amusing drone-based hacking attempt, they highlighted the importance of detecting and responding to cyberattacks promptly. Critical concepts of API discovery, machine learning applications in security, and the utility of Kubernetes and cloud technology are also explored in this detailed technical session.


Reinventing Application Lifecycle Security Through Automation and AI with Fortinet

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: Fortinet Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: Fortinet

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Personnel: Aidan Walden

Fortinet offers a comprehensive solution to application lifecycle security, focusing on the roles of app developers and the cloud SOC in delivering a secure application. Using principles from AI and cloud automation, Fortinet drives automation and DevOps into the security practice. Key aspects of their strategy include ensuring visibility of applications and assets, automating SOC practices and workflows, and using AI as a force multiplier. Fortinet’s automation capabilities also aid in reducing common challenges in web services security, such as false positives. Maintaining a broad and deep integration, operationalizing data and signal, and maximizing automation, Fortinet aims to enhance operational efficiency and scalability.


Introducing WEKA Converged Mode for AWS

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: WEKA Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: WEKA

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Personnel: Efraim Grynberg

WEKA Converged Mode for AWS is a deployment mode that enables greater resource efficiency for AI model training and other GPU-accelerated workloads in AWS Cloud. In this session, Efraim Grynberg discusses WEKA’s approach, the innovation making this possible now, and how customers are benefiting from it.


WEKA in the Cloud Architecture Deep Dive

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: WEKA Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: WEKA

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Personnel: Brennan Conley, Phil Curran

In this session, Phil Curran and Brennan Conley talk through how the WEKA platform runs in the cloud and the unique capabilities WEKA delivers to enable extreme performance, massive scalability, increased operational efficiency and sustainability, and reduced costs. By diving into the architectural details of the WEKA Data Platform, they show how customers benefit from advanced automation, bi-directional autoscaling, and data portability to enable mutlicloud, hybrid cloud, and cloud-native deployments.


Enabling Cloud Workloads with the WEKA Data Platform

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: WEKA Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: WEKA

Video Links:

Personnel: Phil Curran

The WEKA Data Platform is a software solution purpose-built for modern data stacks in the cloud and AI era. It transforms stagnant data silos into dynamic data pipelines that power GPUs efficiently and fuel AI, ML, and HPC workloads seamlessly and sustainably. In this session, Phil provides an overview of the WEKA Data Platform, and discuss major use cases for WEKA in the cloud.


Optimize Costs with VMware Tanzu CloudHealth

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: VMware Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: VMware

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Personnel: Mike Mouchantat, TJ March

Mike Mouchantat, Lead Solution Engineer, and TJ March, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, demonstrate VMware Tanzu CloudHealth. VMware Tanzu CloudHealth is a multi-cloud financial management (or FinOps) platform that helps organizations make sense of their cloud data, optimize and control cloud spend, and enhance their cloud management practice. The presentation and demonstration discussed how Tanzu CloudHealth enables enterprises and managed service providers to deliver quality products and solutions faster, while keeping costs under control.


Achieve Actionable Intelligence with VMware Tanzu Insights

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: VMware Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: VMware

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Personnel: Yogita Patil

Yogita Patil, Senior Technical Marketing Architect at VMware, demonstrates Tanzu Insights, a tool for providing actionable intelligence and holistic visibility for contextual troubleshooting across Kubernetes, AWS, and Azure environments. Unlike traditional tools, Tanzu Insights sources data from a variety of platforms, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of issues. The tool’s unique approach involves de-duplicating, correlating, and summarizing events and alerts from these sources, simplifying insight generation and expediting root cause analysis. Tanzu Insights focuses on making IT operations more efficient by reducing alert noise, offering insights in an easy-to-understand format, and visualizing applications’ impacts on the infrastructure. It excels as a diagnostic tool, providing quick views of issues, their causes, and affected areas, ultimately saving valuable time and resources. With its ability to offer visibility into workloads, performance metrics, and service quality in diverse cloud sources and Kubernetes clusters, Tanzu Insights is a valuable asset for modern IT operations, showcasing the practical application of AI in real-world scenarios.


Demo: Govern Your Clouds at Scale with VMware Tanzu Guardrails

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: VMware Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: VMware

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Personnel: Michael Poore

Michael Poore, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware showcased groundbreaking advancements in unified multi-cloud governance and policy management. Tanzu Guardrails is a transformative product that streamlines compliance and configuration management. The process begins with onboarding accounts for inventory analysis and relationship mapping, enabling automated monitoring of changes and immediate reactions to configuration updates. This dynamic system pairs accounts with compliance benchmarks, auto-applies policy settings, and flags violations or configuration drifts, aggregating them on a single platform marked by an attention score. Guardrails’ flexibility allows for custom policy sets, and it offers notifications to various platforms for quick alerting and remediation.


Govern Your Clouds at Scale with VMware Tanzu Guardrails

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: VMware Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: VMware

Video Links:

Personnel: Tai Tran

Tai Tran, Senior Director of Product Management, introduces Tanzu Guardrails as a groundbreaking tool for unified multi-cloud governance and policy management. As cloud adoption continues to expand, the need for effective governance and policy implementation becomes paramount. Tran shed light on the challenges faced in governing dynamic cloud environments, such as misconfigurations and the complexity of managing multiple cloud environments. Tanzu Guardrails serves as an innovative solution that addresses these challenges, operating on top of Tanzu Hub and leveraging a multi-cloud event-driven graph-based inventory. It offers a compliance approach to posture management, ensuring standards are enforced and drift is prevented over time. Additionally, Tanzu Guardrails handles cloud entitlement management and host configuration, facilitating consistent VM and OS configurations across various cloud environments. It provides a unified view of the cloud environment, making it an essential tool for organizations managing complex and dynamic cloud ecosystems.


Accelerate Multi-Cloud Management with VMware Tanzu Hub

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: VMware Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: VMware

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Personnel: Justin Stanton

Senior Technical Marketing Architect Justin Stanton, showcases VMware Tanzu Hub, a robust platform that redefines multi-cloud management and application delivery. Serving as the foundational framework for all Tanzu Intelligent Services, Tanzu Hub leverages a backend graph data store to provide comprehensive visibility across diverse environments while consolidating data from various Intelligent Services. The platform offers a homepage summary dashboard, expediting resource discovery and enabling cloud account integration. Its versatility is evident in its free tier version and feature-rich entitlements, including the Active Insights tile, governance summary tile, and cost breakdown tile, making it an invaluable resource for optimizing cloud operations. Tanzu Hub’s multi-cloud visibility, resource navigation, and deep search capabilities empower users to efficiently manage applications, explore new resources, and gain a profound understanding of resource interconnections.


Cloud Migrations with VMware Tanzu Transformer

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: VMware Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: VMware

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Personnel: Matt Just

Matt Just, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, presents a comprehensive demonstration of VMware Tanzu Transformer. This powerful tool is designed to facilitate the assessment and planning of cloud migrations while optimizing application workloads. The demonstration emphasized its user-friendly nature and highlighted its diverse data collection methods, including live inventory acquisition from vCenter and secure connections establishment through virtual appliances. Importantly, it detailed the flexibility of VMware Tanzu Transformer, allowing for tailored assessment criteria based on specific business needs and providing in-depth views of applications and their dependencies. Moreover, the presentation included an illustrative Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation, shedding light on the financial implications of migrating to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, making VMware Tanzu Transformer an indispensable resource for organizations embarking on cloud migration journeys.