The Independent IT Influencer Event
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: Cisco Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: Cisco
Video Links:
Personnel: Carly Stoughton
Carly Stoughton, Technical Marketing Engineer, demonstrates the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) system from the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: Cisco Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: Cisco
Video Links:
Personnel: Carly Stoughton
Carly Stoughton, a Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco, presented an in-depth look at how devices connect to the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric, focusing on the concept of ACI domains. She began by explaining the basic architecture of ACI, which includes a spine-leaf topology where all devices connect to leaf switches, and leaves connect to spines but not to each other. This setup ensures predictable latency and efficient data flow. Stoughton emphasized the role of the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) in managing these connections and policies, highlighting how it integrates with various types of devices and systems, such as VMware servers, bare metal servers, and external routers.
Stoughton detailed the integration of VMware into ACI through the creation of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) domains. This integration allows for enhanced visibility and control over VMware environments by pushing a VMware distributed switch into the servers, enabling each port group to act as an endpoint group (EPG). This method allows network administrators to define EPGs based on virtual ports rather than traditional VLANs or physical ports. The APIC establishes a relationship with the VMware vCenter, creating a VMM domain for each data center, which helps in isolating and managing different environments. This setup ensures that network policies are consistently applied across virtual machines, simplifying management and enhancing security.
In addition to VMware integration, Stoughton discussed how ACI handles other types of devices through physical and external Layer 2 and Layer 3 domains. For bare metal servers, a physical domain can be created to group servers with similar policies into the same EPG, regardless of their physical or virtual nature. External Layer 2 domains are typically used for connecting to existing data center switches, while external Layer 3 domains facilitate connections to WAN or internet routers using protocols like OSPF, static routing, and BGP. Stoughton also touched on the future support for additional protocols like EIGRP and IPv6. This comprehensive approach ensures that ACI can accommodate a wide range of devices and configurations, making it a versatile solution for modern data centers.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: Cisco Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: Cisco
Video Links:
Personnel: Carly Stoughton
Carly Stoughton, a Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco, presented an in-depth look at the Cisco ACI policy model during a Tech Field Day session on February 13, 2015. She emphasized the unique aspects of the ACI policy model, which focuses on the needs of applications rather than the traditional method of configuring individual network devices. Stoughton illustrated how ACI simplifies network management by defining who is on the network, who can communicate with whom, and what they are allowed to discuss. This approach contrasts with the traditional method of configuring multiple routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers individually. The ACI policy model uses endpoint groups (EPGs) to categorize network entities that require similar treatment, and it employs a whitelist model where no communication is allowed until explicitly permitted through policies known as contracts.
Stoughton explained that an application typically consists of a front-end web tier, application servers, and a backend database, along with shared services like Active Directory, DHCP, and DNS. These components are grouped into EPGs, which are collections of endpoints needing similar network treatment. The ACI policy model is different from traditional Ethernet networks, as it does not allow any communication by default. Instead, it requires explicit policies, or contracts, to be defined to permit communication between EPGs. These contracts can specify actions such as permit, deny, redirect, log, or copy, and can be unidirectional or bidirectional. The policies are enforced at the leaf switches, which tag packets with source EPG information to ensure proper policy enforcement across the network fabric.
The session also covered the technical aspects of how ACI handles traffic and policy enforcement. Stoughton discussed various methods for defining EPGs, including VLANs, VXLAN tags, physical ports, and virtual ports. She highlighted the flexibility of the ACI policy model in integrating with existing network environments and its ability to support stateful and stateless filtering. The ACI fabric uses a spine-leaf architecture, ensuring predictable latency and bandwidth. Stoughton also touched on the role of the APIC controller cluster, which manages policy configurations and can be interacted with through a GUI or API. The APIC supports automated backups and the export of configurations for version control. Overall, the presentation showcased how the ACI policy model brings a new level of simplicity and efficiency to network management by aligning network configurations with application requirements.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: Cisco Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: Cisco
Video Links:
Personnel: Joe Onisick, Soni Jiandani
Soni Jiandani, Senior Vice President, and Joe Onisick, Principal Engineer, introduce Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and discuss the methodology and reasoning behind it.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: NEC Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: NEC Networking
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Personnel: Aravind Sukumar
Aravind Sukumar, Senior Systems Engineer, introduces the Programmable Flow integration with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and demonstrates how the two products interact.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: NEC Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: NEC Networking
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Personnel: Toshal Dudhwala
Toshal Dudhwala, Senior Product Manager, introduces the new ProgrammableFlow solution for VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCOps).
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: NEC Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: NEC Networking
Video Links:
Personnel: Toshal Dudhwala
Toshal Dudhwala, Senior Product Manager, introduces the NEC ProgrammableFlow product and discusses the recent updates to the solution.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: NEC Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: NEC Networking
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Personnel: Don Clark
Don Clark, Director of Business Development, introduces NEC Networking and discusses their product lines and contributions to software defined networking.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: SolarWinds Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: SolarWinds
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Personnel: Rob Johnson
Rob Johnson, Product Marketing Manager, introduces SolarWinds Log and Event Manager (LEM) and provides a demonstration of the network and security monitoring capabilities.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: SolarWinds Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: SolarWinds
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Personnel: Joel Dolisy
Joel Dolisy, CTO and CIO, talks about the importance of path analysis and how Solarwinds is making it much simpler for end users to perform that analysis.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: SolarWinds Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: SolarWinds
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Personnel: Rob Hock
Rob Hock, Group Product Manager, introduces the new version of Network Performance Manager (NPM) and demonstrates some of the new features, including DPI and WLAN Heat Maps.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: CloudGenix Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: CloudGenix
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Personnel: Aaron Edwards
Aaron Edwards, Director of Technical Marketing, demonstrates the CloudGenix Software Defined WAN solution and showcases how it can measure application service level agreements (SLAs) for transactional cloud applications.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: CloudGenix Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: CloudGenix
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Personnel: Vijay Sagar
Vijay Sagar, Vice President of Product Management, and Mani Ramasamy, Architect and Founder, discuss the CloudGenix Software Defined WAN system and how it allows users to transition from packet networks to being focused on applications, flows, and sessions.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: CloudGenix Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: CloudGenix
Video Links:
Personnel: Vijay Sagar
Vijay Sagar, Vice President of Product Management, and Anand Venkataraman, Vice President of Engineering and Founder, demonstrate the configuration of the CloudGenix Software Defined WAN system and how it can be installed without the need for routing protocols.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: CloudGenix Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: CloudGenix
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Personnel: Vijay Sagar
Kumar Ramachadran, CEO and founder, and Vijay Sagar, Vice President of Product Management, introduce the CloudGenix Software Defined WAN product and discuss its development and use cases.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: SolarWinds Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: SolarWinds
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Personnel: Joel Dolisy
Joel Dolisy, CTO and CIO, talks about the updates with SolarWinds software and where they are going with regards to network troubleshooting.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: NetBeez Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: NetBeez
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Personnel: Stefano Gridelli
Stefano Gridelli, CEO and co-founder, gives a live demonstrations of how NetBeez puts proactive end-user monitoring at the fingertips of network engineers. It starts with and overview of the dashboard, the tests that can run on NetBeez, and continues to show how you can access real time and historical data and generate reports.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: NetBeez Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: NetBeez
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Personnel: Panos Vouzis
Panos Vouzis, COO and co-founder, goes through the nuts and bolts of the NetBeez technology, talking about the main components (agents, server, dashboard) and features available on NetBeez.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: NetBeez Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: NetBeez
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Personnel: Stefano Gridelli
Stefano Gridelli, CEO and co-founder, talks about the blindness that affects network engineers. He shares with the delegates the cure, called NetBeez, that his team developed to stop this terrible disease. He also introduces the product and specific use cases.
Event: Networking Field Day 9
Appearance: Pluribus Networks Presents At Networking Field Day 9
Company: Pluribus Networks
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Personnel: Siva Mandalam
Siva Mandalam, Vice President of Products and Strategy, introduces Appcito and discusses their business model along with their usage of Pluribus Networks Netvisor to provide networking services to their customers.
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