Introduction to Platform9 Elastic Machine Pool

Event: Cloud Field Day 19

Appearance: Platform9 Presents at Cloud Field Day 19

Company: Platform9

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Personnel: Madhura Maskasky

In this presentation, Madhura Maskasky, the Co-Founder and VP of Product at Platform9 Systems, introduces their new product called Elastic Machine Pool (EMP). EMP aims to optimize compute utilization and reduce costs for Kubernetes in public clouds by at least 50%. EMP is unique in the market because it addresses the inefficiency of Kubernetes, which often uses only around 30% of its allocated resources.

EMP works by provisioning bare metal nodes and deploying optimized virtual machines on top of them, called elastic virtual machines (EVMs). A rebalancer component ensures even distribution of resources across the pool of bare metal nodes and can live-migrate VMs without disrupting applications. This allows for over-provisioning and better bin packing without compromising application SLAs.

The product targets DevOps, FinOps, and PlatformOps users and fits into the FinOps landscape by potentially reducing EKS costs significantly. EMP is complementary to other tools that provide cost visibility but differentiates itself by improving utilization and eliminating the need to constantly adjust app configurations for cost optimization.

EMP is licensed on a risk-reward model, charging a percentage of the actual savings it generates for customers. The discussion also covers the importance of feedback loops for engineers to understand resource usage better and the potential expansion of EMP to other clouds beyond AWS.

The presentation concludes with an emphasis on the significant potential cost savings that EMP can offer and its ability to operate seamlessly within existing Kubernetes clusters without requiring fundamental changes or app disruptions.


Democratizing Cloud Computing with Platform9

Event: Cloud Field Day 19

Appearance: Platform9 Presents at Cloud Field Day 19

Company: Platform9

Video Links:

Personnel: Madhura Maskasky

Madhura Maskasky, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Platform9 Systems, introduces Platform9, the main offerings of the company, and a discussion about the “cloud engine” which forms the unique IP that wraps around open-source software to simplify operations with “Always-On Assurance”. The session will further outline the proactive operations methodology, which includes Comprehensive Monitoring, Proactive Issue Identification, Automated Alerting and Ticket Generation, Enhanced System Reliability. The session will end with a review of how a full stack is deployed across 1000s of location in an automated and repeatable way.

The session covers an overview of Platform9, its mission to democratize cloud computing, and the unique services it offers to enterprises. Platform9’s approach involves using open-source software like Kubernetes, OpenStack, and other components, which are then packaged and deployed through a SaaS model. This is coupled with their “Always-On Assurance” guarantee, which ensures high operational efficiency and reliability for cloud infrastructures at scale.

The proactive operations methodology includes comprehensive monitoring, proactive issue identification, automated alerting, and ticket generation. This methodology is powered by a “hidden product” that operates 24/7, monitoring infrastructure, collecting metrics, and analyzing data to maintain a 99.9% SLA for enterprise customers.

During the session, Madhura explains how Platform9 manages customers’ infrastructure remotely, configuring hardware, installing operating systems, deploying Kubernetes or OpenStack, and providing a layer of PaaS services for applications. The discussion also touches on technical aspects such as the use of Prometheus for metrics, Loki and ELK for log aggregation, and Vault for secret management.

Questions from the audience address the intervals at which data is collected, the use of other tools like Splunk and Dynatrace, and the role of Platform9’s support team in application-level monitoring. It is clarified that while Platform9 is responsible for platform-level SLAs, customers can still use their own tools for application-level monitoring and can request access to Platform9’s collected data if needed.

The session concludes with Madhura mentioning some of Platform9’s customers, such as Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Cloudera, and SambaNova, and noting that they manage over 15,000 active nodes worldwide. An attendee inquires about HPE’s use of Platform9, and Madhura confirms that an HPE team uses their OpenStack product for DevTest private cloud purposes.


SoftIron Introduces HyperCloud Version 2.0

Event: Cloud Field Day 19

Appearance: SoftIron Presents at Cloud Field Day 19

Company: SoftIron

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Personnel: Charles Ruffino

Charles Ruffino, a Cloud Architecture Fellow at SoftIron, presents the company’s newest version of HyperCloud, which is designed to provide a true private cloud experience within a user’s own data center. He emphasizes that HyperCloud is distinct from mere virtualization solutions, offering full cloud scalability, elasticity, and ease of management akin to public clouds but on-premises.

Ruffino notes that HyperCloud can be deployed rapidly, becoming operational in half a day, and discusses improvements in compute, storage, and interconnect nodes. He highlights that HyperCloud is designed to be self-healing, self-organizing, and nearly infinitely scalable, with an emphasis on security and compliance to high standards (e.g., FSMA high, FedRAMP high, DoD-SRG impact level 5).

HyperCloud’s architecture is stateless, allowing for easy expansion or replacement of nodes without extensive setup or downtime. Patching is simplified, with one update affecting the entire cloud in a controlled process, eliminating the complexity and risk associated with traditional patch management.

The conversation also touches on the infrastructure as code, with support for tools like Terraform, and the ability to use HyperCloud with various public clouds, avoiding vendor lock-in. Ruffino addresses questions about network management, licensing models, and the potential for integrating platform-as-a-service components and partnerships to expand the marketplace offerings within HyperCloud.


Who is SoftIron and What is Our Value Proposition?

Event: Cloud Field Day 19

Appearance: SoftIron Presents at Cloud Field Day 19

Company: SoftIron

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Personnel: Jason Van der Schyff

SoftIron’s is a worldwide leader in true private cloud infrastructure. HyperCloud by SoftIron allows organizations to build a true private cloud on- premises that deploys, manages and consumes like private cloud. HyperCloud provides the elasticity of cloud in a solution that is fast and simple to deploy, driving extreme agility. HyperCloud delivers the benefits of AWS Outposts or Azure Stack HCI but in a cloud-neutral solution.

Jason Van der Schyff, COO of SoftIron, presented at Cloud Field Day about the company’s mission to simplify and streamline IT infrastructure with their true private cloud offering, HyperCloud. SoftIron aims to provide a public cloud experience on-premises, with a focus on security-by-design and agility. The company has a unique approach to manufacturing, designing, and producing their own hardware and software in-house to ensure security and quality.

SoftIron’s HyperCloud is positioned as a cloud-neutral solution, competing with services like AWS Outposts or Azure Stack HCI, but without being tied to a specific public cloud provider. This allows organizations to deploy, manage, and consume resources on-premises with the elasticity and simplicity of the cloud. HyperCloud is particularly suited for sensitive workloads and data, trusted by industries that require high reliability and security, such as finance, research, national security, and federal agencies.

SoftIron emphasizes their end-to-end control over the production process, contrasting their approach with the industry norm of outsourcing. They operate two manufacturing sites, one in the Bay Area and one in Sydney, Australia. The Sydney facility was co-funded by the Australian Department of Defense under a sovereign industrial capability program, highlighting the importance of secure and local manufacturing in sensitive geopolitical areas.

Van der Schyff addressed questions about the manufacturing process, cost competitiveness, the bespoke nature of their servers, and the scalability of their solution. He also discussed SoftIron’s proprietary operating system and the ability to interface with public cloud services for hybrid or multi-cloud strategies. Additionally, he touched on HyperCloud’s ability to handle distributed storage, disaster recovery, and data replication across regions.

The presentation concluded with a discussion on the industry’s hybrid cloud reality, where many organizations still run workloads on-premises due to various constraints, despite the public cloud’s popularity. SoftIron’s HyperCloud aims to cater to this significant market segment by offering a flexible, secure, and efficient on-premises cloud solution.


Harnessing Acceleration for Future-Proof Big Data Analytics with NeuroBlade

Event: Cloud Field Day 19

Appearance: NeuroBlade Presents at Cloud Field Day 19

Company: NeuroBlade

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Personnel: Mordi Blaunstein

Mordechai Blaunstein discusses the critical need for data analytics acceleration within the big data analytics sphere. By showcasing NeuroBlade’s SQL Processing Unit (SPU), he demonstrates its effectiveness in enhancing the speed and scale of big data processing. Attendees can gain insights into the latest trends that are defining the big data analytics landscape, including Data Lake architecture and open standards, and learn how NeuroBlade is addressing the demand for rapid data analytics acceleration in data centers.

Blaunstein emphasizes the exponential growth of data and the associated challenges such as compute, networking, storage, energy, space, and software. He outlines the market trends that influenced their solution, including the shift towards Data Lake and Data Lakehouse architectures, the need for rapid data analytics in the cloud, and the adoption of open standards.

Blaunstein explains that traditional CPUs cannot efficiently scale to meet the demands of big data analytics, and while GPUs offer better performance, they come with high costs and limited availability. NeuroBlade’s SPU is presented as a purpose-built accelerator for data analytics, designed to enhance performance without exorbitant costs.

The SPU can be integrated into existing software ecosystems and supports common workloads like Spark, Presto, and Clickhouse. It is offered as a PCIe card for easy integration into servers. Blaunstein mentions that the SPU is particularly suited for large enterprises with significant data that cannot be moved to the cloud due to regulatory or other constraints.

Questions from the audience address topics such as the SPU’s target market, competition with other accelerators, integration with analytical layers, licensing, and open-source availability of the software SDK and API. Blaunstein clarifies that the SPU is optimized for one card per server, as it already fully utilizes the server’s I/O capabilities, and that sharding is handled by the data analytics tools above NeuroBlade’s layer.


Revolutionizing Big Data Analytics with NeuroBlade’s SQL Processing Unit (SPU)

Event: Cloud Field Day 19

Appearance: NeuroBlade Presents at Cloud Field Day 19

Company: NeuroBlade

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Personnel: Elad Sity

Elad Sity leads a deep dive into the future of big data analytics with the unveiling of NeuroBlade’s SQL Processing Unit (SPU). This presentation highlights how the SPU is a cornerstone technology for data analytics acceleration, offering rapid and scalable processing capabilities that transform big data into actionable insights. Discover NeuroBlade’s role in advancing big data analytics, making it more accessible through partnerships that enhance market adoption.

Elad Sity, CEO of NeuroBlade, presents an overview of his company, which was founded in 2018 with the aim to revolutionize data processing. NeuroBlade has grown to over 120 employees and raised over $100 million. The company has a presence in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Palo Alto, California. They are focused on accelerating big data analytics, specifically targeting the acceleration of SQL queries and data lookups. NeuroBlade’s SQL processing unit (SPU) is designed to run data analytics more efficiently, boasting performance improvements up to 30x with a third of the cost.

NeuroBlade’s SPU is an accelerator built specifically for data analytics and is not a CPU or GPU. It integrates with existing analytics engines that customers already use, such as Spark, Presto, and ClickHouse, through a software layer and API. The SPU is designed for modern cloud environments and supports containerized workloads but not virtualized ones currently. It is also optimized for structured data analytics.

The company has partnered with Dell to offer the SPU in PowerEdge servers for enterprise customers, while hyperscale customers can integrate the SPU card into their own server designs. NeuroBlade has conducted benchmarks showing significant performance improvements, such as reducing query times from minutes to seconds.

The presentation includes a Q&A session where Elad addresses questions about the SPU’s integration with query optimizers, its support for containerization, its focus on structured data, and its ease of integration with customers’ existing infrastructure and analytics engines. He clarifies that while they are not currently targeting traditional RDBMS platforms like Oracle or SQL Server, they are open to working with such vendors in the future.


AI-Driven Operations for Proactive Decision-Making with FortiSOAR

Event: Cloud Field Day 18

Appearance: Fortinet Presents at Cloud Field Day 18

Company: Fortinet

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Personnel: Julian Petersohn, Srija Allam

Srija Allam and Julian Petersohn demonstrate Fortinet’s FortiSOAR AI capabilities by showing the AI-powered Security Assistant (https://www.fortinet.com/products/fortinet-advisor) in action. Based on the previously identified drone-based hacking attempt, the Security Assistant highlights the importance of GenAI to assist security teams in making better decisions, rapidly responding to threats, and saving time on even the most complex tasks like developing Playbooks or taking care of decisions for further investigation.


Transmitting a Single Frame Across the RF Medium from Keith R. Parsons

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Ignite Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Ignite

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Personnel: Keith R. Parsons

In his Ignite Talk, Keith R. Parsons delves into the intricate process of transmitting a single frame of data across a wireless access point, emphasizing the significant overhead involved. He explains that while factors like channel width and modulation coding schemes (MCS) can affect the payload portion of the transmission, the majority of the process is dominated by protocol overhead, including arbitration time, preambles, and control frames like RTS and CTS. Parsons highlights that even with advancements such as wider channels in Wi-Fi 7, the overall transmission time for a single frame remains largely unchanged because the overhead components stay constant. He encourages the audience to use tools like Garamond’s calculator to visualize these dynamics and understand that improvements in data rates primarily impact the payload, not the total transmission time.


Probability of Collisions with Troy Martin

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Ignite Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Ignite

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Personnel: Troy Martin

In this Ignite Talk, Troy Martin delves into the probability of collisions in Wi-Fi networks, drawing parallels to the unpredictability of lineups at theme parks. He explains that despite adding more capacity, the variability in arrival times still leads to congestion, similar to how Wi-Fi frames contend for transmission opportunities. Martin introduces the concept of the space airtime domain, inspired by Einstein’s space-time domain, to visualize the gaps between Wi-Fi transmissions. He discusses the politeness of Wi-Fi protocols in avoiding collisions and the role of random number generation in managing medium contention. By incorporating Quality of Service (QoS), Wi-Fi can prioritize certain types of traffic, reducing transmission delays and improving overall efficiency. Martin also touches on the complexity of calculating collision probabilities using Markov chain models, which consider various dynamic factors like airtime utilization, signal-to-noise ratio, and distance from access points. He concludes by emphasizing the blend of art and science in Wi-Fi design, advocating for efficiency improvements through reduced transmission gaps.


6GHz and Beyond with Cisco

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Cisco Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Anand Gurumurthy, Nicholas Swiatecki

Wi-Fi has made many advances that have contributed to its growing success over the years.  The allocation of 6 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi low powered indoor networks is one of the most exciting things in a decade for wireless.  Meet Cisco’s newest Wi-Fi 6E access point (AP) CW9163E!  And now, we have Wi-Fi 7, the latest iteration of the wireless standard.  Tune in to find out Cisco’s latest solutions for Wi-Fi 6E and where we are going with Wi-Fi 7.


Cisco Wireless Management

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Cisco Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Karthik Iyer, Sunmeel Bhumkar

Cisco Wireless allows you to customize your network experience, your way.  Our solution gives you the freedom to choose a solution that works best for your network. Customers now have the operational flexibility to choose either Meraki dashboard or Cisco DNA Center for the Cisco Catalyst family, providing extensive monitoring and management capabilities while enabling the choice as to where the services are running—on-premises or in the cloud.


Cisco Applied AI – Evolution of Cisco Wireless

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Cisco Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Minse Kim

The benefit of AI your network allowing you to take steps towards an intelligent autonomous network.  Applied AI in wireless helps you maximize efficiency with AI operations reduce interruptions with AI-Channel Planning, and minimize channel changes in busy hours. Regardless of your management option, Cisco wireless solutions have the capability to support wireless deployments of any scale and complexity.  Find out how applied AI to your network can help drive excellence towards an Enterprise vision.


Cisco The Missing Piece of Wireless Assurance Puzzle: The Client Interop

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Cisco Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Cisco

Video Links:

Personnel: Minse Kim

Understanding client behavior and the challenges they pose contributes to a successful network.  During this presentation, you will learn what’s the most significant trends in the enterprise Wi-Fi industry, derived from the Cisco Cloud data lake. Cisco has exclusive access to extended device information from off-the-shelf device software, with no separate agent.  Tune in to find out about Cisco’s srategic partnerships who provide unprecedented visibility, enabling better Wi-Fi.


Cisco Wireless First for Campus Transformation

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Cisco Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Cisco

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Personnel: Phal Nanda

In this introduction, learn how Cisco is leading the way in business transformation with a wireless-first strategy that defines simple security connectivity with high performance and sustainability built-in. Also discussed is a quick overview of the various management capabilities of edge access points and how Cisco is bringing them together in a simple framework.


Delegate Roundtable: Troubleshooting The Way We Troubleshoot

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Mobility Field Day 10 Delegate Roundtable Discussion

Company: Tech Field Day

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Personnel: Tom Hollingsworth

Troubleshooting is more than just knowing the answer to a problem. In this delegate roundtable, the Mobility Field Day delegates tell Tom Hollingsworth what other skills are needed to ensure that users aren’t just blaming the Wi-Fi or the network. They also discuss soft skills and the need to understand the entire stack when approaching problems to not only absolve blame but narrow the field and provide resolution.


Delegate Roundtable: The Promise and Reality of Wi-Fi 7

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Mobility Field Day 10 Delegate Roundtable Discussion

Company: Tech Field Day

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Personnel: Tom Hollingsworth

Wi-Fi 7 is on the horizon but it’s not quite ready yet. In this delegate roundtable from Mobility Field Day, Tom Hollingsworth moderates a discussion with the delegates around the current state of the newest Wi-Fi technology. Included is conversation around the status of the standard as well as what features stand out as must-haves and the reality of enterprise adoption.


Ventev Wi-Fi 6E Antennas: Does Size Matter?

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Ventev Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Ventev

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Personnel: Dennis Burrell

Dennis Burrell, Sr. Product Manager at Ventev discusses their latest small form factor (SFF) antenna, the Atto Patch. He goes through a brief history of their SFF line of antennas, how he came up with the names for the antennas, how he continues to innovate to make the antennas smaller and test data for the Atto Patch antenna.


Hanging Tough in Rough Conditions with Ventev

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Ventev Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Ventev

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Personnel: Chris Jufer

Chris Jufer, Sr. Product Manager at Ventev discusses Ventev’s Universal Enclosure Offer and their latest Access Point Mounting solution, the VenFlex Mount. He will review the unique deployment and mounting challenges that these solution can solve.


Double Your Battery Life with Ventev

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Ventev Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Ventev

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Personnel: John Hess

John Hess, Product Manager at Ventev previews the Ventev UPS System with Lithium Batteries and how it creates flexibility in the wireless market. He shows how the UPS Power Systems provide extended battery back-up enabling customers to keep their IoT devices up and running for longer periods of time.


Ventev Wireless on the Go with John Hess

Event: Mobility Field Day 10

Appearance: Ventev Presents at Mobility Field Day 10

Company: Ventev

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Personnel: John Hess

John Hess, Product Manager at Ventev introduces the VenGo Mobile Wireless case and how it creates flexibility in the wireless market. He outlines the features and benefits of the VenGo case and describes several use cases for the device and how end users can provides wireless access when there is limited or no power.


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