Nile presented at Networking Field Day 32 on July 26, 2023 and they presented on their Enterprise Networking solutions. Nile has built out a set of networking solutions that focuses on the enterprise and commercial market and they are selling the solution in a Network as a Service model. The overview of what they provide: Wired and Wireless LAN as a Service Guaranteed Network Performance Zero Trust IT Simplicity It seems they are competitors to Meraki, Mist, and Aruba from an enterprise solution offering and to Ubiquiti and Microtik in the commercial market. All of these compe ..read more

Broadcom presented at Networking Field Day 32 on July 26, 2023 and they presented on their AI Networking solutions. These are products and architectures that address the needs of those building out AI data center focused networks. Obviously the design will work for regular data center workloads too. albeit, suboptimal because the design is focused on addressing AI workloads and not a more general workload. The attributes that Broadcom define for what makes an AI Network unique are: Fewer flows (low entropy) High bandwidth flows (elephant flows due to the large amount of da ..read more

Outside of posting content around Tech Field Day events I occasionally participate in, my blog hasn't seen a lot of activity. Mainly because I have been posting content over at the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence or via the IPv6 Buzz Podcast. I recommend you check both those out, it isn't just me generating that content but also Scott Hogg, Tom Coffeen, Cody Christman, Tim Martin, and other great IPv6 content creators. I did want to highlight one observation I have made starting at the end of 2022 and continuing throughout 2023 and that is the noticeable increase of discussions around IPv6 ..read more

 Kentik presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 15, 2021 and I think Kentik is on the right journey around doing observability and monitoring for enterprise networks. They understand they have to support all the traditional capabilities within networks but they also need to have full support and capabilities for public cloud services. I was very interested in what they are doing with Kentik Firehose which aggregates message bus/queue, observability, real-time analytics and data lake sources and provides telemetry and context. This seems like a super useful tool for companie ..read more

ZPE presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 16, 2021 and I will be honest, at first I couldn't figure out where to put ZPE in terms of a product and service category. As they were a first time NFD presenter and I had not heard of them before I was asking myself, are they a remote console server replacement for the likes of Raritan, OpenGear, and others? Are they an SD-WAN solution? Do you use them for routing and switching? Are they really focus on Out-of-Band (OOB) or Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)? It turns out you can use them for all or just part of those things. In my c ..read more

Arista presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 14, 2021 - I was most excited about the presentation that Fred Hsu gave regarding Arista's Next-Generation Automation Architectures. Having a vendor share how they see customers putting together a set of automation tools, frameworks and workflow is super helpful. Honestly, one of the hardest parts of getting started in the network automation journey is where to start. What tools, what language to learn (Python, Go, Tcl?), what editor/IDE to use (PyCharm or VS Code?), what environment setup? I draw the analogy to getting start ..read more

Juniper presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 14, 2021 - I really recommend you check out the presentation on network automation that Ryan and Jake did, you will likely learn something new if you are not staying super current on network automation and APIs. Even if you are staying current, it is worth a watch honestly. Jake showed off Postman (which is an open source tool and is an API platform for building and using APIs) and how they are leveraging the "Power of the Juniper API". More importantly, they provided a Postman Collection Runner (the Collection Runner allows you ..read more

Excuse the bit of pre-ramble before the actual NFD26 content: It is a bit unusual to do back-to-back Network Field Day event, mainly because diversity in delegates is a good thing for the community and for the vendors presenting. It means a greater mix of opinions, use cases, and influence around a topic, the technology and how it is being applied to the market. Those are all wins (at least I think so) until something like a worldwide pandemic makes in person events difficult to impossible to do and also the reality that delegate's time is a harder commodity now. There are two aspects as a del ..read more

Intel presented at Networking Field Day on May 13, 2021 - I really recommend you check out the presentation on Silicon Photonics, you will likely learn something new if you are not staying super current on optical hardware. As a networking engineer, optics are a big part of what you deal with in designing and building networks. More importantly, it is likely the most expensive device per unit cost you will be buying for a regular data center deployment, or any deployment for that matter. So having an understanding of what is happening is critical to helping your company invest correctly and li ..read more

Here we go, Network Field Day 25 (NFD25) is May 12-14, 2021. It is a good line up of presenters and delegates so check out the full event schedule at the NFD25 website. First point, I thinks this NFD shows the changing networking landscape. Yes, some big network brands are still the focus but it is interesting seeing the list of presenters. What previously were second or third options for many companies are being first or second. Second point, the influence of a larger single vendor is slowing changing and the ecosystem is changing with it. I'm exciting to hear what all these sponsors have to ..read more