It’s been a long winter here in Pennsylvania. Near record-breaking for snowfall. But yesterday I traveled to beautiful and temperate San Jose to attend Networking Field Day 7!
I’m honored to have been selected as a delegate for another Tech Field Day event, as these events are a fantastic opportunity to engage with vendors and industry peers. I use the term “peers” only because we work in the same industry. Everyone else is smarter than me.
I’m excited to rub elbows and network with the exceptional delegate list. I have met nearly all of this event’s delegates before and I respect the expertise and experience of every single participant. I feel I have learned so much and made so many valuable connections through TFD events and I’m grateful to Gestalt IT and the TFD community for another opportunity to participate.
Most of all, I’m excited for the opportunity to represent you, the networking/IT community at large. Asking the questions you would ask. I will be live Tweeting during the presentations, so direct your questions my way and I’ll do my best to ask your questions if I miss something you want to know about.
Sponsors
I was going to mention each of the presenting vendors and what of theirs I was interested in learning more about, but after reviewing the list I realized I’m very exited to hear from each of them. Some of these vendors hadn’t struck me as big SDN players, but really each of the “traditional” network equipment vendors (that includes Avaya, Brocade, Dell, Extreme, and Juniper) touts a complete SDN strategy on their website. I’m looking forward to learning more about each vendor’s strategy and what differentiates their approaches.
There will also be a couple of the startup vendors, Plexxi which is on the leading edge of cloud-scale data center networks and automation, and Pluribus Networks who will be giving us detail on their NetVisor network virtualization platform and their Freedom Server-Switch product line. Both should prove very interesting.
Finally, we’ll hear from Tail-F Systems about their vendor-agnostic network controller product, and the recently re-branded LiveAction to talk to us about network monitoring and quality measurement.
I do hope to see at least some discussion of non-datacenter networking as well. SDN can have applicability outside the datacenter, and I build more general enterprise networks with small/medium data center blocks than I do large-scale data centers that fully implement an end-to-end automated, SDN architecture.
My Perspective
Like many in the networking field, I’m looking toward the future (SDN, cloud, automation, and the like) but I’m also mindful of the gap we need to bridge to get there. I work on real networks every day, most of which are not greenfield, pie-in-the-sky SDN datacenters, so I want to learn how the new technologies these vendors are bringing forward are applicable to the real world of grey-field operational networks.
I work on mostly small to mid-sized enterprise networks with anything from very simplistic to moderately complex data center needs. I don’t build cloud-scale data centers or work on huge Internet property environments so my focus is on using technology to help businesses of all sizes gain a competitive advantage whether it’s through new feature/function or reduced operational burden. I’ll be considering the sponsor presentations through that lens all week.
Overall, I’m looking forward to a great and exhausting week. Please be sure to tune into the live streams of the NFD presentations and watch the #NFD7 hashtag on Twitter to join in the conversation.
Herding Packets 
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