In October’s Tech Field Day event, Stephen Foskett and the panelists convened for a delegates’ round-table discussion to talk about edge and address some of the questions that are floating around about edge computing. Edge Computing Past and Future Tech Field Day 26 Roundtable explores the world of edge computing through the timeline from when it didn’t have a name to the present and what it’d look like in the future.

Is the Edge Another Ephemeral IT Trend or Something More?

I think it’s safe to say that in 2022, the edge is real. That fact is unassailable. And part of that is because remote work is a standard model now, much like in-office working was, pre-pandemic. This shift has immensely bolstered the formation of edge as an ecosystem and the proliferation of the family of edge technologies.

But in order to grasp how real the edge is, one needs to understand that since the edge spun out of cloud, it is not to be seen as the future replacement of cloud, and that’s precisely why the edge is coming together so well. The edge may have born out of cloud, but the cloud and edge are not rivals- they are complementary.

Also, the advent of edge is often mixed up with the advent of IoT because the two are so tightly coupled, but edge computing has been around a long time, way before IoT came. Case-in-point, WiFi access points. Over time, the edge has been redefined from something at the networks’ end to anything outside of the datacenter. Today the edge is everywhere, at home, in workplaces, at retail stores, in public places.

From Then to Now

The panel revisits the past of edge computing, especially the time before the pandemic when cloud was the king. Enrico Signoretti says, “A few years ago remote workers were not so many. Post-pandemic, enterprises have adopted edge technologies like the SAS widely. So now there is this continuous expansion towards the far edge and it’s changing everything.”

While the remote work culture may have propelled edge computing into the mainstream, there’s still some skepticism around the edge being another trend born out of the need for the public to move on from cloud to the next big thing.

There may be some truth in that in terms of users’ psychology, but the edge is coming together because of the undeniable reason that there is a massive need for it in customers. Vendors that did not have edge servers up until a few years are now investing in setting up their respective edge sites because the demand for it is growing every day. The AWS Wavelength is a good example of that.

But, edge computing at present does not have an overflowing number of management solutions. The paradigm is undoubtedly maturing but it’s not yet at a state where there’s a complete portfolio of solutions to choose from where management is concerned.

But even in its current form, things that are achieved at the edge is nothing short of magical. Think of autonomous vehicles, smart grid or patient monitoring in hospitals, quality monitoring in the manufacturing industry, and satellites in space – all of that has been made possible because of edge computing.

The Road Ahead

So, what’s next? The answer to that can be summed up in the wild transition of computing from mainframe days to today. Edge has ways to go in the coming years, and being fueled by some of the hottest and most advanced technologies of this decade, that journey will be an exciting one to say the least.

While inventions like 5G, AI and Metaverse give the edge its muscles, new and life-changing use cases will give it firepower to translate futuristic possibilities into real, usable smart technologies. Going forward, we’ll see a lot more activities in this space, especially from vendors that have so long been occupied with cloud.

Wrapping up

As companies continue to explore the possibilities trapped inside edge computing, the definition of edge evolves. Today, the edge is the network’s edge, but it is also the manufacturer’s factory floors, mobile things like self-driving cars, diagnostic machines in hospitals, and the satellites scouting the outer space. That is a clear indication that the edge is anything but static. It will continue to grow and change as distributed network changes and along the way, dish out many milestone technologies.

Give a listen to the Edge Computing Past and Future Tech Field Day 26 Roundtable from the recent Tech Field Day event for more enlightening facts about the edge. While you’re at it, also check out the On-Premise IT podcast- The Edge is Real This Time which is another illuminating discussion on the topic of edge.

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But there is a silver lining. For the last few years, the level of awareness and advocacy for the sustainability has risen, and that has brought issues like ESG that were marginal for decades, front and center.

At the recent Tech Field Day event, Stephen Foskett and the attending panel of delegates, tapped into the topic of sustainability in IT. The discussion- It’s Time to Talk About Sustainability in Enterprise IT! A Field Roundtable – drills down into the heart of the sustainability movement and answers if it’s realistically a campaign in the corporate or just marketing hype designed to gain advantage over competitors.

Understanding the Acronym

ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. Together, they are a set of standards by which a company’s environmental, social and governance policies are evaluated and measured and their sustainable and ethical impacts are determined.

While ‘Environment’ in ESG has shot to stardom in the recent years, it’s counterparts have remained in the shadows.

It’s worth reminding that ESG goes beyond just environment. Stephen Foskett points this out early in the discussion. “Because it’s sustainable and green doesn’t mean it’s ESG, unless you’re addressing the social and governance aspects as well,” he said.

The Anatomy of a Crisis

The tech sector is one of the major contributors of carbon emissions in the world. It may not have surpassed the devastating impacts of industries like fashion and airline, but IT’s carbon footprint is well on the rise.

E-waste has grown YoY at an alarming rate. The crisis is thickening as a result of overproduction which leads to excess consumption and eventual wastage causing environmental pollution.

Every year millions of new computers hardware are manufactured, and with that thousands old ones are discarded. 70% of the items that end up in the landfill are prematurely decommissioned. They are still reusable and rich sources of raw materials. Just recycling these items alone can cut down significant waste production.

The other half of the problem is datacenters. Datacenters account for over 3% of the global power consumption. Servers rely on energy to run, and as the equipment heat up, they need more energy to cool down. The GHG emissions are substantial.

Records state that datacenters release 2% of the global emissions yearly. That may not sound as bad on its own, but it’s about as high as the airline industry which is decried worldwide for its CO2 emissions.

The Forces of Change

So why have we turned a blind eye to something as compelling and potentially catastrophic as this for so long? Until recently, the impacts of global warming were not palpable, or personal.

Another incentive is cost-savings. Enrico Signoretti explains, “The cost of energy is huge. So now everybody is looking at ways to reduce their energy bills. It had to touch the IT budget so dramatically for everybody to be worried about climate change. That was not the case in the past.”

So are companies only acting out of self-interest? Realistically, it makes sense for big companies like hyperscalers to hit the brakes on carbon footprint because that makes a huge difference to their margins. Low energy consumption equals lower TCO meaning, greater gains plus a bonus of emission cuts.

Looking from an economic perspective, it seems unconvincing that corporations’ environmental accountability is a manifestation of real good intensions. Companies often say they want to be more green simply motivated by the profit aspect, but a true awakening about the devastating ramifications of global warming is also underway. It’s not one isolated factor, but rather a culmination of many reasons that leads businesses down the road of sustainability.

Building more energy-efficient infrastructures is incumbent upon cloud providers because a consistent power supply is not ubiquitous. Craig Rodgers points out, “Datacenters are gigantic establishments, and they are mostly stationed in parts of the world where power disruptions are common. So, that’s one of the drivers of building energy-efficient infrastructures.”

The good thing is, sustainability and economic growth are not mutually exclusive, nor are they incompatible. They can go hand in hand and still result in controlled ecological footprints of businesses.

Sustainability Not as a Goal but a Way of Being

So is sustainability in IT worth the hype? Should companies follow the trend and invest in green technologies? Or should they work on optimizing their current infrastructures to achieve the minimum goals?

While a lot of opposing viewpoints came up during the discussion, one point singularly stood out. The panel agreed that an infrastructure overhaul is not necessarily the only path to sustainability.

Disposing off hardware while it has shelf life left in it for a more eco-friendly product is only perpetuating the problem. The best possible approach is to increase utilization, so that when a company finally makes the upgrade, they’re able to drive down power consumption substantively while ensuring that it’s a fully sustainable and an economically sound choice.

With support contracts and value tier offerings from vendors that give old and expired units new lease of life, this can be easily done today.

The takeaway is clear. Do not go for the latest and greatest technologies because it promises to be green or even better-performing, unless it truly makes sense for your infrastructure or use case.

Sustainable manufacturing has brought to the market endless choices in hardware, and they may not all be equally sustainable, but there are more choices in that respect than there ever was to upgrade to that fully green, energy-efficient and low-emission infrastructure.

Wrapping Up

Sustainability is a recurrent theme in enterprise IT today and for good reason. Datacenters are guzzling massive amounts of energy and emitting cringing levels of CO2. That puts every company in the industry under the obligation to conscientiously whittle down their numbers by adopting green, environmentally sustainable policies, be it using more power-efficient CPUs or serverless technologies, or staying away from CAPEX infrastructures by simply getting more use out of old equipment. Unsustainable practices have besmirched the IT industry’s reputation for long. It’s time organizations came together to make a concerted push towards green IT.

For more interesting takes on sustainability be sure to watch It’s Time to Talk About Sustainability in Enterprise IT! A Field Roundtable till the end, and check out more Roundtable discussions on current topics from the recent Tech Field Day event.

The post Digging Deeper into the Theme of Sustainability in Enterprise IT appeared first on Techstrong IT.

Storage Field Day 24 is heading back to Silicon Valley on November 2nd and 3rd. Enterprise storage continues to advance even as cloud, data management, and other abstractions have shifted the focus of the industry. We are thrilled to spend a few days focusing on storage with some of the top companies and delegates in the industry. Here is an overview of what to look forward to.

Storage Field Day begins with Dell Technologies at 8:00 AM on Wednesday. Dell is continuing a decade’s long legacy in enterprise storage while leading the industry forward in areas like cybersecurity and sustainability. Then we’ll hear from Pure Storage at 11:00 AM. We’ve been showing the progress of Pure1 over the last few years and are excited to hear the latest on sustainability and customer driven upgrades. We’ll finish the day with Amazon Web Services. AWS is the industry leader in cloud object storage with S3 but also has a lot to say about file and block storage.

On Thursday, we’ll hear from Solidigm at 9:00 AM. A spinoff from SK Hynix and Intel, Solidigm’s portfolio of flash storage products is truly unique. We can’t wait to tell you more about these topics and for you to hear the opinions of our Field Day delegates through our Roundtable discussions Thursday afternoon.

This event is broadcast live at TechFieldDay.com and over on our company LinkedIn page starting at 8:00 AM PT on Wednesday and 9:00 AM PT on Thursday with more presentations throughout each day. Videos from these presentations will also be available on YouTube soon after the event. Follow the event on Twitter by following Tech Field Day and using the #SFD24.

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The week of the Tech Field Day event, ZPE Systems officially unveiled Network Automation Blueprint, a playbook to building a complete end-to-end automation pipeline in a failsafe fashion. At the Tech Field Day event, they introduced it to the audience.

A Recipe for Disaster

Despite all odds, organizations are still uniquely vulnerable to cyberattacks. Case-in-point, the recent Uber breach. This begs the question, why our best security practices continue to fail us? The answer is as clear as day. The most insidious cyber breaches can be traced back to very benign, and seemingly unrelated root causes – skill gaps and an excess of security tools, and falling out of that, human error.

Automation can evidently resolve a lot of those problems, except there’s a lot of skepticism around it, the first of which is the fear of losing control of the network – and it’s not for nothing. The problem with automation is that it’s too perfect, and that is its bane. It’s an exacting job where one small error can have catastrophic outcomes. So, even though automation can take operators’ hands off of the routine volume-heavy tasks like configuration, provisioning, patches and upgrades, and enable holistic security and bring everybody peace of mind, it can also be ruinous in certain circumstances. Without a rock-solid plan of action that covers these blind spots, automation is messy.

But what if there was a way to build automation such that even if there were human mistakes, there’d be an easy way to recover from them? That in itself would alleviate a lot of the anxiety.

A Plan That Works

ZPE Systems may have worked out that kink. Headquartered in Fremont, California, ZPE Systems has been in the industry since 2013. One of its core missions is to revert the perpetual skill shortage in IT and to execute that, it has built an out-of-band infrastructure that paves the road to hyperautomation, a word that’s ubiquitous in IT right now.

“Automation without a proper automation infrastructure is not the right thing to do. It works but it’s actually what leads to the anxiety. The best practice is to have an automation infrastructure in place,” says ZPE Systems’ VP of Product Management, Koroush Saraf.

ZPE Systems’ offerings cater to use cases across datacenter, campus, colo, branch and edge. Their portfolio includes hardware like serial consoles and routers as well as accompanying software management solutions.

And now, ZPE Systems is bringing hyperautomation within the reach of organizations with its Network Automation Blueprint. Its use? ZPE Systems sees it as the true enabler of network security and reliability.

ZPE Systems’ Network Automation Blueprint

At the recent Tech Field Day event, ZPE Systems gave a sneak-peek of what’s inside Network Automation Blueprint. In a 30 min session, Koroush Saraf talked about ZPE Systems’ out-of-band infrastructure and how the blueprint helps setup the most fail-safe automation pipeline. They wrapped it up with a demo in the next presentation where Director of Solution Engineer, Rene Neumann demoed the automation infrastructure.

Network Automation Blueprint is a 36-page document that Saraf and Neumann jointly drafted with an ONUG (Open Networking User Group) team. It talks about the building blocks of network automation and provides a one-size reference automation architecture with implementation plans.

The architecture proposed in the blueprint has predominantly four sections- AIOps at the top, orchestration and automation, automation infrastructure and IT/OT production infrastructure. According to ZPE Systems, this architecture works for organizations of any size for two reasons- first it encloses the network strategies of some of the biggest tech companies, and second, it has that fabled “undo” button that can turn things around in a heartbeat.

So, besides a ready architecture design, the blueprint also has a fallback plan for when things don’t go to plan. Following its set of instructions, companies can recover from human errors in minimum time. The document expands on the architecture, layer by layer, revealing all the constituent parts, discussing them in details with the help of diagrams.

Saraf drew special attention to the automation infrastructure part which is the load-bearing element of network automation. ZPE Systems’ out of band infrastructure fills this piece giving the architecture a solid core to build on.

Wrapping Up

ZPE Systems’ Network Automation Blueprint has all the answers for anybody looking to learn about building a foolproof automation pipeline from scratch. Loaded with information as it is, it could be the automation bible for enterprises getting hands-on with automation. At the very least, it presents a tried and true design that has set many industry players up for success. As for those already on the journey, it is a great instructional essay to keep in the back pocket for perfecting their automation architectures. For any interested reader, it has all the vital information they need to know to prevent catastrophic security incidents and unplanned outages through automation. Network Automation Blueprint is free to download and can be requested at ZPE Systems’ website today.

If you want to know more about the blueprint and ZPE systems’ automation infrastructure, be sure to check out their presentation and demo from the recent Tech Field Day event. Another great resource to check out related to this is the Edge Computing Past and Future Tech Field Day 26 Roundtable discussion available on the Tech Field Day website.

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At the recent Networking Field Day event in Santa Clara, California, Pica8 showcased the Pica8 Network Platform that thwarts bad actors by building logical access boundaries around network assets with context-based ZTNA.

The Campus Needs a New Attack Surface Management Tactic

The attack surface is expanding with the sudden growth of connections. From the moment a user or device is hooked to the network, it can start to compromise assets and eventually exfiltrate data until someone notices. Hackers have successfully orchestrated lateral movements infecting resources without operators having a clue.

The new campus fabric needs inside-out protection. Traditional security models that worked yesterday won’t cut it when confronting new and evolved threat mechanisms. We’ve seen attacks unfolding from inside the network enough times to know that the threat is not just on the outside.

Secure Remote Access with ZTNA

The concept of Zero Trust Network Access was born to contain this reality. Based on the principle of “never trust, always verify”, it has proven to be the model of choice to protect digital environments from bad actors. Pica8 furthers this mission with its network automation solutions that verify every entity trying to gain access from inside the network or out, without trusting anyone by default.

Born in 2012, Pica8 emerged as the open networking alternative to Cisco and Juniper Networks. Its network platform is a single-license software solution that has a buy-once-use-forever model. The platform can be run anywhere using the same license, no restrictions on port-size or performance. An old license can be reused over and over for new devices. It requires no additional fees to upgrade, or install a patch.

Zero-Trust Networking with Pica8

At the recent Networking Field Day event, Pica8’s Technical Marketing Manager, Mani Subramanian gave an overview of the Pica8 network platform and explained how it helps build that Zero-Trust network.

Pica8 separates hardware from the software providing enterprises the tools required to create a Zero-Trust network. The Pica8 network platform has two halves- the AmpCon Automation Network Controller and the PicOS software switch. Pica8 calls AmpCon “the automation command center” of the enterprise network.

To cut down deployment times and to provide hands-off deployment of switches, Pica8 provides best practice NAC configurations and deployment guides. Its automation tool AmpCon provides push-button automation for full lifecycle management. With AmpCon, users can set backup and upgrades to autopilot during unmanned hours. Another important capability is DIY automation with which users can build custom workflows to easily automate work processes.

With the AmpCon controller, security and network policies can be clearly defined and fully automated. As part of provisioning, Pica8 secures bare metal switches beforehand with “least access” policies that limit users and devices to their respective sections of the network.

Pica8 delivers secure wired access by adopting different identity-based authentication policies separately for users, devices and multi-host, depending on whether it’s an employee, guest or contractor requesting access. Pica8 supports two policies- Dynamic VLAN and Dynamic or Downloadable ACL. The RADIUS server is centrally configured, with the policies applied to the port so that access is limited right from the beginning.

The PicOS Switch Software is a Networking OS (NOS) of open architecture. Its main function is to convert a disaggregated white box hardware into a networking switch. Pica8’s goal with the PicOS is to provide network virtualization for EVPN VXLAN across campus and datacenter fabrics.

With use cases spanning campus to data center, branch and edge, the Pica8 network platform can be deployed flexibly no matter the network. Pica8 also uses third-party NAC controllers from HPE and Cisco.

Wrapping Up

Pica8 network platform is a great tool to start building a bulletproof Zero Trust network. It helps create and clearly define Zero Trust access control policies that are critical to protecting network assets from malicious threats. With it, users can dynamically enforce polices, customize automation and fully leverage the benefits of software-defined networking.

To learn more about Pica8 network platform, be sure to check out the full presentation and other Pica8 demos from the recent Networking Field Day event.

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Programmers Spend Way Too Much Time Coding

Network reliability and QoS balance on successful execution of the discrete tasks. But even with automation, this is often a heavy burden on the networking team because of the code-intensive nature of automation. Orchestration of these volume-heavy tasks requires steep coding skills and an insane amount of coding, enough to keep a large team busy for months on end.

RPA eases that burden by automating these manual activities in a no-code fashion. With RPA, automation of a set of tasks can be orchestrated with workflows. This means reduced staffing cost, but also quick wins on repetitive tasks.

Gluware Introduces Network RPA to Its Network Automation Suite

After a long time in development, Gluware’s Network RPA is finally up for the grabs. For Gluware, the drive to build Network RPA was to be able to deliver no-code automation. Built with special focus on the orchestration challenges of automation, it fulfills the need to automate the automation. Sitting on top of the app suite, Gluware RPA enables operators to automate processes using workflows.

But that’s not all. Gluware Network RPA also enables operators to automate processes that are outside the network infrastructure. Network RPA is Gluware’s early steps towards AI/ML driven automation. “We are doing a lot of the things that we need to on the underlying side to handle the data and be able to then take machine learning algorithms on that data to assist operations engineers in their job,” informed Michael Haugh, VP of Product Marketing at Gluware.

Overview of the Gluware Intelligent Network Automation platform

To give you a quick recap, Gluware Intelligent Network Automation platform comprises a suite of out-of-the-box applications that forms the foundational block of the platform. Just like the MS Office and Adobe applications, Gluware’s pre-built applications can execute individual functions out-of-the-box and can work together to deliver process automation. The suite comprises a device manager, configuration and drift auditor, OS manager, Data Explorer, Dashboard and workflows.

But what happens when customization enters the scene? Pre-built apps can only do so much out-of-the-box. For networks heavy on customization, Gluware has built Gluware Lab on top of the core app suite. Released over a year ago, Gluware Lab is designed on what Gluware calls “DevOps for NetOps” approach. “There is some low coding, but you get to build custom features, introduce custom abstractions, do custom API integrations, and it’s really a cornerstone of what we’ve delivered in our platform,” says Haugh.

Their next frontier, no-code process automation, and the new network RPA ties up the loose end of customization.

Understanding Gluware’s Network RPA

At the Networking Field Day event, Michael Haugh gave a demo of the no-code, drag-and-drop process automation capabilities of the new Gluware RPA.

Gluware runs both on and off-prem. It boasts of a multi-engine architecture that scales with compute. The function of Gluware Network RPA is to implement a CI/CD pipeline to NetOps. So users can not only build a workflow, but also perform all of the subsequent steps of testing, deploying, operating and monitoring the automation with zero coding.

Gluware supports API integrations with a lot of vendors including Cisco, AWS and Azure. The Network RPA has three main pieces- the workflow library, the workflow editor and workflow activity. On the dashboard, under Network RPA is the workflow library. This library is populated with prebuilt workflows, but you can also build your own with just a few clicks. Name your workflow and choose its access level, and it will direct you to a drag-and-drop interface.

This is the Workflow editor where you can build out the processes end-to-end. You can assign tasks to the workflow with a simple drag and drop action. These could be Gluware’s own or third-party tasks. You can layer a workflow however you like with events and logic. Multi-path logic allows users to trigger multiple automatic actions for specific network failures.

The workflows analyze inventory data that it ingests through API looking for vulnerabilities in low, medium and high categories. All critical issues are identified and flagged for operators. Gluware can start a Jira board for critical issues making it easier for operators to analyze and troubleshoot.

Wrapping Up

Network RPA advances Gluware’s goal of “hyperautomation” by automating repetitive, high-volume, code-intensive activities saving operators thousands of working hours and organizations, operational costs. With it, short-duration tasks that take anywhere between 1 and 15 minutes to execute can be done in seconds, no coding required. However, its key asset is not that it makes automation low-cost, but that its incredibly easy to build, and that closes the skill gap in programming. The cherry on top is that it is fast to apply too.

For more on Gluware’s Network RPA, be sure to check out the other presentations by Gluware from the recent Networking Field Day event.

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A Long Struggle

A fact widely known in the cloud community is that transitioning to cloud is not an easy project. Even with a cloud-first mentality, a smooth and successful move to cloud is a matter of a lot of good luck and infinitely more hard work.

No one said the journey to cloud was going to be a weekend project, or even something to be wrapped up inside a month. For some businesses, and depending on the scope of the migration, cloud may very well be a multi-year project. But it’s high time that the processes and procedures got simpler, and less daunting.

The Outcome of an Enduring Partnership

The Google-NetApp partnership is not new. For many years, NetApp and Google Cloud have worked collaboratively on various engineering projects. This time, they have come together to deliver a faster path to cloud. The solution is a file service that delivers the bells and whistles of on-prem into public cloud.

Sean Derrington, Group Product Management at Google Cloud informed that use cases for file service in GC can be seen coming from verticals like financial services, retail and healthcare. So what’s prompting these companies to lift and shift to a public cloud notwithstanding the pain of the process? For one, cloud has its own incentives which make the move worth the pain. Derrington says, “A vast amount of data being unstructured on-premises, it’s a good opportunity to move that into the cloud and still keep that same structure.”

NetApp and Google Cloud joined houses to further this strategy. While Google Cloud offers the landing pad – a robust and open ecosystem with a spectrum of cloud-native services – NetApp gives the journey momentum. The NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows easy and quick migration of data in synchronous models between on-prem and cloud. Specifically for DR use cases, it provides easy data replication, failover and DIY compute and storage capabilities bringing agility to the process.

Taking Some of the On-Prem into Public Cloud

Architecturally, public cloud is vastly different from the on-prem environment. As resilient and rewarding as it is, cloud still misses a lot of the things from on-prem that we love and are so used to. The first thing that companies miss upon arriving is an on-prem-like file service in the cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP brings back those extra things by providing ease of data management on the customer’s infrastructure, but not without the freedom of DIY.

Alternatively, NetApp has Cloud Volumes Service on Google Cloud which is a managed storage service for when you are looking for a managed file system with direct integration and hands-off administration. So even going into public cloud that is by and large managed by the vendor, you can still architect your environment flexibly as required.

Derrington cited the example of one company in the process of consolidating petabytes of data from file services spanning multiple locations. Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP in tandem with Cloud Volumes Edge Cache, formerly known as Global File Cache, they have been able to not only see the process through to the end at minimum time, but by eliminating some of the hardware susceptible to natural decline, they have been able to dial down the operational cost by leveraging a new and more efficient mechanism of data management.

Following the Trend

So what do companies lean towards in the cloud- object or file? Dean Hildebrand, Technical Director at the Office of the CTO at Google answers, “Object and file have been on different journeys over the last five years in cloud. Object is really trying to play to its core strengths around flexibility, scalability and global access of the data, and then they really want to focus on their core use cases which is around content distribution, data analytics and data preservation, and delivering all of that at very low cost. Whereas in file, it’s been on its own journey where all of the data management capabilities that exist on-prem we’ve been moving them into cloud to make it easy to consume and work for non-NetApp experts. They don’t want to think so much about the data management side and really want to focus on their applications.”

According to Hildebrand, object and file are both first-class citizens of cloud. “But what file has is a very specific API around POSIX. It also has its own data sharing semantics between different users as well as a low latency performance access that is much more similar to on-prem even when you’re in in the cloud, versus object which has a much higher latency and is really designed for larger objects. When we talk to customers about what workloads they have and where they want to bring them, it’s really about looking at those types of capabilities that the different services provide and doing the match for each one of them.”

The Straightest Route to the Multicloud

NetApp paves the path to simplistic migration of workloads to cloud. With it’s Google Cloud integration, you can freely move your workloads to Google Cloud with multi-protocol support, recover data via snapshot, replication and backup and save money by tiering off data to the right service tiers which can be changed at a moment’s notice.

Cloud Volumes Service has some add-on security services including customer-managed encryption keys for more control and security.

Wrapping Up

ONTAP has been the holy grail for enterprises since a long time. The arrival of Cloud Volumes on Google Cloud makes its capabilities available off-premises. Cloud Volumes ONTAP serves as a unified data management environment in a fragmented storage system through which enterprises can efficiently design their storage and control their data. Whether a company was born in the cloud or is making the leap from on-premises to public cloud, Cloud Volumes on Google Cloud offers bountiful opportunities where data mobility, simplistic deployment of workloads in Google Cloud and of course data management in the cloud are concerned. It is the optimal blend of easy data management, data mobility and storage optimization.

To know more about how you can run file workloads in GC with NetApp, be sure to watch the presentation till the end, and check out other deep-dive sessions from the recent Take Charge of your Multicloud Environment with NetApp event at Silicon Valley.

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At the recent Mobility Field Day event in California, Juniper Networks showed how with the use of AI/ML, complex network infrastructures can be easily managed and maintained at minimum human intervention. Their secret is their AI assistant – Marvis.

Faster Decisions for Even Performance

Corporate networks can feel overwhelmingly complex to manage owing to their scale and heterogeneity. Issues can appear out of nowhere and when that happens, operators are expected to diffuse an equitable response instantaneously. Most times, this entails split-second decisions. That is a bit of a tall ask from engineers who are occupied most of their working hours trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Admittedly, there are more than enough decision-assist tools to guide them in their pursuits, but without AI/ML, these tools fail to offer users the right choices or recommendations that can potentially boil down a troubleshooting job to minutes. The goal to making faster decisions in networking begins with faster time to know and smart automation can bridge that gap.

Producing New Levels of Efficiency with AI

Implementing AI can go a long way in changing the everyday experience of users. Juniper Networks created a virtual assistant called Marvis that has the cognitive abilities similar to a network engineer. The premise of it is based on helping to manage the “client to cloud experience”. “We have been on a journey to build an AI solution that can manage and operate networks on par with IT human domain experts,” said Juniper Networks’ Chief AI Officer, Bob Friday.

With Marvis, Juniper Networks attempts to build an AI solution with a human level of intelligence. That is no weekend project. Under the hood, Marvis is an algorithm like any other, but it is programmed and trained efficiently to do more things.

Marvis has been a work in progress through the years, with Juniper Networks’ data science team tweaking and tuning it for increasingly better results. As a result of this, Marvis has not only become smarter with time, but it is also the AIOPS piece for the future self-driving action framework that Juniper Networks is building towards.

Juniper Networks takes pride in its Mist customer success team that works jointly with the in-house data science team providing in-depth visibility into the customer experience of every big client on Juniper Networks’ network – that is that fuel that drives their AI journey.

Marvis, a Virtual Network Assistant

At the Mobility Field Day event, the Juniper Networks team presented the journey of Marvis. Bob Friday gave a high-level introduction to the evolution of the technology and Jisheng Wang, Sr. Director of Software Development gave a sneak-peek of the architecture. To wrap it up, him and Sunalini Sankhavaram, Sr. Director of Product Management gave a demo showing Marvis in action.

Data is the cornerstone of any AI technology, and it’s no different for Marvis. Through Marvis, Mist ingests nearly a petabyte of data every day, from wireless, wired, WAN, applications and more. Marvis steps it up by ingesting telemetry from outside the network for visibility into external problems.

A conversational interface powered by the proprietary Mist AI, Marvis can answer any networking question and recommend prescriptive actions. Type in a question or drop a request, and Marvis responds with information in real time. In addition to getting quick answers to questions, Marvis can also be used to obtain reliable analytics and insights. Being a virtual network assistant with NLP capabilities, operators can interact with it the same way team members huddle to discuss an issue. Marvis is now ubiquitous across wireless, wired and route.

Marvis has gotten better over the years, and the reason for this is that the data that is used to train Marvis is the same data that network engineers analyze to solve a problem. Transmitted to cloud, this data is used to train the ML model. In the next step, Juniper Networks will direct more WAN data into Marvis for better training.

At the foundation, Marvis has a hierarchical pipeline that starts in raw input data and ends in actions. Although it performs all the standard functions of sending out notifications and making data correlations, it is really focused on root cause finding. Instead of drowning users with alerts, it tells them the root of a problem and prescribe actions for troubleshooting.

The end goal with Marvis is to deliver customers simplicity through simplified self-driving actions. “The ultimate goal of Marvis is zero support ticket,” says Wang. With Marvis Juniper Networks is driving towards a self-driving network where Marvis can spot, analyze and remediate a problem all by itself. Marvis’ self-driving actions are geared towards ensuring that a problem is resolved long before it shows up at the user-end.

Even though, AI can out-perform its human counterparts in certain areas, not all troubleshooting can be handled by AI as efficiently as some. Juniper Networks admits that there are problems that are outside the expertise of Marvis. But instead of leaving networking engineers to resolve them on their own, it provides step-by-step guidance and insights for those to facilitate troubleshot at minimum response time.

A new addition to their umbrella of AI technologies is the EX4100 series of ethernet switches. Cloud-enabled and AI-powered like the previous EX4400 platform, the EX4100 switches are fully managed by Juniper Mist. The EX4100 lineup is designed from scratch to to optimize AIOPS with rich telemetry. Juniper’s presentation at the recent Mobility Field Day reveals more about their capabilities.

Wrapping Up

Juniper Networks’ Marvis is a futuristic solution. It presents new opportunities and capabilities to enhance and perfect the human experience of the network, but remarkably cuts out human effort from networking. In a network that is overflowing with devices and applications, Marvis continually assesses the components through sound analysis of raw inputs. Through its analytics, recommendations and insights, a bulk of the network problems can be resolved even before they become an end-user problem, and some even preemptively.

To learn more about Marvis, be sure to check out the other presentations by Juniper Networks from the recent Mobility Field Day event.

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Tech That Can Camouflage

In a lot of ways, 6E is truly the Wi-Fi superhighway that it is said to be. It has huge bandwidth, great performance, it is highly secure and has the best user experience. But there is a caveat. As a solution, Wi-Fi 6E faces some steep adoption challenges, the biggest of which is the Automated Frequency Coordination.

To make sure that unlicensed users of 6GHz band do not interfere with the registered users, FCC has put in place the Automated Frequency Coordination or AFC. Any new 6E AP is required to consult a registered database to make sure that a licensed channel user is not adversely impacted by its operations. But to this day, FCC has not approved the 6GHz AFC systems even though it has been in discussion in open meetings. That puts a cap on the use of outdoor 6E APs.

Alongside this, a demand is growing for what is called “inconspicuous Wi-Fi”. Users are increasingly gravitating towards slim body antennas that either blend in on their own or are easy to hide. This is urging manufacturers to digress from the common clunky mounting options for Wi-Fi appliances and design access points of unobtrusive aesthetics that can be tucked behind everyday objects.

Concealable 6E Antennas That Are Not Your Regular Ugly Black Box

Ventev’s line of small form factor antennas is just what have customers been wanting all along. They are small, lightweight, attractive and concealed. Over the years, with the progression of its portfolio, Ventev antennas have grown smaller in size. Compared to its Original Patch antenna which had a form factor of 9×9 inches, its latest Femto Patch antenna is a lot smaller. Measuring only 3.4×3.4 inches, the Femto Patch is three times smaller.

But the Femto Patch antenna is not the smallest they have on the product line. The Ventev Pico Patch II antenna has an even smaller form factor with dimensions 3.5×2”. But unlike the Femto, the Pico Patch II is a 5GHz model.

Ventev partners with industry leading manufacturers like Cisco and Aruba for designing and manufacturing mounting devices for access points.

A Look Through Ventev’s Catalogue

At the recent Mobility Field Day event, Dennis Burrell, Sr Product Manager at Ventev showcased Ventev’s product line. In a short 30-minute presentation, he gave the audience a rundown of the 6E antennas and aesthetic solutions on Ventev’s portfolio that complement the theme of “inconspicuous WiFi”.

Instead of waiting for FCC to finalize the AFC, Ventev got to work designing antennas that are 6E ready. The Femto Patch Antenna is Ventev’s smallest dual band antenna on the catalogue and the smallest in the market so far. Within its slim body, the Femto holds four ports. Ventev improved it by making it 6E. “We wanted to take this antenna and make it a 6E – “tribanded to include the 6E frequency band,” says Burrell.

The Femto Patch 6E is a 6 dBi antenna with a thin and light design. IT has a Voltage Standing Wave Radio value of <2.0 which translates to 90% power transmission and 10% loss. Measuring 3.4×3.4×1.4 inches, the Femto Patch 6E has a front-to-back ratio of 9dB/15dB/15dB. Although that’s admittedly less than that of other antennas, Ventev was able to achieve an acceptable front-to-back ratio even with its slight form factor.

In aesthetic solutions, Ventev has a line of patented raised floor tile antennas which it came up with six years ago. “We took a concrete raised floor tile and we embedded one of our planer antennas into this floor tile,” says Burrell.

Contrary to the traditional top-down design of Wi-Fi deployments, this one has a top-up design that runs from floor to ceiling. With the client device at a height of 3.5 ft, the antenna achieves maximum performance. The AP connected to the tile is either mounted or put in a carrier. Once the tile is put in place and the carpet is pulled over it, its completely out of sight. Ventev works with a number of flooring solutions manufacturers like Global IFS and ASM for its line of raised floor tile antennas to ensure variety in the tiling material.

Wrapping Up

Antennas are often unattractive and not something we like staring us in the face. Users don’t care if it’s put in a box or hidden with the toys, as long as it’s out of sight. Ventev’s antennas and deployment options address both the problems of clunky antennas and the concealment issue. But that’s not all – these antennas are Wi-Fi 6E ready. Perfect reason to swap out the old bulky antenna for a new one.

To know more about the Femto Patch antenna or any other solutions on their product list, be sure to check out the rest of the presentations by Ventev from the recent Mobility Field Day event.

The post Deploying Wi-Fi 6E with Ventev appeared first on Techstrong IT.

A Change Is Unfolding

The rapid evolution of campus network has presented a series of novel challenges that legacy networking technologies aren’t fit to take on. They are encumbered by per-device telemetry collection, slow telemetry streaming, limited state history collection, manual data correlation – all of which are serious disadvantages for a monitoring tool. The criteria have changed. The campus network as we know it today puts renewed emphasis on telemetry and troubleshooting. For a network supporting a huge population of IoT devices and connections, better visibility is through wider telemetry.

Manual tasks like provisioning and configuring cannot be manual anymore if errors are to be avoided. The day-to-day management tasks that used to be shared between NetOps and SecOps need to be streamlined and automated so that maintenance of campus networks is not such a nightmare anymore.

Arista Working toward Building a Self-Healing Network

Arista Networks has a vision. Down the line, Arista plans to build an autonomous self-healing network and for that, Arista believes it has the architecture set up. Arista’s definition of a self-driving network begins with observability. Arista follows the journey of client connectivity from start to end, through all the stages of association, authentication, getting IP address and connecting to the applications. Through all of these states, Arista catches issues and flags them in the dashboard in real-time.

“Once the client is connected successfully, we then very rigorously track the key RF KPIs of the client including retail rate, RSSI, data rate and we highlight when the clients have poor performance,” says Sriram Venkiteswaran, Director of Product Management for Cognitive Wi-Fi at Arista Networks.

Arista Networks’ Cognitive Campus solves the networking challenges of campus with a complete feature set that covers the heterogenous campus ecosystem. Powered with in-house ML models and cloud principles, it ensures 24/7 availability with automatic upgrades and patches, and proactive troubleshooting recommendations. But most importantly, it delivers a broad set of data rich with correlations and analytics that accelerates root cause analysis.

Inside the Architecture of Cognitive Campus

At the Mobility Field Day event, Venkiteswaran gave a peek into the AI/ML architecture of Arista Networks’ Cognitive Campus. In a one-hour presentation, he gave a rundown of the key capabilities of the solution. He was remotely joined by his collogue Nadeem Akhtar who wrapped it up with a couple demonstrations showing the platform’s capabilities in action.

Venkiteswaran points out the three building blocks of the Arista Cognitive Campus. At the foundation, it has the network data lake. The second piece is the network architecture that spans cloud to edge. The third and final component is the data itself. Like all AI/ML platforms, data fuels the Cognitive Campus solution. Arista gathers data from far and wide in the network, including entities like clients, APs, switches on the campus and in the datacenter to constantly train and refine its ML algorithm.

Like a modern networking solution, Arista deals with data of all kinds. It collects states, events, logs, metrics, packet captures, topology and more, leaving out only anonymized data. Arista dynamically employs different ways to treat and transfer these data. Its real-time streaming mechanism allows it to export state changes live and update them instantly in the cloud. For metrics that are not time sensitive, the edge network collects and aggregates them before sending them out in parcels.

Venkiteswaran says, “We treat and transport different types of data and this has allowed us to build a completely optimized transport mechanism from the network edge to the cloud.”

Citing examples of collaboration applications like Zoom and Hangout, Venkiteswaran explained how the platform functions on the inside. “Where we really want to get to is to be able to measure the experience of real applications for these clients.” But it’s not easy to measure the user experience by simply looking at the data. So Arista goes the extra mile to detect application flow extracting parameters like packet rate, jitters and latency every 30 secs. These packets are then sent over to the cloud.

In the cloud, the data is processed by the ML model which then classifies them into good and bad flow. Back in the dashboard, the information shows up telling operators the quality of experience a user had with a concerned application.

Wrapping Up

The hybrid work model is not easy to adapt to, and productivity and QoE are the first things to get compromised in that struggle. Arista Networks’ Cognitive Campus is an intuitive and timely solution that provides organizations the opportunity to build that robust and reliable network that can be scaled on demand. It streamlines and automates sundry networking tasks and with the powerful capabilities of machine learning sets the stage for optimized QoE for users.

For more on Cognitive Campus, be sure to watch Artista Networks’ other presentations from this month’s Mobility Field Day event.

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