TechHouse570

Some things are just made for each other! Cheese on burgers, peanut butter and jelly & now Meraki & Catalyst together finally… Wait did I just type that out loud? Yes, I did as finally the secret is out that for the first time ever engineers can rejoice all over the world has we now have the capability to monitor our Catalyst 9K switches though our Meraki dashboards!

Now this comes in parts, to start we’ll be monitoring our devices. Management and other features will come later on. Along with this exciting news Cisco also is expanding their portfolio of 916X Wi-Fi 6E enabled access points. So, what does this mean for the future of how monitor and maintain our infrastructure? Let’s take a closer look!

Real Time Everything!

Not only can we monitor and have complete visibility in real time though a single pane of glass. But we’ll be able to leverage the key features of what’s continuously made Meraki successful.

From a complete centralized view of our network to the real time status of switch health, monitoring, visibility and more.

As long as your devices are running IOS-XE 17.3 or above. Simply enable them into cloud monitoring mode and you’re good to go! Another thing to keep in mind is anyone with a DNA Essentials license won’t receive application or usage data.

Catalyst 916X Here At Last!

Its one of the many reasons I love Cisco Live the gifts never stop coming! And if the paring of Meraki & Catalyst wasn’t enough. The extension of the Wi-Fi6E AP keeps the excitement going. With the new Catalyst CW9162, CW9164 & CW9166 models they’ll all offer a ton of solid features & capabilities. As well as the ability to be monitored through the Meraki Dashboard itself!

For the first time the best of both worlds are coming together! And through it’s only the beginning with cloud integration. The next phase will see complete management of your devices though the Meraki cloud. For me pumped doesn’t even begin to describe my feeling! I can’t wait to see what what’s coming next, and I hope ya’ll feel just as excited for what the future holds with Cisco delivering & exceeding expectations once again! Until next time be safe everyone, keep your eyes peeled for more exciting news, demos and more as we’ll have so many more takeaways from Cisco Live 2022 !

Best Regards,

Girard

It’s no secret were 18 days away from the premier global IT event! That’s right Cisco Live 2022 is back and bigger than ever baby! And most importantly for the first time in three years in person once again. Showcasing the ultimate entertainment and technology today. So many vendors, IT professionals and more will be there including my phenomenal friends from Opengear. And there was no better way to get prepared on the road to this event then having the honor and privilege to get to sit with a spectacular panel hosted by them to discuss a slew of different topics including the event itself I highly suggest you check out here!

Opengear is without question the ultimate in Out Of Band Management solutions and places the highest emphasis on Network Resiliency. Founded in 2004, Opengear has been a beacon of light for so many organizations & network engineers worldwide! Aiding in not only managing and monitoring your environments when our primary networks are down. But also providing fully independent solutions to continue troubleshooting without the extra work makes them an asset to any organization their team & solutions are a part of!

In this webinar which consisted of an all-star lineup including Jason Gooley, Roy Chua, Ryan Hogg & yours truly. From how businesses have felt the impact of resiliency on the network, to how can we help prepare the next generation of engineers. And most importantly some solid sessions to keep your eye out for at this year’s Cisco Live event! Oh, and a great laugh or 50 of them ha-ha. The honor and privilege was all mine and I once again thank Opengear, and such an incredible group of individuals for having me on to partake in this amazing discussion. If you missed it don’t worry! You can check it out! And if you haven’t go to register for this year’s event here to hang with all of us, Opengear and more. Until next time stay safe everyone & hopefully ill see you at Cisco Live 2022!

Best Regards,

Girard

Networking Field Day 28 was another phenomenal opportunity to showcase some amazing companies & solutions coming down the pipeline as well as getting to hang with another stellar lineup of delegates and presenters this go around at NFD28! So, let’s not waste anytime let’s dive into the event itself!

My Favorite Presenters

Every Tech Field Day event there’s always some phenomenal presentations from some great companies and once everything’s finished, I always have my favorites coming out of the event! This time around my favorite presentations came right from PathSolutions, Augtera and Pica8 who were some of the few that brought their best! Let’s look into what they had to offer and what’s coming up!

PathSolutions

Me and PathSolutions go way back to my first Tech Field Day event Networking Field Day 26! And as always, they didn’t disappoint. Building upon their existing solution which allows you insight into your network before major or critical issues arise. Their newer version TotalView v12 now provides a ton of additional features as well as a more detailed focus on automating troubleshooting features and proving deeper insight into remote workers having issues.

Detailing everything from which switch and interface the device is connected to. Even providing depth to whether certain tasks or processes are pulling the most resources are just some of the newest features in v12. Policy monitoring is also another key highlight showcasing what new devices are on the network, where’s it connected and what is it doing assuring that any unwanted ones that could open door to bigger threats are handled appropriately.

One of the most exciting things for me though was showing how they continued to build upon troubleshooting issues with remote workers which has still for some time been a problem.

“My internet connection is slow” while working from home is and continues to be a recurring issue. The problem is how to do you troubleshoot a needle in a haystack? By outlining a basic scope of the problem with Path Solutions not only does it outline where to pinpoint in troubleshooting first. But as the heuristics to each piece of the software are continuously growing, narrowing down these issues becomes simpler by the minute.

Bandwidth and Cable predictors are another huge feature showing where the most bandwidth is being used, but also foreshadowing certain interfaces that could become an issue later. Having Path Solutions in your environment is key especially in filtering out basic troubleshooting issues before being escalated when they may not need to be! With a tool this incredible out jobs continually become even easier.

Augtera

Its no secret that Network Automation has and continues to be at the forefront of where were headed. And with this platform it provides us ways to not only correlate data and patterns at scale, but also create detailed solutions based on that data for engineers to be proactive and remain in the front of major infrastructure issues.

Their demo gave great Insight into how utilizing machine learning can change the way we utilize DevOps and if you haven’t, I highly suggest you check it out!

Pica8

Prior to this event I didn’t know much about Pica8 but I’m glad I do now! Their title slide said it all one single license to automate them all! And they weren’t lying.

Offering a full all in one solution for your infrastructure needs, this can be deployed for campus, data center, or branch. Focusing on Network Automation my favorite!

Pica8 is comprised of two different solutions, AmpCon which is their command center for viewing your entire network. And PicOS which can turn any white box into a full enterprise level switch and then be automated by the AmpCon solution. AmpCon offers a wide range of feature including switch deployment at a rapid pace, scheduled backups & upgrades, as well as utilizing Ansible playbooks to automate multiple tasks and create your own workflows.

But the real highlight is their licensing model, which allows one license to be run anywhere, anytime. That means you can swap hardware, have no limits on port size or performance it’s a dream come true! With competitive software pricing Pica8 is on my radar and is a tremendous solution with a big payoff that can benefit any environment!

With spectacular presentations also from Juniper, Arista, Netris, Gluware & Progress. Networking Field Day 28 was another one for the books. And while I couldn’t be there with my fellow delegates in person. It just builds the anticipation even more and makes it more exciting to make my in person return hopefully very soon! Another huge thank you to the presenters, delegates & Gestalt IT team. Ya’ll are the best and continue to make these events as incredible as you do! Until the next time ill see you everyone!

Best Regards,

Girard

It’s crazy to think Security Field Day came and went so quick a month or so back. But while I’m sad I still miss everyone in person. I’ll be getting the opportunity to join another phenomenal event & most importantly the one that started my Tech Field Day journey as I’m retuning to Networking Field Day 28! So, let’s not waste anytime let’s look at some of the incredible vendors & delegates that will be at this event in a few weeks!

Pica8

I’m definitely looking forward to hearing from Pica8 as this is my first time getting to see them present! designed as an open networking software alternative. I’m excited to see what new solutions they’ve been working on and that’ll be coming down & could help immensely on the automation and management side of things!

Gluware

Gluware has been one of the industry’s top leaders and its no secret that their incredible Network Automation platform provides an entirely different layer and perspective to not only how we manage large, multi-vendor networks. But also, how we improve those processes to prevent outages, increase security and makes deployments much simpler and more efficient. This is one presentation to keep your eye on!

Augtera

Focusing on utilizing AI to make todays network more manageable and scalable. This organization uses state of the art machine learning to filter though tons of data to focus on the main action able items that need to be addressed. I haven’t heard much about this organization so I’m interested to see what solutions they bring that can further make our day to day even easier!

Netris

Netris is changing the way we operate on our prem networks. Utilizing the automation tools of tomorrow such as Kubernetes, Terraform & Rest API’s. This can offer more insight into DevOps workflows and provide a cloud like experience unlike any other.

Rounding out with what I know will be spectacular presentations from Progress, NetBeez, Arista, Juniper & one of my favorite companies from my first Networking Field Day Path Solutions! This event is going to be spectacular & getting to hang with fellow seasoned delegates Bruno Wollmann, David Varnum, John Herbert, Keith Townsend & Rita Younger. To some new and familiar individuals, I’ve gotten to share this with before such as Jason Gintert, Jeremy Schulman, Jordan Villarreal and our newest delegate Martin Duggan! Getting to share the panel with these icons from all over is going to make this event even more special! If you haven’t check out Tech Field Day website for more info regarding this event & others. And be sure to follow the event using the hashtag #NFD28 for more news updates & to ask me and my fellow delegates & presenters questions leading up to the big event and day of! Get your calendars ready for May 4th to 6^th for Networking Field Day 28. Until next time, stay safe and I’ll see you all next week!

Best Regards,

Girard

Wrapping up Security Field Day 7 over the course of the last few days saw a ton of additional presenters & fun activities afterwards that myself & the other delegates participated in! So, let’s not waste anytime let’s take a look at some of the other presenters and fun events over the remainder of XFD7 in San Jose!

Microsoft Security

Microsoft had some interesting perspectives & solutions they brought to the table at the event. Focusing more on Zero Trust Architecture & a suite of products to align with it such as Microsoft Defender, 365 & Endpoint Manager.

One of the takeaways I enjoyed was though their EDR solution Microsoft Sentinel which sees the expansion of the traditional EDR solution to more of a cloud focused solution. Also 365 Defender provided some new features and a phenomenal demo of the newest version!

Arista

I felt it was a little slow in the beginning to get my interest, but Arista brought it back strong diving into their take on EDR solutions and how to focus on key areas such as the landscape today, what to do when we’ve verified threats and where to go from there.

The only issue I did have was at times it seemed poorly structured and could be confusing at times, but they did provide a solid finish with their demos overall!

Rounding out the presenters was Juniper, ZPE, Progress & Rubrik who over the last two days delivered some presentations and great info you don’t want to miss they’re defiantly worth checking out at the Tech Field Day site!

Escape Room & Delegates Fun!

Outside of the presentations, there was no lack of entertainment! Getting to spend time with the event staff and delegates was such a pleasure as they always make sure these events are top notch and Security Field Day 7 was no different! For the longest time I’ve heard stories of just how incredible these in person events were and getting to experience one for the first time was truly a blast. From the dinners, laughs to an escaping Midnight In Hong Kong! Everyone made this event truly special in so many ways, I met & made new friends and finally got to meet everyone in person, after a long two years it was defiantly much needed, and I hope to get to see everyone again very soon!

With my first in person event in the books I can say without question it was a huge success! But that success is only possible by the people who make it so & you surround yourself with. Everyone at Gestalt IT does such an amazing job at making sure these so special and I’m honored they allow me to continue to be part of their family and partake in these spectacular events! To the delegates you’re all one of a kind and I appreciate getting to be up there with everyone as we got to see some incredible presenters and made some great memories. Thank ya’ll again & until the next Tech Field Day event ill see you all soon!

Best Regards,

Girard

Security Field Day 7 has come and went and what an event it was! So many phenomenal presenters, my first time getting to be in person and finally meeting so many of my close friends & delegates and some new ones also. There’s a ton to unpack and this piece and my next one will do just that. But don’t worry you won’t get just get my side of this incredible event, as some of the other Delegates and some Cisco Champions will share their takeaways also so let’s not waste anytime let’s dive in!

Evan Mintzer- @EvanMintzer

Overall, it was a great event, and the Gestalt team did an awesome job (as usual). I thought the Keeper presentation was the most interesting one – it was great that my questions were answered before I could even ask. It really got me thinking about staying with LastPass – at least it deserves another look. My thought on the worst presentation was Microsoft because it was the same old thing, I always hear from them – they have all these wonderful features, but they will only admit when pressed that you need to upgrade your licenses. My most awkward presentation was from Progress because the presenter was just not ready. I asked a question that I thought was a good conversation starter and it turned into a huge flop.
 
As for the time outside of the presentations, the Escape room was so much fun (with just the right amount of anxiety) and the tour of the Mystery House was a really good addition. Of course, getting to hang out with such wonderful & smart people is my favorite. 

Jody Lemoine- @GhostInTheNet

I normally gravitate towards NFD events, but this is my second XFD and I’m glad I went. It gave me an opportunity to look at what I do from a different angle and tweak a few strategies as I go. As for presenters, I was forced to do some re-evaluation in the case of Keeper Security. I had some bad customer service experience with them last year and dropped them like a hot potato. After that presentation, I’m way more ready to write that experience off as customer service gaffe and give them another whirl. There’s a lot of coolness there.
 
I’m not at all a storage guy, but the Racktop presentation was intriguing. Most of my customer base is mid-market, smaller enterprise, and small business with unique requirements. A secure storage solution with deduplication, encryption, snapshotting, and journaling priced at US$500/TB/year is a solution for the masses.
 
Juniper had an interesting story to tell. Yes, they fell into the whole “let’s tie the cloud solution into our hardware” vendor strategy that’s all too common, but at least they only tied it into one product.
 
Microsoft fell into the same vendor strategy but aggravated the situation by being SaaS. We’re going to build a solution that’s only applicable if you’re already using our entire ecosystem – and the only way we’re going to make it easy is by assuming that you’re going to pay for the large license to do it. I have customers that are well-distributed between Office365 / Azure, Google Workspace / GCP, AWS, and smaller IaaS providers. If the product is only applicable to one set of those, it might be super-cool within its scope, but it’s completely irrelevant outside of it.

Escape room was really awesome. This was the first time I’ve done a competitive one (other than an unofficial race to finish our independent rooms quicker than the other team) and it added a new element to the whole thing. I felt like a bit of an idiot for missing the tattoo theme in the posters, but I’ll get over it.
 
The Mystery House was an experience and a half. I think I had heard of it before, but at best it was one of those things that only existed in dim memory before we arrived. The stories behind those are always fascinating.
 
I appreciated the food much more than my diet did. The Yankee swap was fun, as always. (I’m on chapter four of “This is How They Tell Me the World Will End”, Domenik and it’s got me well and truly sucked into the story.) Hopefully Matt hasn’t gone into a sugar coma with the maple sugar candies.
 
After in Tom’s room was arguably more entertaining than having a night out would have been. The banter over the disassembly of gadgets is always going to make me smile.
 
…and yes, I have a tendency to be long-winded when I write.

Chris Hayner- @Hayner80

This was a great event, and very different in format than anything I’ve done before. I am used to either a 1v1 sales meeting type of feel, or being preached to from up on stage (as in any standard conference setting, ReInvent, Ignite, etc.), but this had much more of a collaborative feel. Obviously not all presentations were perfect, but in general I think they all got the idea and came to the table ready to communicate, not just pontificate. 

Keeper Security definitely seemed to me the most polished and compelling presentation. The demonstration section in particular showed off their product in a great light, and the presenter himself was clearly extremely knowledgeable. I had never heard of Keeper before this but it’s got my attention now- from both individual user and an Enterprise posture. Not a lot of other password/secrets management software out there can do both at such a seemingly high level. 

One overarching theme I sensed was the need to interconnect all things. This was most clearly stated by Microsoft, where their pitch for SIEM+XDR was essentially “all these pieces are great on their own, sure; but to really maximize value, everything should talk to (our cloud-based) SIEM.” And there’s logic to that- it’s the million different data points that lead back to a successful advanced threat detection, not just another stronger firewall. (Although Microsoft did emphasize that Sentinel can ingest logs from your firewall too. 

When it comes to this kind of interconnectedness, it also came up a few times how your environment informs the home bases of these vendors on building threat fingerprints and identities. Microsoft said something like 24 trillion actions were a part of their baseline analysis- stands to reason that your organization’s actions are in there. So simultaneously you are benefiting from the communal knowledge while you are also contributing to it. 

It was refreshing to see some vendors from other disciplines making a statement as well. Rubrik and Racktop are really intent on changing the way people think about laying out and securing their storage. It was a nice compliment to the Arista and Juniper presentations. It will always be crucial to secure the network, but lets look at ways of encrypting what the network connects to as well. 

Racktop has a really flexible deployment and licensing model that is going to be of great benefit to companies that want to build slowly, and their 90 day free trial is very generous. It doesn’t seem like it’s just a “download and let us know when you’re ready to buy,” either- once you start your eval you can talk to the engineering team, get questions answered, get help with deployment. These are the kinds of things that will make people comfortable with a new technology.

My Favorite Presenters

Every Tech Field Day event there’s always some phenomenal presentations from some great companies and once everything’s finished, I always have my favorites coming out of the event! Security Feld Day was no different! As without question my two favorites came from Keeper Security & RackTop Systems let’s look more into what they both brought at XFD7!
 
Keeper Security

Photo Credit: Keeper
Keeper brought one incredible presentation to the table and highlighted some amazing features that have def opened my eyes to newer ways we utilize password management in our environments!

Utilizing both Zero Knowledge & Zero Trust Architecture they’ve developed Keeper Secrets Manager an incredible cloud-based solution for managing not only key IT Infrastructure keys, passwords, and other sensitive information. But providing newer ways in which not only can we view and manage data, but also share access as needed at different levels.

Providing such richer features, its fully Integratable into any environment and supports endless DevOps tools at any level. One of my favorite features among the list is a feature called Commander CLI which provides a ton of tools that can audit reports at any time to see who has access to certain shares they shouldn’t, what time data was accessed & what folders you may need to take away! The demo was great and if you haven’t keep your eyes peeled for this solution and other amazing ones coming down the line from Keeper!

RackTop Systems

Now they say you always save the best for last! And in this case, I had very much looked forward to what RackTop Systems was bringing to Security Field Day 7 & they did not disappoint! In 2010 when the organization was founded, they took a completely different approach to how they focused on CyberStorage in an era of Cyber based attacks.

Through the development of their BrickStor solution, they now provide one of the best ways to not only monitor the way people view their data but most importantly how to keep them safe & prevent them from growing threats such as Ransomware, insider threats and other Cyberattacks. As a cloud NAS based solution, this utilizes not only user behavior over SMB & NFS, but also was designed for most generalists as a simplistic solution that can be deployed in any environment and with ease.

There’re so many features I can’t wait to dive in further in my own lab! But one of my favorites is the Active Defense feature which offers real time response & incident management that can detect data theft & ransomware attacks in real time!

Now I highly recommend seeing the full demo at the Tech Field Day website. But here’s a sneak peak of the demo we got!

And it was amazing to see how fast and efficient not only it detected a ransomware attack, but also immediately killing the connection to the machine and seeing through the dashboard what file was infected, quarantined, and next steps to protect the remaining data itself. RackTop by far is doing huge things & its def a solution I would recommend to my clients themselves at every level!
 
With so many other incredible presentations and the overall event itself we’ll cover the rest of the event and more in our next post since like me I had a ton to unpack! Until next time, stay safe and I’ll talk to you all soon!
 
Best Regards,
Girard

Its crazy to think it felt like just yesterday I made the announcement that I was going to be attending my first in person field day event at Security Field Day 7 in Silicon Valley on March 23^rd. But guess what… IT’S NEXT WEEK!!! And I’ve been so excited & ready for this event it’s going to be phenomenal. So, to get pumped and get some insight into what’s going on lets take a look at some of the incredible vendors that will be presenting at this years in person event!

Rubrik

It’s no secret that data security & protection is always at the forefront of keeping our environments safe. And with Rubrik they offer some amazing solutions to stay steps ahead of today’s forever changing landscape of threats, ransomware and more. And I can’t wait to see what they’ll be bringing to this year’s event!

Arista

Arista has been one of the industry’s top leaders in networking solutions ranging from Data Center & campus environments to real time automation analytics and security through their CloudVision & Arista EOS platforms. I had the privilege of seeing the amazing new things they were bring to the networking space at my first event Networking Field Day 26 and I’m looking forward to getting a peek at what’s coming down the line in their security suite!

Keeper

More and more were seeing breaches across many platforms all stemming from password breaches & cyberattacks that are never ending. I’m looking forward to hearing from Keeper! as I’ve never gotten to utilize any of their solutions it’ll be exciting to see what tools we can implement into our environments to change the way we prevent these types of attacks from happening

ZPE

It’s no question that ZPE always bring their A game! And after seeing what they had to offer at Networking Field Day 26. I can’t wait to see what else they have cooking up as far as expanding upon their incredible OOB & cloud-based solutions, as well as new security offerings.

Rounding out with what I know will be spectacular presentations from Microsoft Security, Racktop, Juniper & Progress. This event is going to be great & getting to hang with fellow delegates from all over is going to make this event more special! If you haven’t check out the Tech Field Day website for more info regarding this event & others. And be sure to follow the event using the hashtag #XFD7 for more news updates & to ask me and my fellow delegates & presenters questions leading up to the big event and day of! Get your calendars ready for March 23^rd to 25^th for Security Field Day 7. Until next time, stay safe and I’ll see you all next week!

Best Regards,

Girard