I enjoyed Cloud Field Day 13 (CFD13) in Santa Clara, CA back in February 2022 so much that I jumped at the chance to team up with a whole new set of colleagues at yet another Tech Field Day event in early April – Tech Field Day 25 – to review some amazing technology from seven different vendors. I have to admit that though the “big guns” at the event (more in my next blog post) brought their A-teams to present on their newest offerings, it seemed to me that the smaller vendors were more than willing to try punching above their weight and present their stories with a lot more verve and nuance.
Nasuni: Not Our Parent’s File Storage
As a past technology advocate for Hitachi Data Storage and as an Oracle DBA consultant, I’ve always been keenly interested in file storage technology. How much it’s progressed exponentially in the last decade was evident when Nasuni showed off their Nasuni File Services platform and its capabilities built to handle the demands of today’s cloud computing environments, with its UniFS file system underpinning storage for AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Ten years ago, we worried about losing critical files or chunks of databases; today’s key challenges include rapid restoration of files that’ve been compromised due to ransomware attacks. One especially innovative idea that they talked about is their Nasuni Labs portal. It’s a free, public, GitHub-based repository of open-source projects that they and their customer base has built over the past few years. The idea here is to provide faster uptake among and allow collaboration between storage solution professionals to solve specific problems within their environments – an excellent way to show support for your client base.
Apica: Let’s Break This App, Oh, a Few Bazillion Times
I started out my IT career as an application developer, and I still have a few broken keyboards to prove my frustration when I missed testing out a key (or not-so-key!) feature with adequate workloads and complexity. So I was intrigued when Apica presented their Active Monitoring Platform that offers full lifecycle testing that focuses on a user’s journey through an application, rather than just simulating random tests or recorded keystrokes. Apica’s toolset makes it possible to test applications at scale as well by quickly building reusable, scripted test cases to be used to ramp up thousands of simultaneous users running millions of test points – including purposely introducing invalid data! – against a pre-production application. Apica also offers application monitoring that’s integratable with popular support tools like Grafana or Splunk.
Keysight: So … How Many Users Can Our Network Really Handle?
Even with reliable cloud storage and the capability to hammer an application with millions of tests, one key component of a reliable user experience is still lacking: how well the actual network itself can handle extreme user demands. Keysight, an offspring of the venerable Hewlett-Packard, a company well-known for its passion to innovate – covered that need with a demo of their new CyPerf product. In today’s world of distributed zero trust networks composed of complex virtualized components – VPNs, VCNs, edge computing devices, and of course, the switches hooked to my Oracle database servers! – CyPerf can simulate actual network traffic across environments so administrators and testers can evaluate just how well current, expected workload levels will perform, as well as the impact of upscaling that traffic as demand increases seasonally.
Fortinet: Detecting & Deflecting Virtual Knives
I’d first encountered the Fortinet team at CFD13 and was blown away by their offerings at that event. I’m the first person to admit that I’m no internet security expert, but I do keep a close eye on trends in security penetration hijinks and techniques that bad actors typically use. Fortinet’s team showed off their FortiWeb product with live demos of how three different and increasingly sophisticated security breach vectors of attack – bot-based user simulation, data scraping, and missing user input sanitation – were detected, analyzed, and almost immediately contained within seconds through Fortinet’s dual layers of machine learning, all with virtually no human intervention.
It was the most interesting presentation at the event – just the right bit of marketing with plenty of pertinent demonstration of how their security toolset just worked. My only infinitestimal critique: Their technical expert playing the security admin role could be a bit more enthusiastic when she blocked the final rather sophisticated attempt, perhaps just smiling wickedly and saying sweetly, “Well, this is what happens when you bring a virtual knife to a security gunfight.” 😉
