I walked away with the following quote, I apologize that I didn’t write down exactly who said it. We’re “getting away from being the dumb plumber”.  Big Switch is using their fabric to make multiple copies of traffic and pass those copies to a services node which can provide de-duplication, packet slicing or regex pattern matching.

You’ll find all the videos and presentations for Tech Field Day 11 on the website;

http://techfieldday.com/appearance/big-switch-networks-presents-at-networking-field-day-11/

Big Switch has a virtual lab which you can work with to try out their solutions and management tools, labs.bigswitch.com. I believe it’s built more around their Big Cloud Fabric. Scratch that they have their Big Monitoring Fabric in there.

In the real world working at a large e-commerce retailer I have the need to provide multiple copies of all Internet traffic for security, IDS/IPS, for customer service, IBM Tealeaf and for general network troubleshooting and performance. If your network is small enough you can usually accomplish this for a few SPAN or mirror ports but if you have a larger network you’ll need something like a Gigamon appliance and potentially inline taps which can be rather expensive. Big Switch has a solution that is very cost competitive compared and worth the look if you are in the market.

Cheers!

We had presentations from Skyport Systems, NetScout (formerly Fluke), Big Switch, Silver Peak, Dell, Cisco and Citrix. The folks over at Gestalt IT brought together a who’s who list of technology and networking professionals, and I was honored to be included among them. The discussions covered a wide breadth of topics and technology. Over the next few weeks I hope to find the time to post some of my thoughts and perspective on each of the presentations.

It was great to meet Brandon, Dominik, Ethan, Greg, Jason, John, Jon, Jordan, Matt, Phil, Terry, Stephen and Tom. If you missed any of the presentations you can see them again by visiting the Tech Field Day website and clicking on the specific presentations made at Networking Field Day 11.

I had hoped to be writing this from the plane but I’m currently writing this from the Biltmore Hotel and Suites since my return flight was canceled. I’ll hopefully be flying out tomorrow via Chicago and then on to Philadelphia. I’m hearing that the snow is really falling and blowing in the Philadelphia suburbs thanks to Winter Storm Jonas. The forecast is for 18″-24″ of snow for the Philadelphia area. I’m not sure I would describe it as a snowmageddon, but there’s definitely going to be a lot of snow to deal with whenever I return to Philadelphia. I can only imagine what the economy parking lot will look like at the Philadelphia airport.

Stay safe everyone!

Cheers!