Month: June 2017

HPE Discover 2017, Las Vegas

Attending HPE Discover 2017 did not disappoint. It was a fabulous week filled with presentations from subject matter experts on cool new tech, conversations with incredibly talented engineers and bloggers, and maximum levels of geeking out with other geeks.

I suspect this blog audience would be super interested to hear more about the new 8400 Aruba core switch announced at HPE Discover this year.

The speeds and feeds, along with and all the usual data sheet info is here, but what really stands out is the emphasis on telemetry data and programmability. Much of the focus on visibility and automation has been leveraged to make troubleshooting easier for the engineer.

The demonstration I saw up close was a simple script that allowed for monitoring of the priority voice queue. The script automagically detected any issues with the queue, captured offending packets when there was an issue, and presented the info to the user.  The Network Analytics Engine even gave some guesses as to why the issue occurred.  The demo I saw is pretty similar to what you can see in this short demo.

The 8400 is the first core switch Aruba has come out with, and it touts a new OS based on the existing Aruba switch OS. Yes, the thought of a new OS makes me a tad nervous when talking core switching, so be sure to check out the Coffee Talk Day 2’s first session in which the thoroughness of the OS testing process is discussed. If you’d rather not watch the whole thing, just know that code quality is a focus of the developers involved.

Other cool HPE Discover announcements included Aruba Asset Tracking, which leverages BLE enabled tags and Meridian Location Services to keep up with your stuff in real time. Data sheet goodness is here – see excerpt below from the data sheet to see the APs that support Asset Tracking.

For more HPE Discover 2017 goodness, check out these recorded sessions, I especially recommend Day Three’s talk on machine learning algorithms and the state of AI, completely fascinating, totally nerdy goodness.

Coffee Talks Day 1
Coffee Talks Day 2
Coffee Talks Day 3

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2017, Las Vegas, USA
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2017, Las Vegas, USA

Disclaimer: While HPE was very generous to invite me to this great event, my opinions are totally my own, as all redheads are far too stubborn to have it any other way.  Also, special thanks to Pegah, Laura, and Becca for doing such a great job organizing this event.

Oracle Ravello Blogger Day, 2017

Attending Oracle Ravello Blogger Day last month provided me deep insight into two products I knew little about before attending, Oracle Cloud and Ravello.  After the excellent deep dive provided and the basic melting of my brain on all things hypervisor, virtualization, and cloud, crafting an intelligible post seems a formidable challenge. But here we go:

Oracle has a cloud?! Yup. And they are pretty serious about where they are taking this. Over the last three years, there’s been a serious commitment to time and resources to build this thing and to build it right. Clay Magouyrk, VP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, jokingly commented one best things about being late to the cloud game is learning from other peoples mistakes.  Cloud isn’t new and watching what is working for the market leaders and avoiding their pitfalls is practically industry tradition.  But there’s differentiation here as well, with Oracle touting non over-subscription, predictable latency, bare metal access, and competitive pricing.  The Oracle cloud still has construction work to be done – only two US regions (think availability zones) are available at this time, but a European region is soon to be established.

Ravello, what is is? Ravello uses nested virtualization to allow you to bring your VMware based applications into the cloud without changing anything about them.  It reads the metadata of your virtual machines, sets up your virtual networking for you, and presto! You have your VMware environment running on cloud infrastructure.  Why is this handy?  Well, lots of vExperts have already leveraged this for their studies and lab environments.  Being able to test large scale scenarios without laying out great big wads of cash into your own virtual infrastructure is huge. For you networkers, this reminds me of Forward Networks where you basically have an accurate running copy of your network that you can break as you will. My favorite case study presented at Oracle Ravello Blogger Day was a network security company whose Ravello template, comprised of hundreds of endpoints and servers, is used to train engineers using true-to-life malware incidents.

Why Ravello and Oracle Cloud together? Ravello has in the past been cloud agnostic and still plans to stay that way, but there will be added benefits if you chose to run Ravello on Oracle cloud – those benefits stemming from the ability of Ravello developers to tap into the underlying infrastructure and eek out that extra bit of performance.  I would try to explain the hypervisor intricacies that allow this dark magic to happen, but I would quickly resort to words like abracadabra and shibboleet.

Fortunately, many of my vExpert friends have already blogged on the finer details of Oracle Cloud and the Ravello announcements and I highly encourage you to check these out:

Chris Wahl (@chriswahl): Getting Nerdy on the Oracle Ravello Cloud Service

Ather Beg (@atherbeg): Oracle Ravello Blogger Day – Part 1: Oracle Cloud Oracle Ravello Blogger Day – Part 2: Ravello

Gareth Edwards (@garethedwards86): Ravello 2017 Bloggers Conference – Opening Post #RBD1

Max Mortillaro (@darkkavenger): RT1 – Oracle Cloud Strategy: Part 1 – Oracle Ravello Cloud Service

Matt Leib (@MBLeib): Ravello Systems Changing the Game

James Green (@jdgreen): Can Oracle Build a Viable Public Cloud

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor): Oracle’s Cloud Investment is Real

Tim Smith (@tsmith_co): Ravello and the Oracle Cloud Journey

 

Disclaimer: While Mark Troyer and the awesome folks at Teck Reckoning were very generous to invite me to this fantastic event which was awesome, my opinions are totally my own, as all redheads are far too stubborn to have it any other way.

 

Published 06/02/2017