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Network Field Day 28 – Recap and Review

  I had the opportunity to participate as a delegate at Network Field Day 28, and I wanted to share my experience.

What is Network Field Day?

Network Field Day is one of the Tech Field Day events put on by Gestalt IT where sponsoring vendors present to a panel of delegates.  Network Field Day is specifically focused on networking solutions, and there are other events including Security Field Day and Storage Field Day with content that aligns to the respective categories.
There are usually about twelve delegates per event, with each one being invite-only.  Each delegate is independent (not employed by a vendor, or an industry analyst), is active in the community through things like blogs, podcasts, social media, etc, and could be considered a subject matter expert on the event topic.
There’s a lot of information on how TFD works at their “About” page – https://techfieldday.com/about/ I recommend checking out the infographic, and reading through the FAQ to get a better understanding of what the event is about.
Want to find out more about the presenters or delegates?  Want to watch the recorded sessions?  Go to the NFD28 page to get all that and more!

Vendor Presentations

The event spanned three days, with 9 presenters, with 13.5 hours of presentations and 4.5 hours of off-camera conversations.  Plus there were plenty of conversations with other delegates throughout the event.  That said, this isn’t an exhaustive review of everything.  I’ll be working on putting more detailed posts together soon.

Day 1

Juniper https://www.juniper.net/

Juniper had two 1.5 hour sessions, so there was a lot of information to cover.  There were a couple specific areas that they talked about extensively – Marvis and Apstra.
Marvis is Juniper’s AI that is used to help improve network operations.  One of the use cases would be streamlined anomaly detection, even to the point of potentially predicting issues before they occur.  There was a lot of discussion around Full Stack AIOps, along with a demo.  Another use case they presented was around wireless performance.  By collecting wireless performance data Marvis can recommend adding or moving APs to improve coverage.
Apstra is a solution that allows network teams to build out templates for data center deployments.  The cool thing that Apstra does is it disassociates the template from the underlying devices.  A single template could be deployed against Juniper, Cisco, and Arista hardware (among others) without needing to make any changes.  It takes the concept of intent-based networking and applies it in a mostly vendor agnostic way.  One of the use cases that was easy to see was environments that are being forced to look to different hardware vendors due to supply chain shortages. Continue reading “Network Field Day 28 – Recap and Review”