Tech Field Day Podcast

Techies are inherently curious, and magic happens when they step outside their area of expertise and really dig into something new. That’s what we’re talking about this week on the On-Premise IT Roundtable with a set of delegates from Tech Field Day 24. We’re mixing disciplines and breaking down the walls between industry verticals and learning about everything from IoT to storage to container man...

With a hybrid work model now a reality for a growing number of enterprise employees, IT departments are now rethinking the way they deploy their resources. One of the big questions is what happens during the next upgrade cycle. Are IT budgets going to be cut? Do we need full-featured devices in an office no one is going to visit? Should that spending be shifted to the end users or to cloud service...

Today, it seems like every cloud vendor is pitching a service mesh, but is this really necessary? In this episode, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Ned Bellavance, and Jason Benedicic join Stephen Foskett to discuss the value of a service mesh to modern application stacks. In theory, a service mesh facilitates communication between services and microservices in modern applications. It also provides a data a...

The history of information technology is bound up with hype. In this discussion, Tech Field Day 24 delegates Paul Stringfellow, Robert Novak, and Craig Rodgers discuss the endless parade of hype with Stephen Foskett. Whether it’s 5G or edge or disaggregated infrastructure or the cloud, every technology goes through a wave of hype before it becomes reality. How can we tell what a technology will re...

In today’s ever-shifting enterprise IT landscape, when is the right time to completely respec your storage setup? Should you tear it all down and start over? Should you learn from the past and keep some of the old ways? When it comes to innovating storage practices in a changing world, there are a lot of opinions on how to do it. Join host Stephen Foskett and his round table of esteemed guests fro...

Storage administration has always been about fighting bottlenecks, but today’s architecture means it’s time to embrace them instead. In this episode, our panel discusses the premise that it’s most important to match bottlenecks to the position in the infrastructure stack and application. One reason for this is the amazing bandwidth and low latency we have, thanks to Optane PMEM, NVMe, flash, and o...

Traditional IT architecture is a poor fit for modern applications and holds us all back. So-called technical debt can pile up, forcing companies to spend time and money supporting legacy infrastructure for the sake of keeping it running rather than moving the company forward. In this special episode of the On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast, sponsored by Pure Storage , we discuss the modern applicat...

Multi-cloud has quickly become a buzzword in the enterprise IT industry, but as organizations start to adopt multi-cloud strategies, their reasoning behind the switch may not justify the act itself. Although a multi-cloud approach can increase an organization’s availability, that alone doesn’t warrant introducing the complexity and costs that come with multi-cloud. Listen to this episode of the On...

The world is starting to recover from the pandemic. People are starting to ask if it’s time to return to the office. And more than a few aren’t ready to go back. At the same time, employers are trying to find a way to get people back, and they’re asking questions about the infrastructure. Could new fast wireless access points be the tipping point? In this episode, we discuss whether or not new wir...

Cloud is the way that we consume our media, content, and even perform our jobs. We rely on it daily to live our lives. And cloud relies on services to ensure prompt delivery and reliable service. We know networking and storage are critical. What about the other services that we don’t always see? In this episode, we explore the importance of DNS to the way modern cloud operates and decide whether o...

Cloud computing has transformed enterprise IT, but it is perhaps less obvious how traditional concepts like data protection and high availability have infiltrated the public cloud. In this episode, Cloud Field Day 11 delegates Max Mortillaro, Adam Post, and Thom Greene join Stephen Foskett to discuss the many ways that cloud computing has adapted to the demands of the enterprise. This has been cal...

With so much data at the average organization’s disposal, the task of storing it all — and storing it in an effective manner — seems to be quickly becoming more than humans can handle on their own. In this episode of the On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast, sponsored by Pure Storage , host Stephen Foskett is joined by Pure’s Prakash Darji, as well as IT luminaries, Gina Rosenthal and Chris Grundemann...

With the rise of Kubernetes and other completely cloud-based deployments, on-premises data centers seem to be on the way out to make way for the scalability and dynamism of the cloud. Innovations in data center and AI composability showcased by Xilinx and Micron at the last Tech Field Day event as well as those displayed by Liqid at the recent AI Field Day event , however, might say otherwise. By...

The enterprise storage industry has passed from the hard disk era through hybrid to all-flash, but what comes next? In this sponsored episode, Moshe Twitto of Pliops joins Enrico Signoretti, Chris Evans, and Stephen Foskett to discuss the end of the SSD era. Considering the durability issues of NAND flash, the limited value add of most SSDs, and the emergence of disaggregated infrastructure, the i...

AI-powered applications are rolling out everywhere, but enterprises are really not ready for this shift. From lack of infrastructure to power training and inferencing, to a skills gap to manage data and AI, to a lack of readiness to deal with diversity and ethics, there are many holes in enterprise IT. Engineering teams tend to approach all applications from a technical perspective, but AI brings...

The enterprise network is full of data. We’ve spent the past decade trying to learn how to unlock those secrets. However, the recent shift away from on-premises networks to cloud-focused solutions means much of the progress we’ve made obsolete. We live in a world of telemetry and analytics and data lakes, not SNMP and simple measurements. In this episode, brought to you by Cisco, we take on the pr...

We spent hours and hours, dollars and dollars to create state-of-the-art networks, ensuring that all the computers in our companies could talk to each other. Now, it seems like nobody uses them… unless they’re accessing their cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms. Have networks just become on-ramps to the internet interstate? As we ramp up for Networking Field Day 25 , Tom and Co...

SD-WAN has been the truest example of implementing software-defined networking in the last decade. With the rise of SASE, we’re seeing the integration of software-defined security as well. SD-WAN helped us tie our branch offices together in ways we never thought possible. But the environment of 2020 and beyond doesn’t look like a traditional office any longer. Workers are leveraging the cloud more...

Dynamic. Extensible. Scalable. These are just some of the key traits today’s companies need from their infrastructure, and frankly, it seems like the server as it has been known is not built to the same specifications. Add on top of that the upcoming announcements by Micron and Xilinx, covered in the next Tech Field Day event at the end of April , and it’s apparent that major changes are in store...

Wi-Fi networking is the way we do business today in the enterprise. Our workstations, printers, and mobile devices are all connected with the technology to allow us to roam around without wires. But what about 5G? The newest generation of mobile broadband technology is rapidly being deployed and adopted. Recent rule changes with the FCC have enabled providers to offer a private version of LTE and...

Modern software is not invulnerable. We constantly find ourselves under attack from a variety of angles trying to sneak in to steal information or cause harm. We can recover from these hacks, but what happens to the software that was violated? Do we need to patch it? Or do we rip it out and replace it with something else? In this episode, we ask if we need to toss out hacked software. On-Premises...

Security is a lot of things. It’s the way we protect ourselves and our information. It’s a process and a need. But can we boil it all down to some product? Are we able to just say that we can order some software and a piece of hardware to run it on and we’re protected? Does the Security Check Box Product list really keep us safe? Or is there more to it? In this episode, we discuss whether or not S...

Pure Storage Spotlight: Does Kubernetes Even Need Storage? In this sponsored episode by Pure Storage, we’re discussing Kubernetes and storage. Specifically, we’re questioning whether Kubernetes even needs persistent storage or if it’s just about the data being kept in containers. With modern applications moving beyond our traditional ideas of what storage should look like, what does that mean for...

With the recent departure of Pat Gelsinger and other executives, VMware finds itself in uncertain times. Rumors have swirled for months about plans to spin it out, leverage the stock to take parent Dell public again, or even purchase the stake outright and make them a part of the organization proper. With deadlines looming later this year, what happens to the tech titan when time’s up? Join us on...

Cisco Spotlight: Is XDR Enough for Your Security Needs? What is XDR exactly? Is it a specific tool? Is it a term that encompasses the entirety of security? Or is it just a buzzword that sells more security devices? How can XDR help you understand the forces at play in your enterprise? Can XDR offer you the capabilities to enhance your security and make it easier for your operations staff to keep e...