I recently had the opportunity to attend Tech Field Day 27, where industry leaders in the CXL space, Memverge, AsteraLabs, and the CXL Consortium, presented their latest developments in high-speed interconnect technology. These presentations highlighted how Compute Express Link (CXL) is poised to revolutionise server architecture and transform memory utilisation in data centres.

CXL provides a unified, high-performance interface for memory, storage, and computational resources, enabling efficient processing of large amounts of data with reduced latency. With CXL, data centre operators can build more scalable, efficient, and versatile systems, allowing for better energy efficiency and reduced costs.

One of the key advantages of CXL is its ability to provide a high-speed interface between CPUs and other accelerators. This can significantly reduce latency and improve performance in data centre applications such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics. CXL also provides a unified interface for memory, and computational resources, simplifying system design and management and improving resource utilisation.

CXL is highly scalable and efficient, allowing data centre operators to build systems that can scale up or down as needed without sacrificing performance or efficiency. By reducing the complexity and cost of memory management, CXL promises to improve the overall performance of data centre applications.

Just as Storage Area Networks (SANs) revolutionised how storage is managed in data centres, CXL is poised to transform how memory is utilised in server architectures. Like SANs, CXL offers a scalable and efficient solution to a critical problem in data centre architecture. As data centre applications have grown in complexity and demand, the need for faster and more efficient memory utilisation has become increasingly important. CXL provides the necessary bandwidth and performance to keep up with these demands, allowing companies to build systems that can scale up or down as needed without sacrificing performance or efficiency.

CXL is a game-changing technology that promises to transform memory utilisation in data centres. With its scalability, versatility, and energy efficiency, CXL will play a critical role in the future of server architecture. The developments presented at Tech Field Day 27 highlight the exciting advancements and demonstrate the potential for CXL to revolutionise the data centre industry, just as SANs did for storage.

If, like me, you are new to the concepts of CXL, I highly recommend you watch the presentation by the CXL Consortium below. Also, be sure to check out the websites of the CXL presenters for more information, the links are below.

Astera Labs

CXL

MemVerge

Whilst at VMware Explore in Barcelona I attended this awesome session regarding the new features in vSphere 8. This session was hosted by Dave Morera and Himanshu Singh both from VMware. Much of the session focused on how vSphere 8 can now be used in many hybrid configuration with vSphere+ as well as the new hardware architectures allowing vSphere to make use of DPU’s for offloading of processing.

If you would like to read more about vSphere 8 be sure to check out the blog linked below.

What's New in vSphere 8? | VMware

You can see my doodle below capturing my key thoughts from the session.

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Today, the increase in cyber-security attacks and their related risk is top of mind for many IT professionals. As such, full consideration needs to be made regarding the appropriate protections that should be in place to mitigate this risk best.

Flowmon positions its Anomaly Detection System (ADS) module at the core of these efforts, ensuring that threats can be detected and responded to as early and quickly as possible.

When speaking to Flowmon, they highlighted the Security Visibility Triad, a framework used by Gartner and others to help examine the three key areas that should be in place to ensure you have true security visibility. The Security Visibility Triad talks about the importance of 1. SIEM and UEBA, 2. Network Detection and Response, and 3. Endpoint Detection and Response. Flowmon focuses its efforts on the Network Detection and Response area of this triad.

Flowmon ADS is a module for the Flowmon product set that is most commonly utilised for network visibility and troubleshooting. Because of this, the ADS module fully leverages the network architecture of Flowmon to collect its data from the network. Furthermore, it utilises network flows, enhanced with layer 7 application data provided by its probes for a unique view of what is going on within the network. You can read more about Flowmon in my previous blog.

Flowmon ADS does not rely on legacy signature-based approaches to detect the anomalies within the captured flows. Instead, it uses machine learning for wide-ranging detection, including zero-day threats.

Typical anomalies detected and alerted upon by Flowmon include:-

• Attacks

  • Port scanning, Dictionary attacks, DoS/DDoS, Telnet

• Traffic Anomalies

  • DNS, DHCP, ICMP, Multicast

• Internal Security

  • Viruses, Malware, Ransomware, Botnets

• Unwanted Applications

  • P2P Networks, Instant Messaging, Anonymisation Servies

• Device Behaviour

  • Change of device behaviour profile

• Operational Problems

  • Delays, Excessive load, Unresponsive services, Broken updates

Whilst how Flowmon detects the anomalies and the breadth of what it is able to detect is truly impressive, the biggest stand-out area for me was how the product allows this information to be used.

With many security products, such as NDR and SIEM solutions, they can be very good at collecting data, but in reality, they simply overload an already overworked administrator with information they can’t use. This is where Flowmon ADS is different.

Flowmon ADS not only detects the threats from the noise using machine learning but also does true route cause analysis. This allows administrators to quickly understand the type of threat, the source, the affected resources and the recommended actions.

With many sources speaking about the amount of time a threat actor may be within your network prior to detection, it is important that IT teams have the right tools to understand exactly what is happening across their network. For me, this is where Flowmon comes in, giving true visibility to Security Operations (SecOps) teams and others in IT to ensure that any threats are quickly and easily neutralised.

For more information about Flowmon ADS and how it can help with Network Detection and Response please check out their website.

Below you can see my doodle covering the subject

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering the Flowmon product set. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

This week saw the Juniper Networks 2021 global summit for analysts, influencers and the media. I have covered my thoughts on this event and Juniper’s strategy in my earlier blog post. In this blog post, I am going to cover the three key announcements from the summit. 

1. Juniper Support Intelligence

2. New Wi-Fi 6E Access Points

3. Juniper Mist IoT Assurance

Juniper Support Insights

Juniper Support Insights is a cloud-connected, AI-driven support platform for customers using Junos OS devices such as ACX. EX. MX, PTX, QFX and SRX.

With Juniper Support Insights, there is no need to replace or upgrade your device to get this functionality - it is already included. You can choose to connect your devices directly to the cloud, like the Mist AI connected devices, or alternatively, you can use a lightweight collector appliance. The collector is a hardware appliance that can support up to 20,000 devices with a single collector. I think many organisations will choose to opt for the collector in their secure environments.

Once connected to the cloud, Support Insights will give operations actionable insights into their network to allow them to be proactive in their maintenance. In addition, Support Insights will use the small amount of data collected about your devices to give insights regarding the following:

• Product data

• Contracts

• Machine learning

• Install base

• Service requests

• Knowledge base

• PBN’s

• SIRTS

• RMAs

• EOL/EOS

As Support Insights uses machine learning, the more devices that are connected to the cloud, the more accurate and relevant the insights that will be delivered. 

I like the fact that Support Insights is readily accessible without additional cost, upgrade or replacement of existing Junos products. It will undoubtedly help operations teams get better insights into their install base and hopefully assist them in moving from reactive to proactive support. Whilst Support Insights is a read-only freemium offering, at a cost, Juniper also has products that offer read and write interactions with the network, with solutions like Paragon Insights. 

Juniper Support Insights solution

Juniper Support Insights blog

AI-driven Wi-Fi 6E Access Points

The second announcement covered two new AI-driven Wi-Fi 6E access points. The two new access points leverage the Mist cloud and AI engine for rich insights, enhanced troubleshooting and optimisations. The two access points that were announced are both tri-band and quad radio with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy Support).

The AP45 access point offers Juniper’s patented virtual Bluetooth LE technology. This will be attractive to organisations that need enhanced location-based services.

Product webpage: Juniper Wireless Access Points and Edge

• Product datasheet: AP45 Datasheet

• Product datasheet: AP34 Datasheet

Juniper Mist IoT Assurance

The final announcement focused on the lifecycle of IoT devices on a wireless network, particularly those that lack the support for 802.1x (WPA3 Enterprise).

With IoT devices increasingly being added to our corporate networks and at scale within many networks, it's essential that this process is quick, easy - and importantly, secure. Unfortunately, many IoT devices aren’t enterprise-ready and will lack the necessary features to secure and isolate traffic, all resulting in security issues or configuration complexity. This is where IoT Assurance comes in.

IoT Assurance is a cloud-based service that leverages a Multiple Pre-Shared Key mechanism (MPSK) to easily onboard devices at scale, offering micro-segmentation of devices as well as traffic engineering and full policy management. IoT Assurance provides a full suite of access control functionality using MPSK or Private Pre-Shared Keys, all without relying on having a client MAC address available in advanced or a configured NAC device.

Once the devices are on board, IoT Assurance takes control of day two operations, including automatic PSK expiration in conjunction with automatic key rotation, making sure that keys are regularly rotated whilst ensuring there is no downtime. Some additional tools are integrated, such as the ability to monitor active device utilisation per PSK, a fully-featured API and the ability in the future to create self-provisioning portals that can be used for BYOD workflows.

IoT Assurance Datasheet

Final Thoughts

These announcements further build upon Juniper’s portfolio of products as well as their vision of experience-first networking. With tools like Support Assurance and IoT Assurance, admins can streamline workflows, take proactive actions, and deliver higher levels of reliability, security, and service to end-users.

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.

Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021

This week saw Juniper present an update on its vision, strategy and latest innovations at the company’s virtual global summit for analysts, influencers and the media. Leading up to this event, I have been lucky enough to meet a number of Juniper execs to understand first-hand its strategy, vision, and latest product offerings.

Juniper has a laser focus on experience-first networking. This is much more than a marketing spin on its products and this was clear throughout the summit and across the company’s product innovations. Experience-first networking for Juniper is all about simple operations for network admins and a superior end-user experience for IT users. Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a simple soul, and while I love enterprise technology, I firmly believe it doesn't need to be complicated. So this messaging and focus both sit well with me.

How is Juniper delivering experience-first networking?

Often when you hear terms like experience-first networking, you will think it is just about marketing spin on top of the same old products. It is clear with Juniper that it goes much deeper than this. It appears to all start with the 2019 acquisition of Mist Systems and particularly the AI offerings surrounding the Marvis technology. If you haven't seen Marvis in action, head over to Tech Field Day to learn more. During the summit there was a short demonstration of the Marvis technology in action, initially showing troubleshooting of a wired network where the root cause had been diagnosed as a faulty network cable. Secondly and most impressively to me, the technology was able to troubleshoot and pinpoint an end-user's issue with Microsoft Teams. These kinds of quick and straightforward troubleshooting abilities make a real difference to both the end-users and the IT teams, allowing them to focus more time on innovation and moving forward, rather than tackling business as usual issues.

The image below was discussed during the summit. It depicts logged support tickets over time and how they were resolved. The green portion shows the tickets resolved (and logged) without human intervention, and the red portion indicates tickets with human intervention. As you can see, with AI technology built into the systems and more nodes being added to improve intelligence, tickets are being resolved before IT even needs to intervene.

Juniper discussed that, moving forward, networking was about much more than speeds and feeds alone. Of course, speeds and feeds are still important, but now it's about delivering real business value - and for Juniper Networks as a software company, this is all about the experience.

What was announced?

Building on the experience-first networking approach and maintaining its leadership within its products, Juniper Networks announced three new offerings during the summit:

• Juniper Support Insights

  • Allows you to connect any Junos OS device securely to the cloud to offer AI-led insights to help operations proactively support the network.

    Juniper Support Insights solution

• Two new Wi-Fi 6E AI-powered Access Points

  • Leveraging the Mist AI technologies, these Wi-Fi 6E access points offer the latest Wi-Fi standards and are combined with technologies such as BLE, other location-based services and much more.

    Wireless Access Points and Edge | Juniper Networks

• IoT Assurance

  • With more and more IoT devices being added to corporate networks, it can often be a challenge to manage the lifecycles of these devices. Whilst some IoT devices will support 802.1X for onboarding, many more devices do not. IoT Assurance allows operations to manage this full lifecycle across all IoT devices using Private Pre-Shared Key (PPSK) technology.

    Delivering Better User and Network Operator Experiences with New Wi-Fi 6E APs and IoT Assurance Driven by Mist AI | Official Juniper Networks Blogs

I have expanded on these announcements in this blog post, but these products further help operations deliver a better experience to end-users, with better uptime, quick resolution to issues, better performance and in-built security.

Final Thoughts

I have been really impressed to hear and understand Juniper's vision, and importantly, how it plans to achieve it. Juniper has been on a journey to modernise its business, and the focus on software and innovation around AI results is a real differentiator that will matter to customers.

Personally, moving forward, I look forward to learning more about Marvis and seeing it in action for myself.

Here are two of my Doodles from the event. Please click them to see them in more detail.

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Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.

This week I have attended #TFD24 as a delegate, the first sponsor to present was Cisco leading with their IoT Solutions. Cisco demonstrated a wide range of IoT ready solutions including both data centre and rugged products for use in the field. During the presentation there was a full review of the IoT portfolio including switching, routing, embedded devices industrial WiFi and their full stack service Industrial Asset vision.

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There were a couple of areas that were of particular interest to me, the first being a discussion on the LoRaWAN architecture. LoRaWAN is a low-powered wide-area network technology that is well suited to IoT use cases. Whilst LoRaWAN is capable of only low data rates (300 bps - 5.5kbps) it is capable of distances up to 15km in rural circumstances and can offer a battery life for devices of up to 10 years! So if you need to track a herd of cattle in a field, or how full a set of bins are in a rural park an IoT solution utilising LoRaWAN might be the right solution for you.

The second interesting part was the Cisco Industrial Asset Vision solution. This was an end to end, customisationable but standardised and ready to deploy IoT solution, including sensors, gateways as well as a cloud-based dashboard to monitor, report and troubleshoot.

This solution will fit a wide amount of use cases due to the large array of sensors available and will be ideally suited to organisations that want an out of the box IoT solution to their business needs, rather than developing something specific from separate parts.

Directly following the launch of Scality ARTESCA the Tech Field Day delegates were asked to share their thoughts and opinions on the product.

Delegates Reflect: Tech Field Day Presents Scality and HPE - Gestalt IT

In the video below the delegates reflect on the following points

• What is ARTESCA?

• What is it about ARTESCA that Scality is doing right?

• What does ARTESCA do to appeal to developers?

• ARTESCA is built on a number of open-source tools, which should make it developer-friendly as well, right?

• ARTESCA isn’t just about storing and retrieving data thought, its about data management as well.

• What is our reaction to the launch of ARTESCA alongside HPE?

• Reflecting on the launch itself.

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Following the recent launch of Scality ARTESCA with Tech Field Day I have been investigating the architecture behind ARTESCA a little bit more.

If you would like to read more about the architecture behind Scality ARTESCA check out this whitepaper > https://go.scality.com/l/893901/2021-05-11/3zjqn/893901/1621255966fkouGUtc/artesca_wp_v4.pdf

Depicted within this doodle is the ARTESCA architecture which is able to be deployed in a single node configuration prior to scaling via multiple nodes to petabyte scale. ARTESCA runs within containers on Kubernetes (MetalK8’s today) and is accessed using the standard S3 protocol which makes it easy for developers to quickly and easily develop against whilst the UI, replication features and more will give IT operations confidence to manage through into production.

Initially, ARTESCA is exclusive with HPE for 6 months and is available with a wide variety of configurations, these include all-flash, hybrid and hard disk-based configurations to meet the needs of the individual workloads. There is also a 50TB starter licence available free of charge for you to try prior to scaling further. It is not yet known what will happen after the first 6 months but I assume it will be available as a software-only solution as well as continuing to be made available by HPE and maybe others.

Within ARTESCA there has been a lot of consideration made into the availability of data with local codes to protect against data loss from disk failure as well as parity stripes to protect against simultaneous disk failures, network repair codes for multi-node solutions and of course multiple replication options not only to ARTESCA but also to their RING product and cloud-based S3 storage.

ARTESCA is a really interesting solution for object storage requirements, it is software-based, leverages Kubernetes, has multiple configuration options to meet edge and core use cases and unites developers and operations by offering ease of adoption for developers via the use of the S3 protocol, Kubernetes architecture and full API and for operations, it is easy to manage and monitor, has full monitoring capabilities and is backed by HPE! What’s not to like!

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Yesterday Scality in collaboration with HPE launched their new ARTESCA Lightweight, cloud-native object storage product. The launch took place online with a collaboration between ActualTechMedia and Tech Field Day.

ARTESCA is designed for the core to the edge and offers a central point of management not just for your ARTESCA deployments but also for Scality RING and other compatible S3 storage technologies from the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure.

ARTESCA is software built upon Kubernetes to modern cloud-native design principles allowing ease of scale from initial deployments during development through to moving into production. ARTESCA offers dual-level data protection and disaster recovery with distributed erasure codes and local repair codes for durability and fast disk rebuilds alongside integrated geo-replication for DR. .

You can see my tech doodle covering the ActualTechMedia presentation above and watch this space for some more thoughts and doodles from the event.

You can learn more about Scality ARTESCA here >> SCALITY ARTESCA | scality

and you can see more from HPE on Scality here >> HPE Object Based Storage for Scality Solutions | HPE

Following #SFD21 I met with David Ranson Soulition Architect at Nasuni to get a deeper understanding of the Nasuni Architecture, migration path and use cases.

My doodles below depict my study notes from the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals training delivered remotely to customers and partners by Matt Hester and Garrett Bundy.

Below are my notes covering Modules 1 through 4

Further resources can be found at the links below

• Use the Azure portal

• Customize the dashboard

• Estimate costs with Azure pricing calculator

• Predict and optimize with Cost Management and Azure Advisor

• Estimate the Total Cost of Ownership with the Azure TCO calculator

• Take the Role Based Assessments at Pluralsight

• Sign up for the AZ900 certification exam

• Visit Microsoft Learn for more free education about Azure

• Create an Azure account

• Create a website hosted in Azure

• Configure an App Service

• Overview of Azure Cloud Shell

• Work with Panes

I found the above video by the fantastic John Savill really informative. Make sure to check out his YouTube channel for more fantastic Azure content (1) John Savill - YouTube.

Core Cloud Concepts and Core Azure Services

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Core Azure Services

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Security, Privacy and Compliance

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Pricing and Support

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Here is my doodle for the @PliopsLtd session at #sfd21 they offer a key-value (KV) based storage processor that accelerates, improve reliability and capacity of SSD storage for data persistence and indexing tasks for transactional DB’s, real-time analytics, edge applications and software-defined storage.. This allows their customers to use more affordable QLC SSD’s, whilst outperforming more expensive alternatives as well as helping overcome the processor bottleneck that you will see in most modern solutions with the workloads mentioned.

Unlock the Full Potential of SSDs – Pliops

Their solution is currently (Jan 2021) around two months away from being mass-produced and whilst theoretically could be used in shared storage solutions or delivered as part of a cloud service will initially focus on directly attached storage workloads.

The Pliops storage processors is a half-height, half-length PCIe card that sits in the storage path between your workload and the onboard SSD storage. You reference the storage using a standard NVMe block interface or via a KV (key-value) library API.

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The Pliops card takes your in-efficient dataset, applies data protection, thin provisioning and then compression prior to it being written to the SSD’s. The Pliops processor results in 90% less writes and 77% less reads to your SSD’s.

Today the Pliops card has to be used with Linux based workloads and has a starting point of 3 SSDs within a solution supporting up to a maximum of 64TB per processor, you can scale out with multiple cards. They have future plans to support other platforms including VMware.

Their data protection allows for multiple single drive failures, with rapid recovery whilst delivering performance that is faster than RAID 0 with the SSDs alone.

Pliops is typically utilised with a wide variety of database and analytics workloads, including but not limited to MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra and SAP Hana.

Pliops-Storage-Processor-–-Solution-Brief.pdf

Conclusion

It was good to hear from the Pliops team especially so early in their journey, they have an innovative solution and if you are looking to reduce costs and increase performance for your highly critical database and analytical workloads you will want to be considering Pliops.

Here is my second doodle from from the Intel Memory and Storage Moment event. On day 2 Intel specialists joined the Tech Field Day team to review the latest announcments around Intel Optane Technologies.

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I am lucky enough to be taking part in another Field Day event, this time a special event dedicated to Intel’s latest innovations in memory and storage. You are able to watch the presentations from Intel’s event over on their website here.

During the keynote presentations there were a number of key product announcements regarding their Optane Storage and Memory portfolio as well as NAND based offerings. You can see my doodle below covering these updates.

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Intel Storage and Memory Annoucments for Optane and NAND.

Most impressive to me was the evolution in these critical technologies and particularly the advancements in the Optane technologies allowing for new and innovative use cases, in both storage and memory ecspecially when looking at benefits of persistent memory on the DDR bus.

Products Announced

Client

• Intel Optane Memory H20

• Intel 3D NAND SSD QLC 670P

Data Center

• Intel Optane SSD P5800X

• Intel 3D NAND SSD TLC - D7-P5510

• Intel 3eD NAND SSD QLC - D5-P5316

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As discussed yesterday I am lucky enough to be one of the delegates during the current Dell EMC Storage, Tech Field Day Exclusive event. Today the presentations focused on Dell EMC Power Scale, Power Protect and Power Scale use cases.

You can see my doodles from todays session below. Keep an eye out for posts covering my thoughts and opinions of the demonstrated technologies.

I am lucky enough to be one of the delegates for the current Tech Field Day virtual event with Dell Technologies.

You can learn more about the event over on the Tech Field Day website at the link below.

https://techfieldday.com/event/powerup/

I am joined on Tech Field Day with some amazing people

• Andrea Mauro, @Andrea_Mauro, http://vinfrastructure.it/en/

• Arjan Timmerman, @ArjanTim, https://www.techunplugged.io/blog/ http://tupodcast.blubrry.net

• Becky Elliott, @BeckyLElliott, https://beckyelliott.com/blog/

• Chris M Evans, @ChrisMEvans, https://www.architecting.it/blog/

• Enrico Signoretti, @ESignoretti, http://juku.it/en

• Gina Rosenthal, @GMinks, http://digitalsunshinesolutions.com/ http://ginaminks.com

• Keith Townsend, @CTOAdvisor, http://thectoadvisor.com/

• Ray Lucchesi, @RayLucchesi, http://www.SilvertonConsulting.com http://www.RayOnStorage.com

• Tim Crawford, @TCrawford, http://AVOA.com

Below you will find my doodles from the first days presentations including Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC PowerFlex. Keep an eye on the blog for some more thoughts and opinions regarding the content covered during the presentations.

PowerStore

PowerFlex

The second presentation from this afternoons vRetreat covered Datrium DRaaS. Their DRaaS offering allows you to replicate from any on-premises VMware infrastructure to a fully managed instance of VMware on AWS.

Today I joined the vRetreat with Snapt a Application, Delivery Control company that has a new take on ADC. Their solution is based on a cloud managed distributed model with nodes able to be deployed across multiple locations and on multiple platforms. Each node is stateless with configuration, management and monitoring about to be controlled from a single cloud managed control plane delivered as a service. The ADC’s offer a wealth of services including global load balancing, WAF, analytics and much more.

What really stood out for me was the ease of management and the fact it could be deployed across on premises virtual or constrained environments as well as cloud and cloud native solutions.

Check them out > https://www.snapt.net/