HPE Aruba, Aviz Networks, & cPacket are Shaping the Future of Networking – Tech Field Day Takeaways

I'm Tom Hollingsworth, event Lead at Tech Field Day, and here are my takeaways for Networking Field Day 38. Hey everyone, it's Tom and we just got wrapped up with Networking Field Day 38, and I am very excited about where the future of networking is headed. I know we say that a lot when we do these presentations because a lot of what we are hearing from the companies is very forward looking.

When you look at what was delivered during the presentations at Networking Field Day 38, you realize that these companies are not just looking back to solve traditional problems, they're trying to remake what the network is capable of producing in order to make it a more integral part of the way that businesses do business. And I wanted to take a few minutes to kind of talk a little bit about the three big takeaways that I had from what we saw. In order to give you an idea of what had me so thrilled to hear from these companies, The first big takeaway is that the network operating system is no longer important to users.

The first two companies that we heard from Avis Networks and Hedgehog Showcase that they have some very great technology that is built on the open source sonic operating system. You'd be hard pressed to have figured that out because they barely mentioned Sonic at all in their presentations. Instead, they were focused on the platforms that they have built on top of Sonic in order to deliver value to companies that are looking to enhance the way that their networks operate.

Hedgehog actually brought in a customer who is using their platform, and this is the second time that he's chosen Hedgehog as a platform to use. Uh, he did it originally at a previous job, and then when he moved to a new job, he immediately went to Hedgehog and had them come on board to work with the company. This tells me that the users of these networks are more focused on outcomes than the minutia of details.

When you think about the way that people build networks, we obsess over the technology. It's a lot like when a new consumer device is released, we don't think about how it's gonna be used. We worry about things like screen brightness, maximums, and RAM sizes, when in reality most people don't care about that.

What they care about is, can I make phone calls? Can I get my email, can I get on the internet? Will my phone stay charged for more than an hour?

That's how we need to start thinking about the network, not about protocols, not about operating system minutiae. Does it accomplish what we need to do? Does it cost a small fortune to upgrade or maintain it?

I think Avis and Hedgehog did a great job of showing that building the network properly today means that you are ready to tackle any challenges that you might have in the future when it comes to new applications or new ways of using the network. My second big takeaway from Networking Field 8 38 was the ascendancy of HPE Aruba Networking. The company brought their entire swath of their portfolio to the table.

They hit on all of the main areas of what we would consider to be the modern network, campus wireless and data center. They showed their leadership in all facets. They had a great discussion about how everything integrates with Aruba Central to make operations easier for IT teams.

And this was even a point of discussion that we had kind of off the, uh, the camera view, if you will, about how a lot of people that are coming into the networking market now are not looking for the traditional command line interface. They're either looking for some kind of a graphical interface to get a big picture view of what's going on, or they're looking for API integration. Two things that Aruba Central really offers.

Well, that's how people want to interact with the network. They don't want to get into the trenches and configure on a device by device basis. They wanna be able to do things at scale and provide all kinds of automation.

With the news that we've gotten over the last couple of weeks about HPE networks has bought Juniper and brought them on board as a brand, the future was already bright for HPE even before this acquisition was finalized. This will just enhance what's going on. Now, I know that a lot of people out there are wondering, well, what's going to happen?

And we didn't really get a look into that at networking Field 8 38 honestly, because nobody had any idea exactly what's going on, and I would rather hear about it later months from now when the decisions have been made and things make sense as opposed to trying to rush to get news out there. And we know that, you know, some products are gonna be kept, some products are gonna be, uh, put away because they, they're not core to what HPE networking wants to deliver from both the Aruba and the Juniper brands. But I think it's important for people to understand that this really does clearly mark them as the favorite to be the second biggest networking company in the industry.

But more importantly, it sets them up to challenge to possibly be the best. We'll have to see, of course. But I think this was a great way for HP Aruba networking to show that they haven't just been resting on their laurels by this acquisition, that they really have been putting a lot of thought and effort into things, and that is a good base to build from.

My third big takeaway is the importance of service assurance. If you are on an operations team, you can no longer afford to just hope things are working. You have to be absolutely sure, sure, if something has gone down, you don't want to know about it after it's already happened.

You wanna see those indicators before it ever really gets there. The right platforms like the ones from C Packet will help you see that because it will show you the faults before you get to the point where it becomes an outage. One of the demos that they showed off actually had a really great uh, way of showing that, you know, there are certain kinds of indicators that you're gonna be seeing video performance problems even before the video feed cuts out completely.

And I think that that is super important for people who need a canary in the coal mine, so to speak, before we actually get to those points. Issues can be detected. That's one thing, but what about the suggestions of how to remediate them?

Well, in today's world, a lot of that can be handled by using an LLM and having AI say, here's what we have seen that does a good job of solving this problem, or, here are some settings that you need to tweak. Here are some collected knowledge that we believe is very important. And even better than that is the fact that you can use integrations with things like ITSM platforms like ServiceNow to immediately create a ticket with a suggested remediations so that you're not wasting time arguing about what needs to be done or whose responsibility it is.

This can be done almost instantaneously so that as soon as the problems are detected, they can be remediated right away and that leads to assured performance. Again, we're going from being firefighters to being more like fire marshals where we are trying to knock out the problems before they happen, rather than saying, well, you know, we need to go over here and put this fire out. Let's move the things that could possibly cause a fire so that it never actually occurs in the first place.

It also underscores the importance of having good data on your network in order to have the best possible chance to affect these outcomes. If all you're getting from your devices is garbage data, then the analysis of that data is going to be likewise garbage. But if you have a good platform that is tuned properly to look for these things, to be able to ingest that data to be able to provide reasonable outcomes for what your network needs to do to perform at its peak level, then I think that something like the C packet observability solution is the best way to make sure that you're getting that critical data.

I hope that these takeaways give you the same kind of excitement that I do when it comes to the network, but just like any network we're building on components, we're building on the components of a solid bedrock operating system, the great platform that sits on top of it, the applications for that platform, whether they're building networks for ai, whether they are using their experience in the networking space to build a holistic solution or providing the kind of assurances that you would expect from a company that wants to ensure maximum uptime and performance for your network. This is why we're thinking about transforming the network from what it was to what it will be. And if you watch the Roundtable discussion from Networking Field Day, you'll know that networks do need to evolve.

I wanna say a special shout out to our three new delegates for this event. com when we see the content that they've created from this event. com and click on the link for Networking Field day 38.

You can also head over to our YouTube channel and find all of the great content there as we post it. Thank you very much for watching this episode of the Tech Field Day takeaway series on the Tech Field Day plus YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, please make sure you subscribe like the video and leave a comment below so we can hear your thoughts on what you thought was your big takeaway from Networking Field Day 38.

Please make sure you follow Tech Field Day on all the social media platforms, including X, Twitter, blue Sky, and Mastodon for more updates from the event and more highlight videos. Thank you very much for watching, and we'll see you at a future tech field day.