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Learn more about Tech Field Day Experience at KubeCon here.
In a world of well-managed Kubernetes, we hoped that infrastructure finally wouldn’t matter. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast features John Willis and Guy Currier wishing that infrastructure didn’t matter, with Alastair Cooke. Every new infrastructure revolution claims to make infrastructure invisible, from virtualization through HCI and cloud to containers and Kubernetes. The reality has always been that these revolutions shift the definition of infrastructure and bring some new aspect to be managed. Developers building features and applications want to focus on satisfying some business need, not considering storage devices and network configurations. Virtualization and Kubernetes both made delivering infrastructure easier, but neither eliminated infrastructure architecture and management. The dream of self-deploying and self-organizing infrastructure is as distant as it ever was. Agentic AI is the latest new hope to eliminate infrastructure challenges, yet it brings its own complex infrastructure requirements. Will we ever stop caring about IT infrastructure?
Host: Alastair Cooke, Event Lead for Tech Field Day
Guests:
Guy Currier, Research Director for The Futurum Group
John Willis, Owner of Botchagalupe Technologies
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
Learn more about Networking Field Day 39 here.
The industry has embraced AI for every possible problem. Operations will eventually embrace it as well but questions remain about how it will be implemented. In this episode, Tom Hollingsworth sits down with Pete Welcher, Rita Younger, and Jonathan Davis to discuss the issues that remain with implementing AI into an operations workflow. They discuss licensing and procurement, the need for institutional knowledge, and how this will all work in a multivendor world. They wrap up with some guidance about how to approach your next big AIOps project.
Host: Tom Hollingsworth, Event Lead for Tech Field Day.
Panelists:
Rita Younger, Practice Lead for Data Center Networking, WWT
Pete Welcher, Networking Expert
Jonathan Davis, Senior Wireless and Network Engineer, East DataComm
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
Learn more about AI Field Day 7 on our website.
Despite widespread skepticism, AI is already widely used in the enterprise, often in the form of so-called shadow applications outside traditional IT. This episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast, recorded on the eve of AI Field Day, features delegates Ryan Booth and Dave Graham discussing the real state of AI adoption in the enterprise with host Stephen Foskett. Just like the advent of the PC, generative AI is widely used across businesses, typically on a bring-your-own basis rather than as a coordinated effort by the IT department. The same process happened in the Software-as-a-Service world, where each department and even individual adopted multiple tools that met their needs. There will soon be a reckoning, where businesses try to get their hands around all of the AI applications being used across the enterprise. The next step is to develop a plan to control sprawl of tools, models, data, and subscriptions to ensure that this shadow AI doesn't become a risk to the company. Then companies need to be prepared as AI agents become critical to their operations, likely also deployed by individuals without corporate control.
Host: Stephen Foskett, President and Organizer of Tech Field Day.
Panelists:
Dave Graham, Head of Marketing at MLCommons
Ryan Booth
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
Learn more about Cloud Field Day 24 here.
Private cloud is not just virtualization 4.0, self-service VM deployment doesn’t fulfil the same need as the Public Cloud. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast features Mike Graff, Jon Hildebrand, and Alastair Cooke. Private cloud has evolved from simple virtualization to a more comprehensive, cloud-like experience, emphasizing the need for on-premises infrastructure to offer the same developer-friendly tools and APIs as public clouds. Some application repatriation is driven by cost concerns and enabled by rise of technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift for managing containerized workloads. A unified control plane for hybrid cloud environments is vital, as is accurate cost accounting for on-premises resources. Enterprises will search for a hybrid approach where developers can deploy applications without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure.
Host: Alastair Cooke, Event Lead for Tech Field Day
Panelists:
Mike Graff, Infrastructure Architecture Director at Dolby
Jon Hildebrand, Independent Contractor, Cloud
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
Projects to deliver applications to edge locations will fail without comprehensive fleet lifecycle management. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast features Sachin Vasudeva from Zededa discussing the importance of long-term edge management with Guy Currier and Alastair Cooke. There are unique challenges of managing edge deployments compared to cloud or on-premises environments. Focusing on business logic and application outputs while leveraging infrastructure providers to handle the complexities of packaging, deploying, and monitoring AI models enables diverse edge environments. Edge locations might have different hardware deployed, intermittent connectivity, requiring a balance between standardization and flexibility in managing edge devices and applications. Teams with rapid responsiveness and adaptation will better enable their business to respond to changing conditions, especially with the rapid pace of AI innovation.
Guest:
Sachin Vasudeva, VP of Product at ZEDEDA
Hosts:
Alastair Cooke, Tech Field Day Event Lead
Guy Currier, Research Director at The Futurum Group
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
More Information on Commvault Shift
Every company lives in fear of a ransomware attack, whether they have suffered one or not, and this is even more critical in the era of AI. This episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast looks forward to Commvault SHIFT in November with a discussion of the importance of data protection to AI applications with Tim Zonca from Commvault, frequent delegate Gina Rosenthal, and host Stephen Foskett. AI applications are reliant on good data, and yet this same technology makes it easier for attackers to breach corporate controls. Today’s social engineering and phishing is more convincing than ever thanks to generative AI, and this has helped ransomware crews to adopt larger and more powerful attacks. Ransomware is a massive business, and it isn’t going away any time soon. At the same time, GenAI applications offer a new attack surface, as agentic AI is empowered to take action based on untrusted inputs. Not only can we not stop ransomware, but the pace and technical capabilities of these attacks keeps accelerating. There is reason for optimism, however, as data protection tools keep getting better. Today’s AI-optimized tools can effectively categorize data, burst or migrate to different locations, and roll back or recover from corruption or compromise. In the future, we will see increasing use of AI to monitor systems and data, detecting patterns and hardening the attack surface.
Guest:
Tim Zonca, VP of Portfolio Marketing at Commvault
Host:
Stephen Foskett, President and Organizer of Tech Field Day
Gina Rosenthal, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Digital Sunshine Solutions
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
More information on NetApp Insight
Running enterprise applications in production is a lot different from the AI experiments many of us have been involved with so far. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, recorded prior to NetApp Insight 2025, features Ingo Fuchs from NetApp along with Gina Rosenthal, Glenn Dekhayser, and Stephen Foskett. AI applications often start as experiments with a limited data set, but once these are moved to production there are many critical decisions to be made. Data must be classified and cleaned, removing personal and financial data and proprietary information before it even reaches an LLM. Data also must be structured for embedding and vectorization prior to use by an LLM. And we have to ensure that data is up to date or the application will not serve the customer properly. Finally we have to consider whether it is proper and ethical to share and act on this data. Many of the challenges facing modern AI applications are similar to the historic issues faced by enterprise storage, and this is an area in which NetApp and their customers have decades of experience.
NetApp Representative: Ingo Fuchs, Chief Technologist of AI at NetApp
Host:
Stephen Foskett, President and Organizer of Tech Field Day
Gina Rosenthal, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Digital Sunshine Solutions
Glenn Dekhayser, Global Principal Technologist at Equinix
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
Learn more about Security Field Day here.
Passwords create friction and therefore users find ways around them. New technology such as secure enclaves and PKI allow us to create better solutions like passkeys. In this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast. Alan Shimel and Kate Scarcella join Tom Hollingsworth to discuss the problems with traditional passwords and how passkeys overcome them. They also talk about why it has taken so long to adopt passkeys and what barriers remain to full implementation. The wrap up with a look at what might lay ahead on the horizon for the future of user security.
Host
Tom Hollingsworth, Event Lead at Tech Field Day
Panelists
Alan Shimel, CEO of Techstrong Group
Kate Scarcella, Cybersecurity Architect and Security Expert
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
AI will need less HBM (high bandwidth memory) because flash memory unification is changing training and inference. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast features Sebastien Jean from Phison, Max Mortillaro, Brian Martin, and Alastair Cooke. Training, fine-tuning, and inference with Large Language Models traditionally use GPUs with high bandwidth memory to hold entire data models and data sets. Phison’s aiDaptiv+ framework offers the ability to trade lower cost of infrastructure against training speed or allow larger data sets (context) for inference. This approach enables users to balance cost, compute, and memory needs, making larger models accessible without requiring top-of-the-line GPUs, and giving smaller companies more access to generative AI.
Learn more about Phison's solutions here.
Phsion Representative: Sebastien Jean, CTO of Phison Electronics
Host
Alastair Cooke, Tech Field Day Event Lead
Panelists
Brian Martin, VP of AI and Datacenter Performance at Signal65
Max Mortillaro, Chief Research Officer at Osmium Group
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
Learn more about AI Infrastructure Field Day 3 here.
Hardware always matters, especially in AI and now software is automating your AI data centre infrastructure. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast features Gina Rosenthal, Barton George, Andy Banta, and Alastair Cooke. Generative AI brought new hardware into enterprise data centres; GPUs, TPUs, NPUs, XPUs all offload AI processing from CPUs for more performance and efficiency. Feeding these accelerators requires fast networks and fast storage, common topics for AI Infrastructure Field Day events. In parallel, sophisticated software to automate the deployment and operation of this new hardware is vital to return value fast and optimize the value from the hardware investment. Automation platforms are moving up towards delivering multiple AI applications on shared XPU infrastructure, where AI inference delivers the business value.
Host
Alastair Cooke, Tech Field Day Event Lead
Panelists
Gina Rosenthal, Digital Sunshine Solutions
Andy Banta, MagnitionlO
Barton George, Al Infrastructure and Cloud Specialist
Follow the Tech Field Day Podcast on X/Twitter or on Bluesky and use the Hashtag #TFDPodcast to join the discussion. Listen to more episodes on the podcast page of the website.
Follow Tech Field Day for more information on upcoming and current event coverage on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
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