In a few weeks I’ll have the opportunity to participate in another Network Field Day. I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend in the past and have done some remote participation when possible, but like some of the other rare opportunities I have had in my career, NFD is fairly unique in that it is constantly evolving in both the information provided and the individuals involved. As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life. I’m particularly excited about the presentations and have been looking forward to talking to a few of the participant companies for a while. There is a tight line up for NFD9, but I am very intrigued as I am either unfamiliar or have been looking for more information about several of them for quite some time now. NetBeez is an interesting one, they provide a service not unlike a project I’ve been working with for years called perfSonar. The data that these kind of projects provide is absolutely invaluable, so I’m very interested in NetBeez and how they’re accomplishing their tasks and presenting their data. I met with and wrote about Pluribus Networks at (and around the time of) NFD7. I was impressed then and I’m impressed now. I see a great value in what they’re doing for so many practical applications and am very anxious to see what they’ve added, changed or tweaked since our last meeting roughly a year ago. Cumulus networks is another one I’ve been wanting to get lab time with since they came out. I am looking forward to having them in a room, they’re doing something to networking that, like Pluribus, is pretty unique and arguably game changing. At then end of the day, though, the best part of this is not that there are a few interesting topics, it is the fact that all of the topics and players are unique, top shelf and potentially game changing. It’s essentially an all star lineup (again) with the likes of Brocade, Solarwinds, NEC, VeloCloud and Cloudgenix. This entire line up is right up my alley, as a large number of them are WAN or SDN oriented, which is where I spend the majority of my normal working days. In addition to all of that, I’ll finally get to meet NetworkingNerd in real life.