Take a Network Break! Broadcom raised eyebrows with its $18.9 billion bid for CA Technologies, and Intel gets in the acquisition game by buying eASIC.

Viptela founders raise big bucks from VCs for a mysterious new venture, BP renews its interest in in-sourced IT, and ZTE moves closer to restarting major operations.

Tech support scammers leverage suspiciously accurate knowledge about Dell customers, PC sales are up, and Blue Origin says it will start taking customers to space in 2019.

Get links to all these tech news stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can smoothly migrate to the cloud, transform your WAN, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Ignition

The Packet Pushers have launched a brand new membership site called Ignition. Ignition offers free and premium memberships and hosts exclusive content for subscribers, including videos, reports, blogs, and more. Check it out at ignition.packetpushers.net.

Show Links:

Broadcom Is Getting Desperate – Seeking Alpha

Broadcom: Crazy Like A Fox, Continue reading

Today on the Packet Pushers Priority Queue, we get nerdy about disaggregation, where you mix and match software from one vendor and hardware from another.

Our sponsor today is Cisco, and if you just did a double-take, that s right, Cisco wants to talk to you about disaggregation, but there’s more to it than just hardware/software separation.

Joining us are Bhavna Prasad, Product Manager at Cisco; and Akshat Sharma, Technical Marketing Engineer for Cisco s Service Provider BU.

We discuss the different kinds or degrees of disaggregation, and then drill into specifics around IOS-XR.

We also look at the programmatic capabilities and interfaces of IOS-XR, what hardware it’s available on, use cases, and more.

Show Links:

@XRDOCS – Cisco Systems

XRDOCS on Twitter

Akshat Sharma on Twitter

Take a Network Break! Dell Technologies is heading back to the public market, Vodafone tests a whitebox optical switch, and an LTE vulnerability rears its head.

Diane Bryant leaves Google Cloud after less than a year. Is Intel beckoning?

A Swedish private equity firm spins out SUSE, Micron products get banned in China, ZTE shuffles its executive ranks to comply with US requirements, and China approves Marvell’s acquisition of Cavium.

We’ve got links to all these stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. If you re not doing optics correctly, you re going to pay for it upfront (and then later too). Don t be fooled by lesser optics. The difference between generic third-party and brand-equivalent optics matters.

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Ignition

The Packet Pushers have launched a brand new membership site called Ignition. Ignition offers free and premium memberships and hosts exclusive content for subscribers, including videos, reports, blogs, and more. Check it out at ignition.packetpushers.net.

Show Links:

Dell moves to go public, spurns IPO – Reuters

Vodafone begins its trek with Voyager – Cumulus Networks Blog

Vodafone deploys TIP s Voyager in a live network Continue reading

Take a Network Break! Juniper Networks announces a new campus switch that supports EVPN and VXLAN for a campus fabric, Extreme Networks announces new products for the network edge, and the IEEE gives its blessing to a fog computing reference architecture.

Dell and VMware posted big HCI gains in revenue and market share, new laptops will be delayed as Intel works out CPU issues, and Silver Peak pulls in $90 million in new investment.

AT&T confirms its acquisition of digital ad exchange AppNexus, and the uptick in rocket launches is affecting commercial airline traffic.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: Couchdrop

Couchdrop provides Secure Copy Protocol,or SCP and Rsync to Dropbox, Box and other cloud storage providers. Find out more at Couchdrop.io.

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Ignition

The Packet Pushers have launched a brand new membership site called Ignition. Ignition offers free and premium memberships and hosts exclusive content for subscribers, including videos, reports, blogs, and more. Check it out at ignition.packetpushers.net.

Show Links:

Juniper Networks Delivers EVPN-VXLAN Fabric to Connect Enterprise Data Center and Campus Networks – Juniper Networks

Juniper To The Enterprise: We re Serious About Campus Networking – Packet Pushers

Continue reading

Today on the Weekly Show, the Packet Pushers officially launch Ignition, our new membership site.

Ignition offers exclusive content to help you develop as a networking and IT professional, including blogs, white papers, videos, and e-books. Over time we’ll add in-depth technical courses and other materials to help you advance your career.

You can join for free and get limited access to the site (plus Link Propagation and the Human Infrastructure Magazine), or get a premium membership for $99 a year for full access.

We also spend some time reviewing the state of the networking industry, including a look at the true drivers of automation, whether Intent-Based Networking is a real thing, why legacy networking vendors are flocking to multicloud as a strategy, the trend of AI-washing, and whether SD-WAN is going to kill private circuits.

Sponsor: Cumulus Networks

Cumulus Networks presents Networking with S.O.U.L – Simple, Open, Untethered Linux. These 4 tenants enable modern, agile networks be built to support the new demands of the business. Save an average of 45% on CapEx and approximately 74% on OpenEx by adopting these SOULful networking solutions. Learn how to leverage the top 5 automation tips and tricks Continue reading

Take a Network Break! Aruba Networks rolls out a new SD-WAN platform plus a grand strategy for branch management, Cisco acquires July Systems for its wireless location services technology, and AT&T sells dozens of data centers for $1.1 billion.

But AT&T may take that cash and pour it into the acquisition of a digital ad exchange company, Deutsche Telecom announces big layoffs in its T-Systems unit, and Australian telco Telstra splits off its legacy infrastructure unit into a standalone business.

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendor lifts the curtain on why WAFs get bought but rarely used, HPE pledges $4 billion for edge computing, and Intel bids a terse goodbye to its CEO.

Coffee Talk: Mellanox

Stay tuned after the news for a sponsored conversation with Mellanox, where Greg and guests dive into data center fabrics using VXLAN and EVPN. For more information, head over to Mellanox.com/packetpushers. And check out these links:

Performance Report by The Tolly Group – Mellanox

Controllerless VXLAN With BGP EVPN – Mellanox (PDF)

Is it Time to Upgrade to VXLAN – Mellanox blog

VXLAN Eye on Mellanox – Mellanox via YouTube

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Ignition

The Packet Pushers have launched a brand new Continue reading

Take a Network Break! Cisco Live US 2018 took place last week, so we spend a some time covering show news, overall impressions, and a touch of tea-leaf reading.

In non-Cisco news, VMware has a new lower-cost pricing tier to encourage customers to try VMware on AWS, LiveAction acquires packet capture/network monitoring vendor Savvius for an undisclosed amount, and orchestration vendor Gluware can now upgrade OSs for seven different vendors.

Metaswitch joins the OpenSwitch project, ONAP announces the Beijing release of its network automation package, and Comcast has deactivated its “congestion management system” (aka throttling).

Speaking of Comcast, the ISP has made a $65 billion bid for 21st Century Fox. In other provider news, AT&T gets the greenlight to merge with Time Warner. And last but not least, Cisco has joined an investment round in the startup Avi Networks, which makes software load balancers and service meshes.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can smoothly migrate to the cloud, transform your WAN, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free Continue reading