Author Archives: Greg Ferro
Author Archives: Greg Ferro
There is more genuine innovation and change coming from Facebook than any networking vendor. Whether its hardware designs, firmware (BMC , FBOSS applications and new protocols. I’m remain confident that the future isn’t being made by billion dollar companies with 65% gross margins.
If you are involved in network strategy then these videos will get you thinking in new ways.
The growing ecosystem around open networking hardware | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code | Facebook : https://code.facebook.com/posts/1241394199239439/the-growing-ecosystem-around-open-networking-hardware/
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A balanced discussion on the merits of the US H1B visa program. These programs exist in most developed nations, and the same issues apply.
As you would expect, the program is used to benefit some companies and abused by others:
Giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel, and Microsoft were all among the top 20 H-1B employers in 2014, according to Ron Hira, professor of political science at Howard University who has testified before Congress on high-skill immigration. The other fifteen—which include IBM but also consulting firms such as Tata Consultancy, Wipro, and Infosys—used the visa program mainly for outsourcing jobs.
On the whole, modern IT is changing much faster and automation is replacing most of the tasks the outsourcing does today. The era of oursourcing ended about 3 years ago, it will take several years for the market at large to catch up to this fact though.
Four Ways to Tackle H-1B Visa Reform – IEEE Spectrum : http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/tech-careers/four-ways-to-tackle-h1b-visa-reform
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Added to my to-do list to watch and re-watch this about every 6 months.
Topics include:
Tutorial: Tutorial Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical Networking – YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KFpXuHqHQg
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Tim Cook in the latest earnings calls.
The Mac not only returned to growth but generated its highest quarterly revenue ever. Our latest data shows that most Mac customers are buying their first Mac, with the vast majority of them coming from a Windows PC.
(My emphasis).
I forget these things.
Link: Apple (AAPL) Q1 2017 Results – Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha – http://seekingalpha.com/article/4041266-apple-aapl-q1-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single
The post Thought: Latest Apple Mac Customers Are Switching from Windows appeared first on EtherealMind.
Progress towards standardised switching hardware is moving along nicely. Big Switch is support 14 MORE platforms with its OpenNetworkLinux NOS and applications.
Support for 12 New Platforms
In addition to the Facebook boxes above, we’ve added support for the following new 1G, 10G, and 100G switch platforms:
- Celestica Redstone XP, Redstone XL, and Seastone
- Agema AGC7648
- Alpha Networks SNX-60×0-486F
- Dell S6100-ON, S6010-ON, S4048t-ON, Z9100-ON
- Accton AS4610 (ARM), AS5512 (Nephos), AS7512 (Cavium), AS7716 (Xeon)
Open Network Linux Expansion | Big Switch Networks, Inc. : http://www.bigswitch.com/blog/2016/11/21/open-network-linux-expansion
The post Musing: Open Network Linux Expansion | Big Switch Networks, Inc. appeared first on EtherealMind.
Friendor – a vendor person who pretends to be your friend but all they really want is your money / purchase order.
(Brutal)
The post Dictionary: friendor appeared first on EtherealMind.
Free Training materials on IT Security incident and breach response. Looks quite good.
The new training material provides a step-by-step guide on how to address and respond to incidents, as an incident handler and investigator, teaching best practices and covering both sides of the breach. The material is technical and aims to provide a guided training both to incident handlers and investigators, while providing lifelike conditions. The training material mainly uses open source and free tools.
ENISA online training material updated and extended — ENISA : https://www.enisa.europa.eu/news/enisa-news/enisa-online-training-material-updated-and-extended
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I am working with a client that has a rather unique problem and I’m looking for help on the possible solution.
For unusual, but practical, reasons there is a need to deploy three SDN solutions.
What I need help with is the stitching these different overlays together so that high bandwidth (>500Gbps), low latency (<5ms) data can flow in between virtual and physical networks.
There is no alignment to a hardware vendor and will buy whatever hardware can meet the requirements based on its software features.
I would be interested in talking to anyone who could offer advice and input Continue reading
Oracle doubles pricing on cloud use in AWS which will ‘coincidentally’ make the high pricing of its own cloud look relatively cheap. Will customers lie down and take this ? Almost certainly, its hard to imagine a bigger commercial sucker than an Oracle customer – its hard to get rid of it once you have it and they love price increases (probably thinking it validates why they bought the product in the first place).
Oracle has changed the way it charges users to run its software in Amazon Web Services, effectively doubling the cost along the way.
Oracle effectively doubles licence fees to run its stuff in AWS • The Register : https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/30/oracle_effectively_doubles_licence_fees_to_run_in_aws/
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Geoff Huston taking a withering look at the crapness of BGP in the Internet. As always, its quite crap excluding the fact that it actually works (more or less).
It has become either a tradition, or a habit, each January for me to report on the experience with the inter-domain routing system over the past year, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.
The long predicted apocalypse in the Internet routing table hasn’t come to pass so the those 15-year old Catayst 6500 switches will still be used in the Internet backbone for many years to come. Oh, yay.
None of the metrics indicate that we are seeing such an explosive level of growth in the routing system that it will fundamentally alter the viability of carrying a full BGP routing table anytime soon. In terms of the projections of table size in the IPv4 and IPv6 networks, the BGP sky is firmly well above us, and it’s not about to fall on our heads just yet!
The IETF posted that travel bans may impact its decisions on where to hold conferences. This has got me thinking.
From a personal perspective, I’m in the final stages of content planning for the Packet Pushers two day workshop at the Interop ITX conference on May 15-16. Last year, we had a large contingent of overseas folks attend Interop in large part to hear us and for some this was their first trip to the USA.
Many conferences3 are already struggling to maintain attendees, vendors and revenue. The Continue reading
Another “public cloud isn’t for everyone” story:
By charting Office 365’s new subscribers using a trailing 12 months — the latest quarter plus the three previous — to eliminate seasonal spikes, the suite’s waxing and waning over the past four years becomes apparent. From its Q1 2013 debut until Q4 2015, Office 365 subscriber growth was always steady, sometimes spectacular.
Solid approach to charting and yes, Office 365 did well but:
After Q4 2015, however, the trailing 12-month numbers fell, a decline fueled by the plateau of 0.9 million each quarter from the second onward. That resulted in a gain of just 4.3 million subscribers throughout 2016, a reduction of 62% from the year before.
Oh, the path to public cloud isn’t always a growth market? That’s not the story from the clouderati. Oh dear.
New Office 365 subscriptions for consumers plunged 62% in 2016 | ITworld : http://www.itworld.com/article/3162708/enterprise-applications/new-office-365-subscriptions-for-consumers-plunged-62-in-2016.html
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Google continues to build out its ownership of key Internet infrastructure. Email/Spam filtering, Chrome Browser, DNS
As we look forward to the evolution of both the web and our own products it is clear HTTPS will continue to be a foundational technology. This is why we have made the decision to expand our current Certificate Authority efforts to include the operation of our own Root Certificate Authority. To this end, we have established Google Trust Services (https://pki.goog/), the entity we will rely on to operate these Certificate Authorities on behalf of Google and Alphabet.
Thoughts, in no particular order:
One of the base Continue reading
What a load of bull.
The journey to cloud is a matter of when, not if. The first step in that journey is well underway with organizations replacing on-premise servers with cloud-based systems that are better in every dimension — faster, cheaper, more secure. In 5 years, every modern business will have a substantial portion of their systems running the cloud. But that’s only the first step.
Your Business Won’t Use a Server in 5 Years : https://serverless.zone/your-business-wont-use-a-server-in-5-years-79c8fd25b239
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This seems significant. VMware has hired a key Linux kernel contributor, specifically Real Time.
We have seen a substantial reversal of open source commitments by many incumbent vendors eg. Cisco in ODL, HPE Openswitch. VMware might be increasing its commitment.
This company that I am now at, VMware, is taking open source seriously. By hiring myself and others, VMware is not just talking about open source, but wants to actively take part in the community. Actions speak much louder than words. Linux and open source has won and is here to stay. Linux is now a key part of enterprise software and companies like VMware acknowledge this, and they are making an effort to join, and become a productive member of the open source community.
And Then They Join You… – Open Source @VMware – VMware Blogs : https://blogs.vmware.com/opensource/2017/01/26/and-then-they-join-you/
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I appreciated this rant by @alicegoldfuss on a impractical parts of running containers. Not many people talk about the downsides.
(shame its not on a blog somewhere where it would be readable)
It's almost like containers only improved the Dev side of DevOps hmmmm how strange
— Alice Goldfuss (@alicegoldfuss) January 26, 2017
Hope none of your containers have noisy neighbors because cgroups only go so far.
— Alice Goldfuss (@alicegoldfuss) January 26, 2017
Iptables? Different with containers? Perf profiling? Much harder with containers.
— Alice Goldfuss (@alicegoldfuss) January 26, 2017
Hope none of your containers have noisy neighbors because cgroups only go so far.
— Alice Goldfuss (@alicegoldfuss) January 26, 2017
Orchestrators can redeploy a dead instance but can they detect latency and move it to a better system? Because a slow container is hell.
— Alice Goldfuss (@alicegoldfuss) January 26, 2017
Everyone using containers means I don't have to wake someone else up to deploy their broken shit. It makes DR much faster, too.
— Alice Goldfuss (@alicegoldfuss) January 26, 2017
But that's only half of the ol DevOps pie. The other half? More burden and work. At scale.
— Alice Goldfuss (@alicegoldfuss) January 26, 2017
Why do Continue reading
Vendors marketing is getting overexcited with hyperbole and suddenly basic filtering such as access-lists are Deep Packet Inspection.
Packet munging for layer 2-4 is shallow packet inspection. Specifically, its when you match Ethernet MAC, IP Addresses and TCP/UDP port numbers but nothing else. At time of writing, shallow packet inspection is simple, cheap and part of the forwarding ASIC.
Devices that perform inspection at Layer 5-7 of the OSI model is deep packet inspection (DPI). This requires exponentially more complex handling of the data in the ASICs, awareness of data formats and flow operations. In addition, the applications that configure are complex and sophisticated (the CLI just doesn’t cut it).
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Interesting
Encrypted vMotion has been asked about for YEARS. It’s here now in vSphere 6.5! And, like VM Encryption, we’ve taken a different approach than you might think. We don’t actually encrypt the vMotion network. What we DO encrypt is the data going over the vMotion network. At the time of migration, a 256-bit key and 64-bit Nonce are created by vCenter. This is a one-time-use key and is not persisted!
Some thoughts:
5545x/act# logoff
^
ERROR: % Invalid input detected at ‘^’ marker.
5545x/act# logout
Logoff
I would expect nothing less from a Cisco CLI to be fair. Irrational, inconsistent and byzantine CLI is the normal.
ASA logout weirdness | Battles with Cisco product weirdness : https://ciscoweirdness.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/asa-logout-weirdness/
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