The Butcher’s Bill

Watching a real butcher work is akin to watching a surgeon. They are experts with their tools, which are cleavers and knives instead of scalpels and stitches. They know how to carve the best cut of meat from a formless lump. And they do it with the expert eye of a professional trained in their trade.

Butcher is a term that is often loaded with all manner of negative connotations. It makes readers think of indiscriminate slaughter and haphazard destruction. But the real truth is that a butcher requires time and training to cut as they do. There is nothing that a butcher does that isn’t calculated and careful.

Quick Cuts

Why all the discussion about butchers? Because you’re going to see a lot more comparisons in the future when people talk about the pending Dell/EMC acquisition. The real indiscriminate cutting has already started. EMC hid an undisclosed number of layoffs in a Dec. 31 press release. VMware is going to take a 5% hit in jobs, including the entire Workstation and Fusion teams.

It’s no secret that the deal is in trouble right now. Investors are cringing at some of the provisions. The Virtustream spin out was rescinded after Continue reading

The Tortoise and the Austin Hare

Dell announced today the release of their newest network operating system, OS10 (note the lack of an X). This is an OS that is slated to build on the success that Dell has had selling 3rd party solutions from vendors like Cumulus Networks and Big Switch. OS10’s base core will be built on an unmodified Debian distro that will have a “premium” feature set that includes layer 2 and layer 3 functionality. The aim to have a fully open-source base OS in the networking space is lofty indeed, but the bigger question to me is “what happens to Cumulus”?

Storm Clouds

As of right this moment, before the release of Dell OS10, the only way to buy Linux on a Dell switch is to purchase it with Cumulus. In the coming months, Dell will begin to phase in OS10 as an option in parallel with Cumulus. This is especially attractive to large environments that are running custom-built networking today. If your enterprise is running Quagga or sFlow or some other software that has been tweaked to meet your unique needs you don’t really need a ton of features wrapped in an OS with a CLI you will barely use.

So Continue reading

My Thoughts On The Death Of IP Telephony

A Candlestick Phone (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) posted a thought provoking article about collaboration in his Human Infrastructure magazine (which you should be reading). He talks about the death of IP Telephony and the rise of asynchronous communications methods like Slack. He’s got a very interesting point of view. I just happen to disagree with a few of his assertions.

IP Telephony Is Only Mostly Dead

Greg’s stance that IP Telephony is dead is a bit pointed to say the least. He is correct that the market isn’t growing. It is also true that a great number of new workers entering the workforce prefer to use their smartphones for communications, especially the asynchronous kind. However, desk phones are a huge part of corporate communications going forward.

IT shops have a stilted and bizarre world view. If you have a workforce that has to be mobile, whether it be for making service calls or going to customer sites for visits, you have a disproportionately large number of mobile users for sure. But what about organizations that don’t have large mobile populations? What about financial firms or law offices or hospitals? What about retail organizations? These Continue reading

It’s Time For IPv6, Isn’t It?

I made a joke tweet the other day:

It did get lots of great interaction, but I feel like part of the joke was lost. Every one of the things on that list has been X in “This is the Year of X” for the last couple of years. Which is sad because I would really like IPv6 to be a big part of the year.

Ars Technica came out with a very good IPv6-focused article on January 3rd talking about the rise in adoption to 10% and how there is starting to be a shift in the way that people think about IPv6.

Old and Busted

One of the takeaways from the article that I found most interesting was a quote from Brian Carpenter of The University of Aukland about address structure. Most of the time when people complain about IPv6, they say that it’s stupid that IPv6 isn’t backwards compatible with IPv4. Carpenter has a slightly different take on it:

The fact that people don’t understand: the design flaw is in IPv4, which Continue reading

Doing 2016 Write

It’s the first day of 2016 and it’s time for me to look at what I wanted to do and what I plan to accomplish in the coming 366 days. We’ve got a busy year ahead with a leap day, the Olympics, and a US presidential election. And somewhere in the middle of all that there’s a lot of exciting things related to tech.

2015 In Rewind

Looking back at my 2015 goals, I think I did a fairly good job:

• Writing in Markdown – Read about it all here
• Blog themes – I really did look at quite a few themes and tried to find something that worked the way I wanted it to work without major modifications. What I finally settled on was a minor font change to make things more readable. For me, form has never been more important than function, so I spend less time worrying about how my blog looks and much more time focusing on how it reads.
• Cisco Live Management – Didn’t quite get this one done. I wanted to put up the poll for the big picture at the end and I managed to miss it this year! The crew Continue reading

My Markdown Adventure

It was almost a year ago that I set forth the idea to start writing all my blog posts in Markdown. I’ve been doing my best to keep up with that throughout the year and now I’m fifty Markdown posts into my goal. How is it working out so far?

Markdown Mindset

Learning to write in Markdown took some adjustment. Before, I had just used the web editor or the occasional HTML editing suite to write my posts. Most of the HTML was hidden. With Markdown, you have to think about what you’re going to do before you start writing it. Where are the links going to appear? How is your post going to be organized? Putting a bit more thought into your post gives you more structure to your thoughts. That’s something that’s helped my writing a bit.

The table layout for the 2015 Cisco Live Twitter List really wasn’t all that difficult either. Once I put the initial code together, it was just a simple copy/paste job after that. I’m toying with the idea of putting all my notes into Markdown as well. But given how terrible I am with taking typed notes that may not happen.

Editing Continue reading

Keeping IT Up With The Joneses

We’ve all been in that meeting. We’re learning the important facts about a company and their awesome technology. We think we’ve got a handle of the problem they’re solving and how we can apply it to our needs. And then…BAM! Our eyes are assaulted by a billboard full of company logos. We’re told how every one of these companies think that this product or solution is awesome. And because they think it’s awesome and bought it, you should think it’s awesome as well and buy it too.

Do As They Do

This particular exchange in a presentation has a term: the NASCAR slide. When I came up with the term years ago during a Tech Field Day presentation, I referred to the fact that the slide was covered by all of the logos of customers and sponsors, not unlike the side of a NASCAR race car or the coveralls worn by the drivers. It turned the presentation into a giant neon sign signaling all the companies that bought the solution.

Vendors love to tell you who their customers are. They love holding those solution bidding wins over their competitor’s heads and informing the populace that a company like Victoria’s Continue reading

Share And Share Alike

Every once in a while, I like to see who is clicking through to my blog. It helps me figure out what’s important to write about and who reads things. I found a recent comment that made me think about what I’m doing from a different perspective.

Build Slides Are Evil

PowerPoint is a necessary evil. No program allows us to convey as much information in a short amount of time. PowerPoint is almost a requirement for speaking in front of groups. Information can be shown in a very effective manner for audiences of five or five hundred. But PowerPoint also allows presenters to do some very silly things that impact our ability to learn.

Not Built In A Day

The biggest offense in the land of PowerPoint is the build slide. Build slides are those that have elements that must be layered together in order to show the complete picture. In some cases, build slides have complex graphic overlays with many different elements. They may have clip art overlays. But build slides can also be simple bullet points that appear one at a time in a list. The key is that all the parts of the slide must progress in series to “build” the whole thing.

Build slides look very awesome. They provide the appearance of motion and give a movie-like quality to a static presentation. And they often take up a large amount of time during the creation process. But they are almost always unnecessary.

When built properly, Continue reading

The Marriage of the Ecosystem

A recent discussion with Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) of Packet Pushers and Nigel Poulton (@NigelPoulton) of In Tech We Trust got me thinking about product ecosystems. Nigel was talking about his new favorite topic of Docker and containers. He mentioned to us that it had him excited because it felt like the good old days of VMware when they were doing great things with the technology. That’s when I realized that ecosystems aren’t all they are cracked up to be.

Courting Technology

Technology is a huge driver for innovation. New ideas are formed into code that runs to accomplish a task. That code is then disseminated to teams and built upon to create toolsets to accomplish even more tasks. That’s how programs happen. Almost every successful shift in technology starts with the courtship of focused code designed to accomplish a simple task or solve a quick problem.

The courtship evolves over time to include other aspects of technology. Development work extends the codebase to accept things like plugins to provide additional functionality. Not core functions though. The separation comes when people want to add additional pieces without compromising the original program. Bolting additional non-core pieces on Continue reading

A Voyage of Discover-E

I’m very happy to be attending the first edition of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) Discover in London next week. I say the first edition because this is the first major event being held since the reaving of HP Inc from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. I’m hopeful for some great things to come from this.

It’s The Network (This Time)

One of the most exciting things for me is seeing how HPE is working on their networking department. With the recent news about OpenSwitch, HPE is trying to shift the way of thinking about a switch operating system in a big way. To quote my friend Chris Young:

Vendors today spend a lot of effort re-writing 80% of their code and focus on innovating on the 20% that makes them different. Imagine how much further we’d be if that 80% required no effort at all?

OpenSwitch has some great ideas, like pulling everything from Open vSwitch as a central system database. I would love to see more companies use this model going forward. It makes a lot of sense and can provide significant benefits. Time will tell if other vendors recognize this and start using portions of OpenSwitch in their projects. But Continue reading

A Stack Full Of It

During the recent Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Meeting, there was a lot of discussion around the idea of a Full Stack Engineer. The idea of full stack professionals has been around for a few years now. Seeing this label applied to networking and network professionals seems only natural. But it’s a step in the wrong direction.

Short Stack

Full stack means having knowledge of the many different pieces of a given area. Full stack programmers know all about development, project management, databases, and other aspects of their environment. Likewise, full stack engineers are expected to know about the network, the servers attached to it, and the applications running on top of those servers.

Full stack is a great way to illustrate how specialized things are becoming in the industry. For years we’ve talked about how hard networking can be and how we need to make certain aspects of it easier for beginners to understand. QoS, routing protocols, and even configuration management are critical items that need to be decoded for anyone in the networking team to have a chance of success. But networking isn’t the only area where that complexity resides.

Server teams have their own jargon. Their language Continue reading

Gathering No MOS

If you work in the voice or video world, you’ve undoubtedly heard about Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). MOS is a rough way of ranking the quality of the sound on a call. It’s widely used to determine the over experience for the user on the other end of the phone. MOS represents something important in the grand scheme of communications. However, MOS is quickly becoming a crutch that needs some explanation.

That’s Just Like Your Opinion

The first think to keep in mind when you look at MOS data is that the second word in the term is opinion. Originally, MOS was derived by having selected people listen to calls and rank them on a scale of 1 (I can’t hear you) to 5 (We’re sitting next to each other). The idea was to see if listeners could distinguish when certain aspects of the call were changed, such as pathing or exchange equipment. It was an all-or-nothing ranking. Good calls got a 4 or even rarely a 5. Most terrible calls got 2 or 3. You take the average of all your subjects and that gives your the overall MOS for your system.

When digital systems came along, MOS took Continue reading

How Much Is Unlimited Anyway?

The big news today came down from the Microsoft MVP Summit that OneDrive is not going to support “unlimited” cloud storage going forward. This came as a blow to folks that were hoping to store as much data as possible for the foreseeable future. The conversations have already started about how Microsoft pulled a bait-and-switch or how storage isn’t really free or unlimited. I see a lot of parallels in the networking space to this problem as well.

All The Bandwidth You Can Buy

I remember sitting in a real estate class in college talking to my professor, who was a commercial real estate agent. He told us, “The happiest day of your real estate career is the day you buy an apartment complex. The second happiest day of your career is when you sell it to the next sucker.” People are in love with the idea of charging for a service, whether it be an apartment or cloud storage and compute. They think they can raise the price every year and continue to reap the profits of ever-increasing rent. What they don’t realize is that those increases are designed to cover increased operating costs, not increased money in Continue reading

Who Wants To Save Forever?

At the recent SpectraLogic summit in Boulder, much of the discussion centered around the idea of storing data and media in perpetuity. Technology has arrived at the point where it is actually cheaper to keep something tucked away rather than trying to figure out whether or not it should be kept. This is leading to a huge influx of media resources being available everywhere. The question now shifts away from storage and to retrieval. Can you really save something forever?

Another One Bites The Dust

Look around your desk. See if you can put your hands on each of the following:

* A USB Flash drive
* A DVD-RW
* A CD-ROM
* A Floppy Disk (bonus points for 5.25")

Odds are good that you can find at least three of those four items. Each of those items represents a common way of saving files in a removal format. I’m not even trying to cover all of the formats that have been used (I’m looking at you, ZIP drives). Each of these formats has been tucked away in a backpack or given to a colleague at some point to pass files back and forth.

Yet, each of these formats Continue reading

Open Networking Needs to Be Interchangeable

We’re coming up quickly on the fall meeting of the Open Networking User Group, which is a time for many of the members of the financial community to debate the needs of modern networking and provide a roadmap and use case set for networking vendors to follow for in the coming months. ONUG provides what some technology desperately needs – a solution to which it can be applied.

Open Or Something Like It

We’ve already started to see the same kind of non-open solution building that plagued the early network years creeping into some aspects of our new “open” systems. Rather than building on what we consider to be tried-and-true building blocks, we instead come to proprietary solutions that promise “magic” when it comes to configuration and maintenance. Should your network provide the magic? Or is that your job?

Magical is what the network should look like to a user, not to the admins. Think about the networking in cloud providers like AWS and MS Azure. The networking there is a very simple model that hides complexity. The average consumer of AWS services doesn’t need to know the specifics of configuration in the underlay of Amazon’s labyrinth of the Continue reading

My Thoughts on Dell, EMC, and Networking

The IT world is buzzing about the news that Dell is acquiring EMC for $67 billion. Storage analysts are talking about the demise of the 800-lb gorilla of storage. Virtualization people are trying to figure out what will happen to VMware and what exactly a tracking stock is. But very little is going on in the networking space. And I think that’s going to be a place where some interesting things are going to happen.

It’s Not The Network

The appeal of the Dell/EMC deal has very little to do with networking. EMC has never had any form of enterprise networking, even if they were rumored to have been looking at Juniper a few years ago. The real networking pieces come from VMware and NSX. NSX is a pure software networking implementation for overlay networking implemented in virtualized networks.

Dell’s networking team was practically nonexistent until the Force10 acquisition. Since then there has been a lot of work in building a product to support Dell’s data center networking aspirations. Good work has been done on the hardware front. The software on the switches has had some R&D done internally, but the biggest gains have been in partnerships. Dell works closely Continue reading

SDN Myths Revisited

I had a great time at TECHunplugged a couple of weeks ago. I learned a lot about emerging topics in technology, including a great talk about the death of disk from Chris Mellor of the Register. All in all, it was a great event. Even with a presentation from the token (ring) networking guy:

I had a great time talking about SDN myths and truths and doing some investigation behind the scenes. What we see and hear about SDN is only a small part of what people think about it.

SDN Myths

Myths emerge because people can’t understand or won’t understand something. Myths perpetuate because they are larger than life. Lumberjacks and blue oxen clearing forests. Cowboys roping tornadoes. That kind of thing. With technology, those myths exist because people don’t want to believe reality.

SDN is going to take the jobs of people that can’t face the reality that technology changes rapidly. There is a segment of the tech worker populace that just moves from new job to new job doing the same old things. We leave technology behind all the time without a care in the world. But we worry when people can’t work on that technology.

I Continue reading

Premise vs. Premises

If you’ve listened to a technology presentation in the past two years that included discussion of cloud computing, you’ve probably become embroiled in the ongoing war of the usage of the word premises or the shift of people using the word premise in its stead. This battle has raged for many months now, with the premises side of the argument refusing to give ground and watch a word be totally redefined. So where is this all coming from?

The Premise of Your Premises

The etymology of these two words is actually linked, as you might expect. Premise is the first to appear in the late 14th century. It traces from the Old French premisse which is derived from the Medieval Latin premissa, which are both defined as “a previous proposition from which another follows”.

The appearance of premises comes from the use of premise in legal documents in the 15th century. In those documents, a premise was a “matter previously stated”. More often than not, that referred to some kind of property like a house or a building. Over time, that came to be known as a premises.

Where the breakdown starts happening is recently in technology. We live Continue reading

Tips For Presenting On Video

Giving a presentation is never an easy thing for a presenter. There’s a lot that you have to keep in mind, like pacing and content. You want to keep your audience in mind and make sure you’re providing value for the time they are giving you.

But there is usually something else you need to keep in mind today. Most presentations are being recorded for later publication. When presenting for an audience that has a video camera or two, there are a few other things you want to keep in mind on top of every other thing you are trying to keep track of.

Tip 1: Introduce Early. And Often

One of the things you really need to keep in mind for recorded presentations is time. If the videos are going to be posted to Youtube after the event the length of your presentation is going to matter. People that stumble across your talk aren’t going to want to watch an hour or two of slide discussion. A fifteen minute overview of a topic works much better from a video perspective.

Never rely on a lower third to do something you are capable of taking five seconds to say.

Keeping Continue reading