The IPv6 Revolution Will Not Be Broadcast

There are days when IPv6 proponents have to feel like Chicken Little. Ever since the final allocation of the last /8s to the RIRs over four years ago, we’ve been saying that the switch to IPv6 needs to happen soon before we run out of IPv4 addresses to allocate to end users.

As of yesterday, ARIN (@TeamARIN) has 0.07 /8s left to allocate to end users. What does that mean? Realistically, according to this ARIN page that means there are 3 /21s left in the pool. There are around 450 /24s. The availability of those addresses is even in doubt, as there are quite a few requests in the pipeline. I’m sure ARIN is now more worried that they have recieved a request that they can’t fulfill and it’s already in their queue.

The sky has indeed fallen for IPv4 addresses. I’m not going to sit here and wax alarmist. My stance on IPv6 and the need to transition is well known. What I find very interesting is that the transition is not only well underway, but it may have found the driver needed to see it through to the end.

Mobility For The Masses

I’ve Continue reading

Thoughts on Cisco Live 2015

We’ve secretly replaced Tom with Mike Rowe. Let’s see if anyone notices…

Cisco Live 2015 is in the books. A great return to San Diego. A farewell from John Chambers. A greeting from Chuck Robbins (@ChuckRobbins). And a few other things.

The Community is Strong, But Concerned

The absolute best part of Cisco Live is the community that has grown from the social media attendees. More than once I heard during the week “I can’t believe this used to be 20-30 people!”. The social community continues to grow and change. Some people move on. Others return from absence. Still others are coming for the first time.

The Cisco Live social community is as inclusive as any I have seen. From the Sunday night Tweetup to the various interactions throughout the week, I’m proud to be a part of a community that strives to make everyone feel like they are part of a greater whole. I met so many new people this year and marveled at the way the Social Media Hub and Meetup Area were both packed at all hours of the day.

That being said, the community does have some concerns. Some of them are around Continue reading

There’s No Such Thing As Free Wireless

If you’ve watched any of the recent Wireless Field Day presentations, you know that free wireless is a big hot button issue. The delegates believe that wireless is something akin to a public utility that should be available without reservation. But can it every really be free?

No Free Lunches

Let’s take a look at other “free” offerings you get in restaurants. If you eat at popular Mexican restaurants, you often get free tortilla chips and salsa, often called a “setup”. A large number of bars will have bowls of salty snacks waiting for patrons to enjoy between beers or other drinks. These appetizers are free so wireless should be free as well, right?

The funny thing about those “free” appetizers is that they aren’t really free. They serve as a means to an end. The salty snacks on the bar are there to make you thirsty and cause you to order more drinks to quench that thirst. The cost of offering those snacks is balanced by the amount of extra alcohol you consume. The “free” chips and salsa at the restaurant serve as much to control food costs as they do to whet your appetite. By offering cheap food Continue reading

Can Community Be Institutionalized?

As technology grows at a faster pace, companies are relying more and more on their users to help spread the word about what they are doing. Why pay exorbitant amounts for marketing when there is a group of folks that will do it for little to nothing? These communities of users develop around any product or company with significant traction in the market. But can they be organized, built, and managed in a traditional manner?

Little Pink Houses

Communities develop when users start talking to each other. They exist in numerous different forms. Whether it be forum posters or sanctioned user groups or even unofficial meetups, people want to get together to talk about things. These communities are built from the idea that knowledge should be shared. Anecdotes, guides, and cautionary tales abound when you put enough people into a room and get them talking about a product.

That’s not to say that all communities can be positive ones. Some communities are even built around the idea of a negative reaction. Look at these groups that formed around simple ideas like getting their old Facebook page back or getting their old MySpace layout returned to them. Imagine the reaction that Continue reading

Just. Write.

Somewhere, someone is thinking about writing. They are confused where to start. Maybe they think they can’t write well at all? Perhaps they even think they’ll run out of things to say? Guess what?

Just. Write.

Why A Blog?

Social media has taken over as the primary form of communication for a great majority of the population. Status updates, wall posts, and picture montages are the way we tell everyone what we’re up to. But this kind of communication is fast and ephemeral. Can you recall tweets you made seven months ago? Unless you can remember a keyword, Twitter and Google do a horrible job of searching for anything past a few days old.

Blogs represent something different. They are the long form record of what we know. They expand beyond a status or point-in-time posting. Blogs can exist for months or years past their original post date. They can be indexed and shared and amplifed. Blogs are how we leave our mark on the world.

I’ve been fielding questions recently from a lot of people about how to get started in blogging. I’m a firm believer that everyone has at least one good blog post in them. One story Continue reading

Open Choices In Networking

I had an interesting time at the spring meeting of the Open Networking User Group (@ONUG_) this past week. There were lots of discussions about networking, DevOps, and other assorted topics. One that caught me by surprise was some of the talk around openness. These tweets from Lisa Caywood (@RealLisaC) were especially telling:

After some discussion with other attendees, I think I’ve figured it out. People don’t want an open network. They want choice.

Flexible? Or Predictable?

Traditional networking marries software and hardware together. You want a Cisco switch? It runs IOS or NX-OS. Running Juniper? You can have any flavor of OS you want…as long as it’s Junos. That has been the accepted order of things for decades. Flexibility is traded for predictability. Traditional networking vendors give you many of the tools you need. If you need something different, you have to find the right mix of platform and software to Continue reading

The Light On The Fiber Mountain

Fabric switching systems have been a popular solution for many companies in the past few years. Juniper has QFabric and Brocade has VCS. For those not invested in fabrics, the trend has been to collapse the traditional three tier network model down into a spine-leaf architecture to optimize east-west traffic flows. One must wonder how much more optimized that solution can be. As it turns out, there is a bit more that can be coaxed out of it.

Shine A Light On Me

During Interop, I had a chance to speak with the folks over at Fiber Mountain (@FiberMountain) about what they’ve been up to in their solution space. I had heard about their revolutionary SDN offering for fiber. At first, I was a bit doubtful. SDN gets thrown around a lot on new technology as a way to sell it to people that buy buzzwords. I wondered how a fiber networking solution could even take advantage of software.

My chat with M. H. Raza started out with a prop. He showed me one of the new Multifiber Push On (MPO) connectors that represent the new wave of high-density fiber. Each cable, which is roughly the size and Continue reading

Could IPv6 Drown My Wireless Network?

By now, the transition to adopt IPv6 networks is in full swing. Registrars are running out of prefixes and new users overseas are getting v6-only allocations for new circuits. Mobile providers are going v6-only and transition mechanisms are in place to ease the migration. You can hear about some of these topics in this recent roundtable recorded at Interop last week:

One of the converstaions that I had with Ed Horley (@EHorley) during Interop opened my eyes to another problem that we will soon be facing with IPv6 and legacy technology. Only this time, it’s not because of a numbering scheme. It’s because of old hardware.

Rate Limited

Technology always marches on. Things that seemed magical to us just five years ago are now antiquated and slow. That’s the problem with the original 802.11 specification. It supported wireless data rates at a paltry 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps. When 802.11b was released, it raised the rates to 5.5 Mbps and 11 Mbps. Those faster data rates, combined with a larger coverage area, helped 802.11b become commercially successful.

Now, we have 802.11n with data rates in the hundreds of Mbps. We also have 802. Continue reading

The Walls Are On Fire

There’s no denying the fact that firewalls are a necessary part of modern perimeter security. NAT isn’t a security construct. Attackers have the equivalent of megaton nuclear arsenals with access to so many DDoS networks. Security admins have to do everything they can to prevent these problems from happening. But one look at firewall market tells you something is terribly wrong.

Who’s Protecting First?

Take a look at this recent magic polygon from everyone’s favorite analyst firm:

FW Magic Polygon. Thanks to @EtherealMind.

I won’t deny that Checkpoint is on top. That’s mostly due to the fact that they have the biggest install base in enterprises. But I disagree with the rest of this mystical tesseract. How is Palo Alto a leader in the firewall market? I thought their devices were mostly designed around mitigating internal threats? And how is everyone not named Cisco, Palo Alto, or Fortinet regulated to the Niche Players corral?

The issue comes down to purpose. Most firewalls today aren’t packet filters. They aren’t designed to keep the bad guys out of your networks. They are unified threat management systems. That’s a fancy way of saying they have a whole bunch of software built on top Continue reading

Betting On The Right Horse

The annoucement of the merger of Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia was a pretty big discussion last week. One of the quotes that kept being brought up in several articles was from John Chambers of Cisco. Chambers has said the IT industry is in for a big round of “brutal consolidation” spurred by “missed market transitions”, which is a favorite term for Chambers. While I agree that consolidation is coming in the industry, I don’t think market transitions are the driver. Instead, it helps to think of it more like a day at the races.

Tricky Ponies

Startups in the networking industry have to find a hook to get traction with investors and customers. Since you can’t boil the ocean, you have to stand out. You need to find an application that gives you the capability to sell into a market. That is much easier to do with SDN than hardware-based innovation. The time-to-market for software is much lower than the barriers to ramp up production of actual devices.

Being a one-trick pony isn’t a bad thing when it comes to SDN startups. If you pour all your talent into one project, you get the best you can build. If Continue reading

Going Out With Style

Watching the HP public cloud discussion has been an interesting lesson in technology and how it is supported and marketed. HP isn’t the first company to publish a bold statement ending support for a specific technology or product line only to go back and rescind it a few days later. Some think that a problem like that shows that a company has some inner turmoil with regards to product strategy. More often than not, the real issue doesn’t lie with the company. It’s the customers fault.

No Lemonade From Lemons

It’s no secret that products have a lifespan. No matter how popular something might be with customers there is always a date when it must come to an end. This could be for a number of reasons. Technology marches on each and every day. Software may not run on newer hardware. Drivers may not be able to be written for new devices. CPUs grow more powerful and require new functions to unlock their potential.

Customers hate the idea of obsolescence. If you tell them the thing they just bought will be out-of-date in six years they will sneer at you. No matter how fresh the technology might be, the idea Continue reading

That’s Using Your Embrane

Cisco announced their intent to acquire Embrane last week. Since they did it on April 1st, there was an initial thought that it might be a prank. But given that Cisco doesn’t really do April Fools jokes, it was quickly determined to be the real deal. More importantly, the Embrane acquistion plugs a very important hole in ACI that I have been worried about for a while.

Everybody Play Nice

Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a great idea that works on the principle that Cisco can get multiple disparate systems to work together to “program” the underlying network to rapidly deploy applications and create policies that allow systems to be provisioned and reconfigured with a minimum of effort.

That’s a great idea in theory. And if you’re only working with Cisco gear it’s any easy thing to pull off. Provided you can easily integrate the ASA operating system with IOS and NX-OS. That’s not an easy chore and all those business units work for the same company. Can you imagine how hard it would be to integrate with an external third party? Even one that is friendly to Cisco? What about a company that only implements the bare minimum functionality Continue reading

Budgeting For Wireless With E-Rate

After having a nice conversation with Josh Williams (@JSW_EdTech) and helping Eddie Forero (@HeyEddie) with some E-Rate issues, I’ve decided that I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it any longer. But my conversation with Josh revealed something that I wasn’t aware of with regards to the new mandate from the president that E-Rate needs to address wireless in schools.

Building On A Budget

The first exciting thing in the new rules for E-Rate modernization is that there has been an additional $1 billion injected into the Category 2 (Priority 2) items. The idea is that this additional funding can be used for purchasing wireless equipment as outlined in the above initiative. I’ve said before that E-Rate needed an overhaul to fix some of the issues with reduced funding in competition for the available funding pool. That this additional funding came through things like sunsetting VoIP funding is a bit irritating, but sometimes these things can’t be helped.

The second item that caught my attention is the new budgeting rules for Category 2 in E-Rate going forward. Now, schools are allocated $150 per student for a rolling five year period. That means the old “2 Continue reading

Does EMC Need A Network?

Network acquisitions are in the news once again. This time, the buyer is EMC. In a blog article from last week, EMC is reportedly mulling the purchase of either Brocade or Arista to add a networking component to its offerings. While Arista would be a good pickup for EMC to add a complete data center networking practice, one must ask themselves “Does EMC Really Need A Network?”

Hardware? For What?

The “smart money” says that EMC needs a network offering to help complete their vBlock offering now that the EMC/Cisco divorce is in the final stages. EMC has accelerated those plans from the server side by offering EVO:RAIL as an option for VSPEX now. Yes, VSPEX isn’t a vBlock. But it’s a flexible architecture that will eventually supplant vBlock when the latter is finally put out to pasture once the relationship between Cisco and EMC is done.

EMC being the majority partner in VCE has incentive to continue offering the package to customers to make truckloads of cash. But long term, it makes more sense for EMC to start offering alternatives to a Cisco-only network. There have been many, many assurances that vBlock will not be going away any Continue reading

Insecurity Guards

Pick a random headline related to security today and you’ll see lots of exclamation points and dire warnings about the insecurity of a something we thought was inviolate, such as Apple Pay or TLS. It’s enough to make you jump out of your skin and crawl into a dark hole somewhere never to use electricity again. Until you read the article, that is. After going through a couple of paragraphs, you realize that a click-bait headline about a new technology actually underscores an age-old problem: people are the weakest link.

Engineered To Be Social

We can engineer security for protocols and systems until the cows come home. We can use ciphers so complicated that even Deep Thought couldn’t figure them out. We can create a system so secure that it could never be hacked. But in the end that system needs to be used by people. And people are where everything breaks down.

Take the most recent Apple Pay “exploit” in the news that’s been making all the headlines. The problem has nothing to do with Apple Pay itself, or the way the device interacts with the point-of-sale terminal. It has everything to do with enterprising crooks calling in to Continue reading

Are We The Problem With Wearables?

Something, Something, Apple Watch.

Oh, yeah. There needs to be substance in a wearable blog post. Not just product names.

Wearables are the next big product category that is driving innovation. The advances being made in screen clarity, battery life, and component miniaturization are being felt across the rest of the device market. I doubt Apple would have been able to make the new Macbook logic board as small as it is without a few things learned from trying to cram transistors into a watch case. But, are we the people sending the wrong messages about wearable technology?

The Little Computer That Could

If you look at the biggest driving factor behind technology today, it comes down to size. Technology companies are making things smaller and lighter with every iteration. If the words thinnest and lightest don’t appear in your presentation at least twice then you aren’t on the cutting edge. But is this drive because tech companies want to make things tiny? Or is it more that consumers are driving them that way?

Yes, people the world over are now complaining that technology should have other attributes besides size and weight. A large contingent says that battery life is Continue reading

Are Your Tweets Really Your Own?

We’ve all seen it recently. Twitter bios and blog profile pages with some combination of the following:

My tweets are my own.

Retweets are not endorsements.

My views do not represent my employer.

It has come to the point where the people in the industry are more visible and valuable than the brands they work for. Personal branding has jumped to the forefront of marketing strategies. But with that rise in personal branding comes a huge risk for companies. What happens when one of our visible stars says something we disagree with? What happens when we have to pull back?

Where Is My Mind?

Social media works best when it’s genuine. People sharing thoughts and ideas with each other without filters or constraint. Where it breaks down is when an external force starts interfering with that information exchange. Think about corporate social media policies that restrict what you can say. Or even policies that say your Twitter handle has to include the company you work for (yes, that exists). Why should my profile have to include miles of disclaimers telling people that I’m not a robot?

Is it because we have become so jaded as to believe that people can’t Continue reading

HP Is Buying Aruba. Who’s Next?

Sometimes all it takes is a little push. Bloomberg reported yesterday that HP is in talks to buy Aruba Networks for their wireless expertise. The deal is contingent upon some other things, and the article made sure to throw up disclaimers that it could still fall through before next week. But the people that I’ve talked to (who are not authorized to comment and wouldn’t know the official answer anyway) have all said this is a done deal. We’ll likely hear the final official confirmation on Monday afternoon, ahead of Aruba’s big conference.

R&D Through M&A

This is a shot in the arm for HP. Their Colubris-based AP lineup has been sorely lacking in current generation wireless technology, let alone next gen potential. The featured 802.11ac APs on their networking site are OEMed directly from Aruba. They’ve been hoping to play the OEM game for a while and see where the chips are going to fall. Buying Aruba gives them second place in the wireless market behind Cisco overnight. It also fixes the most glaring issue with Colubris – R&D. HP hasn’t really been developing their wireless portfolio. Some had even thought it was gone for good. This immediately Continue reading

Cumulus Networks Could Be The New Microsoft

When I was at HP Discover last December, I noticed a few people running around wearing Cumulus Networks shirts. That had me a bit curious, as Cumulus isn’t usually on the best of terms with traditional networking vendors unless they have a partnership. After some digging, I found out that HP would be announcing a “britebox” branded whitebox switch soon running Cumulus Linux. I wrote a post vaguely hinting about this in as much detail as I dared leak out.

No surprise that HP has formally announced their partnership with Cumulus. This is a great win for HP in the long run, as it gives customers the option to work with an up-and-coming network operating system (NOS) along side HP support and hardware. Note that the article mentions a hardware manufacturing deal with Accton, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised to learn that Accton had been making a large portion of their switching line already. Just a different sticker on this box.

Written Once, Runs Everywhere

The real winner here is Cumulus. They have partnered with Dell and HP to bring their NOS to some very popular traditional network vendor hardware. Given that they continue to push Cumulus Linux Continue reading

Hypermyopia In The World Of Networking

The more debate I hear over protocols and product positioning in the networking market today, the more I realize that networking has a very big problem with myopia when it comes to building products. Sometimes that’s good. But when you can’t even see the trees for the bark, let alone the forest, then it’s time to reassess what’s going on.

Way Too Close

Sit down in a bar in Silicon Valley and you’ll hear all kinds of debates about which protocols you should be using in your startup’s project. OpenFlow has its favorite backers. Others say things like Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT) are the way to go. Still others have backed a new favorite draft protocol that’s being fast-tracked at the IETF meetings. The debates go on and on. It ends up looking a lot like this famous video.

But what does this have to do with the product? In the end, do the users really care which transport protocol you used? Is the forward table population mechanism of critical importance to them? Or are they more concerned with how the system works? How easy it is to install? How effective it is at letting them do their jobs?

The Continue reading