Fear itself: Thinking through change and turmoil

Fair warning: this is going to be a controversial post, and it might be considered a bit “off topic.”

Maybe it’s just that time of year. Or maybe it’s several conversations I’ve been involved in recently. Or maybe it’s the result of following over 150 blogs on a daily basis covering everything from religion to politics to technology to philosophy. Whatever it is, there’s one thing I’ve noticed recently.

We’re really afraid.

I don’t mean “concerned about what the future might hold,” but rather — it seems, at least sometimes — sinking into a state of fear bordering on the irrational. Sometimes it feels like the entire world is one long troubleshooting session in the worst designed network I’ve ever encountered. Let me turn to a few completely different areas to illustrate my point. Some of these are going to make people mad, so hold on to your hats — and hear me out before you jump all over me or shut down.

We’re afraid of what the future might hold for us as engineers and as people. Maybe this entire software defined thing is going to destroy my entire career. Maybe I’ll end up like a buggy whip maker Continue reading

Worth Reading: Type 4’s

So, a type-4 asbr-summary LSA is needed to help make the ASBR reachable and, by extension make the associated type-5 prefix valid. The type-4 acts like a glue record, and uses the ABRs well known RID as a care-of address for the ASBR and it’s advertised prefixes. via network sherpa

Continue reading

QOTW: Virtue in Good

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Worth Reading: The Marriage of the Ecosystem

New technology is like dating. You get excited and giddy about where things are going and all the potential you see. You enjoy spending time together just talking or existing. As you start to get more serious you start to see issues crop up the need to be solved. Eventually you take the plunge and make things super serious. What you don’t want to have happen at this point is the trap that some people fall into. via networking nerd

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Yokohama

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Worth Reading: P4

P4 , the language that could be a successor to OpenFlow , isn’t a sure thing yet, but it’s certainly captured the imagination of certain vendors, particularly on the chip side. via sdn central

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Worth Reading: What’s Your KPI?

In our quest to make business and work as mechanical and inhuman as possible over the past hundred years, every position in many large organizations has been sliced and diced into tiny pieces so that each piece can be measured and evaluated against a chart posted on the wall. via linkedin

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New technology watch ‘net

A few thoughts on new technology from around the web over the last week. Is data center software defined networks crossing the chasm? According to the Next Platform, for instance, it is —

And the answer is that it is in Gartner’s slope of enlightenment, that it is crossing Moore’s chasm, and that it is in a period where market share is being set month by month. If you follow the assumptions made in the above analysis, then 2015 will represent at most 1 percent to 3 percent of the total revenue that will occur in the datacenter SDN market over the next five years. It is an exciting time to be in datacenter networking.

This still leaves me with a question, however — what does a “software defined network” really mean? From one perspective, I’ve been working on software defined networks since the mid-1990’s. It is the software based centralized and distributed control planes that have defined the network ever since then; the last hardware defined network I worked on was based on inverse multiplexers and physical interconnects to direct and manage traffic. So what do we mean when we say “software defined network” today? It seems the biggest Continue reading

Worth Reading: Fairy Tales and Hard Work

In practical reality, people don’t live like MBA simulations expect most of the time. Leaders say that we want our employees to be rational actors, but then condemn and punish employees for acting rationally, logically and appropriately when they find themselves trapped in an inherently unfair operating environment. via business reporter

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Why aren’t you teaching?

There is an old saw about teaching and teachers: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” This seems to be a widely believed thought in the engineering world (though perhaps less in the network engineering world than many other parts of engineering) — but is it true? In fact, to go farther, does this type of thinking actually discourage individual engineers teaching, or training, in a more formal way in the networking world? Let me give you my experience.

What I’ve discovered across the years is something slightly different: if you can’t explain it to someone else in a way they can understand it, then you don’t really know it. There are few ways to put this into practice in the real world better than intentionally taking on the task of teaching others what you know. In fact, I’ve probably learned much more in the process of preparing to teach than I ever have in “just doing.” There is something about spending the time in thinking through how to explain something in a number of different ways that encourages understanding. To put it in other terms, teaching makes you really think about how something works.

Don’t get Continue reading

Worth Reading; Squatting

If the rightful entity decides to route them or transfer them to someone else who then routes them, then everyone has a problem. The network that is squatting will not be able to get to the legitimate users of the block. The legitimate user of the block will not be able to get to a sizable number of eyeballs on those squatting ISPs’ networks. via teamarin

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QOTW: Labor and Morality

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HL: Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture

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Worth Reading: Omnipath

Omni-Path, known internally by the generic code name “Storm Lake,” is a vital ingredient in Intel’s Scalable Systems Framework, which was announced earlier this year as a collection of hardware and systems software components to build parallel systems for running simulation and modeling workloads and increasingly other kinds of data analytics jobs that benefit from running on clusters with low latency and high bandwidth interconnects. via nextplatform

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Life Rafts

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Worth Listening: Datanauts 15

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Worth Reading: The 10x Rule

How can you determine whether a new technology is worth the costs and risks and costs of adoption? Start by calculating them. One guideline is the 10X rule: if you can expect a return of 10 times your investment, then it’s worth it. via netcraftsmen

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Reaction: Innovation and the Internet

Industries mature, of course. That they do so shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s watched the world for very long. The question is — do they mature in a way that places a few players at the “top,” leaving the rest to innovate along the edges? Or do they leave broad swaths of open space in which many players can compete and innovate? Through most of human history, the answer has been the first: industries, in the modern age, tend to ossify into a form where a few small players control most of the market, leaving the smaller players to innovate along the edges. When the major impetus in building a new company is to “get bought,” and the most common way for larger companies to innovate is by buying smaller companies (or doing “spin ins”), then you’ve reached a general point of stability that isn’t likely to change much.

Is the networking industry entering this “innovation free zone?” Or will the networking industry always be a market with more churn, and more innovation? There are signs in both directions.

For instance, there’s the idea that once technology reaches a certain level of capability, there’s just no reason for Continue reading

Highlight: Get out of the way

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Worth Reading: IPv6 Performance

Every so often I hear the claim that some service or other does not support IPv6 not because of some technical issue, or some cost or business issue, but simply because the service operator is of the view that IPv6 offers an inferior level service as compared to IPv4, and by offering the service over IPv6 they would be exposing their clients to an inferior level of performance of the service. via potaroo.net

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