To Infinity and Beyond…

It’s an exciting time in networking!

Google and Amazon recently gave the IT community a glimpse behind the curtain of web-IT, revealing the outcome of their pioneering efforts. It’s no surprise that they’ve settled on IP fabrics and network virtualization to provide both scale and isolation. Web giants Facebook and Microsoft are both driving open hardware in an effort to eliminate the lock that industry incumbents have on networking solutions.

You know that you’re onto something when industry analysts start counting things – Gartner’s Andrew Lerner recently published his perspective on the networking industry; by 2017, they expect 50% of global enterprises to embrace web-IT architectures.

Last year, we saw the uptake of modern networking paradigms. Practitioners of NetDevOps are driving automation practices into the network domain. IP storage solutions are rampant, benefiting from high capacity IP fabrics. Brite-box hardware suppliers have enabled web-IT with procurement, logistics, and support capability that meets the needs of any organization. Network virtualization solutions from VMware NSX and up-and-comer Nuage are getting the nod in enterprises. The OpenStack community applied a laser-like focus on Neutron which in turn has promoted virtual network solutions from Akanda and Midokura to be deployed at scale. We’re seeing Continue reading

Juniper’s Second Run up the Open Networking Mountain

Juniper’s announcement last week that it was launching Junos Software Disaggregation reflects a customer drive towards separating networking software and hardware, one that it was first evident Juniper was listening to with its OCX1100 announcement in early 2015. While the OCX announcement introduced this as a possibility, Juniper’s latest announcement ups the game, pointing out that customers are requiring the ability to procure networking hardware from sources other than Juniper.

Gartner agrees. In their recent report (Brite-Box and SDN Are Driving Innovation and Data Center Network Savings, 2015), the disaggregation benefits were highlighted as “enterprises to standardize network operations”, where organizations can “achieve life cycle savings of 25% to 50%”.

Cumulus Networks kick started this revolution in partnership with industry leading brite-box providers such as Dell, HP, and Quanta, with over 2 million ports in production. So while we are excited to have Juniper join the Open Networking revolution, a closer look suggests this could be another half-hearted attempt.

Based on the launch references, here are a few questions to ask your Juniper rep:

1. Juniper says its disaggregated Junos software can run on “Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) compliant third-party switches.” Without a third party Continue reading

OpenStack Summit Tokyo: Learn Open Networking with OpenStack

Meet us at OpenStack Summit Tokyo and learn how to build fast, scalable, secure OpenStack networking.

Mark McClain (CTO, Akanda Inc) and I will be presenting at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo about the next-generation physical and virtual network that DreamHost is deploying for their DreamCompute cloud.

The design marries Cumulus Networks Dynamic LNV (Lightweight Network Virtualization) with Akanda’s Astara L3-7 services, all being orchestrated by the OpenStack Neutron.

We’ll be expanding on the talk we gave at the last OpenStack summit in Vancouver.  That talk was about the design and why we should deploy it. In this one, we will be discussing in depth about our experiences deploying it in production.

If you can’t make it to Tokyo, don’t worry, the talk will be recorded.

Watch out for this space for updates on the talk!

The post OpenStack Summit Tokyo: Learn Open Networking with OpenStack appeared first on Cumulus Networks Blog.

OpenStack Summit Tokyo: Learn Open Networking with OpenStack

Meet us at OpenStack Summit Tokyo and learn how to build fast, scalable, secure OpenStack networking.

Mark McClain (CTO, Akanda Inc) and I will be presenting at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo about the next-generation physical and virtual network that DreamHost is deploying for their DreamCompute cloud.

The design marries Cumulus Networks Dynamic LNV (Lightweight Network Virtualization) with Akanda’s Astara L3-7 services, all being orchestrated by the OpenStack Neutron.

We’ll be expanding on the talk we gave at the last OpenStack summit in Vancouver.  That talk was about the design and why we should deploy it. In this one, we will be discussing in depth about our experiences deploying it in production.

If you can’t make it to Tokyo, don’t worry, the talk will be recorded.

Watch out for this space for updates on the talk!

The post OpenStack Summit Tokyo: Learn Open Networking with OpenStack appeared first on Cumulus Networks Blog.

NetDevOps: Networking Methods with a DevOps Mindset

DevOps brings together software developers and IT operations through mutual and organic cooperation and collaboration. In legacy IT shops, the roles of developers and IT operations are logically segregated, which stifles progress and prohibits progressive integration efforts. Products that leverage DevOps provide developers self-service capabilities they’ve never had before — eliminating provisioning bottlenecks and adapting to changes quickly. The platform becomes highly scalable and flexible, removing much of the “red tape” in getting things done.

This is all well and good, and is often sufficient for most, but networking is often neglected as a part of the DevOps model. Common questions that arise include the following:

• Is your current networking strategy holding you back from scaling new projects quickly?
• Is your network topology designed to quickly add and remove compute infrastructure?
• How can your network integrate in a DevOps orchestrated world?

This is where including DevOps for networking comes in, or “NetDevOps.” Traditional networking infrastructure can be difficult to manage when requiring agility with updated tools. If your organization is already implementing DevOps principles or has an organization that is flat or non-siloed, integrating networking into your framework may be right for you.

NetDevOps extends what you’re already doing Continue reading

Automation Testing: Tools and Concepts

One of the key tenets of DevOps is automation, or more specifically, “Infrastructure as Code.” That means your system configuration is expressed as a series of scripts that can be executed by your configuration management software, repeatedly, across multiple machines.

Treating infrastructure as code has many benefits, including the abilities to control when and how changes are applied, to apply changes quickly and to manage your changes with version control. Most importantly, because it’s code, you can test it.

If you’ve been maintaining computer systems for any amount of time, you’ve probably accidentally broken something important when you were making a configuration change; either the change didn’t work as you expected or you typed the wrong command. What if you had been able to write your changes ahead of time and test them before you applied them to production? Infrastructure as Code enables you to do just that.

Software developers have been testing their code for a long time, and we can leverage their experience and knowledge and apply it to Infrastructure as Code. So, just as there are a series of testing tools available for software engineers, automation engineers can also draw from a collection of tools and build themselves a complete end-to-end Continue reading

Enabling the Software-Defined Data Center Vision

We’re excited to announce our latest tier 1 partnership, this time with VMware, which demonstrates the growing strategic role and importance that Cumulus Linux plays in rapidly building and scaling private and public clouds. VMware has announced VMware EVO SDDC — a software suite that provides a prescriptive and simple way for organizations to build and operate highly scalable and performant private clouds based on VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture. With VMware EVO SDDC bundled with OEM hardware, VMware provides compute, storage and network virtualization, and now fully integrated physical networking solutions.

Cumulus Linux comes embedded in VMware EVO SDDC, which also includes a hardware management system (HMS) component with software integration at the network layer.  The top of rack (ToR), spine, and management switches all run Cumulus Linux as the network OS on Dell and Quanta platforms.  Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions based on the suite will be available over time through an exclusive set of VMware partners.

This technology partnership is significant for several reasons. First, to have struck such a strategic OEM partnership with VMware is a ringing endorsement of the enterprise-grade quality of software that Cumulus Linux represents as well as the quality of engineering Continue reading

Monitoring Our Network Infrastructure With Sensu

Cumulus Networks provides a service known as the Cumulus Workbench. This service is an infrastructure made of physical switches, virtual machines running in Google Compute Engine (GCE), virtual machines running on our own hardware and bare metal servers. It allows prospective customers and partners to prototype network topologies, test out different configuration management tools, and get a general feeling for open networking. The workbench is also utilized for our boot camp classes.

Right now, we are completely rewriting the workbench backend! Many of the changes that we’re making are to the technical plumbing, so they’re behind the scenes. Monitoring the various workbench components is critical, as any downtime can easily affect a prospective sale or even an in-progress training session. Since our infrastructure is a mix of virtual machines, physical servers and switches, I needed one place to help me monitor the health of the entire system.

We use Puppet for automating our internal infrastructure. I chose Puppet since it holds most of my operational experience, but I firmly believe that the best automation tool is the one that you choose to use! If you want more details on how we use Puppet for automation, I will be speaking in Continue reading

Building an OpenStack Practice

In Q4 2013 at Dasher, we began our journey to create an OpenStack ecosystem that helps our clients as they transform their business and IT infrastructure. For years, Dasher has been helping clients move from physical to virtual environments. As business and IT needs evolved, more customers started evaluating moving from virtual to cloud environments and building their own private cloud. Dasher saw OpenStack becoming the de facto standard for private cloud, but proprietary black box network switches remained a misfit, giving rise to open networking — the disaggregation of network hardware from software.

A couple of our clients along with one of our senior solution architects, Ryan Day, suggested we explore Cumulus Networks® and learn about their Cumulus® Linux® offering. The results are highlighted below and we will attempt to answer: Why do we think the Cumulus Linux OS is a logical step in the evolution of network operating systems?

Cumulus Linux enables software-defined everything (SDE). SDE may be the cool new fad of 2015, but adopting SDE because it is what all the cool kids are doing is certainly not a reason to move to a new technology. Let’s explore Dasher’s reasons for recommending Cumulus Continue reading

Security Benefits of Open Source and Open Development

Gregory Pickett of Hellfire Security reached out to me last Wednesday about some interesting research he is presenting tomorrow at Black Hat USA. There are two parts to his research: a security bug in Cumulus Linux (that we already patched) and other network operating systems, and a serious design issue with how all network switches are designed and built.

The security bug was the easy part: it is not exploitable in our default configuration, and Gregory politely gave us a heads up well ahead of time, so we put the fix out last Friday to protect customers who have modified their sudoers configuration in a way that exposed them to the vulnerability. You can see the details in our security fix announcement from last Friday. (If you’re interested in being notified about future security fixes in Cumulus Linux, please sign up for our security mailing list.)

The much more serious issue he will present is the exploitability of firmware in all network switches. This same exploitability has been known about in servers, laptops and PCs for years (and in some cases mitigated with technologies like Trusted Platform Modules), but its application to networking devices is new.

This issue means Continue reading

Improve Your Open Networking Experience with Cumulus® VX™

In past jobs, when I was responsible for the architecture and engineering of networks, my peers and I would often spend measurable time working in the lab and testing out the setup of new network designs or approaches that we were looking to implement.

As anyone who has had to build a lab themselves will attest, you never have enough gear, power or space to do all of the testing you would like.  Between the problems of having to build the network from gear that’s been cast-off from the production network to not being able to run the latest software, you can end up questioning your testing results.  From being limited on cooling and power to having to find and run the cables to connect it all together, it can be a lot of work that may not answer everything you need for production.

In the compute space, this has been less of an issue in recent years. With the introduction of accessible virtualization, the application teams could simulate entire solution stacks on their desktop.  While you wouldn’t want to run your production environment on many of them, you could at least simulate all of the components in the solution and verify what you were doing different was viable. Continue reading

Vote for Our OpenStack Summit Presentations!

Since Cumulus Linux first shipped, OpenStack and Cumulus Networks have grown together to deliver a vibrant ecosystem of solutions and multiple go-to-market options that make open networking a reality for customers.

The last OpenStack Summit in Vancouver showed that we have a lot to share with the OpenStack community.

That is why with our partners and customers, we submitted several speaking sessions. We would be thrilled to present them at OpenStack Summit Tokyo.

Support us to make this happen!

The voting period is open for a short period of time only and will close on July 30 at 11:59PM PST.  Check out our submission below and Vote now to hear us at OpenStack Summit Tokyo!

VTEP: Your High-throughput Bridge from Virtual to Physical

Speakers: Adam Johnson, VP of Business, Midokura and Leslie Carr, DevOps Engineer, Cumulus Networks

Abstract:  In this session, we will use a real-world case study to show how VXLAN tunnel endpoints (VTEPs) and VXLAN offloading can increase network throughput while reducing CPU overhead — overcoming two significant hurdles facing virtualized data centers.  We will demonstrate typical applications and workloads deployed on physical and virtualized machines.  On the network layer, the switches will utilize Continue reading

The Growing Open Networking Ecosystem

What a difference a couple of years can make. Two years ago, Cumulus Networks was a startup just coming out of stealth mode, and the open networking movement was a mere twinkle in our eyes. Since then, an ecosystem has arisen around open networking that offers customers choice not only in the networking hardware and software they run, but also in how they procure it. Now, companies of all sizes — from small shops with an IT team to the world’s largest cloud providers — are able to reap the benefits of open networking in the way that works best for them.

The expanding open networking ecosystem

While some customers choose Cumulus Linux when shopping for a network solution, many of our customers first experience open networking as part of a broader procurement strategy. Increasingly, open networking is part of next-generation architectures designed to deliver IT as a pool of unified resources that can be managed holistically — what some people call the software-defined data center. With a growing network of partners — ranging from resellers to integrators to OEMs — customers can buy open networking from an IT provider that they know and trust.

Here are a few common Continue reading

Testing Open Networking

Over the last couple of weeks, the networking industry has made some significant steps in the right direction, the open networking direction. At the Open Networking Summit (ONS), we heard some great news about the disaggregated network and how open networking is now everywhere from hyperscale to the enterprise to startups to telcos. As exciting as that is, that’s not the news I’m referring to — I’m referring to the announcement of the Open Networking Testing Consortium.

To illustrate why this is big news, I’ll give some background on how open networking has been operating for most people. Up until a few years ago, the way you purchased a bare metal switch was through select APAC sources and a wire transfer. A few weeks later, you’d receive your equipment and it was then up to you, the end user, to perform interoperability testing with your cables and optics manufacturers while on the phone with support, along with bootstrapping your OS to these boxes. Eventually you had both a CapEx and OpEx saving solution that you controlled from end to end.

Luckily for most of you, that experience has now been refined significantly Continue reading

Interning with Rocket Turtle at Cumulus Networks

My amazing California journey as a French undergrad software engineer.

Most days, the first thing I do in the morning is wake up and check my email. That’s normal, but on March 2014, I received a special email that would change my life forever. This email was from the Cumulus Networks VP of Engineering, Shrijeet Mukherjee, offering me an internship on the Cumulus Networks engineering team. I was so thrilled that I literally jumped out of bed and started the victory dance (which by the way is much stronger than a cup of coffee).

I could have ended up interning at a less “cool” random French consulting company, but I wasn’t really passionate about this option anymore now that I had the opportunity to join the hottest startup in the networking industry in Mountain View, California.

I’m so excited to share my experience!

My time at Cumulus Networks, May through September 2014, was the final internship of my bachelor program at EPITECH in Rennes, France, where I’ve been pursuing a 5-year Bachelor/Masters degree in Software Engineering. I had several internship offers in various parts of the world (Germany, Philippines, Estonia and of course, France) but I turned down all of them to Continue reading

Cumulus Linux — The Foundation of OpenStack Automation

OpenStack is the de facto open source orchestration standard for modern cloud infrastructure. The foundational components stitch together compute, storage and, of course, networking. Linked together, these components are used for both public and private clouds all around the world. Cumulus Networks naturally fits into this ecosystem, and Cumulus Linux is the universal underlay or enabler for such deployments.

Solution Guide

Over the past two quarters, Cumulus Networks has shared solution guides for our 2.5.x releases. In this post we’re going to dive into how you can automate a proof-of-concept OpenStack deployment. For those who learn by watching, a recent video from the OpenStack Vancouver (May 2015) summit event may be helpful; the presentation summarizes all of the behind-the-scenes tasks described below.

Prerequisites

Our goal is to set up an end-to-end OpenStack deployment with the fewest interactive steps, making it as unattended as possible, and ideally taking no more than 20 minutes. The configuration scope includes all networking, server and storage components.

To facilitate a consistent architecture, we’ve imposed a few basic cabling and physical requirements. To make the PoC easy to implement, we assume no external Internet access is available — the entire solution is autonomous with all prerequisites present or cached.

For our first Continue reading

Open Networking for the Whole of Your Data Center Network

In the past, I’ve designed, deployed and operated networks of various sizes, needs and scopes. One of the perennial design points common to all of them is how to approach the out-of-band (OOB) network. When it comes to making sure your production network operates in the face of issues, the OOB network is often a critical component. But it also raises the question of how to build it, what components to use and how much they affect the “day job” of running the production network. These decisions haven’t always been easy.

Generally, there is a spectrum of approaches.  On one end is the choice to go with the same gear that you are deploying in the production network. On the other end is the decision to just build the OOB network out of what you can get from the local or online electronics superstore.  One can cause you budget problems; the other raises the question if your OOB network will be there when you most need it.  All too often the most frugal designs win, and this can cause you to have to troubleshoot the OOB network before you can troubleshoot the production network. So the issue is more than just the initial acquisition cost, Continue reading

Reflections on OpenStack Summit 2015 – A Market Maturing

I just came back from the OpenStack Summit 2015 in Vancouver and have finally caught my breath, so I can share some insights from this important event. It was incredible to bear witness to the continued growth of the OpenStack community in general and this event in particular. I still remember the very early summits when this industry was in its infancy. Back then, it seemed that most of the attendees were engineers conducting design sessions. This past week was gratifying to see how many real customers and actual OpenStack users were at the show. I would even go so far as to say they constituted the majority of the attendees.

Cumulus Networks co-founder and CTO Nolan Leake talks with visitors at the Cumulus Networks booth.

OpenStack Users Love Cumulus Networks

Cumulus Networks was very much present throughout the show — in our booth, in our partners’ booths, in panel sessions and, apparently, in the minds of many of the attendees. Cumulus Linux was seen as a universal network OS underlay for a variety of architectures. In addition to the sessions featuring our co-founder and CTO Nolan Leake, it was exciting to hear Cumulus Networks mentioned in many of the sessions I Continue reading

What Do Spinal Tap and OpenStack Have in Common?

They both go to 11!

Kilo is the eleventh major OpenStack release, with enhancements across the board and new features like Ironic for bare metal service provisioning. SMB to large-scale clouds with OpenStack are being deployed in droves with a self-service portal to spin up virtual and now bare metal workloads while automatically provisioning all the requisite compute, storage and networking resources.  Yet, network service provisioning remains to be cumbersome, brittle and closed.

OpenStack and Cumulus Linux share a common philosophy, design and operational framework. Compute and storage (with Cinder and Swift) leverage standard infrastructure, so why use black boxes from Cisco and Arista, especially when the systems are merchant silicon reference designs. Cumulus Linux is unencumbered Linux without proprietary APIs and protocols, with the flexibility to run on your platform of choice.  Build and runtime operations are identical from bootstrapping infrastructure with PXE or ONIE to lifecycle management with config management and patching. Clouds have become the new frontier not only for orchestration platforms like OpenStack but for tools, processes and organizations. Converged administration with battle-tested automation platforms (such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible) or monitoring (with Nagios or collectd) enable admins to rise to critical tasks such Continue reading

vSphere with Cumulus Linux

I presented my first webinar on VMware vSphere with Cumulus® Linux® last week, which was really exciting for me. VMware has been around for 17 years and counting while Cumulus® Networks® came out of stealth mode only in June 2013. We all know that VMware vSphere works with a variety of network architectures, so I wanted to take a slightly different approach while presenting the webinar and writing this blog:

•  What does Cumulus Networks bring to vSphere that others don’t?
•  Does Cumulus Linux work well with vSphere?  How can we test it?

VMware vSphere and Cumulus Linux

Cumulus Linux and VMware vSphere are both software solutions that run on a variety of hardware platforms. This allows customers to build and use platforms from a range of suppliers for compute, storage and networking. The software defines the performance and behavior of the environment, which allows the administrator to exercise version control and programmatic approaches that are already in use by DevOps teams. Today, switches with Cumulus Linux can be treated as servers.

Cumulus Linux with ONIE, ZTP and Automation

How does Cumulus Linux just work on top of bare metal switches? What is so different? Why can’t we do this with any switch out there Continue reading