The Importance of sFlow and NetFlow in Data Center Networks
As networks get more complex, and higher-speed interconnects are required, in-depth information about the switches serving these networks becomes crucial to maintain quality-of-service, perform billing, and manage traffic in a shared environment.
Some of you reading this blog post may already be familiar with “sFlow,” an industry-standard technology for monitoring high-speed switched networks and obtaining insights about the data traversing them. This blog post will focus on the importance of sFlow and the similar technology, “NetFlow,” in large – and getting larger – data centers.
Comparing sFlow and NetFlow
sFlow and NetFlow are technologies that, by sampling traffic flows between ports on a switch or interfaces on a router, can provide data about network activity, such as uplink load, total bandwidth used, graphs of history, and so on. To take this data and put it into a form that’s easily digestable, there is NfSen, a web-based front-end for these tools.
While sFlow and NetFlow may – at least on the surface – sound the same, they have underlying protocol differences that may be relevant, depending on your use case. sFlow is, as previously stated, an industry-standard technology. This dramatically increases the chances the sFlow agent (the piece of Continue reading
Buzzword bingo: NetDevOps edition
Looking at the marketing landscape for IT, you could be forgiven for thinking that the current strategy was to dynamite a word factory and use the resulting debris as marketing content. DevSecOps. NetDevOps. Ops, ops, spam, eggs, spam, and DevSpamOps.
The naming trend lends itself easily to parody, but it began as shorthand for an attempt to solve real IT problems. And its iterations have more in common than a resemblance to alphabet salad. What lies beneath the buzzwords? And do you need to care?
Countless companies have jumped on the NetDevOps bandwagon, all with their own way of doing things; and most are utterly incompatible with everyone else. Some may have already abandoned the NetDevOps craze, believing it to be nothing but marketing hype wrapped around a YAML parser and some scripts. Others might have found a system that works for them and swear by it, using nothing else for provisioning.
Regardless of views, a system that allows for rapid provisioning and re-provisioning of applications, containers, virtual machines, and network infrastructure is paramount.
Ministry of Silly Names: A History
The modern era of namesmashing started with DevOps. This made a sort of sense because, before this, IT had Continue reading
The Multicloud We Need, But Not the One We Deserve
Large organizations are married to the VMware suite of products. We can quibble about numbers for adoption of Hyper-V and KVM, but VMware dominates the enterprise virtualization market, just as Kubernetes is the unquestioned champion of containers.
Virtual Machines (VMs) are a mature technology, created and refined before large-scale adoption of public cloud services. Cloud-native workloads are often designed for containers, and containerized workloads are designed to fail. You can tear one down on one cloud, and reinstantiate it on another. Near-instant reinastantiation is the defense against downtime.
VMs take a different approach. A VM is meant to keep existing for long periods of time, despite migrations and outages. Failure is to be avoided as much as possible. This presents a problem as more organizations pursue a multi-cloud IT strategy.
The key technology for highly available VMs is vMotion: the ability to move a VM from one node in a cluster to another with no downtime. However, as data centers themselves become increasingly virtualized, using cloud computing services such as Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Amazon EC2, there’s a growing requirement to be able to move VMs between cloud infrastructures. This is not a supported feature of vMotion.
Routed Continue reading
Cumulus Networks is Excited to Announce being the First to Power Facebook’s Next Generation, Open Modular Platform, Minipack
Cumulus Networks, the leader in building open, modern and scalable networks, announced at OCP Summit that Cumulus Linux is the first network operating system to fully support the Minipack next-generation modular switch platform. Developed by Edgecore and contributed by Facebook to the Open Compute Project, Minipack empowers organizations of all sizes to architect, design and scale their infrastructure with unprecedented flexibility, capacity and interoperability.
Figure 1: Minipack Modular Chassis
Minipack is a modular switch platform, which means together, Cumulus Networks and Edgecore are bringing the benefits of web-scale networking to the mainstream. Minipack follows the open networking principles of disaggregation that allow customers to maintain consistent automated provisioning across all their switches of different form-factors (fixed or chassis).
Minipack leverages the latest ASIC technology from Broadcom including the Tomahawk III, the industry’s highest performance switch silicon. Compared to its predecessor, Backpack, Minipack is ½ the height, uses ½ the power and offers equivalent capacity making it one of the most operationally efficient open networking data center spine switches available today.
Additionally, Minipack offers either 100GE or 400GE options with Field Replaceable Port Interface Modules (PIM)’s in the following form factors:
- PIM-16Q: Port Interface Module with 16 x QSFP28 100G
- Continue reading
Kernel of Truth season 2 episode 3: Storage solutions
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Click here for our previous episode.
You asked for it, we listened, and now we’re delivering! This episode, host Brian calls on Pete Lumbis and special guest David Illes from Mellanox to answer a question we got on our community Slack channel: “What are middle-tier customers doing for storage of Cumulus enabled solutions?” David and Pete share not only what’s changing for middle-tier customers but also tackle the topic of storage solutions in general. What sort of things are we seeing as customers migrate to Ethernet storage? Listen and find out.
Guest Bios
Brian O’Sullivan: Brian currently heads Product Management for Cumulus Linux. For 15 or so years he’s held software Product Management positions at Juniper Networks as well as other smaller companies. Once he saw the change that was happening in the networking space, he decided to join Cumulus Networks to be a part of the open networking innovation. When not working, Brian is a voracious reader and has held a variety of jobs, including bartending in three countries and working as an extra in a German soap opera. You can find him Continue reading
Cumulus content roundup: February
It’s time to officially unveil our Cumulus content roundup- February edition! In case you missed any of the content from the last month we, naturally, have you covered with links to it all below. Dig into the latest and greatest resources and news including two great podcasts that we recommend you queue up and listen to during your commute.
From Cumulus Networks:
How to make CI/CD with containers viable in production: Software-defined infrastructure is no longer a nice to have. It’s an absolute must using modern development approaches, such as CI/CD, containers, etc.
Kernel of Truth season 2 episode 1- EVPN on the host: Guess who’s back? Back again? The real Kernel of Truth is back with season 2 and we’re starting off this season with all things EVPN! This topic is near and dear to Attilla de Groots’ heart having talked about it in his recent blog here. He now joins Atul Patel and our host Brian O’Sullivan to talk more about EVPN on host for multi-tenancy.
BGP: What is it, how can it break, and can Linux BGP fix it?: Border Gateway Protocol is one of the most important protocols on the internet. Linux BGP allows for in-depth monitoring and Continue reading
Cumulus Networks Named to CRN Data Center 50
Cumulus Networks is proud to announce CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named us to its 2019 Data Center 50 list.
This annual list identifies technology suppliers that offer the right management tools to help businesses and solution providers ensure data centers run with maximum performance and efficiency. We couldn’t be more thrilled! This accomplishment really solidifies our vision — to build the modern data center networks for applications of the future.
It’s been a while since we updated our blog community with our evolved vision for the modern data center, so we thought this would be a great opportunity to review a little bit about what Cumulus has been doing lately and how our products have evolved.
Our story — Building the modern data center
We pride ourselves on providing networking software to design, run and operate modern data centers that are simple, open, resilient, scalable and operationally efficient.
Our network operating system, Cumulus Linux, is a powerful, open network operating system that allows you to automate, customize and scale using web-scale principles like the world’s largest data centers.
When it comes to data center networks, traditional network solutions are unable keep up with the pace of Continue reading
Kernel of Truth season 2 episode 2: The future of the Linux Kernel
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Click here for our previous episode.
This episode, host Brian is joined by two of our in-house Linux Kernel experts David and Roopa. Joining them is Attilla who, like many of you, is curious about what’s coming down the line in regards to the Linux Kernel. Since they’re working ahead of everyone, what can we look forward to in the future? We promise you won’t need a crystal ball to find out, just listen here!
Guest Bios
Brian O’Sullivan: Brian currently heads Product Management for Cumulus Linux. For 15 or so years he’s held software Product Management positions at Juniper Networks as well as other smaller companies. Once he saw the change that was happening in the networking space, he decided to join Cumulus Networks to be a part of the open networking innovation. When not working, Brian is a voracious reader and has held a variety of jobs, including bartending in three countries and working as an extra in a German soap opera. You can find him on Twitter at @bosullivan00.
David Ahern is a Member of Technical Staff at Cumulus Networks. He traded Continue reading
Upgrade Scripts
We need to do “upgrades in the network” is one of those phrases that chills the bones of all IT engineers. Upgrades don’t have to be so painful and in this blog, we’re going to discuss the upgrade process recommended by Cumulus and leave you with some example automation to make the process as efficient as possible.
Upgrades are necessary to maintain stable and secure code but bring the risk of new bugs and sustained outages due to unforeseen circumstances, and they’re generally not very easy to perform. Anyone who has worked network operations knows that upgrade windows could run as quickly as an hour or as long as all night (and maybe for the next three nights). Even as I write this I am remembering experiences from upgrade windows of old where things did not go according to plan. But before we get into the specifics of the upgrade process with Cumulus, it is worth discussing why upgrades in the network are so fraught with peril.
DISCLAIMER: Rant Incoming
The biggest impediment to network upgrades is complexity. When we say complexity we mean the conscious choice to add complexity into the design of the network that most folks undertake Continue reading
BGP: What is it, how can it break, and can Linux BGP fix it?
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one of the most important protocols on the internet. At the same time, when it breaks, it is one of the most potentially catastrophic.
As the internet grows ever larger and becomes ever more complex, having a well-configured BGP is crucial to keeping everything running smoothly. Unfortunately, when a BGP is not configured correctly, there can be disastrous consequences.
This blog will provide a brief explanation of what BGP is, and then dive into some of the common protocol issues and pitfalls. We cannot go too deep into the intricacies of BGP – those can (and do) fill entire books. However, we can provide an overview of how Linux (which has a standardized BGP protocol set and in-depth monitoring, analysis, and control tools) can be used to alleviate some of these common issues.
What is BGP?
BGP is a routing protocol that relies on TCP, designed for providing routing information in and between autonomous systems (ASes). In large networks, BGP is responsible for informing all hosts that need to know of the ways a packet can travel from site A to site B – and, if a site or router goes down, how to reroute the packet so Continue reading
Kernel of Truth season 2 episode 1: EVPN on the host
Subscribe to Kernel of Truth on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Cast Box and Sticher!
Click here for our previous episode.
Guess who’s back? Back again? The real Kernel of Truth podcast is back with season 2 and we’re starting off this season with all things EVPN! This topic is near and dear to Attilla de Groots’ heart having talked about it in his recent blog here. He now joins Atul Patel and our host Brian O’Sullivan to talk more about EVPN on host for multi-tenancy.
Join as we as discuss the problem that we’re solving for, how to deploy EVPN on the host, what the caveats are when deploying and more.
Guest Bios
Brian O’Sullivan: Brian currently heads Product Management for Cumulus Linux. For 15 or so years he’s held software Product Management positions at Juniper Networks as well as other smaller companies. Once he saw the change that was happening in the networking space, he decided to join Cumulus Networks to be a part of the open networking innovation. When not working, Brian is a voracious reader and has held a variety of jobs, including bartending in three countries and working as an extra in a German Continue reading
How to make CI/CD with containers viable in production
Continuing Integration and Continuing Development (CI/CD), and containers are both at the heart of modern software development. CI/CD developers regularly break up applications into microservices, each running in their own container. Individual microservices can be updated independently of one another, and CI/CD developers aim to make those updates frequently.
This approach to application development has serious implications for networking.
There are a lot of things to consider when talking about the networking implications of CI/CD, containers, microservices and other modern approaches to application development. For starters, containers offer more density than virtual machines (VMs); you can stuff more containers into a given server than is possible with VMs.
Meanwhile, containers have networking requirements just like VMs do, meaning more workloads per server. This means more networking resources are required per server. More MAC addresses, IPs, DNS entries, load balancers, monitoring, intrusion detection, and so forth. Network plumbing hasn’t changed, so more workloads means more plumbing to instantiate and keep track of.
Containers can live inside a VM or on a physical server. This means that they may have different types of networking requirements than traditional VMs, (only talking to other containers within the same VM, for example) than other workloads. Continue reading
Cumulus content roundup: January
The new year is now in full swing and we’re excited about all the great content we’ve shared with you so far! In case you missed some of it, here’s our Cumulus content roundup- January edition. As always, we’ve kept busy last month with lots of great resources and news for you to read. One of the biggest things we announced was our new partnership with Nutanix but wait, there’s so much more! We’ve rounded up the rest of the right here, so settle in and stay a while!
From Cumulus Networks:
Cumulus + Nutanix = Building and Simplifying Open, Modern Data Centers at Scale: We are excited to announce that Cumulus and Nutanix are partnering to build and operate modern data centers with open networking software.
Cumulus Networks Strengthens Board of Directors Amid Record Growth and Market Adoption of its Open, Modern Networking Software: Former Deutsche Bank Group COO, Kim Hammonds, joins board as company leads the transition to open networking and data center modernization
Moving a Prototype Network to Production: With prototyping production networks, the network becomes elevated to a standard far superior to the traditional approaches.
Operations guide: We thought it would be great Continue reading
Cumulus + Nutanix = Building and Simplifying Open, Modern Data Centers at Scale
We are excited to announce that Cumulus and Nutanix are partnering to build and operate modern data centers with open networking software. We’ve worked closely with Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, to develop a joint integration that will solve one of the most pressing enterprise infrastructure problems by unlocking the power of hyperconverged systems with open networking.
It’s a challenge every enterprise knows all too well: siloed servers, storage and compute make traditional IT infrastructure expensive and complex to maintain and creates a dynamic that holds back business innovation. Hyperconverged infrastructure with modern, open networking software allows for agility, flexibility, and a greatly simplified operational model across compute, storage, and networking. Our joint solution brings a fully automated and highly distributed network fabric to hyperconverged workloads for the modern data center.
Together, Cumulus and Nutanix unite compute, storage, virtualization and now networking in an open, scalable, and efficient way for today’s modern data center.
Cumulus Linux and NetQ with Nutanix delivers tangible business value by increasing operational efficiency shortening the time required to stand up Nutanix clusters, organizational agility by improving the user experience via a single interface using Nutanix Prism, streamlined procurement through common hardware partners such Continue reading
Moving a Prototype Network to Production
Network Engineers create and operate prototype networks all the time. Prototype networks are used to validate designs, test features or changes, troubleshoot use-case scenarios, and often just for learning. Typically, pre-prod testing environments are set up in such a way that device host names, attributes, configurations, IP assignments, software versions, and topologies are mostly inconsistent with production environments. This inconsistency is counter-intuitive, considering that accurate design validations should closely match reality to avoid any mistakes when deploying in production.
Cumulus Linux can run as a virtual appliance, allowing network engineers to build to-scale virtual networks for activities like modeling changes and performing validations, while opening the door for similar DevOps methodologies application developers have operated with for years: validated testing before deploying in production for continuous integration.
Enter Cumulus VX
Cumulus VX (Virtual Experience) is a Cumulus Linux virtual appliance. You can test drive Cumulus Linux on a laptop, while those fluent with Cumulus Linux can prototype large networks and develop software integrations before deploying into production environments.
Cumulus VX is a platform — just like Cumulus Linux on a real switch — and therefore is designed to perform just like an actual switch running Cumulus Linux. Every feature you Continue reading
Operations guide
One of the most common requests we, as consultants, get from our customers is for an operations guide as the final deliverable for any data center build out. There are a few goals for such a guide:
- Allow the customer to better transfer knowledge as their teams grow and change.
- Provide an “as built” guide that explains step-by-step how to deploy and manage the infrastructure.
- Tie together the operational workflow for all the new components that are leveraged in the modern open-networking paradigm.
Since Scott and I have been working on many operations guides, we thought it would be great to document our process so that customers can write their own operations guides.
The operations guide for web scale networking goes beyond just documenting configuration backups, user account access and change requests though. Web scale networking integrates proven software development processes and as such, the operations guide needs to account for these workflows.
As Built
The starting point of all operations guides is the initial build. Most of the cabling architecture, traffic flows and features, along with decision making and architectural choices, are captured within the High level Design and Low Level Design document. The operations guide on the other Continue reading
Containers are here to stay, who has the right skill set?
Who controls containers: developers, or operations teams? While this might seem like something of an academic discussion, the question has very serious implications for the future of IT in any organization. IT infrastructure is not made up of islands; each component interacts with, and depends on, others. Tying all components of all infrastructures together is the network.
If operations teams control containers, they can carefully review the impact that the creation of those containers will have on all the rest of an organization’s infrastructure. They can carefully plan for the consequences of new workloads, assign and/or reserve resources, map out lifecycle, and plan for the retirement of the workload, including the return of those resources.
If developers control containers, they don’t have the training to see how one small piece fits into the wider puzzle, and almost certainly don’t have the administrative access to all the other pieces of the puzzle to gain that insight. Given the above, it might seem like a no-brainer to let operations teams control containers, yet in most organizations deploying containers, developers are responsible for the creation and destruction of containers, which they do as they see fit.
This is not as irrational as it Continue reading
Kernel of Truth episode 10: 2019 predictions
Subscribe to Kernel of Truth on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Cast Box and Sticher!
Click here for our previous episode.
As we enter the year, many, if not most, organizations have already been engaging in 2019 planning and strategizing. With that in mind, we thought what better way to wrap up our first season of Kernel of Truth than with an episode dedicated to trends and predictions straight from the brains of some of Cumulus’ brightest — CTO and Co-founder, JR Rivers, TME manager Pete Lumbis, and consultant David Marshall.
Join as we as discuss EVPN, virtualization, keeping up with the demands of digital transformation and more. This will be our last episode of the season, with our next season kicking off later this month.
Guest Bios
JR Rivers: JR is a co-founder and CTO of Cumulus Networks where he works on company, technology, and product direction. JR’s early involvement in home-grown networking at Google and as the VP of System Architecture for Cisco’s Unified Computing System both helped fine tunehis perspective on networking for the modern datacenter. Follow him on Twitter at @JRCumulus
Pete Lumbis: Pete is a Technical Marketing Engineer at Cumulus Networks. He helps Continue reading
New Opportunities, Different perspectives…
Today we are launching our partnership with FS.com and with that comes an opportunity to engage our customers in a new and unique way. FS.com has been providing networking solutions since 2009. The joint partnership of Cumulus and FS.com allows a new way for our collective customers to achieve web-scale networking solutions in a convenient and timely manner. FS.com’s commitment to fast response times and comprehensive networking solutions brings a layer of convenience we feel our clients will appreciate.
Cumulus Networks is driven to provide flexibility, choice and affordability when it comes to building out the next generation of network infrastructures. By adding FS.com as an additional option to our portfolio we continue that commitment to our customers. It is exciting to see how this space will evolve and the new ways in which customers will source network infrastructure moving forward.
Whether you are looking for Data Center TOR solutions with Enterprise feature set corporate buying behavior is evolving as our consumer buying habits blend more into our corporate lives. This method of sourcing and buying consumer goods has grown significantly over the past decade as our consumer selves buy more and more of Continue reading
The Importance of Container Visibility
Containers are unlike any other compute infrastructure. Prior to containers, compute infrastructure was composed of a set of brittle technologies that often took weeks to deploy. Containers made the automation of workload deployment mainstream, and brought workload deployment down to minutes, if not seconds.
Now, to be perfectly clear, containers themselves aren’t some sort of magical automation sauce that changed everything. Containers are something of a totem for IT operations automation, for a few different reasons.
Unlike the Virtual Machines (VMs) that preceded them, containers don’t require a full operating system for every workload. A single operating system can host hundreds or even thousands of containers, moving the necessary per-workload RAM requirement from several gigabytes to a few dozen megabytes. Similarly, containerized workloads share certain basic functions – libraries, for instance – from the host operating system, which can make maintaining key aspects of the container operating environment easier. When you update the underlying host, you update all the containers running on it.
Unlike VMs, however, containers are feature poor. For example, they have no resiliency: traditional vMotion-like workload migration doesn’t exist, and we’re only just now – several years after containers went mainstream – starting to get decent persistent Continue reading