A reader wrote to me, explaining that they were unhappy in their current job situation, and queried how they might be able look for a new job without raising any red flags with their existing employer. Tricky, but I have a few thoughts, having done this a time or two over my career. […]
Arkin Net Rises from Stealth with $7M in funding, to bring Google Search-like Simplicity to Software-Defined Datacenter Operations “Arkin Net is coming out of stealth mode with $7 million in funding, led by Nexus Venture Partners, to revolutionize the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) market – projected to be $8B by 2018. Arkin Net is […]
In my role as co-founder of Packet Pushers, I do some amount of sales and marketing of the show to sponsors. Our philosophy of sponsorship is very simple. The audience knows when content is sponsored. Period. We don’t hide it. We don’t disguise sponsored content as non-sponsored content in the hope that the […]
I’ve been working with Juniper SRX firewalls, MX routers, and EX switches for over a year now. I don’t spend a ton of time at the CLI. Mostly, I have some project I need to accomplish, so I do my homework, mock up in a lab what I’m able to, and wing the rest. […]
I receive a steady stream of press releases from networking vendors. I don’t have time to cover them all (or even most of them) individually, because there’s only so many hours in the week. Even so, I find many of the releases to contain genuinely interesting news. I thought I’d try echoing the […]
When observing network utilization (whether that’s bandwidth or some other element you monitor), you have to know your baseline. The big idea is to understand what’s normal for your network, as every network is a little different. Only when you know your network’s baseline does it become possible to detect anomalies. For example, when […]
I’ve blogged about Scapple in the past, describing how I’ve been using Scapple to do basic network diagrams. If you are willing to give up some of the fancy features you get with an advanced diagramming tool like Visio or Omnigraffle, Scapple can take you reasonably far. In preparation for a recent change […]
I’ve launched a newsletter called The Hot Aisle. Why might you care? The Hot Aisle is a personal look at my real life IT engineering projects, thoughts about the networking industry I won’t publish anywhere else, my growingly contrarian views on social media, good stuff I’ve read, and comments from fellow Hot Aisle readers. The content is […]
As I study software defined networking architectures, I’ve observed that none of them are exactly alike. There are common approaches, but once diving into the details of what’s being done and how, even the common approaches seem to have as many differences as similarities. One of the most interesting elements of SDN architectures […]
ThousandEyes is a network monitoring company who’s shining a light on the darkened portion of the network path you don’t own. Rather than the Internet appearing to an enterprise as a generic cloud where magic happens, ThousandEyes looks inside the cloud, revealing details about how your enterprise gets to remote services. For example, […]
The amount of information to be found out about tech products is astonishing. Anything you’d like to know about virtually any product is a Google search away. The hits you’ll get back are loaded with information, some useful and some…less useful. I am awash in data to ingest each and every day. I […]
In a Tech Field Day Extra briefing held at VMworld 2014, SolarWinds chatted with the delegation about the future of their product set. If you’re thinking of SolarWinds as that little company that does red light / green light and makes pretty meters that show network bandwidth utilization, you’ve lost track of what […]
While browsing through the blog post about the Cumulus Linux 2.2 release as well as the release notes, I noticed several references to Prescriptive Topology Manager (PTM). Having not heard of this feature before, I dug in to discover what PTM is all about. First of all, here’s a PTM summarizing quote from […]
I had moment of confusion when a 1,200+ word analytical piece I’d written on HP networking utterly disappeared from my WordPress site. I still don’t know what happened. The piece was written, published, and linked all over social media. It was picking up page views immediately after publication. I’d seen some re-tweets and […]
After nine years with Dish Network, I’ve replaced it with an AppleTV and Roku 3 ($99 each, last time I looked). Having done that, what’s life like without traditional TV & DVR? In a nutshell, it’s just fine. My kids watch a lot of YouTube, and did before I retired Dish. I was bored […]
In response to the power redundancy article I wrote yesterday, a few comments came in. One of them (thanks, Mike!) mentioned an automatic transfer switch (ATS), a useful tool in a redundant power strategy. What is an ATS? There are many types of electrical transfer switches whose primary purpose is to divert the […]
As someone who’s been monitoring HP’s SDN strategy for years now, news that Bethany Mayer is headed to Ixia is rather interesting. Despite HP’s networking division having had some successes and gaining small bits of market share here and there, the fact they they are leaders in the SDN space seems to go unnoticed by the […]
A question came into the Packet Pushers mailbox along these lines. If a unit has two power inputs, should one go to UPS and one to street power, or is it better to have both power supplies fed by the same UPS? The issue with raw street power is that it isn’t conditioned. […]
I’ll be at VMworld in a couple of weeks. If you’re a vendor that would like to chat, please schedule me. I’d be happy to meet. If you’re a fellow IT engineer, I’d be happy to meet up as well. I’ll be hanging with folks from Tech Field Day, as well as Chris […]
A friend sent me a picture of an ink stamp from a company we started back in 1999 or so. It was a little consulting & hosting company that delivered for our customers things that we were good at: web hosting, e-mail services with spam protection, and a variety of SMB IT services. […]