Geo-Political Instability = Network Instability

Geo-Political Instability = Network Instability

It was an incredible time to be in the tech business. Al Gore had kick-started the Internet, and the World Wide Web was just beginning to form - like a cluster of stars in an ever-expanding galaxy. Little did we know it also marked the beginning of more sinister things. 

During that time I was a systems administrator for a networked set of IBM RT PC workstations running a Unix variant operating system from Carnegie Mellon. The systems were running the first wide area networked file system - the Andrew File System (AFS). They were part of a project initially funded by IBM. The project was tasked with introducing networked graphical workstations into the Thayer School of Engineering curriculum at Dartmouth College. 

In the beginning we had about twenty or so workstations networked together using bridges, thick wire Ethernet and some thin wire. Broadcast storms were a nasty reality on shared Ethernet hubs, and vamp taps had nothing to do with Twilight. Life was simpler then. 

The project was called “Northstar” and if you Google it you’ll probably get some hits Continue reading

Okay, Maybe it IS the Network (Infographic)

Okay, Maybe it IS the Network (Infographic)

“It’s NOT the network.” If you work in networking, this refrain is familiar to you. While we all know the network is sometimes the cause of performance issues, often network engineers spend too much time proving the negative. However, the infographic below, based on a survey of 250 enterprise networking professionals in North America (and 22% in Europe), indicates that the network is the logical first place to look when troubleshooting performance issues. This is because both the scope and size of networks are growing to keep up with the demands of new architectures as well as business requests, making it increasingly more complex to deliver applications and services. These results and others are from a new Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research paper titled “Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN, and Big Data: Network Management Megatrends 2014.” 

As authors Jim Frey and Tracy Corbo write in the paper’s introduction: 

“Networks have never been more critical to the success of IT and the business. New virtualization and Cloud technologies and services are remaking the face of IT and the Continue reading

How Service Providers are Outpacing Enterprises in SDN Deployments

How Service Providers are Outpacing Enterprises in SDN Deployments

Service providers are well ahead of enterprises in SDN deployments. The numbers confirm this according to Jim Duffy in his Network World article “Enterprise SDN use lags service providers.” ACG Research estimates that sales of SDN products for live service provider deployments will reach $15.6 billion by 2018, while those that may become live will reach $29.5 billion. Use of production SDNs by enterprises and cloud/service provider data centers will be a fraction of that according to Infonetics Research: $3.1 billion by 2017. 

Why are service providers so far ahead of enterprises? To paraphrase the oft-used political aphorism: It’s the business model, stupid. Duffy said it best in his article: “To service providers, the network is the business. To enterprises, the network enables or supports its core business.” 

To a network service provider, technology is the revenue generator in a competitive market. Better solutions and better technology lead to lower costs (and more profits), and/or competitive differentiation. 

Of course, competitive differentiators tend to become commodities over time, and we’ve seen that happen repeatedly Continue reading

Linking Purpose to Profits

Linking Purpose to Profits

Three bricklayers were working side by side. When asked, “What are you doing?” the first bricklayer replied, “I’m laying bricks.” The second bricklayer was asked and he answered, “Feeding my family.” The third bricklayer when asked the question, “What are you doing?” responded, “I’m building a cathedral.” 

This story illustrates the power of purpose. In a previous post I suggested that we are all in the customer service business, and I posed some questions to help teams see linkages between what they do and how that impacts customers and the company. The reason this is so important is because purpose leads to employee engagement, which leads to profitability. 

To maximize our personal satisfaction and employee engagement, we need three ingredients: purpose, autonomy, and mastery. (See Daniel Pink’s explanation in this video.) As leaders we must work relentlessly to break down barriers to allow our people the freedom to thrive. 

To help people understand the purpose of their work, leaders link tasks to outcomes and benefits. Some people see linkages naturally, while others require leaders to communicate Continue reading

Hot Potatoes and Network Neutrality

Hot Potatoes and Network Neutrality

If you are reading this blog, you probably know what I mean by hot potatoes. The routing in the Internet is often referred to as hot potato routing. This analogy comes from how BGP and IGP work together so that incoming IP packets to an Autonomous System (AS) are treated like hot potatoes. If someone hands you a hot potato, what do you do? You pass it to the next person as soon as possible. This is what BGP and IGP routing do. When IP packets enter a network, they are delivered to the next AS as soon as possible. 

Since most of the network neutrality debate is regarding Netflix, Comcast and Verizon these days, let’s see how hot potato routing works in this scenario. Netflix buys transit services from Cogent, another service provider (see our related white paper on peering relationships). Their agreement is that Cogent will deliver Netflix’s IP packets to their destinations. I, as a consumer, buy “Internet service” from Time Warner. My agreement with them is for all-I-can-eat Internet access with up to 30Mbps download speeds for about $80 a month. Continue reading

SDN/NFV Management & Orchestration

SDN/NFV Management and Orchestration

At last week’s Big Telecom Event in Chicago, Caroline Chappell, senior analyst with Heavy Reading (the sister organization of Light Reading) moderated a panel discussion on SDN/NFV Management and Orchestration. Readers of this blog will know that’s a subject near and dear to us at Packet Design, and Cengiz Alaettinoglu, our CTO, was a member of the panel. He was joined by speakers from Infoblox, Overture, UBIqube, and NTT America. 

Packet Design CTO, Cengiz Alaettinoglu, speaks at the BTE Conference

Ms. Chappell opened the discussion by posing the question, “How real is SDN/NFV, and how quickly will network operators move from proofs of concept to production deployments?” In keeping with what we had heard in earlier conference keynotes and panel sessions, Doug Junkins with NTT America, the only operator on this panel, stated they are already implementing SDN/NFV in 50 data centers globally. He said the primary business drivers are: (1) driving down the cost of provisioning services and (2) new services creation. When asked how NTT views SDN in the context of NFV, he explained that they use the term network automation in Continue reading

SDN/NFV: More than Hot Air in the Windy City

SDN/NFV: More than Hot Air in the Windy City

As reported in my last blog post - SDN: Déjà vu all over again? - Packet Design was a gold sponsor of Light Reading’s inaugural Big Telecom Event in Chicago this week. The organizers claim there were about 1,500 registered attendees with two thirds of them representing network operators. There were several really interesting presentations and panel discussions, and I’ve captured four key takeaways here.

Cengiz Alaettinoglu prepping to demo the Network Access Broker

SDN is getting the buzz, but NFV is where the early action is. This theme ran through the conference and there was much discussion on the relative merits of SDN vs. NFV and whether they should be implemented simultaneously or separately. While there are clear near-term benefits – including lower capex and faster time to revenue – for operators who virtualize network functions that today run on hardware appliances, most agreed that this is a first step only. To achieve maximum efficiency and flexibility as well as deliver the best customer experience (see below), an SDN-enabled network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) is needed in which pools Continue reading

SDN: Déjà vu all over again?

SDN: Déjà vu all over again?

Having been in this industry longer than I care to think about (I cut my teeth in operations and systems programming on mainframes and early Intel 8080-based ‘microcomputers’), I’ve seen a few technology innovations that were truly disruptive and some that claimed to be but ultimately morphed into something else or were relegated to a niche (remember the Infiniband ‘revolution’ in the early 2000s?). Software defined networking and network functions virtualization clearly threaten to upset the status quo, which in this case, is the vast ecosystem of hardware-based switched and routed networks, and the network equipment manufacturers who build the gear. Cisco, arguably, has the most to lose, but potentially, the most to win also. 

In Peter Burrows’ recent Bloomberg article, reflecting how SDN has become mainstream news, he points out that the existing market for switches and routers is growing at the very modest rate of three percent a year. While this business is the lifeblood of companies like Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, it is becoming commoditized with downward price pressure and diminishing technological differentiation. These players can certainly Continue reading

Outlier or Leader? Learning from Google’s Andromeda SDN

Outlier or Leader? Learning from Google's Andromeda SDN

A bit like how physics breaks down when you start talking about the supermassive black holes, all the conventional wisdom about best practices regarding SDN deployment goes out the window when you start talking about the outliers of the biggest companies. 

There's a very good reason that "Google" was named after a really big number. 

Google, and companies like them (Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) who have super-large, complex network infrastructures, face challenges that 99.99% of enterprises will never have. It makes financial sense for them to invest in custom technologies to address their unique challenges and give them competitive advantages. Not surprisingly then, their SDN deployments are full of unique, in-house solutions to unique, in-house problems. 

Google's SDN is codenamed Andromeda, and not only is it used with Google's own servers but also in two zones of Google’s IaaS, Compute Engine. 

As Google’s Cloud Platform Blog states, its virtual network has to compete with the physical network when it comes to performance, availability, and security. This has to be done "across virtual machines, hypervisors, operating systems, network interface Continue reading

Will End-to-End Service Management Standards and Tools Always Trail New SDN Technologies?

Will End-to-End Service Management Standards and Tools Always Trail New SDN Technologies?

There’s an interesting Light Reading article by Carol Wilson talking about Ari Banerjee's research into end-to-end service management for SDN & NFV, and how Banerjee has shown that the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has failed to take into account hybrid virtualized and non-virtualized environments when drawing up their standards on virtualized service and network functions.  

In other words, the standards work in theory, but in practice, they're just too simple for real-world environments. Will end-to-end service management standards and tools always trail new SDN technologies? 

Here's an odd thing about technology development: it tends to come in five distinct stages. 

Stage 1: Can we do this thing?
Stage 2: How can we do this thing?
Stage 3: What's the best way to do this thing?
Stage 4: How do we make doing this thing easier?
Stage 5: How can we manage this thing? 

And of course, sometimes answering, "How do we make doing this thing easier?" and “How can we manage this thing?” starts with asking the question "Can we do this Continue reading

40th Anniversary of the TCP Protocol

40th Anniversary of the TCP Protocol

In May of 1974, the IEEE published a paper titled “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.” The authors were Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. 

Forty years later, the protocol they developed, TCP, is still the undisputed king of “sending stuff.” It’s no longer alone in packet types, but we still use the conventions for routing and interconnecting networks that TCP established, and the basic operation hasn’t changed since 1974.

It’s a brilliant design; one that, at its most simple, comes down to a single idea: it doesn’t matter where the packets come from, how fast they get there, what order they get there, or even how many copies there are of that packet on the network - so long as they get there. 

The TCP receiver can simply reassemble the sequence as it was originally transmitted, and double-check with the sending computer to ensure accuracy. The TCP slow-start means that it automatically determines the safe rate at which to send packets.

The upshot of all of this has been that TCP enabled, for the first time, the building of robust Continue reading

Integrating Route Explorer with the OpenDaylight Controller for SDN Provisioning

Integrating Route Explorer with the OpenDaylight Controller for SDN Provisioning

Despite the hype surrounding SDN, no one can afford to leap frog to the new technology. They must have a strategy to integrate the new with the old to reap the biggest benefits. Packet Design has taken its first step in helping customers do so. We’ve integrated Route Explorer with the OpenDaylight controller to automate SDN provisioning of RSVP-TE tunnels. For network engineers, this means eliminating the manual process of creating tunnels. They can simply plan it in Route Explorer and have the OpenDaylight controller automatically provision it. Some of our early adopter customers – especially service providers – are very happy about this. 

OpenDaylight only supports TE tunnels today, but our integration is an example of how we can support SDN in hybrid environments. Our analytics technology is unique because it allows us to build SDN conforming applications in the presence of non-conforming applications. You don’t have to do a forklift hardware upgrade in the network or build a brand new network architecture where the controller provisions everything. We are able to demonstrate provisioning of RSVP-TE tunnels in hybrid environments Continue reading

Making Sense of the SDN Landscape

Making Sense of the SDN Landscape

Understanding SDN, as a concept, is relatively simple. But understanding the SDN landscape can be difficult. Here are some of the major players in the SDN standards bodies landscape and why they're significant. 

The Open Networking Foundation: 

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is in charge of the OpenFlow standard, which defines how the control layer and delivery layer are meant to function, and the protocols for how they interact. It enables remote controllers to correctly route packets through the network, separating control from forwarding – the technological foundation of SDN. OpenFlow allows for remote administration of packet forwarding tables, and can add, modify, and remove packet matching rules and actions. ONF is a user-led organization that promotes the adoption of SDN. A number of switch and router vendors have announced to support or are shipping supported gear for OpenFlow, including Alcatel-Lucent, Big Switch Networks, Brocade Communication, Arista Networks, Cisco, Dell Force10, Extreme Networks, IBM, Juniper Networks, Larch Networks, HP, NEC, and MikroTik. 

OpenDaylight Project: 

OpenDaylight is a collaborative open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation. It's a consortium of about 20 Continue reading

Like it or Not, You ARE in the Customer Service Business

Like it or Not, You ARE in the Customer Service Business

Unless you work in research and development, where the value of your work may not be realized for many years, you are in the customer service business. That’s everyone from sales to finance to engineering.  

I find this statement is a great conversation starter because it invariably gets mixed reactions.  

Sales people and customer service representatives who are already close to the customers nod politely at this self-evident truth. The statement causes barely a ripple, because people in these roles meet with customers each day. They hear about customer goals, needs, and problems and help address the variety of issues that customers face.  

People who work in supporting roles like human resources or finance often respond with raised eyebrows. The accounts receivable group may only rarely meet with the customers who pay the bills. And human resources teams, for example, sometimes fail to recognize that their efforts to establish retirement and insurance plans impact the quality of talent a company can attract. They may miss the connection between hiring the best people and strong financial Continue reading

Packet Design to sponsor ENOG 7 in Moscow

Packet Design is a silver sponsor of ENOG 7, 26-27 May in Moscow, Russia.

Click here to register for this free event.

Is Netflix’s Arresting Development with Comcast a House of Cards, or Is it The New Black?

Is Netflix's Arresting Development with Comcast a House of Cards, or Is it The New Black?

Photo credit: Netflix

Comcast has decided to start charging Netflix extra to connect Netflix's customers on Comcast's network. More or less. It gets complicated, depending on whether Netflix is being charged for data transfer, or interconnectivity.   

The headline in the New York Times reads: “Comcast and Netflix Reach Deal On Service.” But Netflix CEO Reed Hastings posted on the official Netflix blog that there was a need for “a strong net neutrality,” calling the Comcast deal an “Internet toll.” That does not sound to me like Hastings came out of the deal happy. 

Now, to be clear, what the deal is actually doing, on a technical level, is allowing Netflix to deliver its content directly to Comcast's servers, rather than going through a middleman such as Cogent. It's a type of “paid peering,” instead of “paid prioritization.” 

Hastings, however, believes the two are the same thing – charging the content provider to provide the data at the rate that the ISP charges its customers. After all, the only reason Continue reading

No, Software Defined Networking will not Doom Engineers

No, Software Defined Networking will not Doom Engineers

With the advent of SDN, there is a lot of speculation these days about the future of network engineers. An article in PCWorld written by Stephen Lawson of IDG News Service caught our eye a while back for doing an excellent job dissecting the situation: 

“Will software-defined networking doom the command line interface?” “Will SDN spell doom for the tool that network engineers have used throughout their careers?” Lawson asks. 

“If done properly, yes, it should kill the CLI. Which scares the living daylights out of the vast majority of CCIEs,” Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa said. “Certainly all of those who define their worth in their job as around the fact that they understand the most obscure Cisco CLI commands for configuring some corner-case BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol 4) parameter.” 

Now, Lawson did a great job of examining the question he set up. In our opinion though, the main issue is not with the CLI. Sure, command line interfaces were eventually replaced in many places with graphical user interfaces in the general history of computers. But CLIs have Continue reading

Comparing and Contrasting SDN Across the Pond

Comparing and Contrasting SDN Across the Pond

How do the U.S. and Europe compare on SDN? To find out, we just replicated a survey we conducted in the U.S. last year. At the MPLS SDN World Congress in Paris a few weeks ago, we polled more than 100 service providers and equipment providers (mostly based in the EU) about their SDN plans, business drivers and concerns. Added to the U.S.-based survey of 100, the results show many similarities as well as some interesting differences. 

Production SDN Deployment Lower in Europe 

More than 90 percent of the 200+ respondents to the two surveys said their organizations are exploring SDN in some way. However, while 74 percent of the EU-based respondents said their organizations are either researching or prototyping SDN, only about eight percent said they currently have some production deployment. This compares to 20 percent of the U.S. survey respondents who indicated some production deployment (with 62 percent either researching or prototyping SDN). 

The percentage planning to deploy production SDN in either this year or in 2015 was similar for both sets, with eight Continue reading

Press Release: Results of Cross-Continent SDN Survey

American and European service providers agree on SDN benefits and challenges with key differences

U.S. and European service providers share similar SDN business drivers and challenges, but Europe has a lower deployment rate and is more concerned about reducing costs as well as managing the technology. These are the main results of a Packet Design survey of more than 200 network service providers on both continents. The company polled more than 100 service providers and equipment providers at the 2014 MPLS SDN World Congress in Paris last month (more than half of the respondents were based in Europe). This adds to the results of the survey of 100 service providers Packet Design conducted at the 16th annual MPLS/SDN International Conference in Washington, D.C. last November.

Key Findings:  

• More than 90 percent of the 200+ survey respondents are exploring SDN in some way. However, only eight percent of EU-based respondents said they currently have some production deployment compared to 20 percent of the U.S. survey respondents.  
• Both geographies indicated the same SDN business drivers: support new services, increase business agility, and improve productivity. Europe is more concerned about reducing expenditures: More than one-third of European respondents Continue reading

Route Analytics in the Age of SDN – Now, More than Ever.

Route Analytics in the Age of SDN - Now, More than Ever.

One of the biggest problems that may delay widespread SDN adoption is not a problem of coding or engineering, but one of poetry.

Network management is about logic and reason, but our nomenclature was written by poets. Even the word “networking” calls to the image a “netting work” - like you would find on a hammock or trapeze artist's safety net. We talk about network “pipes,” and conjure throughput like liquid water flowing through Roman aqueducts or modern PVC piping. We think of the “flow” of data through those pipes, though the only “fluid” is the movement of electrons – if that.

Metaphors that are inelegant or uninformative (“Information Superhighway” for example) fail.

Which is why SDN can be hard to envision. Intellectually, we know that it is about separating the control of where data is sent and the hardware that actually sends it. But what metaphor can we conjure that makes sense to explain this concept?

This is a problem for poets.

One metaphor that was recently used in IT Business Edge was the idea of “relying Continue reading