Tech Bytes: Why SD-WAN is the Secret to SASE Success (Sponsored)
The rise of SASE has eclipsed SD-WAN as organizations develop strategies and analyze products for secure access. But SD-WAN is an essential component of SASE; in fact, sponsor Palo Alto Networks says SD-WAN is the most important component. On today’s Tech Bytes podcast we talk with Palo Alto Networks about why SD-WAN underpins a SASE... Read more »NB485: A Final FU for Greg
Greg Ferro bids farewell to Network Break, and Drew Conry-Murray and Johna Till Johnson bid farewell to Greg. Of course, the podcast must go on, so we also cover some tech news. First, Nokia acquires optics maker Infinera, Broadcom brings new features to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and campus switch sales drop. A Microsoft subsidiary... Read more »Fat Pipe Transition Notification – July 2024
Hey, everyone. Ethan here with a behind-the-scenes administrative request. Several thousand of you subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ Fat Pipe. In the Fat Pipe, we’ve been stuffing every single podcast we produce. The problem is that we produce way too many shows–one almost every weekday–for the average podcast client to absorb them all. We can... Read more »HN740: IETF’s Network Management Operations (NMOP) Working Group
When you think of IETF, you probably just think of defining protocols, but its new NMOP working group is all about helping network operators identify issues and deploy solutions, including those that pop up around automation. Mahesh Jethanandani is an NMOP leader and joins the show today to tell us what they are working on... Read more »IPB154: IPv6 Basics: Neighbor Discovery
Imagine a world with no broadcast storms, basically no DAD issues, not even ARP and reverse ARP. That is the world of IPv6 neighbor discovery. In today’s episode, we teach you the simplicity of IPv6 neighbor discovery: just native Layer 3 addresses, ICMPv6, and multicast. If you’ve ever been annoyed at a guy hopping on... Read more »NAN067: AI and Total Network Operations with Scott Robohn
This is the final episode of a series of interviews with Scott Robohn (for now). We discuss AI in networking operations and how it’s still too early to tell exactly how much, if any, value will be created. We also dig into Scott’s Total Network Operations framework, what it consists of and how he wants... Read more »PP020: Dropping the SBOM: The Software Bill of Materials and Risk Management
If you care about nutrition, you check the ingredients of your food. If you care about your IT infrastructure, you check the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) of the tech. At least that’s the future that Thomas Pace hopes for. Right now, SBOMs aren’t super common and software transparency is very low. Thomas walks us... Read more »HW030: Down and Dirty with Industrial Wireless
Wastewater containers, conveyors, chemical reactors… Scott McNeil goes out where the carpet ends to do his wireless work. Today he joins the show to talk us through the basics of designing industrial wireless architecture. With advances in wireless technology, not only is wireless now reliable enough for production environments, but it’s also much cheaper than... Read more »HS076: Greg’s Finale
This is Greg’s last Heavy Strategy episode before he heads off to retirement. He gives us his final pieces of career and life advice, opinions on private equity, and a Cookie Monster quote. We also briefly introduce John Burke, the new Heavy Strategy co-host. Farewell, Greg. Thank you for all the great debates. Episode Transcript... Read more »
NB484: HPE, Nvidia Cozy Up on AI Infrastructure; Norway Uncovers Rare Earth Elements Motherlode
Take a Network Break! We start with a longish round of FUs, and then dive into news. HPE announces HPE Private Cloud, which includes software, switches, and GPUs from Nvidia for building out infrastructure to support AI workloads. HPE also announced KVM virtualization for HPE Private Cloud. We debate whether Britian’s anti-trust inquiry to the... Read more »Tech Bytes: Performance, Power Efficiency Drive Dutch IXP Upgrade to Nokia Routers, Silicon (Sponsored)
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Nokia, we hear from Nokia customer NL-IX. NL-IX is a leading Internet Exchange based in the Netherlands. The organization recently redesigned and upgraded its network. Nokia played a role in that upgrade, including 400 and 800G routers and FP5 silicon. We’re joined by Dirk Kalkman, Chief Network... Read more »HN739: High Stakes Network Observability for High Frequency Trading
High Frequency Trading in finance demands the utmost quality and speed from a network, making flawless observability a must. Our guest today is Radu Ionco from Jump Trading, and he tells us about how they built their own custom network observability platform, even creating a monitoring system for the monitoring system. We talk through streaming... Read more »NAN066: Operationalize Your Automations With torero (Sponsored)
When you’re trying to share your cool new network automation with your co-workers, the last thing you want to do is deal with other systems’ different libraries and dependencies gumming it up. That’s where our episode sponsor torero comes into play. As an “automation gateway,” torero dynamically creates an execution environment based on what has... Read more »D2C245: Don’t Fear Database DevOps
Most platform engineers are scared of databases, and most database administrators prefer it that way. But our guest today says it’s time to move forward together toward a future of database linters, observability, and abstraction. Adam Furmanek makes the case that just like how developers had to learn some networking, and networking tools were created... Read more »PP019: The God Accounts: Cloud IAM
Today we discuss how to secure your all-powerful root accounts on the three major public cloud providers: AWS, Azure, and GCP. Our guests today, Ned Bellavance and Kyler Middleton from the Day Two Cloud podcast (soon to be Day Two DevOps podcast), describe the struggle of securely managing several root accounts at once. They take... Read more »HS075: How to Ask Questions
Asking questions is a critical skill whether you’re an outside consultant or on an internal IT team. In today’s episode, Greg and Johna review what kind of questions to ask and how to ask them. They discuss the ‘Five Whys,’ identifying points of invariance, discovering unknown unknowns, and watching out for landmines. They also cover... Read more »