Today, we talk to network architect Andrey Khomyakov, who s helped his organization make the transition from traditional to open networking in production.

What s it like to disaggregate switch hardware from network operating system? Was it hard? Does it really work? What s support like? Was any money saved? Will I get fired for suggesting my company go the open networking route? Andrey will answer these and more questions.

Pete Lumbis, long time friend of the Packet Pushers and contributor to the networking community, also joins with some of his insights learned in his role at Cumulus Networks. This is not a sponsored show. We just want to share the real-world experience of going new-school disaggregation with your networking.

We’ll look at the distinctions between open networking, disaggregation, and whitebox. We’ll also look at day-to-day operations with whitebox, common problems, how to choose a whitebox, and more.

You ve got your traditional on-premises network. You know how it works. Lots of manual configuration and ticket-y stuff to get the job done when someone needs something.

And then you ve got your cloud network. You don t worry about that one as much. The devs provision what they need automatically, hitting APIs as they go, and you keep tabs on things from a watchful distance, helping out as needed.

What if you could operate your on-premises network like you do your public cloud network? What if your hybrid cloud was operationally consistent? Today on the Datanauts, sponsor Big Switch Networks makes some pretty big hybrid cloud networking announcements, and we quiz them on the why and how.

Our guest is Kyle Forster, founder of Big Switch.

We talk about Big Switch’s new products, including the ability to create an on-premises VPC within Big Switch’s data center fabric. The goal is to provide the same operational constructs within your own data center as you’d get in a public cloud like AWS, Azure, or Google.

Show Links:

Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Labs

Multi-Cloud Director Tech Demo

Big Cloud Fabric-Public Cloud Tech Demo

Big Switch Networks on Twitter

Big Switch Continue reading

Take a Network Break! Broadcom raised eyebrows with its $18.9 billion bid for CA Technologies, and Intel gets in the acquisition game by buying eASIC.

Viptela founders raise big bucks from VCs for a mysterious new venture, BP renews its interest in in-sourced IT, and ZTE moves closer to restarting major operations.

Tech support scammers leverage suspiciously accurate knowledge about Dell customers, PC sales are up, and Blue Origin says it will start taking customers to space in 2019.

Get links to all these tech news stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can smoothly migrate to the cloud, transform your WAN, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Ignition

The Packet Pushers have launched a brand new membership site called Ignition. Ignition offers free and premium memberships and hosts exclusive content for subscribers, including videos, reports, blogs, and more. Check it out at ignition.packetpushers.net.

Show Links:

Broadcom Is Getting Desperate – Seeking Alpha

Broadcom: Crazy Like A Fox, Continue reading

Today on the Priority Queue, we re gonna hide some information. Oh, like route summarization? Sure, like route summarization. That s an example of information hiding. But there s much more to the story than that.

Our guest is Russ White. Russ is a serial networking book author, network architect, RFC writer, patent holder, technical instructor, and much of the motive force behind the early iterations of the CCDE program.

The latest tome to flow from his keyboard (and mine, actually) is Computer Networking Problems and Solutions available on Amazon right now. While I wrote or contributed to several of the chapters in this book, Russ did the lion s share, and we re going to dive into one of his book chapters, devoted to the topic of information hiding.

We discuss the reasons for information hiding in the control plane, including resource conservation and reducing the failure domain; the pros and cons of dividing a network in multiple failure domains with information hiding; and the criticality of convergence.

We also talk about techniques for information hiding, including filtering reachability information and using overlays.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more Continue reading

Today on the Packet Pushers Priority Queue, we get nerdy about disaggregation, where you mix and match software from one vendor and hardware from another.

Our sponsor today is Cisco, and if you just did a double-take, that s right, Cisco wants to talk to you about disaggregation, but there’s more to it than just hardware/software separation.

Joining us are Bhavna Prasad, Product Manager at Cisco; and Akshat Sharma, Technical Marketing Engineer for Cisco s Service Provider BU.

We discuss the different kinds or degrees of disaggregation, and then drill into specifics around IOS-XR.

We also look at the programmatic capabilities and interfaces of IOS-XR, what hardware it’s available on, use cases, and more.

Show Links:

@XRDOCS – Cisco Systems

XRDOCS on Twitter

Akshat Sharma on Twitter

Cloud native applications are designed to be managed by software in all stages. This includes ongoing health checks as well as initial deployments. Human bottlenecks should be eliminated as much as possible in the technology, processes, and policies.

That quote is from the O Reilly book Cloud Native Infrastructure. On today s Datanauts episode, we talk to Justin Garrison, one of the authors and a senior systems engineer.

We dive into the chapter about managing cloud native applications, including a general conversation about the definition of a cloud-native app–that is, an application managed by software rather than humans.

Then we discuss the challenges of managing a microservices architecture, explore the concept of sidecar proxies, and walk through the process of deploying a new cloud application into production.

We also look at troubleshooting tools and techniques, and examine the necessity of service discovery and resource scheduling.

Sponsor: Linux Academy

Linux Academy offers the most hands-on training content in AWS, Azure, OpenStack, Linux, DevOps, Containers, security, and Google Cloud. Beginners and advanced learners alike will find up-to-date courses in skills development and certification prep. Hands-on labs let you work in actual cloud environments. Find out about the newest courses available online–including Continue reading

Take a Network Break! Dell Technologies is heading back to the public market, Vodafone tests a whitebox optical switch, and an LTE vulnerability rears its head.

Diane Bryant leaves Google Cloud after less than a year. Is Intel beckoning?

A Swedish private equity firm spins out SUSE, Micron products get banned in China, ZTE shuffles its executive ranks to comply with US requirements, and China approves Marvell’s acquisition of Cavium.

We’ve got links to all these stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. If you re not doing optics correctly, you re going to pay for it upfront (and then later too). Don t be fooled by lesser optics. The difference between generic third-party and brand-equivalent optics matters.

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Ignition

The Packet Pushers have launched a brand new membership site called Ignition. Ignition offers free and premium memberships and hosts exclusive content for subscribers, including videos, reports, blogs, and more. Check it out at ignition.packetpushers.net.

Show Links:

Dell moves to go public, spurns IPO – Reuters

Vodafone begins its trek with Voyager – Cumulus Networks Blog

Vodafone deploys TIP s Voyager in a live network Continue reading