One promise of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is ease of management. Break down the silos, put all the components into a unified whole displayed on a single pane of glass, and voila! Apps are served.

But networking hasn t been integrated as effectively into HCI as the other components of the IT stack. Networking, even in an HCI world, tends be difficult. And with the dynamic needs of HCI, networking just isn’t keeping up.

The days of standing up the network and letting it run are past, because a best effort, rough approximation of how the network should behave isn t something you have to settle for anymore.

Discussing integration of HCI with networking is Big Switch Networks, our sponsor for today s Priority Queue. Prashant Gandhi, Chief Product Officer at Big Switch, is our guest.

We talk about why “best-effort” networking isn’t suited for HCI, and look at HCI-specific operational issues and use cases including container networking and multi-tenancy.

For hands-on experience with Big Cloud Fabric, register for BSN Labs, a demo environment in the cloud that lets you experience the technical differentiation, management CLI, and GUI of Big Cloud Fabric.

Show Links:

Solution Brief: Scale Out Networking Continue reading

The robotic production facilities on board the Datanauts’ dreadnought cruiser are really great at making scout drones for identifying rich mineral deposits. Sadly, our probe production numbers are fairly low right now, because every single build is done by hand.

Blasphemy! We need a way to simply define the end state of our drone creation and then let an orchestration engine handle all of the building. Plus, if the design changes, we need to make sure all of the existing drones are retrofitted to take advantage of the new improvements! What can be done?!

Our guest today is Ned Bellavance. We pick Ned’s brain about infrastructure as code and his hands-on experience with HashiCorp’s Terraform.

Find Out More About Terraform

• Datanauts Episode 71 with Mitchell Hashimoto
  http://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/datanauts-071-everything-code-hashicorp/
• Datanauts Episode 92 with Brett Johnson
  http://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/datanauts-092-microsoft-mcsa-lab-creation-chef/
• Hashicorp Training
  https://www.hashicorp.com/training

Follow Ned Bellavance

• Ned’s Courses On PluralSight
  https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/edward-bellavance
• Ned’s Blog
  https://nedinthecloud.com/
• The Buffer Overflow Podcast
  https://www.anexinet.com/resources/podcasts/buffer-overflow/
• The Anexipod Podcast
  https://www.anexinet.com/resources/podcasts/anexipod/

Take a Network Break! The Trump administration proposes sanctions on a portion of Chinese tech imports, the FBI advises router reboots to help thwart the VPNFilter malware, and Huawei completes a 200Gbps backbone network in Spain.

CenturyLink becomes certified on Cisco Meraki to compete with resellers, OpenStack matures, and network engineers decry an ITU proposal to speed IPv6 deployments in emerging countries.

Apstra extends its network orchestration coverage, Cisco wrestles with how to sell cloud, VMware posts a positive financial quarter, and AT&T tests an all-weather communications drone called a Flying COW.

Get links to all these stories just after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: Couchdrop

Couchdrop provides Secure Copy Protocol,or SCP and Rsync to Dropbox, Box and other cloud storage providers. Find out more at Couchdrop.io.

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White House announces tariffs, investment restrictions on China over intellectual property abuse – Axios

Donald Trump to hit US$50 billion of Chinese imports with 25 per cent tariffs and restrict investment in US hi-tech industries – South China Morning Post

Sen. Warner warns against ZTE deal – Axios

Huawei and Orange Spain finalize the construction of 200 Gbps Backbone Network – Huawei Press Center

Foreign Cyber Actors Target Home and Office Continue reading

On today’s Weekly Show the Packet Pushers jump on the live grenade that is the debate over the value of IT certifications.

Spurred by Greg’s blog about giving up his CCIE status, this episode looks at the value of technology certifications such as the CCIE and others.

Greg and guests Mike Fryar, Chris Kluka, and Jeremy Filliben discuss the benefits and limits of professional certifications, the differences between certifications and actual skills, whether certifications represent a standardized body of knowledge or just a set of instructions, and how the industry might better foster learning.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more at InterOptic.com, and if you re attending Interop 2018 in Vegas, stop by the InterOptic booth to learn how they can help you spec the right optics for your network.

Sponsor: Cumulus Networks

The Cumulus Linux network OS is simple, open, untethered Linux that can run on more than 70 hardware platforms and help you transition from your legacy infrastructure. Cumulus Networks is Web-scale networking for the digital age. Go to cumulusnetworks.com to find out more.

Show Links:

Quitting My CCIE Status – Greg Ferro

Jeremy Filliben.com

On this episode of Datanauts, we chat with Brandon Olin, the creator of PoshBot, a PowerShell based chatbot for ops teams. What does PoshBot do? How was PoshBot built? How do chatbots impact Brandon’s delivery model?

ChatBots?

Bots have been around for a long time. They re really handy, too, often being able to answer simple questions by submitting a special command that has some sort of prefix or identifier associated with them. Especially if you re on Twitch and want to know how long your favorite streamer has been online.

Maybe that isn t the most helpful thing in the world, but what if we changed the narrative to be all about operations and how talking to a bot (with your peers watching) could actually up-level your day-to-day enjoyment of IT?

That’s our conversation today.

What is PoshBot?

PoshBot is a chat bot written in PowerShell. It makes extensive use of classes introduced in PowerShell 5.0. PowerShell modules are loaded into PoshBot and instantly become available as bot commands. PoshBot currently supports connecting to Slack to provide you with awesome ChatOps goodness.

For More Information About PoshBot

• PoshBot on GitHub, Home of the PoshBot Project
  https://github.com/poshbotio
• PoshBot Continue reading

Take a Network Break! Security researchers are tracking the VPNFilter malware, which has infected an estimated 500,000 devices, GDPR regulations have gone into effect, and the OpenStack Summit debuts a new project called Airship.

Startup Lumina Networks bags $10 million in funding from Verizon, AT&T, and others; Pica8 releases PicaPilot for network fabric orchestration; and Huawei wins “Supplier of the Decade” from Vodaphone.

HPE released its quarterly earnings and warned of challenges for the second half of the year, and Amazon’s Echo unexpectedly recorded and sent a couple’s conversations.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor message, and stay tuned for a Coffee Talk with Silver Peak.

Sponsor: Cisco Systems

Find out how Cisco and its trusted partners Equilibrium Security and ePlus/IGX can help your organization tackle the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Tune into Packet Pushers Priority Queue episode 147 to get practical insights on how to get your arms around these wide-ranging rules.

Coffee Talk: Silver Peak and Solis Mammography

On today’s Coffee Talk conversation we discuss SD-WAN with Solis Mammography and how its Silver Peak SD-WAN deployment helped the company streamline the movement of about a petabyte of imaging data efficiently and security.

Show Links:

Continue reading

The Internet is a network of networks. Where do each of these networks meet to form the global Internet? At Internet Exchange Points or IXPs. In North America, these IXPs are also known as network access points, or NAPs.

Over the years, connecting to a NAP has become increasingly crucial for service providers to get right because of the sheer volume of traffic the Internet carries these days (Hello, Netflix!), the complexity of service provider peering agreements, and endless troubles with security threats.

Joining us today to discuss how to better plan, design, operate, and secure peering is our sponsor Cisco. Our guests from Cisco are Phil Bedard, Service Provider TME; and Bruce McDougall, Consulting Systems Engineer.

We discuss the evolution of Internet traffic flow and interconnection, how peering designs among service providers have changed, the role of telemetry and data, and peering security issues.

Show Links:

BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) – IETF

Internet Edge Peering – Current Practice – GitHub

BGP Operations and Security – IETF

Observing BGP activity with BGP Monitoring Protocol – Cisco

Streaming Network Analytics System (SNAS) – snas.io

The Death of Transit And Beyond – Geoff Huston (PDF)

Eyeball network – Wikipedia