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Category Archives for "Networking"

Snabb Switch Update on Software Gone Wild

In 2014, we did a series of podcasts on Snabb Switch (Snabb Switch and OpenStack, Deep Dive), a software-only switch delivering 10-20 Gbps of forwarded bandwidth per x86 core. In the meantime, Snabb community slowly expanded, optimized the switching code, built a number of solutions on top of the packet forwarding core, and even forked a just-in-time Lua compiler to get better performance.

To find out the details, listen to Episode 91 of Software Gone Wild in which Luke Gorrie explained how far the Snabb project has progressed in the last four years.

Listen to the podcast

BDS: A centralized near-optimal overlay network for inter-datacenter data replication

BDS: A centralized near-optimal overlay network for inter-datacenter data replication Zhang et al., EuroSys’18

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site).

This is the story of how inter-datacenter multicast transfers at Baidu were sped-up by a factor of 3-5x. That’s a big deal!

For large-scale online service providers, such as Google, Facebook, and Baidu, an important data communication pattern is inter-DC multicast of bulk data — replicating massive amounts of data (e.g., user logs, web search indexes, photo sharing, blog posts) from one DC to multiple DCs in geo-distributed locations.

To set the scene, the authors study inter-DC traffic at Baidu over a period of seven days. Nearly all inter-DC traffic is multicast (91.1%), highlighting the importance of optimising the multicast use case.

When looking at the individual transfers, there is great diversity in the source and destination DCs. Thus it’s not going to suffice to pre-configure a few select routes: “we need a system to automatically route and schedule any given inter-DC multicast transfers.”

60% of the transferred files are over 1TB Continue reading

Comparing files and directories with diff and comm

There are a number of ways to compare files and directories on Linux systems. The diff, colordiff, and wdiff commands are just a sampling of commands that you're like to run into. Another is comm. The command (think "common") lets you compare files in side-by-side columns the contents of individual files.Where diff gives you a display like this showing the lines that are different and the location of the differences, comm offers some different options with a focus on common content. Let's look at the default output and then some other features.Here's some diff output -- displaying the lines that are different in the two files and using < and > signs to indicate which file each line came from.To read this article in full, please click here

Comparing files and directories with the diff and comm Linux commands

There are a number of ways to compare files and directories on Linux systems. The diff, colordiff, and wdiff commands are just a sampling of commands that you're likely to run into. Another is comm. The command (think "common") lets you compare files in side-by-side columns the contents of individual files.Where diff gives you a display like this showing the lines that are different and the location of the differences, comm offers some different options with a focus on common content. Let's look at the default output and then some other features.Here's some diff output — displaying the lines that are different in the two files and using < and > signs to indicate which file each line came from.To read this article in full, please click here

Network-intelligence platforms, cloud fuel a run on faster Ethernet

2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for all things Ethernet.First of all, the ubiquitous networking technology is having a banner year already in the data center where in the first quarter alone, the switching market recorded its strongest year-over-year revenue growth in over five years, and 100G Ethernet port shipments more than doubled year-over-year, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group researchers.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] The 16-percent switching growth was, "driven by the large-tier cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook but also by enterprise customers,” said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell’Oro.To read this article in full, please click here

Network-intelligence platforms, cloud fuel a run on faster Ethernet

2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for all things Ethernet.First of all, the ubiquitous networking technology is having a banner year already in the data center where in the first quarter alone, the switching market recorded its strongest year-over-year revenue growth in over five years, and 100G Ethernet port shipments more than doubled year-over-year, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group researchers.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] The 16-percent switching growth was, "driven by the large-tier cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook but also by enterprise customers,” said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell’Oro.To read this article in full, please click here

Network-intelligence platforms, cloud fuel a run on faster Ethernet

2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for all things Ethernet.First of all, the ubiquitous networking technology is having a banner year already in the data center where in the first quarter alone, the switching market recorded its strongest year-over-year revenue growth in over five years, and 100G Ethernet port shipments more than doubled year-over-year, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group researchers.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] The 16-percent switching growth was, "driven by the large-tier cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook but also by enterprise customers,” said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell’Oro.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: A digital-first enterprise needs SD-WAN

Since the advent of the internet and IP, networking technology has not seen a seismic shift of this magnitude that is occurring in Enterprise networks today. As organizations move from on-premises application hosting to a cloud-based approach, they are inundated with the inherent challenges of legacy network solutions. The conventional network architectures in most of today’s enterprises, were not built to handle the workloads of a cloud-first organization. Moreover, the increasing usage of broadband to connect to multi-cloud-based applications have escalated concerns around application performance, agility, and network security.Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has gained immense traction among CIOs lately. Gartner forecasts that SD-WAN will grow at a 59% compound annual growth rate through 2021 to become a $1.3 billion market. This is because there are a myriad of payoffs of moving to SD-WAN: Primarily, SD-WAN enables easier access to cloud and SaaS based applications for geographically distributed branch offices and mobile work force. Here are but just a few other important benefits that SD-WAN brings to digital-first organizations:To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: A digital-first enterprise needs SD-WAN

Since the advent of the internet and IP, networking technology has not seen a seismic shift of this magnitude that is occurring in Enterprise networks today. As organizations move from on-premises application hosting to a cloud-based approach, they are inundated with the inherent challenges of legacy network solutions. The conventional network architectures in most of today’s enterprises, were not built to handle the workloads of a cloud-first organization. Moreover, the increasing usage of broadband to connect to multi-cloud-based applications have escalated concerns around application performance, agility, and network security.Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has gained immense traction among CIOs lately. Gartner forecasts that SD-WAN will grow at a 59% compound annual growth rate through 2021 to become a $1.3 billion market. This is because there are a myriad of payoffs of moving to SD-WAN: Primarily, SD-WAN enables easier access to cloud and SaaS based applications for geographically distributed branch offices and mobile work force. Here are but just a few other important benefits that SD-WAN brings to digital-first organizations:To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper vQFX10K on ESXi 6.5

A quick and dirty post on running the Juniper vQFX on VMWare ESXi.

You might be wondering why ESXi seeing as we’re all cloudy types. ESXi is purely a case of laziness. Each server in my control has ESXi 6.5 installed. This becomes tin management at the most basic level.

Part of my home network has a DMZ which has several public IP addresses and I expose systems and VNFs externally over the internet. More recently thanks to the IP fabric craze, part of what I’m exploring is easy integration and feature enhancement on Juniper vQFX instances. Two choices exist:

  • Install vQFX on servers with KVM
  • Install on ESXi

I went for the easy ground (because why make it harder than it has to be?) Turns out, it wasn’t as straight forward as it should be, although not difficult. Just a niggle.

Installation Process

Grab yourself the RE and PFE images from the Juniper download site:
https://www.juniper.net/support/downloads/?p=vqfxeval I Grabbed the 18.1 RE and the 17.4 PFE image.

Next, extract the two 

.vmdk
files from the 
.box
files. You can use the trusty tar tool to extract the files required. Below are two files Continue reading

Command Module Deep Dive for Networks

Ansible-Blog-Network-Command-Module

Enterprise customers often ask the Ansible Network team about the most common use cases for network automation. For this blog post I want to talk about one of the most used (and most versatile) set of network modules: the command modules. The command modules let you run networking commands with Ansible, the same way a network engineer would type them on the command line. With Ansible, though, the output doesn’t just fly by the terminal window to be lost forever; it can be stored and used in subsequent tasks. It can also be captured in variables, parsed for use by other tasks, and stored in host variables for future reference.
Today we’re going to cover basic use of the network command modules, including retaining command output with the register parameter. We’ll also cover scaling to multiple network devices with hostvars and adding conditional requirements with the wait_for parameter and three related parameters: interval, retries, and match. The takeaway from this blog post is that any repeatable network operations task can be automated. Ansible is more than configuration management, it allows network operators the freedom to decouple themselves from routine tasks and save themselves time.

There are command modules Continue reading

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