Salt Deep Dive on Building Network Automation Solutions Online Course

In the first few sessions of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course we used Ansible as the tool-of-choice because it’s the easiest automation tool to get started with. Now that we’ve established the baseline, it’s time to explore the alternatives.

In a live session on February 27th 2018, Mircea Ulinic will describe Salt, an open source, general-purpose event-driven automation framework that we briefly discussed in Episode 77 of Software Gone Wild podcast.

BiB 20: Broadcom Tomahawk 3 Announced With 32x400G ports

Holy cow. Broadcom Tomahawk 3 is a 32 x 400G ASIC at lower power, latency and reduced cost/100G speed. Built for the cloud it signals the next generation of 200G/400G Ethernet is on its way.

The post BiB 20: Broadcom Tomahawk 3 Announced With 32x400G ports appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Introduction to Client VPN

Introduction to Metro Ethernet

Starting a new BCOP – “How to run and protect an email server on IPv6”

After the recent series of technical Best Current Operational Practices (BCOP) documents that we initiated and co-authored, it’s time for new one. This time on how to run an incoming email server on IPv6 and survive!

Back in 2010 we started the IPv6 series of BCOP documents, starting with the popular RIPE-501 that was superseded by the even more popular RIPE-554 that discusses how to specify IPv6 functionality and compliance when ordering ICT equipment. This document emerged from listening to the Internet community that is deploying IPv6, and figuring out the common problems in order to come up with recommendations on how to solve them.

The next most common issue that we heard about, was that helpdesks of network operators would melt down if they deployed IPv6 to their end customers as they don’t know anything about IPv6. So we built an online tool and wrote some helpdesk procedures on how to troubleshoot IPv6 issues when users call them – resulting in another useful document that was published as RIPE-631.

After addressing this, we then repeatedly heard questions about what size of IPv6 prefixes should be given to end-users and should it be assigned statically or dynamically. We therefore put Continue reading

Enterprise Security Spending Will Total $96.3B in 2018, Gartner Says

Companies are using multiple tools, leading to vendor fatigue and complex security environments.

Worth Reading: The Largest Deal in Tech history

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners has an appetite for tech, and securing funding for Dell to take itself private and then go out and buy EMC and VMware is now going to take a backseat in terms of deal size – and in potential ripple effects in the datacenter – now that chip giant Broadcom is making an unsolicited bid, backed by Silver Lake, to take over often-times chip rival Qualcomm. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

Gartner report: Worldwide server sales revenue increases 16%

The drive toward the cloud is lifting all boats. The need for capacity and new servers combined to lift the server market in the third quarter, with more growth to come, especially for the “white box” vendors.Gartner reported worldwide server revenue grew by a very impressive 16 percent year over year in the third quarter of 2017, while unit shipments grew by 5.1 percent. That gulf between revenue and units means more higher-end, more decked-out servers are being sold than cheap, commodity hardware.Also on Network World: REVIEW: How rack servers from HPE, Dell and IBM stack up It helps that in recent months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell EMC and Lenovo have all released new hardware, which is helping to drive sales as enterprises refresh their on-premises hardware. So all told, the third quarter was marked by new hardware and continued growth of the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner report: Worldwide server sales revenue increases 16%

The drive toward the cloud is lifting all boats. The need for capacity and new servers combined to lift the server market in the third quarter, with more growth to come, especially for the “white box” vendors.Gartner reported worldwide server revenue grew by a very impressive 16 percent year over year in the third quarter of 2017, while unit shipments grew by 5.1 percent. That gulf between revenue and units means more higher-end, more decked-out servers are being sold than cheap, commodity hardware.Also on Network World: REVIEW: How rack servers from HPE, Dell and IBM stack up It helps that in recent months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell EMC and Lenovo have all released new hardware, which is helping to drive sales as enterprises refresh their on-premises hardware. So all told, the third quarter was marked by new hardware and continued growth of the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

LinkedIn’s Project Falco Swoops Up SONiC Switching Platform

The disaggregated data center project developed its own switch called Pigeon.

Oracle Constructs $1.2B Offer for Cloud Firm Aconex

Construction-technology firms have generated $10 billion in funding since 2011, a McKinsey report says.

Equinix Acquires Metronode for $792 Million, Extending Australian Footprint

The deal will add 10 new data centers in Australia.

AT&T Will Use FlexWare Platform in Waco 5G Trial

FlexWare will act as a type of router for the 5G network.

Do We Really Need a New BGP?

From time to time, I run across (yet another) article about why BGP is so bad, and how it needs to be replaced. This one, for instance, is a recent example.

It seems the easiest way to solvet this problem is finding new people—ones who don’t make mistakes—to work on BGP configuration, building IRR databases, and deciding what should be included in BGP? Ivan points out how hopeless of a situation this is going to be, however. As Ivan says, you cannot solve people problems with technology. You can hint in the right direction, and you can try to make things a little more sane, and a little less complex, but people cannot be fixed with technology. Given we cannot fix the people problem, would replacing BGP itself really help? Is there anything we could do to make things better?

To understand the answer to these questions, it is important to tear down a major misconception about BGP. The misconception?

BGP is a routing protocol.

BGP was not designed to be a routing protocol. It was designed to provide a loop free path through a series of independently operated networks, each with its own policy and business goals. In the Continue reading

Will Telco Infrastructure Go Soft in 2018?

Hardware isn't going away. But software is where all the action is.

BrandPost: Putting VNFs to work

Network functions virtualization (NFV) makes it possible to replace traditional dedicated customer premise equipment with software in the form of virtual network functions (VNFs), running on standardized hardware. Despite the confusing acronym overlap of NFV and VNF, the technology is intended to vastly simplify enterprise wide area networking.Virtualization and Cloud Review describes NFV as a younger cousin to software-defined networking: “Like SDN, NFV is fundamentally about the shift from proprietary hardware-based solutions to more open, software-based substitutes,” David Ramel explains.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco Integrates Viptela SD-WAN Tech on Existing Routers

About 95% of Viptela employees joined Cisco.

Safety Company Uses SD-WAN to Connect Manufacturing Plants

The goal was better connectivity and improved efficiency.

Falco joins SONiC

One of the key components of our vision for LinkedIn’s global infrastructure is to ultimately build a programmable data center fabric on top of an open network operating system. While scaling our data centers out, we want to control the complexity of the data center fabric by moving toward an automated, self-defined, and purpose-built, application-centric network that operates on its own. —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

Big changes coming for the application delivery controller market

Application delivery controllers (ADCs) have long been a critical piece of infrastructure.  They sit between applications and infrastructure and are the only piece of technology that can speak the language of both applications and networks. I have often characterized the ADC as the “Rosetta Stone” of the data center, as it’s the key to being able to translate application speak to the network and vice versa.IT is undergoing a rapid modernization process, and things such as software-defined everything, the cloud, containers and other initiatives are having a profound impact on infrastructure.Also on Network World: Enterprise network trends to watch 2018 To understand how these trends are impacting ADCs, I recently conducted an Application Delivery Controller Survey to get a pulse of IT professionals who work with ADCs. The demographics of the survey were 100 U.S.-based respondents across a variety of industry verticals and company sizes and is an accurate representation of the current opinions of ADCs with respect to IT modernization.To read this article in full, please click here