Navigating the Evolving SD-WAN Market
Learn about deployment options and other considerations for choosing software-defined WAN.
EVPN Is More than VPLS on Steroids
Tiziano Tofoni wrote a lengthy comment on my EVPN in small data center fabrics blog post continuing the excellent discussion we started over a beer last October. Today I’ll address the first part:
I think that EVPN is an excellent standard for those who love Layer 2 (L2) services, we may say that it is an evolution of the implementation of the VPLS service, which addresses some limits in the original standard (RFCs 4761 and 4762).
I might be missing something, but in my opinion there’s no similarity between EVPN and VPLS (apart from the fact that they’re trying to solve the same problem).
Read more ...Marhaba Beirut! Cloudflare’s 121st location – مرحبا بيروت! موقع “كلاودفلار” ال ١٢١
Lebanon is a historic country, home to two cities among the oldest in the world. There’s a vast mix of influences from the East and West. It’s also the smallest country in continental Asia.
لبنان بلد تاريخي، موطن مدينتين من بين أقدم
المدن في العالم. هناك مزيج كبير من التأثيرات من الشرق والغرب. كما أنه أصغر .بلد في آسيا القارية
CC-BY-SA Gregor Rom
Lebanon’s connection to the Internet
Lebanon is a little different to most other countries when it comes to the internet, with all connectivity to the outside world flowing via a single network, Ogero. Traffic to Lebanon was previously served from our existing deployments in Marseille and Paris, due to where Ogero connects to the rest of the internet. By deploying locally in Beirut, round-trip latency is cut by around 50 milliseconds. This might seem like almost nothing, but it adds up when you factor in a DNS lookup and 3-way handshake required to open a TCP connection. Internet penetration in Lebanon according to different sources is around 75%, which is quite high. However, the speed available to end users is low, typically in single digit megabits per second.
The Ministry of Telecommunications has an ambitious plan to Continue reading
The Case of the Flapping BGP Routes: A Network Detective Ride-Along
Let’s go on a Network Detective Ride-Along together! 
YouTube Style! Case open to case closed in less than 15 minutes. You ride along! Use the 3 part BGP Table Version blog series below the YouTube to see how to use BGP table version in your Network Detecting.
Ready to hop on the case with me? Just click below.
Understanding the BGP Table Version – Part 1: Introduction to BGP Table Version
Understanding the BGP Table Version – Part 2: BGP Table Version in Action
Understanding the BGP Table Version – Part 3: BGP Table Version & Troubleshooting
The Case of the Flapping BGP Routes: A Network Detective Ride-Along
Let’s go on a Network Detective Ride-Along together! YouTube Style! Case open to case closed in less than 15 minutes. You ride along! Use the 3 part BGP Table Version blog series below the YouTube to see how to use BGP table version in your Network Detecting.
Ready to hop on the case with me? Just click below.
Understanding the BGP Table Version – Part 1: Introduction to BGP Table Version
Understanding the BGP Table Version – Part 2: BGP Table Version in Action
Understanding the BGP Table Version – Part 3: BGP Table Version & Troubleshooting
Bye Bye Blackbird
Courtesty of PublicDomainPictures.net
As we have talked about repeatedly in this blog, we at Cloudflare are not fans of the behavior of patent trolls. They prey upon innovative companies using overly-broad patents in an attempt to bleed settlements out of their targets. When we were first sued by a patent troll called Blackbird Technologies last spring, we decided that we weren’t going along with their game by agreeing to a modest settlement in lieu of going through the considerable effort and expense of litigation. We decided to fight.
We’re happy to report that earlier today, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the case that Blackbird brought against Cloudflare. In a two-page order (copied below) Judge Vince Chhabria noted that “[a]bstract ideas are not patentable” and then held that Blackbird’s attempted assertion of the patent “attempts to monopolize the abstract idea of monitoring a preexisting data stream between a server” and is invalid as a matter of law. That means that Blackbird loses no matter what the facts of the case would have been.
The court’s ruling comes in response to a preliminary motion filed by Cloudflare under Section 101 of the U. Continue reading
Introducing VMware NSX-T Reference Design
Available now is the VMware NSX-T Reference Design Guide, a deployment path to adopting NSX with diverse multi-domain workload requirements – multi-cloud (private/public), multi-hypervisor, and multiple application frameworks (VMs, PaaS and containers).
Since VMware acquired Nicira almost five years ago, NSX for vSphere has become de-facto standard for private cloud solutions, delivering key use cases in private cloud – namely security, automation and application continuity. Since then, we’ve witnessed our customers datacenter and workload requirements changing; therefore, the demand for a platform that not only can deliver current private cloud requirements, but now many enterprises are looking for integration with the likes of cloud native apps, public/hybrid cloud, and other compute domains covering multiple hypervisors.
VMware NSX-T was introduced last year to meet the demands of the containerized workload, multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud. The NSX-T platform is focused on a diverse set of use cases – from private to public, traditional (multi-tiered architecture) to container (microservices architecture) based apps, automation and monitoring of security at IaaS, to programmatic devops workloads in PaaS and CaaS environments. It is very important to start with an understanding of NSX-T architecture and its components, and some topics (ex. routing) have been discussed Continue reading
Service Assurance Can Transform Your SDN/NFV Investment
Assurance solutions must be flexible enough to manage change while working toward network virtualization.
Virtuosys Meshes Software with Hardware for MEC Platform
The MEC platform relies on containers to support edge applications.
Oracle Quadruples Cloud Data Center Footprint
The company is also expanding autonomous capabilities across its entire PaaS product line.
Citrix Acquires Cedexis to Improve App Performance in Hybrid Clouds
Citrix will integrate Cedexis’ programmable traffic steering technology into its portfolio.
Viavi Will Help China Mobile on FlexE Slicing Packet Network
China Mobile wants the ITU to standardize slicing packet network for FlexE.
Reaction: The Pace of Innovation
Dave Ward has an excellent article over at the Cisco blog on the three year journey since he started down the path of trying to work the standards landscape (called SDOs) to improve the many ways in which these organizations are broken. Specifically, he has been trying to connect the open source and open standards communities better—a path I heartily endorse, as I have been intentionally trying to work in both communities in parallel over the last several years, and find places where I can bring them together.
While the entire blog is worth reading, there are two lines I think need some further thought. The first of this is a bit of a scold, so be prepared to have your knuckles rapped.
My real bottom line here is that innovators can’t go faster than their customers and customers can’t go faster than their own understanding of the technology and integration, deployment and operational considerations.
Precisely. Maybe this is just an old man talking, but I sometimes want to scold the networking industry on this very point. We fuss about innovation, but innovation requires customers who understand the technology—and the networking world has largely become a broad set of meta-engineers, Continue reading