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Category Archives for "Networking"

IDG Contributor Network: How to overcome infrastructure firefighting and other distractions

As an IT professional, you were hired for a certain, specialized job. But why can’t you seem to get it done? Maybe you’ve been busy “fighting fires.” For anyone responsible for network infrastructure, that’s a leading culprit. But there are others.On the theory that to solve a problem first you need to identify it, we’ve listed a number of obstacles that may be keeping you and your team from the mission-critical parts of your jobs. Taking note of these distractions can be a first step toward fashioning solutions that lead to better outcomes for you and your organization.Infrastructure firefighting When things don’t go according to plan and you have to trade your strategic IT roadmap for tactical reactionary decisions - that’s infrastructure firefighting. The network may not be working as intended; capacity planning may be off mark; production issues could be causing outages, requiring in-depth explanation and research to mitigate repeat outages in the future. Outages may require special actions, as we discuss in this article. You may not have signed on to extinguish unwanted fires, but like it or not, that has become part of your job.To read this article in full, please click here

Response: The Need For Stretched VLANs (@ioshints)

A recent post from Ivan Pepelnjak entitled Revisited: The Need For Stretched VLANs made me smile rather bitterly as Ivan dug into the apparent continued desire for stretched layer 2 networks and the reasons people give for the solution’s requirement and validity. I love a good bit of snark as much as the next nerd, so as you can imagine, I’m all over that post.

John Herbert, Expressing Extreme Disbelief At The Horror He Is Reading

However, I confess I did wince slightly – in the way one might do when an old wound is poked with a sharp stick – as Ivan made a passing sarcastic reference to Microsoft’s amazing Network Load Balancing technology:

ipspace.net: Revisited: The Need For Stretched VLANs

My mind was thrown back to the heady days of 2009 when I stumbled across another post from Mr Pepelnjak, this time entitled Turn a switch into a hub … the Microsoft Way which bemoaned the unadulterated stupidity of Microsoft’s attempt to use layer 2 network flooding to accomplish clustering. I had discovered the nature of this behavior at a previous client and had my mind blown by the very stupid and non-standards-compliant way in which this had been implemented.

The reason my mind went to that post, however, is because if I recall correctly it’s Continue reading

Some Market Thoughts on the Broadcom SDKLT

Broadcom, to much fanfare, has announced a new open source API that can be used to program and manage their Tomahawk set of chips. As a general refresher, the Tomahawk chip series is the small buffer, moderate forwarding table size hardware network switching platform on which a wide array of 1RU (and some chassis) routers (often called switches, but this is just a bad habit of the networking world) used in large scale data centers. In fact, I cannot think of a single large scale data center operating today that does not somehow involve some version of the Tomahawk chip set.

What does this all mean? While I will probably end up running a number of posts on SDKLT over time, I want to start with just some general observations about the meaning of this move on the part of Broadcom for the overall network engineering world.

This is a strong validation of a bifurcation in the market between disaggregation and hyperconvergence in the networking world. Back when the CCDE was designed and developed, there was a strong sense among the folks working on the certification that design and operations were splitting. This trend is still ongoing, probably ultimately resulting Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Mean time to innocence – using AI to uncover the truth behind perceived WiFi issues

Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is a common term in IT that represents the average time required to repair a failed component or device. In networking, MTTR is often longer than desired because there are many interdependencies, whereby an issue in one part of the network may cause a problem much farther downstream. Furthermore, a configuration change might appear to create a new issue, when in fact it just exposed something that was there all along but hidden. It takes quite a bit of forensics to get to the root cause of a network problem. In the meantime (pun intended), there is plenty of blame to go around. The Wi-Fi network seems to be at the top of the list when the accusations fly – more so than any other section of the network. Why is that?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Mean time to innocence – using AI to uncover the truth behind perceived WiFi issues

Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is a common term in IT that represents the average time required to repair a failed component or device. In networking, MTTR is often longer than desired because there are many interdependencies, whereby an issue in one part of the network may cause a problem much farther downstream. Furthermore, a configuration change might appear to create a new issue, when in fact it just exposed something that was there all along but hidden. It takes quite a bit of forensics to get to the root cause of a network problem. In the meantime (pun intended), there is plenty of blame to go around. The Wi-Fi network seems to be at the top of the list when the accusations fly – more so than any other section of the network. Why is that?To read this article in full, please click here

Machine Learning and Network Traffic Management

A while ago Russ White (answering a reader question) mentioned some areas where we might find machine learning useful in networking:

If we are talking about the overlay, or traffic engineering, or even quality of service, I think we will see a rising trend towards using machine learning in network environments to help solve those problems. I am not convinced machine learning can solve these problems, in the sense of leaving humans out of the loop, but humans could set the parameters up, let the neural network learn the flows, and then let the machine adjust things over time. I tend to think this kind of work will be pretty narrow for a long time to come.

Guess what: as fancy as it sounds, we don’t need machine learning to solve those problems.

Read more ...

Intentional Infrastructure

I gave a presentation at the recent Network Field Day 17 (on my 3rd day working for Juniper). My main goal for this presentation was just to get people excited about building stuff.

We tend to focus on vendor-provided solutions in this industry, and there’s a lot of good reasons for that, but it’s also good to stay sharp and be able to build your own solution to fill gaps where necessary. One reason I joined Juniper is that much of what we offer is built on a highly programmable foundation. So you get the best of both worlds - high-level products to solve the hard problems, but you still have the ability to insert your own custom tooling at various points in the stack.

In the above video, I outlined a simple Github-available demo for applying policies to a vSRX based on the existing services running in Kubernetes, and then verifying those policies are actually working by again using Kubernetes to determine what applications should be available.

My demo is designed to be self-sufficient, meaning you should be able to follow the README and get a working demo. Feel free to watch the above video first for context, then Continue reading

Intentional Infrastructure

I gave a presentation at the recent Network Field Day 17 (on my 3rd day working for Juniper). My main goal for this presentation was just to get people excited about building stuff.

We tend to focus on vendor-provided solutions in this industry, and there’s a lot of good reasons for that, but it’s also good to stay sharp and be able to build your own solution to fill gaps where necessary. One reason I joined Juniper is that much of what we offer is built on a highly programmable foundation. So you get the best of both worlds - high-level products to solve the hard problems, but you still have the ability to insert your own custom tooling at various points in the stack.

In the above video, I outlined a simple Github-available demo for applying policies to a vSRX based on the existing services running in Kubernetes, and then verifying those policies are actually working by again using Kubernetes to determine what applications should be available.

My demo is designed to be self-sufficient, meaning you should be able to follow the README and get a working demo. Feel free to watch the above video first for context, then Continue reading

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