IDG Contributor Network: Network analytics will change everything

The way we manage and monitor networks is morphing. Passive, reactive tools are being replaced by more proactive network analytics systems that give the entire network team a single source of truth about network behavior and a much deeper understanding of where infrastructure issues are hiding and what to do about them.Before IT was forever changed by the arrival of mobile devices, virtualization and cloud apps, fixing network problems was relatively simple because users plugged into the network from one location to access local applications and resources.But with the proliferation of diverse wireless clients – a range of hardware using different versions of different operating systems (the permutations can quickly scale into the thousands) – and the use of applications and services that are often not under IT’s control, getting to the heart of individual user and systemic client network problems has become the new nightmare.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Refactoring the network

The fundamental shift of the enterprise toward the cloud has posed a conundrum for many. The largest issue is the state of most enterprise networks. These networks were designed for an era gone by. Their original designs could not foresee the coming of technologies such as SDN, SDWAN, Segment Routing, the Cloud and an exponential increase in bandwidth that have all happened over the past 10 years.The IPv4 Internet BGP routing table alone has experienced a 10% year over year growth between 2009 and 2017 along. In 2009 the table eclipsed 286,000 routes. Here in 2017 we are at approximately 650,000. These figures only account for IPv4 routes, and not the full IPv4 and IPv6 tables. During that same period we have gone from token ring and 10Base-T to 100GbE.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Refactoring the network

The fundamental shift of the enterprise toward the cloud has posed a conundrum for many. The largest issue is the state of most enterprise networks. These networks were designed for an era gone by. Their original designs could not foresee the coming of technologies such as SDN, SDWAN, Segment Routing, the Cloud and an exponential increase in bandwidth that have all happened over the past 10 years.The IPv4 Internet BGP routing table alone has experienced a 10% year over year growth between 2009 and 2017 along. In 2009 the table eclipsed 286,000 routes. Here in 2017 we are at approximately 650,000. These figures only account for IPv4 routes, and not the full IPv4 and IPv6 tables. During that same period we have gone from token ring and 10Base-T to 100GbE.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: IoT devices communicate by Chirping

Most IoT systems assume there will be some form of connectivity. But what happens when there isn’t any Bluetooth, WiFi or cellular connectivity? R2D2, the adorable robot from Star Wars, may have the answer with the bird-like noises he used to communicate.How can sensors share data when connectivity isn’t available? How can IoT devices be designed to last longer without being recharged? How can legacy equipment be retrofitted affordable to communicate with other devices?Most IoT devices communicate through either a Bluetooth, WiFi, LoRaWAN, SIGfox or cellular connection. The mode chosen is determined by the size of the payload to be transmitted, distance to be traversed, and the power available to the transmitting device. Walls, other electronic equipment and conflicting radio signals also influences the selection of the protocol to be used. What’s needed is that can work in ‘noisy’ environments and work with very little power.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner analyst predicts doom for on-premises data centers

Enterprise software’s days are numbered, and if you don’t adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, your data center will be useless.Those are the claims of Gartner Research Vice President Milind Govekar, who gave a presentation at Gartner’s annual conference for IT infrastructure operations professionals recently in Las Vegas.Govekar said that as soon as 2019, at least a third of the largest software vendors will have transitioned their products from cloud-first to cloud-only. Although he didn’t mention it by name, you have to think Microsoft is in that category because it is already cloud-first with its enterprise apps. Office 365 already outsells the packaged Office 2016, so I can see a major de-emphasis of the client product in the coming years.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner analyst predicts doom for on-premises data centers

Enterprise software’s days are numbered, and if you don’t adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, your data center will be useless.Those are the claims of Gartner Research Vice President Milind Govekar, who gave a presentation at Gartner’s annual conference for IT infrastructure operations professionals recently in Las Vegas.Govekar said that as soon as 2019, at least a third of the largest software vendors will have transitioned their products from cloud-first to cloud-only. Although he didn’t mention it by name, you have to think Microsoft is in that category because it is already cloud-first with its enterprise apps. Office 365 already outsells the packaged Office 2016, so I can see a major de-emphasis of the client product in the coming years.To read this article in full, please click here

The end of the road for Server: cloudflare-nginx

Six years ago when I joined Cloudflare the company had a capital F, about 20 employees, and a software stack that was mostly NGINX, PHP and PowerDNS (there was even a little Apache). Today, things are quite different.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Randy Merrill

The F got lowercased, there are now more than 500 people and the software stack has changed radically. PowerDNS is gone and has been replaced with our own DNS server, RRDNS, written in Go. The PHP code that used to handle the business logic of dealing with our customers’ HTTP requests is now Lua code, Apache is long gone and new technologies like Railgun, Warp, Argo and Tiered Cache have been added to our ‘edge’ stack.

And yet our servers still identify themselves in HTTP responses with

Server: cloudflare-nginx

Of course, NGINX is still a part of our stack, but the code that handles HTTP requests goes well beyond the capabilities of NGINX alone. It’s also not hard to imagine a time where the role of NGINX diminishes further. We currently run four instances of NGINX on each edge machine (one for SSL, one for non-SSL, one for caching and one Continue reading

7 Enterprise Storage Trends for 2018

HP Networking/Comware NETCONF interface quick tutorial (using python’s ncclient and pyhpecw7)

So let’s learn about NETCONF, but first a bit of history and perspective. Everyone in networking business at least once heard about SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), which is the goto protocol for monitoring your network devices, and wondered how cool it would be if you could not only monitor your network with it, but actively configure it (sort of like “SDN wannabe”). But for that purpose the SNMP  was not really useful, it supported some write operations but they were so generic and incomplete that it was not really feasible. That is where NETCONF came around 2011 as a standard (it was here before but its RFC 6241 was ratified then) and changed the game in favor of configuring any device, while not restricting vendors from declaring their own NETCONF data structures to fit their features, but lets first check the protocol first before diving into the data structures.

NETCONF is a RCP (remote procedure call) based protocol, using XML formating as payload and YAML language as data modeling (the part that explains to you what XML to send to configure something).

LAB TOPOLOGY

Ok, lets get to the point, in our excercise I will be focused on the Continue reading

MANRS, Routing Security, and the Brazilian ISP Community

Last week, I presented MANRS to the IX.BR community. My presentation was part of a bigger theme – the launch of an ambitious program in Brazil to make the Internet safer.

While there are many threats to the Internet that must be mitigated, one common point and a challenge for many of them is that the efficacy of the approaches relies on collaboration between independent and sometimes competing parties. And, therefore, finding ways to incentivize and reward such collaboration is at the core of the solutions.

MANRS tries to do that by increasing the transparency of a network operator’s security posture and its commitment to a more secure and resilient Internet. Subsequently, the operator can leverage its increased security posture, signaling it to potential customers and thus differentiating from their competitors.

MANRS also helps build a community of security-minded operators with a common purpose – an important factor that improves accountability, facilitates better peering relationships, and improves coordination in preventing and mitigating incidents.

So, what does the Brazilian ISP community think about routing security and MANRS?

I ran an interactive poll with four questions to provide a more quantitative answer. More than 100 people participated, which makes the results Continue reading

First Speakers in the Spring 2018 Automation Online Course

For the first two sessions of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course I got awesome guest speakers, and it seems we’ll have another fantastic lineup in the Spring 2018 course:

Most network automation solutions focus on device configuration based on user request – service creation or change of data model describing the network. Another very important but often ignored aspect is automatic response to external events, and that’s what David Gee will describe in his presentation.

Configuring InterVLAN Routing- Router on Stick

New Content: Debugging Ansible Playbooks and Jinja2 Templates

Here’s a quote from one of my friends who spent years working with Ansible playbooks:

Debugging Ansible is one of the most terrible experiences one can endure…

It’s not THAT bad, particularly if you have a good debugging toolbox. I described mine in the Debugging Ansible Playbooks part of the Ansible for Networking Engineers online course.

Please note that the Building Network Automation Solutions online course includes all material from the Ansible online course.

Cisco DNA Center Vs Arista Cloud Vision

Today I am going to talk about the Automation orchestration layer for Cisco and Arista which can push the policies around the network automatically and many other features to have the best customer experiences. The goal for Cisco and Arista are same to provide the automation in the Campus or enterprise networks.

Before I will start up with the Cloud Vision and Cisco DNA center, I would like to tell you guys that we have our own youtube channel for various network videos that can further help you guys to study further. I will going to add many more videos soon on the channel, Please subscribe to the channel for the study network related videos.

Subscribe us on Youtube: http://y2u.be/0c4lMYVp9go

Arista Networks- Cloud Vision

Lets talk about the Cloud Vision first. Cloud Vision is the part of Arista Networks showing the capabilities of the network automation.

CloudVision platform is a software suite of services that deliver further operational simplification of the Arista physical infrastructure 

Work ow monitoring and provisioning is controlled centrally with pre-integrated tool sets for provisioning, change management, network-wide upgrades & rollback, network monitoring, network virtualization, and visibility services. 

Fig 1.1- ARISTA Cloud-Vision

CloudVision actually Continue reading

Introduction to Arista Networks High End Switches : Arista 7500 E Switches

Worth Reading: Postpone Inbox Procrastination

This blog post by Ethan Bank totally describes my (bad) Inbox habits. If you're anything like me, you might find Ethan's ideas useful (I do... following them is a different story though).

Computer Networking Problems and Solutions on Sale

For anyone who would like to pick up a copy of Ethan and I’s latest work, it’s currently on prepublication special over at InformIT. Click on the image below for the sale price.

Pre-Order My Computer Networking Problems & Solutions Book And Save 40%

I co-authored Computer Networking Problems And Solutions with Russ White. The nice folks at InformIT.com are accepting pre-orders of the book and ebook at 40% off until December 16, 2017. Go get yourself a copy of this short 832 page read via this link containing all of InformIT’s titles coming soon.

Or, if you use the book’s product page instead of the “coming soon” link above, use code PREORDER to get the discount.

All “coming soon” titles on sale at InformIT: http://informit.com/comingsoon

Product Page for Computer Networking Problems & Solutions: http://www.informit.com/store/computer-networking-problems-and-solutions-an-innovative-9781587145049

Pre-Order My Computer Networking Problems & Solutions Book And Save 40%

I co-authored Computer Networking Problems And Solutions with Russ White. The nice folks at InformIT.com are accepting pre-orders of the book and ebook at 40% off until December 16, 2017. Go get yourself a copy of this short 832 page read via this link containing all of InformIT’s titles coming soon.

Or, if you use the book’s product page instead of the “coming soon” link above, use code PREORDER to get the discount.

All “coming soon” titles on sale at InformIT: http://informit.com/comingsoon

Product Page for Computer Networking Problems & Solutions: http://www.informit.com/store/computer-networking-problems-and-solutions-an-innovative-9781587145049

Show 369: Work/Life Balance In IT