Networking Field Day 10 – Arista
I finally had the chance to finish watching all of the Arista videos from Networking Field Day 10. They did quite a few presentations and if you haven’t watched them yet I would recommend you do…
While the bulk of the videos talked about Arista platforms or features, Ken Duda’s presentation (EOS Evolution and Quality) really struck a chord with me. Early in the presentation Ken summarizes the problem by saying “when the network ain’t working, ain’t nothing working”. The software powering your network just has to work and it has to work consistently. Ken then goes into where he thinks quality should come from breaking it into 3 pieces.
Culture – It’s obvious from Ken’s talk that Arista legitimately cares about software quality. While I don’t think this is unique to Arista, I think it’s something they’ve fully embraced because they can. Arista was born out of the commodity network era. When you are working with commodity chips, the real differentiator becomes software. This puts them at a unique position compared to other traditional vendors who Continue reading
Cisco in China: If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em
Having struggled in China since Snowden, Cisco is taking a new tack.
Opengear Saves the Day from 35K Feet
On Tuesday, I was boarding a flight heading to the west coast and realized I had 3 switches powered down in the colo that I needed for a presentation and demo on Wednesday. Not a good feeling.
We have an IP enabled PDU that I usually connect to with no issues from the office and home office since we also have an SD-WAN deployed using Viptela. The only issue — there is not a way to VPN into the colo (yes, that’s my fault).
As it turns out, I had exposed the Opengear console server, that we used for all out of band access, to the Internet a few months prior. On a flight that I was only planning to do offline work, I was forced to purchase Wifi…from there, the fix was pretty simple.
I SSH’d into the Opengear console server, got access to the Juniper SRX perimeter FW, and then added a temporary NAT configuration that exposed the PDU to the Internet. I was able to now access the PDU directly from 35K feet in the air, get the devices powered up, and have some peace that they could be used in the demo. Sure, I could have Continue reading
ONF Debuts Northbound Interfaces for Intent-Based Networking
The intent-based Boulder & Aspen projects are designed to open up networking.
Increased Security Spending: Good Money After Bad?
A couple of recent analyst reports tout significant growth in the information security market. But More security spending on products doesn’t necessarily mean better outcomes for customers.
The post Increased Security Spending: Good Money After Bad? appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Citrix Sale Options Would Likely Include Netscaler & GoToMeeting
Citrix is reportedly mulling a selloff of its entire business, or certain assets. Dell is a possible suitor.
Last Chance! Maximize Network Programmability with NX-API REST, NX-Toolkit, & NX-API
Join the Cisco DemoFriday on September 25th and learn how you can benefit from network programmability as you transition from legacy systems to open standard interfaces.
CloudFlare Raises $110M with Promise to Eliminate Lots of Hardware
A five-year-old upstart garners investments from Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm and sets its sights on competing with Amazon Web Services.
Former Gigamon CEO Raises $7M for a Different Type of Security Monitoring
Datiphy watches how data is being used — a managed service that's being turned into a software product for the U.S. market.
Alcatel-Lucent BGP configuration tutorial. Part 2 – BGP policies. Community
In the first part of this BGP tutorial we prepared the ground by configuring eBGP/iBGP peering. We did a good job overall, yet plain BGP peering relationship is useless, the power of BGP in its ability for granular management of multiple routes from multiple sources. And the tools that help BGP to handle this complex task are BGPReaction: Interoperate or Die
Ethan has an excellent post up on Interoperate or Die. Herewith, a few thoughts in response.
From my perspective, the importance of open standards in the world of network engineering can hardly be overstated. As networks become more complicated (or complex, depending on what word you want to use), having consistent interfaces will become increasingly important. Think of the old IP model — every transport runs on top of IP, and IP runs on top of every physical/link layer. Using IP as a “choke point” built a “wasp waist,” a single API everyone on both sides of the narrow point in the protocol layer could talk to.
in recent years, we’ve forgotten the wasp waist. We’ve built everything over HTTP, and everything over Ethernet over IP, and everything over GRE over IP, and… The entire stack, above IP, is a hornet’s nest of convoluted caverns and side halls pointing, apparently, everywhere at once (like the guy from the forest in The Point, above).
If you think of IP as an API (which is really what it is), the point is to have a single layer API between any two interacting systems. This creates a clean interaction surface that helps you to Continue reading