Vendor Neutral
And then Bilbo held the router up to the light and wondered aloud… Whatever is, vendor neutral?
Vendor neutral certainly receives a lot of play in the world of network engineering. You might have even heard the words come out of my mouth during my case study on the Telepost Greenland network at Interop a couple of weeks ago. Maybe even more than once.
But what does vendor neutral actually mean?
Does it really mean, “Can I buy my next piece of equipment from any vendor I like, and not worry about it working in my network?” Or, perhaps, “Can I buy my next piece of equipment from any vendor I like, and not worry about it disrupting my network management and operations?” The second question is the harder, in the real world — and one we’re not likely to get an answer to any time soon.
What about an open API into every piece of equipment in your network? That would be nice — but how do we get from where we are today to that nirvana? We’ve had the drive towards a MIB based interface, a common set of command line configuration constructs, several API driven Continue reading
ONUG Spring 2015 Live Blog
My live blog from the ONUG 2015 Spring event in NYC.SDN Terminology from Layered Models
Even though we don’t build networks with OSI products, we still use terms from the OSI model. What terms will we end up using for SDN, once the dust settles?
The previous post introduced one document that attempts to define terms and architecture, and today’s post introduces another: the ITU-T Y.3300 document. But how do these documents fit in with our fast-changing networking landscape – and what words should we use? Today’s post looks at the Y.3300 doc, and explores a few of the terms.
Other posts in this series:
Big Picture First: ITU-T Y-Series
Most of us don’t have a reason to read docs from standards bodies unless we’re looking for a particular standard or fact. But as long as we’re talking about one doc from the ITU-T Y-series, it’s worth a minute to set the context of what these documents are.
First off, the topic area for the Y-series is broad, but it’s all networking! The title for the ITU-T’s Y-series of documents spells out the big items:
Global information infrastructure, Internet protocol aspects and next-generation networks
Great, so the topic is global network, IP, including next-generation networks. It’s networking! Continue reading
Diving into the DNS
The turning of the DNS from a distributed database query tool into a malicious weapon in the cyber warfare arena has had profound impacts on the thinking about the DNS. I remember hearing the rallying cry some years back: “Lets all work together to find all these open resolvers and shut them down!” These days I don't hear that any more. It seems that, like SPAM in email, we’ve quietly given up on eradication, and are now focusing on how to preserve service in a toxic world. I suppose that this is yet another clear case of markets in action – there is no money in eradication, but there is money in meeting a customer’s requirement to allow their service to work under any circumstances. We’ve changed our self-perception from being the public DNS police to private mercenaries who work diligently to protect the interests of our paying customers. We are being paid to care about the victim, not to catch the attacker or even to prevent the attack.Reinventing CLNS with L3-only Forwarding
Hank left a lovely comment on my Rearchitecting L3-Only Networks blog post:
What you describe is literally intra-area routing in CLNS.
He’s absolutely right (and I admitted as much during my IPv6 Microsegmentation presentations @ Troopers 15).
Read more ...Connecting NXOS VIRL instance to Arista vEoS
In this blog, I will cover the steps that I did to connect Cisco NXOS VIRL switch instance to Arista vEoS switch instance. We can connect any Cisco switch simulated in VIRL, I just picked the NXOS switch type. CML/VIRL supports majority of Cisco switches as VM as well as few external switches from Juniper, … Continue reading Connecting NXOS VIRL instance to Arista vEoS
Cisco NXAPI with VIRL
In this blog, I will cover the steps to get NXAPI working with NXOS image in VIRL. For more details on CML/VIRL, please refer to my earlier blog series. Running NXAPI with VIRL image makes it easy to write automation scripts without needing a physical switch. Earlier, I had installed VIRL February release(0.9.17) which included … Continue reading Cisco NXAPI with VIRL
Vapor IO Takes Data Center Disaggregation a Step Further
Everything else is getting opened up — how about rack management?
ONUG Spring 2015
I’ll continue to update this throughout the next two days. Feel free to issue a pull request if you’re also here at the conference and want to add to this post.
General
Location: Open Networking User Group (ONUG) at Columbia University
ONUG currently has 6 working groups:
- NSV
- SD-WAN
- Virtual Network Overlays
- Common Management tools across network, compute, and storage
- Network State Collection, correlation, and analytics
- Traffic Monitoring and Visibility
It is interesting and awesome to see that half of the working groups are all about Day 2 operations and management of networks. This is exactly what’s needed in the industry.
Sessions
Creating Business Value with Cloud Infrastructure
Speaker: Adrian Cockcroft
- Developers don’t need any of that referring to NSV/NFV.
- 2009 developed the Cloudicorn, took knowledge gained to Battery
- Docker wasn’t on anyone’s roadmap for 2014. It’s on everyone’s roadmap for 2015
- 2014 was the year that Enterpises finally embraced cloud and DevOps
- Optimizing from IT cost to delivery and speed - Nordstrom - ended up yielding lower costs
- Product IT reports into the business
- Director is the highest Corp IT title
- Immutable microservice deployments scales
- If your QA team is saying there are too many bugs in a release, Continue reading