CCNP Voice is Extinct, The CCNP Collaboration is Taking Over!
Just as was recently announced for the CCNA Voice and CCNA Video, the CCNP Voice has now gone the way of the dinosaur. It’s replacement? The highly-anticipated CCNP Collaboration certification, which of course will now be adding video to its laundry list of topics.
To attain the CCNP Collaboration certification, you must now pass four different exams. This is actually a nice bit of news, since we had to pass five separate exams to achieve the CCNP Voice certification. Don’t get too excited though; Cisco is sure to have packed each of these four exams full of enough content to account for the loss! On that note, Cisco has not yet released the exact details regarding the topics for each exam. So we must wait a little while to let the full picture develop.
The first of the four exams is called “Implementing Cisco IP Telephony and Video, Part 1” and corresponds to exam number 300-070 CIPTV1. This exam will mostly likely introduce the majority of the necessary Cisco IPT concepts while laying a solid foundation to build upon. The second is called “Implementing Cisco IP Telephony and Video, Part 2” which corresponds to exam number 300-075 CIPTV2. For this Continue reading
Being Hacked Is Good For Business! or Why You Need To Security Detection not Security Prevention
I've always said that its pointless investing in strong IT security because it will drag down profits and productivity which impacts your stock price in the current quarter. Be prepared for the media campaign that reacts to a security breach and make the most of the media coverage for promotion, exposure and business growth.
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EVPN (RFC 7432) Explained
EVPN or Ethernet VPN is a new standard that has finally been given an RFC number. Many vendors are already working on implementing this standard since the early draft versions and even before that Juniper already used the same technology in it’s Qfabric product. RFC 7432 was previously known as: draft-ietf-l2vpn-evpn.
The day I started at Juniper I saw the power of the EVPN technology which was already released in the MX and EX9200 product lines. I enabled the first customers in my region (Netherlands) to use it in their production environment.
EVPN is initially targeted as Data Center Interconnect technology, but is now deployed within Data Center Fabric networks as well to use within a DC. In this blog I will explain why to use it, how the features work and finally which Juniper products support it.
Why?
Data Center interconnects have historically been difficult to create, because of the nature of Layer 2 traffic and the limited capabilities to control and steer the traffic. When I have to interconnect a Data Center today I have a few options that often don’t scale well or are proprietary. Some examples:
- Dark Fiber
- xWDM circuit
- L2 service from a Service Provider
- VPLS
- Continue reading
HP Is Buying Aruba. Who’s Next?
Sometimes all it takes is a little push. Bloomberg reported yesterday that HP is in talks to buy Aruba Networks for their wireless expertise. The deal is contingent upon some other things, and the article made sure to throw up disclaimers that it could still fall through before next week. But the people that I’ve talked to (who are not authorized to comment and wouldn’t know the official answer anyway) have all said this is a done deal. We’ll likely hear the final official confirmation on Monday afternoon, ahead of Aruba’s big conference.
R&D Through M&A
This is a shot in the arm for HP. Their Colubris-based AP lineup has been sorely lacking in current generation wireless technology, let alone next gen potential. The featured 802.11ac APs on their networking site are OEMed directly from Aruba. They’ve been hoping to play the OEM game for a while and see where the chips are going to fall. Buying Aruba gives them second place in the wireless market behind Cisco overnight. It also fixes the most glaring issue with Colubris – R&D. HP hasn’t really been developing their wireless portfolio. Some had even thought it was gone for good. This immediately Continue reading
Scaling Overlay Networks: Scale-Out Control Plane
A week or so ago I described why a properly implemented hypervisor-based overlay virtual networking data plane is not a scalability challenge; even though the performance might decrease slightly as the total number of forwarding entries grow, modern implementations easily saturate 10GE server uplinks.
Scalability of the central controller or orchestration system is a totally different can of worms. As I explained in the Scaling Overlay Networks, the only approach that avoids single failure domain and guarantees scalability is scale-out control plane architecture.
A Quick Look at Cisco FabricPath
Cisco FabricPath is a proprietary protocol that uses ISIS to populate a “routing table” that is used for layer 2 forwarding.
Whether we like or not, there is often a need for layer 2 in the Datacenter for the following reasons:
- Some applications or protocols require to be layer 2 adjacent
- It allows for virtual machine/workload mobility
- Systems administrators are more familiar with switching than routing
A traditional network with layer 2 and Spanning Tree (STP) has a lot of limitations that makes it less than optimal for a Datacenter:
- Local problems have a network-wide impact
- The tree topology provides limited bandwidth
- The tree topology also introduces suboptimal paths
- MAC address tables don’t scale
In the traditional network, because STP is running, a tree topology is built. This works better for for flows that are North to South, meaning that traffic passes from the Access layer, up to Distribution, to the Core and then down to Distribution and to the Access layer again. This puts a lot of strain on Core interconnects and is not well suited for East-West traffic which is the name for server to server traffic.
A traditional Datacenter design will look something like this:
If we Continue reading