Friday News Analysis: Open Networking Foundation, Dave Ward on Open
Open Networking Foundation Extends Conformance Testing to Non-Members “The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced it has extended the ONF OpenFlow™ Conformance Testing Program to include testing for non-ONF members. Companies interested in receiving an OpenFlow Certificate of Conformance for […]Open vSwitch Performance Revisited
A while ago I wrote about performance bottlenecks of Open vSwitch. In the meantime, the OVS team drastically improved OVS performance resulting in something that Andy Hill called Ludicrous Speed at the latest OpenStack summit (slide deck, video).
Let’s look at how impressive the performance improvements are.
Read more ...Not Raising Red Flags While Looking For A New Job
A reader wrote to me, explaining that they were unhappy in their current job situation, and queried how they might be able look for a new job without raising any red flags with their existing employer. Tricky, but I have a few thoughts, having done this a time or two over my career. […]In the Data Center, No One Can Hear You Lose Your Hearing
Working for a data center-focused reseller/integrator like H.A. Storage Systems, I spend my fair share of time in various data center environments. I have, for years, elected to use some sort of hearing protection when in these facilities. I have constantly been amazed, though, at how few other workers in data centers do the same.
Honestly, I’m not sure why most people I see in data center facilities don’t use hearing protection. Perhaps they think they’ll only be on the data center floor for a few minutes. We all know it never goes like that! Perhaps they think it makes it too hard to hear co-workers. Personally, I find it easier to communicate with someone when I have ear protection on. Maybe workers think it’s not loud enough for ear protection to be necessary. Unfortunately, this isn’t true in most cases.
Can You Hear Me Now?
As an example, I was recently down at the Sungard Availability Services colo facility in Philadelphia. It’s one of the largest colos in the immediate area with 230,000 square feet of raised floor. I was in there all day long with one of my customers, for two days while we traced out Continue reading
One Month in Review – The Numbers
It has been 30 days since we unleashed GNS3 v1.x, GNS3.com, and the GNS3 Jungle onto the world. And we figured there was no better way toMaturity and Evolution of SDN
A few weeks ago I read this article from Craig Matsumoto on SDN Central.
At first I read it with a bit of a smile, but for some reason it has actually started to bother me a little. In this article, Craig summarizes a talk by Scott Shenker about SDN and a proposal for an SDNv2 that would fix the things that are wrong with SDNv1. In a way this represents what is wrong with our industry. We create a new version or create a new name for a concept that is not particularly well defined to begin with, and in many interpretations is far broader than is assumed in the pre-fixed version.
Many folks still believe that OpenFlow defines SDN. And that all the limitations of a basic protocol invalidate or limit the capabilities of an evolving concept like SDN. Why do we feel such a need to increment a version of an undefined term to make it sound like we are creating something new and different?
In SDNv2, we would still have separation of control and date (at least all that work is not wasted), but there are three major differences between it and the “old” SDN concepts. Continue reading
Network Programmability Phase 2: the Provisioned Network
After describing the current state of affairs in his Network Programmability 101 webinar, Matt Oswald moved to the low-hanging fruits: automating repetitive tasks in baby steps, from VLAN provisioning to consistent device configurations.
The Resolvers We Use
The Internet's Domain Name System is a modern day miracle. It may not represent the largest database that has ever been built, but nevertheless it's truly massive. The DNS is consulted every time we head to a web page, every time we send an email message, or in fact every time we initiate almost any transaction on the Internet. We assume a lot about the DNS. For example, content distribution networks are observed to make use of the location of the DNS resolver as being also the same location as the user. How robust is this assumption of co-locality of users and their resolvers? Are users always located "close" to their resolvers? More generally, what is the relationship between the end user, and the DNS resolvers that they use? Are they in fact closely related? Or is there widespread use of distant resolvers?Who’s Watching?
It's been more than a year since Edward Snowden released material concerning the activities of US agencies in the area of cyber-intelligence gathering. A year later, and with allegations of various forms of cyber spying flying about, it's probably useful to ask some more questions. What is a reasonable expectation about privacy and the Internet? Should we now consider various forms of digital stalking to be "normal"? To what extent can we see information relating to individuals' activities online being passed to others?HP Networking and Cisco CLI Reference Guide
New to HP Networking products? Know Cisco IOS CLI and now work with HPN products? Or know Comware (from previous 3Com/H3C days) and now also work with HPN ProVision products? Or know HPN ProVision and now work with Comware? And … Continue reading
The changing of the guard: Telecom Style-Part 1
The sale of a incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) aka the local telephone company can be much more complicated than one might think, ordinary folks anyway. Networking & IT professionals most likely have a different viewpoint as migrations are a fundamental part of the IT field. Such a transaction becomes more complicated when triple play […]
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The Linux ip Command – An Ostensive Overview
It came to my attention and I was rather surprised to learn a while back that the Linux ifconfig command has been deprecated for quite some time by the Linux ip command set. The ip command isn’t new to me and I’ve recognised its advantages for some time but considering its ‘elevated’ status I thought […]
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The post The Linux ip Command – An Ostensive Overview appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.
Stop Doing Post Mortems & Root Cause Analysis With indeni
Indeni has technology that can predict known types of network failures using pre-mortem analysis.
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The post Stop Doing Post Mortems & Root Cause Analysis With indeni appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Sponsored Blog Posts.
Wipebook – A Portable Whiteboard
It is a stereotype, but engineers really do like whiteboards. Problem is, you can’t carry one around with you. Plus there’s still a few unenlightened employers who don’t provide whiteboards. Enter the Wipebook, a spiral-bound notebook made of whiteboard-like pages:
I normally carry a notebook for scratching out notes while talking to customers, sketching diagrams, working through problems, etc. I don’t archive these notes – most are just short-term things, and I shred them. Important stuff gets turned into OmniFocus tasks/emails/etc.
So the Wipebook looks perfect for me. My wife bought one for me recently, and I’ve started using it at work. So far, it’s working as expected. I can quickly scribble notes, sketch a diagram, make corrections, etc. When I’m done with it, I wipe the page down.
It’s not perfect – the pages don’t always wipe down perfectly, and obviously it gets bumped around in my bag. So it won’t last forever. But it’s a nice touch that I can open & close the bindings, so I can easily get rid of any pages that are too beaten up.
The pens have a small eraser on the end, but it’s only suitable for very minor corrections. I have a Continue reading
The Proof Is in The Facebook Data Center Pudding
In case you missed it, Wired just exposed the elephant in the room with last week’s article on the next generation Facebook data center.
For years, anyone who’s had to build out or run a network has handed over large sums of money to the networking hardware titans, without the freedom to choose what to run on that hardware. But I’m sure if you’re someone who placed one of those orders, the thought crossed your mind if this was always going to be the norm.
Every time before you clicked or signed on that dotted line, you wondered whether it’s worth buying from the incumbents and playing in their locked-in world. Maybe deep down you had some burning desire to break away, but were afraid to stray from the blue chip way of life.
I feel your pain and it’s okay because we all want to maximize the value of our dollar. That’s why we all shop for the best choice and at the best price point; otherwise, we will just wait and buy another day.
I mean, you have the freedom to buy the servers you want, so why not have the freedom to buy the network gear that Continue reading
Just Published: PCI DSS Videos
The edited videos of the fantastic PCI DSS webinar Michele Chubirka presented in early July have finally been published (yes, there’s a huge backlog that’s getting cleaned up). Enjoy!
Net Neutrality: It’s regulation for the public good, not government takeover
My good friend Chuck Papageorgiou recently wrote a post on his blog he titled Net Neutrality – Policies or Politics in which he argued:
… as a capitalist and free-marketer, I have a hard time reconciling the notion that the Government should just take over privately deployed and owned assets without fairly compensating the TelCo’s and their shareholders for the investment they have made, and continue to make, in internet infrastructure.
Despite the fact that yesterday was Chuck’s birthday I’m going to disagree strongly with my friend.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT’s march towards mass customization
[Unbeknownst to me, Matt Oswalt (@mierden on Twitter) posted a thematically similar post a few days before me. While I did not see that post, it seems disingenuous not to reference it, so please read his thoughts here: http://keepingitclassless.net/2014/11/mass-customization/]
IT is constantly evolving, from mainframes to disaggregated components to an integrated set of infrastructure elements working in support of applications. But that description is more about how individual infrastructure is packaged and less about the role that these solutions play. There is a more subtle but perhaps more profound change in IT that is simultaneously taking place: a shift in how IT architectures are actually being designed.
So what is at the heart of this change?
Single purpose infrastructure
IT was born with the mainframe. Mainframes were basically entire IT ecosystems in a box. They included compute, storage, networking and applications. But what is most notable about these solutions is that the entire system was aimed at providing a single outcome. That is to say that the mainframe itself was a composed system that was designed with a single purpose in mind: deliver some application.
In the early days of IT, there was no need for systems to run different Continue reading
Coping with Byzantine Routing Failures
One of my readers sent me an interesting challenge:
We have two MPLS providers sending us default routes and it seems like whenever we have problem with SP1 our failover is not happening properly and actually we have to go in manually and influence our traffic to forward via another path.
Welcome to the wondrous world of byzantine routing failures ;)
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