HP Talks SDN Turkey at Interop
Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of meeting with Chris Young and Jeff Enters from HP Networking as part of Tech Field Day Extra! at Interop NYC 2014. Going into the discussion I had expected to get a presentation on … Continue reading
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OpEx savings and the ever-present emergence of SDN
Software-defined networking is fundamentally about two things: the centralization of network intelligence to make smarter decisions, and the creation of a single (or smaller number of) administrative touch points to allow for streamlined operations and to promote workflow automation. The former can potentially lead to new capabilities that make networks better (or create new revenue streams), and the latter is about reducing the overall operating costs of managing a network.
Generating revenue makes perfect sense for the service providers who use their network primarily as a means to drive the business. But most enterprises use the network as an enabling entity, which means they are more interested in the bottom line than the top. For these network technology consumers, the notion of reducing costs can be extremely powerful.
But how do those OpEx savings manifest themselves?
OpEx you can measure
When we consider OpEx, it’s easy to point to the things that are measurable: space, power and cooling. So as enterprise customers examine various solutions, they will look at how many devices are required, and then how those devices consume space, power, and cooling. It is relatively straightforward to do these calculations and line up competing solutions. Essentially, you calculate Continue reading
Now that We’ve Buried the Seven Layer Model…
“But the seven layer model is still useful for teaching networking…” So ran the most common reaction to my post last week about the seven layer model being dead. But let me ask something — how useful is the seven layer model for teaching networking? It doesn’t match the TCP/IP stack, it doesn’t account for […]
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LAG versus ECMP
Bryan sent me an interesting question:
When you have the opportunity to use LAG or ECMP, what are some things you should consider?
He already gathered some ideas (thank you!) and I expanded his list and added a few comments.
Read more ...Interop New York: It Was Great Fun
Last week’s Interop New York was hard work (three workshops in two days), but also lots of nerdy fun. I love doing workshops with smart participants who bring their real-life problems to the room and challenge my assumptions and conclusions, and I had plenty of these interactions during the week. Thank you all (you know who you are)!
Read more ...Interop NYC & Software Gone Wild
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Interop in NYC. It wasn’t the best turn out for a conference, but all of the sessions that were about automation, APIs, DevOps, and programmability seemed to do fairly well. For those that didn't attend, the title of the presentation was A Practical Look at Network Automation --- the deck is posted below.
I also had the opportunity to be a guest on Ivan Pepelnjak’s podcast Software Gone Wild recently and it was just posted yesterday. Have a listen.
| edelman-interopnyc-092014pv.pdf |
Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments regarding any of the material.
Thanks,
Jason
Twitter: @jedelman8
Thanks,
Jason
Twitter: @jedelman8
CCIE RSv5 Workbook Troubleshooting Labs Now Available
Troubleshooting Lab 1 has been added to the CCIE Routing & Switching v5 Workbook. This is in addition to Full Scale Lab 1 which was posted yesterday. More Foundation, Troubleshooting, and Full Scale Labs will be added soon to the workbook. More information about additional content and its release schedule will be available shortly.
This lab uses a 20 router topology which will be available through our rack rental system shortly. In the meantime if you have your own lab built on CSR1000v, IOU/IOL, etc. the initial configs are available to download on the lab 1 tasks page. For technical discussion of this lab, please visit the Troubleshooting Labs section of our Online Community here.
Dictionary: Bra-padding
Bra-padding is a term used to describe fluff marketing pieces about some relatively minor advance in product or technology. Mostly favoured by large incumbent technology vendors like EMC, Cisco etc who have an over-abundance of marketing people who need something to occupy their time.
The post Dictionary: Bra-padding appeared first on EtherealMind.
Utility-Based Pricing Troubles Me
Utility, or Consumption-Based pricing models offer an interesting way of matching costs to revenues. But if they’re not managed well, customer costs could blow out just trying to keep the lights on. We’ve come to expect rapidly declining hardware prices. Have vendors realised their utility prices need to decline at a similar rate?
I’ve been doing more architecture work over the last twelve months, and this has changed some of my thinking about technology. Previously I was only really interested in speeds & feeds, and technical capabilities. Scaling was only about how to add capacity – not what it would cost. When I looked at costs, it was just to shake my head at the ridiculous prices charged for things like a second power supply.
But now I find myself interested in things like cost curves, and trying to figure out how my costs will change as demand changes. The ideal is for their to be a clear relationship between costs & revenue, hopefully with costs growing at a slower rate than demand (and revenue).
Previously we had high upfront costs to buy hardware and software, and we aimed to amortise it over the life of the service. Our costs Continue reading
Cisco Adds New Routers In the ISR 4000 Family
The Cisco ISR G2 routers have been around for a while now. Roughly a year ago, Cisco released the Cisco 4451-X router which was the first ISR running IOS-XE. Cisco has now added new routers to the 4000 family, which means that the ISR G2 family will eventually go away. Don’t panic though! That will not happen for a while but if you are looking to buy new ISR routers, then take a look at the new 4000 family.
One great thing about the new ISR 4000 routers is that they support upgrading of the bandwidth capacity by buying a license. That means that you can keep the same router for a longer time and grow into it, rather than doing a complete replacement as your demand for bandwidth increases. The new models are ISR 4321, 4331, 4351 and 4431.
If you need a router that does 10 Mbit/s, then you can get the 4321 and you can keep using it until you reach 100 Mbit/s. The 4331 will get you from 100-300 Mbit/s which would cover a lot of customers that I currently have.
The next slide shows some of the new features of the ISR 4000:
The ISR Continue reading
Show 207 – Cisco Nexus Unified Fabric – Sponsored
What’s new with Cisco Nexus Unified Fabric (formerly Dynamic Fabric Automation), you ask? Well, an integrated end-to-end solution that builds on four fundamental pillars is what’s new. The pillars are… Fabric management. Workload automation. Optimized networking. Virtual fabrics. These features are applicable across the Nexus product line from the Nexus 7K down to the Nexus 1K […]
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The post Show 207 – Cisco Nexus Unified Fabric – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
CCIE RSv5 Workbook Full Scale Lab 1 Now Available
Full Scale Lab 1 has been added to the CCIE Routing & Switching v5 Workbook. More Foundation, Troubleshooting, and Full Scale Labs will be coming soon, including additional updates before the end of the weekend. I will post more information about additional content and its release schedule shortly.
This lab uses a 20 router topology which will be available through our rack rental system shortly. In the meantime if you have your own lab built on CSR1000v, IOU/IOL, etc. the initial configs are available to download on the lab 1 tasks page. For technical discussion of this lab, please visit the Full Scale Labs section of our Online Community here.
Who Uses the 55:4e:20 MAC OUI?
I set up a new secondary ISC DHCP server yesterday, as an interim solution while I get round to fixing a dead server. The easiest short term fix was to spin up a VM and install DHCP there. As I … Continue reading
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Renesys Team Launches Dyn Research
Welcome to the new Dyn Research Blog! We’re certainly glad you’re here, and we hope you like the snazzy new look.
Since the Renesys team joined Dyn in May, the number one question we’ve received is “will you keep publishing the blog?” The answer is yes, absolutely, and we hope to bring you some diverse perspectives on Internet performance from other members of the Dyn technical team as well. Please do let us know what you think of the new Dyn Research Blog, and feel free to suggest topics you’d like us to cover.
A moment for reflection
Looking back over the eight years that we’ve been publishing our observations about Internet structure and operations, I’m struck mostly by how you, our audience, have evolved and grown. In the early days, news about Internet infrastructure appealed to a pretty narrow group of readers within the network operations community. We never had to buy beer at conferences like NANOG, but the rest of the world was more or less content to ignore the dirty details of IPv6, peering and depeering, Net Neutrality, and the evolution of the IP wholesale transit industry.
Plexxi Pulse—HadoopWorld 2014: Is your network ready for Big Data?
We are two short weeks away from HadoopWorld, one of the world’s largest Big Data conferences. October 15—17 our team will be in in New York City to demo our Big Data fabric and answer questions about preparing networks for Big Data. Stop by booth 552 to catch up with our team and pick up a pair of Plexxi Socks. We look forward to seeing you there.
In this week’s PlexxiTube of the week, Dan Backman describes how Plexxi manages load balancing in Big Data networks.
Check out what we’ve been up to on social media this week. Have a great weekend!
The post Plexxi Pulse—HadoopWorld 2014: Is your network ready for Big Data? appeared first on Plexxi.
IPv6 Adoption in the UK
One of my biggest annoyances for a while has been the lack of interest in IPv6 in the UK. There just isn’t a thirst for it. I’m pretty convinced it’s down to lack of sales support by out coin operated fraternity of technology touting army of salesmen (and women). Justifications like “IPv4 is running out” and “IPv6 when wielded correctly gives us huge growth potential” just isn’t enough to convince anyone that it’s here and is ready for adoption in enterprises nationally. The commoditisation of last mile circuits and consumer grade connectivity has also driven down profit and therefore as these businesses run with tightly controlled finances, the ability to invest in additional functionality with no perceivable gain is frowned upon somewhat. So, a quote that I thumbed in to Twitter was “Would you expect sparkling vitamin water to come out of the same taps as your current still cold feed? Who would pay £1 a month more?”. The answer to this somewhat pointless frustrated question is probably not of any value to anyone barring technologists who get it. Of course you wouldn’t get it out of the same tap! Whilst it would be delivered from the same set Continue reading
Network Automation Tools with Jason Edelman on Sofware Gone Wild
The stars have finally aligned, and after months of scheduling Jason and myself found time to chat about network automation tools and all the other exciting things Jason is doing (and blogging about).
We started with easy topics:
Read more ...Arista vEOS on GNS3
EOS (Extensible Operating System) is Linux-based network operating system developed by Arista Networks that runs on all Arista switches. Virtual EOS (vEOS) is single image and can be run in a virtual machine. The article describes how to set up vEOS virtual machine and connects it to GNS3 in order to test EOS functionality.
Host Requirements
Linux x86-64
Qemu or VirtualBox installed
Virtual Machine Requirements
1024 MB RAM
IDE CD-ROM drive with mounted Aboot-veos-serial-2.0.8.iso
2GB flash IDE disk - vEOS-4.14.2F.vmdk
NICs e1000 type
1. Download Bootloader and Virtual EOS
Clik the link to create a new account. The guest account (when no corporate email is used for registration e.g. gmail.com) is sufficient to download vEOS software. Click the link and login with the credentials you entered during the registration. You have to accept License Agreement in order to download vEOS software.
Download the bootloader and a virtual disk:
Aboot-veos-serial-2.0.8.iso
vEOS-4.14.2F.vmdk
2. Arista Switch First Boot on Qemu
Use Qemu to boot Arista switch virtual machine for the first time.
$ /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 -enable-kvm -cdrom ./Aboot-veos-serial-2.0.8.iso -boot d vEOS-4.14.2F.vmdk -serial telnet::3355,server,nowait
Connect to the Continue reading
Route leak incident on October 2, 2014
Today, CloudFlare suffered downtime which caused customers’ sites to be inaccessible in certain parts of the world. We take the availability of our customers’ web properties very seriously. Incidents like this get the absolute highest priority, attention, and follow up. The pain felt by our customers is also felt deeply by the CloudFlare team in London and San Francisco.
This downtime was the result of a BGP route leak by Internexa, an ISP in Latin America. Internexa accidentally directed large amounts of traffic destined for CloudFlare data centers around the world to a single data center in Medellín, Colombia. At the same time Internexa also leaked routes belonging to Telecom Argentina causing disruption in Argentina. This was the result of Internexa announcing via BGP that their network, instead of ours, handled traffic for CloudFlare. This miscommunication caused a flood of traffic to quickly overwhelm the data center in Medellín. The incident lasted 49 minutes, from 15:08UTC to 15:57UTC.
The exact impact of the route leak to our customers’ visitors depended on the geography of the Internet. Traffic to CloudFlare’s customers sites dropped by 50% in North America and 12% in Europe. The impact on our network in Asia was isolated Continue reading