Data Is Not The New Oil, It’s Nuclear Power

Big Data. I believe that one phrase could get millions in venture capital funding. I don’t even have to put a product with it. Just say it. And make no mistake about it: the rest of the world thinks so too. Data is “the new oil”. At least, according to some pundits. It’s a great headline making analogy that describes how data is driving business and controlling it can lead to an empire. But, data isn’t really oil. It’s nuclear power.

Black Gold, Texas Tea

Crude oil is a popular resource. Prized for a variety of uses, it is traded and sold as a commodity and refined into plastics, gasoline, and other essential items of modern convenience. Oil creates empires and causes global commerce to hinge on every turn of the market. Living in a state that is a big oil producer, the exploration and refining of oil has a big impact.

However, when compared to Big Data, oil isn’t the right metaphor. Much like oil, data needs to be refined before use. But oil can be refined into many different distinct things. Data can only be turned into information. Oil burns up when consumed. Aside from some smoke and Continue reading

Should We Build A Better BGP?

One story that seems to have flown under the radar this week with the Net Neutrality discussion being so dominant was the little hiccup with BGP on Wednesday. According to sources, sources inside AS39523 were able to redirect traffic from some major sites like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft through their network. Since the ISP in question is located inside Russia, there’s been quite a lot of conversation about the purpose of this misconfiguration. Is it simply an accident? Or is it a nefarious plot? Regardless of the intent, the fact that we live in 2017 and can cause massive portions of Internet traffic to be rerouted has many people worried.

Routing by Suggestion

BGP is the foundation of the modern Internet. It’s how routes are exchanged between every autonomous system (AS) and how traffic destined for your favorite cloud service or cat picture hosting provider gets to where it’s supposed to be going. BGP is the glue that makes the Internet work.

But BGP, for all of the greatness that it provides, is still very fallible. It’s prone to misconfiguration. Look no further than the Level 3 outage last month. Or the outage that Google caused in Japan in August. Continue reading

Network Visibility with Barefoot Deep Insight

As you may have heard this week, Barefoot Networks is back in the news with the release of their newest product, Barefoot Deep Insight. Choosing to go down the road of naming a thing after what it actually does, Barefoot has created a solution to finding out why network packets are behaving the way they are.

Observer Problem

It’s no secret that modern network monitoring is coming out of the Dark Ages. ping, traceroute, and SNMP aren’t exactly the best tools to be giving any kind of real information about things. They were designed for a different time with much less packet flow. Even Netflow can’t keep up with modern networks running at multi-gigabit speeds. And even if it could, it’s still missing in-flight data about network paths and packet delays.

Imagine standing outside of the Holland Tunnel. You know that a car entered at a specific time. And you see the car exit. But you don’t know what happened to the car in between. If the car takes 5 minutes to traverse the tunnel you have no way of knowing if that’s normal or not. Likewise, if a car is delayed and takes 7-8 minutes to exit Continue reading

Does Juniper Need To Be Purchased?

You probably saw the news this week that Nokia was looking to purchase Juniper Networks. You also saw pretty quickly that the news was denied, emphatically. It was a curious few hours when the network world was buzzing about the potential to see Juniper snapped up into a somewhat larger organization. There was also talk of product overlap and other kinds of less exciting but very necessary discussions during mergers like this. Which leads me to a great thought exercise: Does Juniper Need To Be Purchased?

Sins of The Father

More than any other networking company I know of, Juniper has paid the price for trying to break out of their mold. When you think Juniper, most networking professionals will tell you about their core routing capabilities. They’ll tell you how Juniper has a great line of carrier and enterprise switches. And, if by some chance, you find yourself talking to a security person, you’ll probably hear a lot about the SRX Firewall line. Forward thinking people may even tell you about their automation ideas and their charge into the world of software defined things.

Would you hear about their groundbreaking work with Puppet from 2013? How about their wireless Continue reading

Complexity Isn’t Always Bad

I was reading a great post this week from Gian Paolo Boarina (@GP_Ifconfig) about complexity in networking. He raises some great points about the overall complexity of systems and how we can never really reduce it, just move or hide it. And it made me think about complexity in general. Why are we against complex systems?

Confusion and Delay

Complexity is difficult. The more complicated we make something the more likely we are to have issues with it. Reducing complexity makes everything easier, or at least appears to do so. My favorite non-tech example of this is the carburetor of an internal combustion engine.

Carburetors are wonderful devices that are necessary for the operation of the engine. And they are very complicated indeed. A minor mistake in configuring the spray pattern of the jets or the alignment of them can cause your engine to fail to work at all. However, when you spend the time to learn how to work with one properly, you can make the engine perform even above the normal specifications.

Carburetors have been largely replaced in modern engines by computerized fuel injectors. These systems accomplish the same goal of injecting the fuel-air mixture into Continue reading

Predictions As A Service

It’s getting close to the end of the year and it’s time once again for the yearly December flood of posts that will be predicting what’s coming in 2018. Long time readers of my blog know that I don’t do these kinds of posts. My New Year’s Day posts are almost always introspective in nature and forward looking from my own personal perspective. But I also get asked quite a bit to contribute to other posts about the future. And I wanted to tell you why I think the prediction business is a house of cards built on quicksand.

The Layups

It’s far too tempting in the prediction business to play it safe. Absent a ton of research, it’s just easier to play it safe with some not-so-bold predictions. For instance, here’s what I could say about 2018 right now:

• Whitebox switching will grow in revenue.
• Software will continue to transform networking.
• Cisco is going to buy companies.

Those are 100% true. Even without having spent one day in 2018. They’re also things I didn’t need to tell you at all. You already knew them. They’re almost common sense at this point. If I needed to point out that Cisco Continue reading

An Opinion On Offense Against NAT

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to rant against Network Address Translation (NAT). At first, I had hoped that was because IPv6 transitions were happening and people were adopting it rapidly enough that NAT would eventually slide into the past of SAN and DOS. Alas, it appears that IPv6 adoption is getting better but still not great.

Geoff Huston, on the other hand, seems to think that NAT is a good thing. In a recent article, he took up the shield to defend NAT against those that believe it is an abomination. He rightfully pointed out that NAT has extended the life of the modern Internet and also correctly pointed out that the slow pace of IPv6 deployment was due in part to the lack of urgency of address depletion. Even with companies like Microsoft buying large sections of IP address space to fuel Azure, we’re still not quite at the point of the game when IP addresses are hard to come by.

So, with Mr. Huston taking up the shield, let me find my +5 Sword of NAT Slaying and try to point out a couple of issues in his defense.

Relationship Status: NAT’s…Complicated

The first Continue reading

VMware and VeloCloud: A Hedge Against Hyperconvergence?

VMware announced on Thursday that they are buying VeloCloud. This was a big move in the market that immediately set off a huge discussion about the implications. I had originally thought AT&T would buy VeloCloud based on their relationship in the past, but the acquistion of Vyatta from Brocade over the summer should have been a hint that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, VMware swooped in and picked up the company for an undisclosed amount.

The conversations have been going wild so far. Everyone wants to know how this is going to affect the relationship with Cisco, especially given that Cisco put money into VeloCloud in both 2016 and 2017. Given the acquisition of Viptela by Cisco earlier this year it’s easy to see that these two companies might find themselves competing for marketshare in the SD-WAN space. However, I think that this is actually a different play from VMware. One that’s striking back at hyperconverged vendors.

Adding The Value

If you look at the marketing coming out of hyperconvergence vendors right now, you’ll see there’s a lot of discussion around platform. Fast storage, small footprints, and the ability to deploy anywhere. Hyperconverged solutions are also starting to focus on Continue reading

Devaluing Data Exposures

I had a great time this week recording the first episode of a new series with my co-worker Rich Stroffolino. The Gestalt IT Rundown is hopefully the start of some fun news stories with a hint of snark and humor thrown in.

One of the things I discussed in this episode was my belief that no data is truly secure any more. Thanks to recent attacks like WannaCry and Bad Rabbit and the rise of other state-sponsored hacking and malware attacks, I’m totally behind the idea that soon everyone will know everything about me and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.

Just Pick Up The Phone

Personal data is important. Some pieces of personal data are sacrificed for the greater good. Anyone who is in IT or works in an area where they deal with spam emails and robocalls has probably paused for a moment before putting contact information down on a form. I have an old Hotmail address I use to catch spam if I’m relative certain that something looks shady. I give out my home phone number freely because I never answer it. These pieces of personal data have been sacrificed in order to provide me Continue reading

Scotty Isn’t DevOps

I was listening to the most recent episode of our Gestalt IT On-Presmise IT Roundtable where Stephen Foskett mentioned one of our first episodes where we discussed whether or not DevOps was a disaster, or as I put it a “dumpster fire”. Take a listen here:

Around 13 minutes in, I have an exchange with Nigel Poulton where I mention that the ultimate operations guy is Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott of the USS Enterprise. Nigel countered that Scotty was the epitome of the DevOps mentality because his crazy ideas are what kept the Enterprise going. In this post, I hope to show that not only was Scott not a DevOps person, he should be considered the antithesis of DevOps.

Engineering As Operations

In the fictional biography of Mr. Scott, all he ever wanted to do was be an engineer. He begrudging took promotions but found ways to get back to the engine room on the Enterprise. He liked working starships. He hated building them. His time working on the transwarp drive of the USS Excelsior proved that in the third Star Trek film.

Scotty wasn’t developing new ideas to implement on the Enterprise. He didn’t spend his time figuring out Continue reading

More Accurate IT Acronyms

IT is flooded with acronyms. It takes a third of our working life to figure out what they all mean. Protocols aren’t any easier to figure out if it’s just a string of three or four letters that look vaguely like a word. Which, by the way, you should never pronounce.

But what if the acronyms of our favorite protocols didn’t describe what the designers wanted but instead described what they actually do?

• Sporadic Network Mangling Protocol

• Obscurity Sends Packets Flying

• Expensive Invention Gets Routers Puzzled

• Vexing Router Firmware

• Really Intensive Protocol

• Someone Doesn’t Worry About Networking

• Somewhat Quixotic Language

• Blame It oN DNS

• Cisco’s Universal Call Misdirector

• Some Mail’s Thrown Places

• Mangles Packets, Looks Silly

• Amazingly Convoluted Lists

• ImProperly SECured

• May Push Lingering Sanity To Expire

Are there any other ones you can think of? Leave it in the comments.

Back In The Saddle Of A Horse Of A Different Color

I’ve been asked a few times in the past year if I missed being behind a CLI screen or I ever got a hankering to configure some networking gear. The answer is a guarded “yes”, but not for the reason that you think.

Type Casting

CCIEs are keyboard jockeys. Well, the R&S folks are for sure. Every exam has quirks, but the R&S folks have quirky QWERTY keyboard madness. We spend a lot of time not just learning commands but learning how to input them quickly without typos. So we spend a lot of time with keys and a lot less time with the mouse poking around in a GUI.

However, the trend in networking has been to move away from these kinds of input methods. Take the new Aruba 8400, for instance. The ArubaOS-CX platform that runs it seems to have been built to require the least amount of keyboard input possible. The whole system runs with an API backend and presents a GUI that is a series of API calls. There is a CLI, but anything that you can do there can easily be replicated elsewhere by some other function.

Why would a company do this? To Continue reading

How Should We Handle Failure?

I had an interesting conversation this week with Greg Ferro about the network and how we’re constantly proving whether a problem is or is not the fault of the network. I postulated that the network gets blamed when old software has a hiccup. Greg’s response was:

Which led me to think about why we have such a hard time proving the innocence of the network. And I think it’s because we have a problem with applications.

Snappy Apps

Writing applications is hard. I base this on the fact that I am a smart person and I can’t do it. Therefore it must be hard, like quantum mechanics and figuring out how to load the dishwasher. The few people I know that do write applications are very good at turning gibberish into usable radio buttons. But they have a world of issues they have to deal with.

Error handling in applications is a mess at best. When I took C Programming in college, my professor was an actual coder during the day. She told us during the error handling Continue reading

Legacy IT Sucks

In my last few blog posts, I’ve been looking back at some of the ideas that were presented at Future:Net at VMworld this year. While I’ve discussed resource contention, hardware longevity, and event open source usage, I’ve avoided one topic that I think dictates more of the way our networks are built and operated today. It has very little to do with software, merchant hardware, or even development. It’s about legacy.

They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To

Every system in production today is running some form of legacy equipment. It doesn’t have to be an old switch in a faraway branch office closet. It doesn’t have to be an old Internet router. Often, it’s a critical piece of equipment that can’t be changed or upgraded without massive complications. These legacy pieces of the organization do more to dictate IT policies than any future technology can hope to impact.

In my own career, I’ve seen this numerous times. It could be the inability to upgrade workstation operating systems because users relied on WordPerfect for document creation and legacy document storage. And new workstations wouldn’t run WordPerfect. Or perhaps it cost too much to upgrade. Here, legacy Continue reading

Penny Pinching With Open Source

You might have seen this Register article this week which summarized a Future:Net talk from Peyton Koran. In the article and the talk, Peyton talks about how the network vendor and reseller market has trapped organizations into a needless cycle of bad hardware and buggy software. He suggests that organizations should focus on their new “core competency” of software development and run whitebox or merchant hardware on top of open source networking stacks. He says that developers can use code that has a lot of community contributions and shares useful functionality. It’s a high and mighty goal. However, I think the open source part of the equation is going to cause some issues.

A Penny For Your Thoughts

The idea behind open source isn’t that hard to comprehend. Everything available to see and build. Anyone can contribute and give back to the project and make the world a better place. At least, that’s the theory. Reality is sometimes a bit different.

Many times, I’ve had off-the-record conversations with organizations that are consuming open source resources and projects as a starting point for building something that will end up containing many proprietary resources. When I ask them about contributing back to Continue reading

Network Longevity – Think Car, Not iPhone

One of the many takeaways I got from Future:Net last week was the desire for networks to do more. The presenters were talking about their hypothesized networks being able to make intelligent decisions based on intent and other factors. I say “hypothesized” because almost everyone admitted that we aren’t quite there. Yet. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that perhaps the timeline for these mythical networks is a bit skewed in favor of refresh cycles that are shorter than we expect.

Software Eats The World

SDN has changed the way we look at things. Yes, it’s a lot of hype. Yes, it’s an overloaded term. But it’s also the promise of getting devices to do much more than we had ever dreamed. It’s about automation and programmability and, now, deriving intent from plain language. It’s everything we could ever want a simple box of ASICs to do for us and more.

But why are we asking so much? Why do we now believe that the network is capable of so much more than it was just five years ago? Is it because we’ve developed a revolutionary new method for making chips that are ten times Continue reading

Resource Contention In IT – Time Is Never Enough

I’m at Future:NET this week and there’s a lot of talk about the future of what networking is going to look like from the perspective of vendors like Apstra, Veriflow, and Forward Networks. There’s also a great deal of discussion from customers and end users as well. One of the things that I think is being missed in all the talk about resources.

Time Is Not On Your Side

Many of the presenters, like Truman Boyes of Bloomberg and Peyton Maynard-Koran of EA, discussed the idea of building boxes from existing components instead of buying them from established networking vendors like Cisco and Arista. The argument does hold some valid ideas. If you can get your hardware from someone like EdgeCore or Accton and get your software from someone else like Pluribus Networks or Pica8 it looks like a slam dunk. You get 90% to 95% of a solution that you could get from Cisco with much less cost to you overall.

Companies like Facebook and Google have really pioneered this solution. Facebook’s OCP movement is really helping networking professionals understand the development that goes into building their own switches. Facebook’s commitment is also helping reduce the price of the Continue reading

The Complexity Of Choice

Russ White had an interesting post this week about the illusion of choices and how herd mentality is driving everything from cell phones to network engineering and design. I understand where Russ is coming from with his points, but I also think that Russ has some underlying assumptions in his article that ignore some of the complexity that we don’t always get to see in the world. Especially when it comes to the herd.

Collapse Into Now

Russ talks about needing to get a new mobile phone. He talks about how there are only really two choices left in the marketplace and how he really doesn’t want either of them. While I applaud Russ and his decision to stand up for his principals, there are more than two choices. He could easily purchase a used Windows mobile phone from eBay. He could choose to run a Palm Tree 650 or a Motorola RAZR from 2005. He could even choose not to carry a phone.

You’re probably saying, “That’s not a fair comparison. He needs feature X on his phone, so he can’t use phone Y.”

And you would be right! So right, in fact, that you’ve already missed one Continue reading

Automating Documentation

Tedium is the enemy of productivity. The fastest way for a task to not be done is to make it long, boring, and somewhat complicated. People who feel that something is tedious or repetitive are the ones more likely to marginalize a task. And I think I speak for the entire industry when I say that there is no task more tedious and boring than documentation. So how can we fix it?

Tell Me What You Did

I’m not a huge fan of documentation. When I decide on a plan of action, I rarely write it down step-by-step unless I’m trying to train someone. Even then, it looks more like notes with keywords instead of a narrative to follow. It’s a habit that has been borne out of years of firefighting in networks and calls to “do it faster”. The essential items of a task are refined and reduced until all that remains is the work and none of the ancillary items, like documentation.

Based on my previous life as a network engineer, I can honestly say that I’m not alone in this either. My old company made lots of money doing network discovery engagements. Sometimes these came because the Continue reading

Virtual Reality and Skeuomorphism

Remember skeuomorphism? It’s the idea that the user interface of a program needs to resemble a physical a physical device to help people understand how to use it. Skeuomorphism is not just a software thing, however. Things like faux wooden panels on cars and molded clay rivets on pottery are great examples of physical skeuomorphism. However, most people will recall the way that Apple used skeuomorphism in the iOS when they hear the term.

Scott Forrestal was the genius behind the skeuomorphism in iOS for many years. Things like adding a fake leather header to the Contacts app, the wooden shelves in the iBooks library, and the green felt background in the Game Center app are the examples that stand out the most. Forrestal used skeuomorphism to help users understand how to use apps on the new platform. Users needed to be “trained” to touch the right tap targets or to feel more familiar with an app on sight.

Skeuomorphism worked quite well in iOS for many years. However, when Jonny Ive took over as the lead iOS developer, he started phasing out skeuomorphism starting in iOS 7. With the advent of flat design, people didn’t want fake leather and Continue reading