It’s Probably Not The Wi-Fi
After finishing up Mobility Field Day last week, I got a chance to reflect on a lot of the information that was shared with the delegates. Much of the work in wireless now is focused on analytics. Companies like Cape Networks and Nyansa are trying to provide a holistic look at every part of the network infrastructure to help professionals figure out why their might be issues occurring for users. And over and over again, the resound cry that I heard was “It’s Not The Wi-Fi”
Building A Better Access Layer
Most of wireless is focused on the design of the physical layer. If you talk to any professional and ask them to show your their tool kit, they will likely pull out a whole array of mobile testing devices, USB network adapters, and diagramming software that would make AutoCAD jealous. All of these tools focus on the most important part of the equation for wireless professionals – the air. When the physical radio spectrum isn’t working users will complain about it. Wireless pros leap into action with their tools to figure out where the fault is. Either that, or they are very focused on providing the right design from Continue reading
The History of The Wireless Field Day AirCheck
Mobility Field Day 2 just wrapped up in San Jose. It’s always a little bittersweet to see the end of a successful event. However, one thing that does bring a bit of joy to the end of the week is the knowledge that one of the best and longest running traditions at the event continues. That tradition? The Wireless/Mobility Field Day AirCheck.
The Gift That Keeps Giving
The Wireless Field Day AirCheck story starts where all stories start. The beginning. At Wireless Field Day 1 in March of 2011, I was a delegate and fresh off my first Tech Field Day event just a month before. I knew some wireless stuff and was ready to learn a lot more about site surveys and other great things. Little did I know that I was about to get something completely awesome and unexpected.
As outlined in this post, Fluke Networks held a drawing at the end of their presentation for a first-generation AirCheck handheld wireless troubleshooting tool. I was thrilled to be the winner of this tool. I took it home and immediately put it to work around my office. I found it easy to use and it provided great information Continue reading
Context From The People
Are you ready for the flood of context-based networking solutions? If not, it’s time to invest in sandbags. After the launch of Cisco’s Intuitive Network solution set at Cisco Live, the rest of the context solutions are coming out to play. Granted, some of them are like Apstra and have been doing this for a while. Others are going to be jumping on the bandwagon of providing a solution that helps with context. But why are we here and why now?
Creating Context
The truth is that we’ve had context in the network for decades now. It’s not a part number that we can order from a vendor. It’s not a command that we type into the CLI to activate. In fact, it’s nothing that you can see at all right now, unless there’s a mirror handy.
The context in networks has been provided by people for as far back as anyone can remember. You do it every day without consciously realizing it. You interpret error messages and disregard those that aren’t important. People know how to program VLANs correctly to segment traffic in certain ways. Security context, application context, and more are delivered by breathing, thinking humans.
We have Continue reading
Mythbusting the CCIE Continuing Education Program
It’s been about a month since the CCIE Continuing Education program was announced ahead of Cisco Live. There was a fair amount of discussion about it both on this blog as well as other places, like Jeff Fry’s post. Overall, the response has been positive. However, there are a few questions and ideas about the program that are simply not true. And no, this is not The Death Of The CCIE Program (just Google it). So, let’s take a look at this edition of Mythbusters for the CCIE CE program.
Myth #1: The CE Program Is Just A Way For Cisco To Sell More Training
This was a good one. The list of CE classes that was release at the beginning of the program included Cisco Live classes as well as Cisco Authorized training classes. Those were the only thing on the list as of right now. When some people saw the list, they jumped to the conclusion that the reason why the CE program exists is because Cisco wants to push their training courses. Let’s look at that.
Let’s say you want to start a global program that requires people to keep track of their training credits to turn Continue reading
Why Do You Still Blog?
After recording an excellent session on social media at Cisco Live with The Network Collective (@NetCollectivePC), I started thinking about blogging and where it stands in the grand scheme of information sharing. With the rise of podcasting and video blogging now in full swing, I was even asked by my friend Michael Stump “Do you see blogging as a dying form of content?” For obvious reasons, I said “no”, but I wanted to explain two major reasons why.
Needle In A Haystack
One of the major reasons why I still blog through written form is searchability. When I started blogging almost seven years ago I wanted to create a place where I could put down my thoughts about topics and share them with everyone. More by accident than design, many of those thoughts became popular topics of conversation. Even today, some of my posts are being used to help people figure out problems and address issues that aren’t well documented in other places.
But why? How can posts many years old still be relevant to audiences today? Because of searching. Use of Google, DuckDuckGo, and even Bing allow people to search for specific error messages Continue reading
Not The Cisco of John Chambers Anymore
I just got back from Cisco Live 2017 last night and I had a blast at the show. There was a lot of discussion about new architectures, new licensing models, and of course, Tech Field Day Extra. However, one of the most interesting topics went largely under the radar. I think we’re fully in the transition of Cisco away from being the Company of John Chambers.
Steering A Tall Ship
John Chambers wasn’t the first CEO of Cisco. But he’s the one that most people would recognize. He transformed the company into the juggernaut that it is today. He watched Cisco ascend to the leader in the networking space and helped it transform into a company that embraced voice, security, and even servers and compute as new business models.
John’s Cisco is a very unique animal. It’s not a single company. It’s a collection of many independent companies with their own structures and goals all competing with each other for resources. If John decided that UCS was more important to his goals this quarter, he shifted some of the support assets to focus on that business unit. It was a featured product, complete with healthy discounts to encourage user adoption.
Subscription Defined Networking
Cisco’s big announcement this week ahead of Cisco Live was their new Intent-based Networking push. This new portfolio does include new switching platforms in the guise of the Catalyst 9000 series, but the majority of the innovation is coming in the software layer. Articles released so far tout the ability of the network to sense context, provide additional security based on advanced heuristics, and more. But the one thing that seems to be getting little publicity is the way you’re going to be paying for software going forward.
The Bottom Line
Cisco licensing has always been an all-or-nothing affair for the most part. You buy a switch and you have two options – basic L2 switching or everything the switch supports. Routers are similar. Through the early 15.x releases, Cisco routers could be loaded with an advanced image that ran every service imaginable. Those early 15.x releases gave us some attempts at role-based licensing for packet, voice, and security device routers. However, those efforts were rolled back due to customer response.
Shockingly, voice licensing has been the most progressive part of Cisco’s licensing model for a while now. CallManager 4.x didn’t even bother. Hook things up and Continue reading
Don’t Build Big Data With Bad Data
I was at Pure Accelerate 2017 this week and I saw some very interesting things around big data and the impact that high speed flash storage is going to have. Storage vendors serving that market are starting to include analytics capabilities on the box in an effort to provide extra value. But what happens when these advances cause issues in the training of algorithms?
Garbage In, Garbage Out
One story that came out of a conversation was about training a system to recognize people. In the process of training the system, the users imported a large number of faces in order to help the system start the process of differentiating individuals. The data set they started with? A collection of male headshots from the Screen Actors Guild. By the time the users caught the mistake, the algorithm had already proven that it had issues telling the difference between test subjects of particular ethnicities. After scrapping the data set and using some different diverse data sources, the system started performing much better.
This started me thinking about the quality of the data that we are importing into machine learning and artificial intelligence systems. The old computer adage of “garbage in, garbage Continue reading
CCIE Continuing Education – Learn Your away To Recertification
It looks like one of the best (or worst) kept secrets about the CCIE has finally come to pass. This week, Cisco announced that there is a new program in place to recertify your CCIE without the need to continually retake the written exam. How is this going to measure up?
The Learning Train
The idea behind continual recertification is very simple. Rather than shut down what you’ve got going on every 18 months to spend time studying for an exam, Cisco is giving current CCIEs and CCDEs the option of applying credit from educational sessions toward recertifying their credentials.
This is very similar to the way that it works in for a doctor or a lawyer. There are courses that you can take that provide a certain number of “points” for a given class. When you accumulate 100 points in a two year span, you can apply those points to recertification.
The credits are good for a maximum of three years from the date earned. You can’t carry them over between recertification periods or bank them in case your certification expires. Once you use the points to recert, you start back up the treadmill again.
We’ll Do It Live!
How To Make Mistakes
We all make mistakes. We type the wrong command. We use the wrong verb tense in an article. We leave out a critical step when explaining a process. It’s something that happens all the time. It’s avoidable through careful planning, but how do you handle things when the avoidable becomes unavoidable?
Making Amends, Not Mistakes
Once a mistake is out in the open and noticeable, it’s done. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen or that it’s not affecting things. That’s when you need to own up to what happened and fix it. Sometimes that’s not always easy. Even the best person is reticent to admit to being fallible. So the process for fixing a mistake isn’t always easy. But it is important.
- Realize You’ve Made A Mistake – As amazing as it sounds, this is sometimes the hardest part of the deal. It’s easy to see that you’ve typed in the wrong command to a router and that the output isn’t what you were expecting. But what about those errors you don’t immediately catch. How about hearing the incorrect name at a dinner party and calling someone by the wrong name for an entire night? Or incorrectly spelling or pronouncing Continue reading
It’s Not The Size of Your Conference Community
Where do you get the most enjoyment from your conference attendance? Do you like going to sessions and learning about new things? Do you enjoy more of the social aspect of meeting friends and networking with your peers? Maybe it’s something else entirely?
It’s The Big Show
When you look at shows like Cisco Live, VMworld, or Interop ITX, there’s a lot going on. There are diverse education tracks attended by thousands of people. You could go to Interop and bounce from a big data session into a security session, followed by a cloud panel. You could attend Cisco Live and never talk about networking. You could go to VMworld and only talk about networking. There are lots of opportunities to talk about a variety of things.
But these conferences are huge. Cisco and VMware both take up the entire Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. When in San Francisco, both of these events dwarf the Moscone Center and have to spread out into the surrounding hotels. That means it’s easy to get lost or be overlooked. I’ve been to Cisco Live before and never bumped into people I know from my area that said they Continue reading
What Happened To The CCDE?
Studying for a big exam takes time and effort. I spent the better part of 3 years trying to get my CCIE with constant study and many, many attempts. And I was lucky that the CCIE Routing and Switching exam is offered 5 days a week across multiple sites in the world. But what happens when the rug gets pulled our from under your feet?
Not Appearing In This Testing Center
The Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) is a very difficult exam. It takes all of the technical knowledge of the CCIE and bends it in a new direction. There are fun new twists like requirements determination, staged word problems, and whole new ways to make a practical design exam. Russ White made a monster of a thing all those years ago and the team that continues to build on the exam has set a pretty high bar for quality. So high, in fact, that gaining the coveted CCDE number with its unique styling is a huge deal for the majority of people I know that have it, even those with multiple CCIEs.
The CCDE is also only offered 3-4 times a year. The testing centers are specialized Pearson centers Continue reading
The Myth of The Greenest Field
A fun anecdote: I had to upgrade my home landline (I know, I know) from circuit switched to packet switched last week. I called the number I was told to call and I followed the upgrade procedure. I told them exactly what I wanted – the bare minimum necessary to move the phone circuit. No more. No less.
When the technician arrived to do the upgrade, he didn’t seem to know what was going on. Instead of giving me the replacement modem I asked for, he tried to give me their “upgraded, Cadillac model” home media gateway router. I told him that I didn’t need it. I had a perfectly good router/firewall. I had wireless in my house. I didn’t need this huge monstrosity. Yet, he persisted. No amount of explanation from me could make him understand I neither wanted or needed what he was trying to install.
Finally, I gave in. I let him finish his appointment and move on. Once he was gone, I disassembled the router and took it to the nearest cable company store. I walked in and explained exactly what I wanted and what I needed. It took the techs there less than five minutes Continue reading
Cisco and Viptela – The Price of Development Debt
Cisco finally pulled themselves into the SD-WAN market by acquiring Viptela on Monday. Viptela was considered to be one of, if not the leading SD-WAN vendor in the market. That Cisco decided to pick them as an acquisition target isn’t completely surprising. But one might wonder why?
IWANna New Debt
Cisco’s premier strategy for SD-WAN up until last week was IWAN. This is their catch-all solution designed to take the various component pieces being offered by SD-WAN solutions and replicate them on Cisco hardware. IWAN has served as a vehicle for Cisco to push things like the APIC-EM solution, Cisco ONE licensing, and a variety of other enhanced technologies like NBAR and PfR.
Cisco has packaged these technologies together because they have spent a couple of decades building these protocols up to be the best at what they do in the industry. NBAR was the key to application QoS years ago. PfR and OER were the genesis of Cisco having the ability to intelligently route packets to destinations. These protocols have formed the cornerstone of their platform for many, many years.
So why is IWAN such a mess? If you have the best of breed technology built into a router Continue reading
Don’t Be My Guest
I’m interrupting my regularly scheduled musing about technology and networking to talk today about something that I’m increasingly seeing come across my communications channels. The growing market for people to “guest post” on blogs. Rather than continually point folks to my policies on this, I thought it might be good to break down why I choose to do what I do.
The Archive Of Tom
First and foremost, let me reiterate for the record: I do not accept guest posts on my site.
Note that this has nothing to do with your skills as a writer, your ability to create “compelling, fresh, and exciting content”, or your particular celebrity status as the CTO/CIO/COMGWTFBBQO of some hot, fresh, exciting new company. I’m sure if Kurt Vonnegut’s ghost or J.K. Rowling wanted to make a guest post on my blog, the answer would still be the same.
Why? Because this site is the archive of my thoughts. Because I want this to be an archive of my viewpoints on technology. I want people to know how I’ve grown and changed and come to love things like SDN over the years. What I don’t want is for people to need to Continue reading
The Future Of SDN Is Up In The Air
The announcement this week that Riverbed is buying Xirrus was a huge sign that the user-facing edge of the network is the new battleground for SDN and SD-WAN adoption. Riverbed is coming off a number of recent acquisitions in the SDN space, including Ocedo just over a year ago. So, why then, would Riverbed chase down a wireless company when they’re so focused on the wiring behind the walls?
The New User Experience
When SDN was a pile of buzzwords attached to an idea that had just come out of Stanford, a lot of people were trying to figure out just what exactly SDN could offer them in terms of their network. Things like network slicing were the first big pieces to be put up before things like orchestration, programmability, and APIs were really brought to the fore. People were trying to figure out how to make this hot new thing work for them. Well, almost everyone.
Wireless professionals are a bit jaded when it comes to SDN. That’s because they’ve seen it already in the form of controller-based solutions. The idea that a central device can issue commands to remote access devices and control configurations easily? Airespace was doing Continue reading
Changing The Baby With The Bathwater In IT
If you’re sitting in a presentation about the “new IT”, there’s bound to be a guest speaker talking about their digital transformation or service provider shift in their organization. You can see this coming. It’s a polished speaker, usually a CIO or VP. They talk about how, with the help of the vendor on stage with them, they were able to rapidly transform their infrastructure into something modern while at the same time changing processes to accommodate faster IT response, more productive workers, and increase revenue or transform IT from a cost center to a profit center. The key components are simple:
- Buy new infrastructure from $vendor
- Transform all processes to be more agile, productive, and better.
Why do those things always happen in concert?
Spring Cleaning
Infrastructure grows old. That’s a fact of life. Outside of some very specialized hardware, no one is using the same desktop they had ten years ago. No enterprise is still running Windows 2000 server on an IBM NetFinity server. No one is still using 10Mbps Ethernet over Thinnet to connect their offices. Hardware marches on. So when we buy new things, we as technology professionals need to find a way to integrate them Continue reading
Short Take – The Present Future of the Net
A few random thoughts from ONS and Networking Field Day 15 this week:
- Intel is really, really, really pushing their 5 generation (5G) wireless network. Note this is not Gen5 fibre channel or 5G 802.11 networking. This is the successor to LTE and capable of pushing a ridiculous amount of data to a very small handset. This is one of those “sure thing” technologies that is going to have a huge impact on our networks. Carriers and service providers are already trying to cope with the client rates we have now. What happens when they are two or three times faster?
- PNDA has some huge potential for networking a data analytics. Their presentation had some of the most technical discussion during the event. They’re also the basis for a lot of other projects that are in the pipeline. Make sure you check them out. The project organizers suggest that you get started with the documentation and perhaps even help contribute some writing to get more people on board.
- VMware hosted a dinner for us that had some pretty luminary speakers like Bruce Davie and James Watters. They talked about the journey from traditional networking to a new paradigm filled Continue reading
Extreme-ly Interesting Times In Networking
If you’re a fan of Extreme Networks, the last few months have been pretty exciting for you. Just yesterday, it was announced that Extreme is buying the data center networking business of Brocade for $55 million once the Broadcom acquisition happens. Combined with the $100 million acquisition of Avaya’s campus networking portfolio on March 7th and the purchase of Zebra Wireless (nee Motorola) last September, Extreme is pushing itself into the market as a major player. How is that going to impact the landscape?
Building A Better Business
Extreme has been a player in the wireless space for a while. Their acquisition of Enterasys helped vault them into the mix with other big wireless players. Now, the rounding out of the portfolio helps them complete across the board. They aren’t just limited to playing with stadium wifi and campus technologies now. The campus networking story that was brought in through Avaya was a must to help them compete with Aruba, A Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company. Aruba owns the assets of HPE’s campus networking business and has been leveraging them effectively.
The data center play was an interesting one to say the least. I’ve mused recently that Brocade’s data center business Continue reading
Do Network Professionals Need To Be Programmers?
With the advent of software defined networking (SDN) and the move to incorporate automation, orchestration, and extensive programmability into modern network design, it could easily be argued that programming is a must-have skill. Many networking professionals are asking themselves if it’s time to pick up Python, Ruby or some other language to create programs in the network. But is it a necessity?
Interfaces In Your Faces
The move toward using API interfaces is one of the more striking aspects of SDN that has been picked up quickly. Instead of forcing information to be input via CLI or information to be collected from the network via scraping the same CLI, APIs have unlocked more power than we ever imagined. RESTful APIs have giving nascent programmers the ability to query devices and push configurations without the need to learn cumbersome syntax. The ability to grab this information and feed it to a network management system and analytics platform has extended the capabilites of the systems that support these architectures.
The syntaxes that power these new APIs aren’t the copyrighted CLIs that networking professionals spend their waking hours memorizing in excruciating detail. JUNOS and Cisco’s “standard” CLI are as much relics of the Continue reading