Bringing 2017 To Everyone
It’s time once again for my traditional New Year’s Day navel gazing. As per tradition with my blog, I’m not going to make prognostications about networking or IT in general. Either I’m going to wind up totally wrong or be totally right and no one will care. I rather enjoy the ride as we go along, so trying to guess what happens is kind of pointless.
Instead, I’m going to look at what I want to accomplish in the coming year. It gives me a chance to analyze what I’m doing and what I want to be working on. And it’s a whole lot easier than predicting that SDN is going to take everyone’s job or OpenFlow being dead again.
Write Like the Wind
My biggest goal for 2016 was to write more. And that I did. I worked in writing any time I could. I wrote about ONUG, SD-WAN, and other fun topics. I even wrote a small book! Finding time to work all the extra typing in to my Bruce Wayne job at Tech Field Day was a bit challenging here and there. And more than once I was publishing a blog post at the deadline. But all Continue reading
Automating Your Job Away Isn’t Easy
One of the most common complaints about SDN that comes from entry-level networking folks is that SDN is going to take their job away. People fear what SDN represents because it has the ability to replace their everyday tasks and put them out of a job. While this is nowhere close to reality, it’s a common enough argument that I hear it very often during Q&A sessions. How is it that SDN has the ability to ruin so many jobs? And how is it that we just now have found a way to do this?
Measure Twice
One of the biggest reasons that the automation portion of SDN has become so effective in today’s IT environment is that we can finally measure what it is that networks are supposed to be doing and how best to configure them. Think about the work that was done in the past to configure and troubleshoot networks. It’s often a very difficult task that involves a lot of intuition and guesswork. If you tried to explain to someone the best way to do things, you’d likely find yourself at a loss for words.
However, we’ve had boring, predictable standards for many years. Instead of Continue reading
Is It Really Always The Network?
Image from Thomas LaRock
I had a great time over the last month writing a series of posts with my friend John Herbert (@MrTugs) over on the SolarWinds Geek Speak Blog. You can find the first post here. John and I explored the idea that people are always blaming the network for a variety of issues that are often completely unrelated to the actual operation of the network. It was fun writing some narrative prose for once, and the feedback we got was actually pretty awesome. But I wanted to take some time to explain the rationale behind my madness. Why is it that we are always blaming the network?!?
Visibility Is Vital
Think about all the times you’ve been working on an application and things start slowing down. What’s the first thing you think of? If it’s a standalone app, it’s probably some kind of processing lag or memory issues. But if that app connects to any other thing, whether it be a local network or a remote network via the Internet, the first culprit is the connection between systems.
It’s not a large logical leap to make. We have to start by assuming the the people Continue reading
Is The Rise Of SD-WAN Thanks To Ethernet?
SD-WAN has exploded in the market. Everywhere I turn, I see companies touting their new strategy for reducing WAN complexity, encrypting data in flight, and even doing analytics on traffic to help build QoS policies and traffic shaping for critical links. The first demo I ever watched for SDN was a WAN routing demo that chose best paths based on cost and time-of-day. It was simple then, but that kind of thinking has exploded in the last 5 years. And it’s all thanks to our lovable old friend, Ethernet.
Those Old Serials
When I started in networking, my knowledge was pretty limited to switches and other layer 2 devices. I plugged in the cables, and the things all worked. As I expanded up the OSI model, I started understanding how routers worked. I knew about moving packets between different layer 3 areas and how they controlled broadcast storms. This was also around the time when layer 3 switching was becoming a big thing in the campus. How was I supposed to figure out the difference between when I should be using a big router with 2-3 interfaces versus a switch that had lots of interfaces and could route just as Continue reading
HPE Networking: Past, Present, and Future
I had the chance to attend HPE Discover last week by invitation from their influencer team. I wanted to see how HPE Networking had been getting along since the acquisition of Aruba Networks last year. There have been some moves and changes, including a new partnership with Arista Networks announced in September. What follows is my analysis of HPE’s Networking portfolio after HPE Discover London and where they are headed in the future.
Campus and Data Center Divisions
Recently, HPE reorganized their networking division along two different lines. The first is the Aruba brand that contains all the wireless assets along with the campus networking portfolio. This is where the campus belongs. The edge of the network is an ever-changing area where connectivity is king. Reallocating the campus assets to the capable Aruba team means that they will do the most good there.
The rest of the data center networking assets were loaded into the Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG). This group is headed up by Dominick Wilde and contains things like FlexFabric and Altoline. The partnership with Arista rounds out the rest of the switch portfolio. This helps HPE position their offerings across a wide range of potential clients, Continue reading
OpenFlow Is Dead. Long Live OpenFlow.
Remember OpenFlow? The hammer that was set to solve all of our vaguely nail-like problems? Remember how everything was going to be based on OpenFlow going forward and the world was going to be a better place? Or how heretics like Ivan Pepelnjak (@IOSHints) that dared to ask questions about scalability or value of application were derided and laughed at? Yeah, good times. Today, I stand here to eulogize OpenFlow, but not to bury it. And perhaps find out that OpenFlow has a much happier life after death.
OpenFlow Is The Viagra Of Networking
OpenFlow is not that much different than Sildenafil, the active ingredient in Vigara. Both were initially developed to do something that they didn’t end up actually solving. In the case of Sildenafil, it was high blood pressure. The “side effect” of raising blood pressure in a specific body part wasn’t even realized until after the trials of the drug. The side effect because the primary focus of the medication that was eventually developed into a billion dollar industry.
In the same way, OpenFlow failed at its stated mission of replacing the forwarding plane programming method of switches. As pointed out by folks like Ivan, Continue reading
Nutanix and Plexxi – An Affinity to Converge
Nutanix has been lighting the hyperconverged world on fire as of late. Strong sales led to a big IPO for their stock. They are in a lot of conversations about using their solution in place of large traditional virtualization offerings that include things like blade servers or big boxes. And even coming off the recent Nutanix .NEXT conference there were some big announcements in the networking arena to help them complete their total solution. However, I think Nutanix is missing a big opportunity that’s right in front of them.
I think it’s time for Nutanix to buy Plexxi.
Software Says
If you look at the Nutanix announcements around networking from .NEXT, they look very familiar to anyone in the server space. The highlights include service chaining, microsegmentation, and monitoring all accessible through an API. If this sounds an awful lot like VMware NSX, Cisco ACI, or any one of a number of new networking companies then you are in the right mode of thinking as far as Nutanix is concerned.
SDN in the server space is all about overlay networking. Segmentation of flows and service chaining are the reason why security is so hard to do in the networking space Continue reading
Visibility In Networking – Quick Thoughts from Networking Field Day
I’m at Networking Field Day 13 this week. You can imagine how much fun I’m having with my friends! I wanted to drop some quick thoughts on visibility for this week on you all about what we’re hearing and raise some interesting questions.
I Can See Clearly Now
Visibility is a huge issue for companies. Seeing what’s going on is hard for people. Companies like Ixia talk about the need to avoid dropping any packets to make sure we have complete knowledge of the network. But that requires a huge amount of hardware and design. You’re always going to need traditional monitoring even when everything is using telemetry and other data models. Make sure you size things right.
Forward Networks told us that there is an increasing call for finding a way to monitor both the underlay network and the overlay network. Most overlay companies give you a way to tie into their system via API or other telemetry. However, there is no visibility into the underlay because of the event horizon. Likewise, companies like Forward Networks are focusing on the underlay with mapping technologies and modeling software but they can’t pass back through the event horizon to see into Continue reading
How To Ask A Question At A Conference
The last time you went to a conference, did you ask any questions? Were you curious about a technology and wanted to know more? Was there something that you didn’t quite get and needed an explanation? Congratulations. You’re in a quiet group of people that ask questions for knowledge. More and more, we are seeing questions becoming a vehicle for more than just knowledge acquisition. If you want to learn how to ask a proper question at a conference, read on.
1. Have A Question
I know it goes without saying, but if you’re going to raise your hand at a conference to ask a question, you should actually have a question in mind. Some people grab a microphone without thinking through what they’re going to say. This leads to stammering and broken thoughts that usually culminate in a random question mark here or there. This makes it difficult for the speaker to figure out what you’re trying to ask.
If you’re going to raise your hand, jot some notes down first. Bullet points help as does making a note or two. This is especially true if the speaker is answering questions before yours. If they answer part of your Continue reading
Setting Sail on Secret Seas with Trireme
Container networking is a tough challenge to solve. The evolving needs of creating virtual networks to allow inter-container communications is difficult. But ensuring security at the same time is enough to make you pull your hair out. Lots of companies are taking a crack at it as has been demonstrated recently by microsegmentation offerings from Cisco, VMware NSX, and many others. But a new development on this front set sail today. And the captain is an old friend.
Sailing the Security Sea
Dimitri Stiladis did some great things in his time at Nuage Networks. He created a great overlay network solution that not only worked well for software defined systems but also extended into the container world as more and more people started investigating containers as the new way to provide application services. He saw many people rushing into this area with their existing solutions as well as building new solutions. However, those solutions were all based on existing technology and methods that didn’t work well in the container world. If you ever heard someone say, “Oh, containers are just lightweight VMs…” you know what kind of thinking I’m talking about.
Late last year, Dimitri got together with some of Continue reading
Designer or Architect? It’s A Matter Of Choice
I had a great time at ONUG this past week. I got to hear a lot of great presentations from some great people, and I got a chance to catch up with some friends as well. One of those was Pete Lumbis (@PeteCCDE) who had a great presentation this past spring at Interop. We talked a lot about tech and networking, but one topic he brought up that made me stop and think for a moment was the wide gulf between design and architecture.
Binary Designers
Design is a critical part of an IT project. Things must fit and make sense before the implementors can figure out how to put the pieces together. Design is all about building a list of products and describing how they’ll interact once turned on. Proper design requires you to step away from the keyboard for a moment and think about a bigger picture than just hacking CLI commands or Python code to make some lights start blinking in the right order.
But design is inherently limited. Think about the last design you did, whether it be wireless or networking or even storage. When you start a design, you automatically make assumptions about Continue reading
Facebook Wedge 100 – The Future of the Data Center?
Facebook is back in the news again. This time, it’s because of the release of their new Wedge 100 switch into the Open Compute Project (OCP). Wedge was already making headlines when Facebook announced it two years ago. A fast, open sourced 40Gig Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch was huge. Now, Facebook is letting everyone in on the fun of a faster Wedge that has been deployed into production at Facebook data centers as well as being offered for sale through Edgecore Networks, which is itself a division of Accton. Accton has been leading the way in the whitebox switching market and Wedge 100 may be one of the ways it climbs to the top.
Holy Hardware!
Wedge 100 is pretty impressive from the spec sheet. They paid special attention to making sure the modules were expandable, especially for faster CPUs and special purpose devices down the road. That’s possible because Wedge is a highly specialized micro server already. Rather than rearchitecting the guts of the whole thing, Facebook kept the CPU and the monitoring stack and just put newer, faster modules on it to ramp to 32x100Gig connectivity.
As suspected in the above image, Facebook is using Broadcom Tomahawk as Continue reading
Tomahawk II – Performance Over Programmability
Broadcom announced a new addition to their growing family of merchant silicon today. The new Broadcom Tomahawk II is a monster. It doubles the speed of it’s first-generation predecessor. It has 6.4 Tbps of aggregate throughout, divided up into 256 25Gbps ports that can be combined into 128 50Gbps or even 64 100Gbps ports. That’s fast no matter how you slice it.
Broadcom is aiming to push these switches into niches like High-Performance Computing (HPC) and massive data centers doing big data/analytics or video processing to start. The use cases for 25/50Gbps haven’t really changed. What Broadcom is delivering now is port density. I fully expect to see top-of-rack (ToR) switches running 25Gbps down to the servers with new add-in cards connected to 50Gbps uplinks that deliver them to the massive new Tomahawk II switches running in the spine or end-of-row (EoR) configuration for east-west traffic disbursement.
Another curious fact of the Tomahawk II is the complete lack of 40Gbps support. Granted, the support was only paid lip service in the Tomahawk I. The real focus was on shifting to 25/50Gbps instead of the weird 10/40/100Gbps split we had in Trident II. I talked about this a couple of Continue reading
Thoughts on Theft
It’s been a busy week for me. In fact, it’s been a busy few weeks. I’ve had lots of time to enjoy NetApp Insight, Cloud Field Day, and Storage Field Day. I’ve also been doing my best to post interesting thoughts and ideas. Whether it’s taking on the CCIE program or keynote speakers, I feel like I owe a debt to the community and my readers to talk about topics that are important to them, or at least should be. Which is why I’m irritated right now about those ideas being stolen.
Beg, Borrow, and Steal
A large part of my current job is finding people that are writing great things and shining a spotlight on them. I like reading interesting ideas. And I like sharing those ideas with people. But when I share those ideas with people, I make absolutely sure that everyone knows where those ideas came from originally. And if I use those ideas for writing my own content, I make special care to point out where they came from and try to provide the context for the original statement in the first place.
What annoys me to no end is when people take ideas as Continue reading
Keystone Keynotes
My distaste for keynotes is well known. With the possible exception of Justin Warren (@JPWarren) there may not be a person that dislikes them more than I do. I’ve outlined my reasons for it before, so I won’t go into much depth about it here. But I do want to highlight a few recent developments that are doing a great job of helping me find new things to dislike.
Drop The “Interviews”
When you walk into a keynote ballroom or arena and see two comfy chairs on stage, you know what’s coming. As someone told me recently, “This is when I know the next hour is going to suck.” The mock interview style of keynote speech is not good. It’s a thinly-veiled attempt to push an agenda. Perhaps it’s about innovation. Or transformation. Or some theme of the conference. Realistically, it’s mostly a chance for a keynote host (some form of VP) to provide forced banter with a celebrity that’s being paid to be there.
These “interviews” are rarely memorable. They seem self serving and very plastic. The only ones that even stand out to me in recent memory are the ones that went off the Continue reading
Apple Watch Unlock, 802.11ac, and Time
One of the benefits of upgrading to MacOS 10.12 Sierra is the ability to unlock my Mac laptop with my Apple Watch. Yet I’m not able to do that. Why? Turns out, the answer involves some pretty cool tech.
Somebody’s Watching You
The tech specs list the 2013 MacBook and higher as the minimum model needed to enable Watch Unlock on your Mac. You also need a few other things, like Bluetooth enabled and a Watch running WatchOS 3. I checked my personal MacBook against the original specs and found everything in order. I installed Sierra and updated all my other devices and even enabled iCloud Two-Factor Authentication to be sure. Yet, when I checked the Security and Privacy section, I didn’t see the checkbox for the Watch Unlock to be enabled. What gives?
It turns out that Apple quietly modified the minimum specs during the Sierra beta period. Instead of early 2013 MacBooks being support, the shift moved support to mid-2013 MacBooks instead. I checked the spec sheets and mine is almost identical. The RAM, drive, and other features are the same. Why does Watch Unlock work on those Macs and not mine? The answer, it appears, is Continue reading
DevOps and the Infrastructure Dumpster Fire
We had a rousing discussion about DevOps at Cloud Field Day this week. The delegates talked about how DevOps was totally a thing and it was the way to go. Being the infrastructure guy, I had to take a bit of umbrage at their conclusions and go on a bit of a crusade myself to defend infrastructure from the predations of developers.
Stable, Boy
DevOps folks want to talk about continuous improvement and continuous development (CI/CD) all the time. They want the freedom to make changes as needed to increase bandwidth, provision ports, and rearrange things to fit development timelines and such. It’s great that they have they thoughts and feelings about how responsive the network should be to their whims, but the truth of infrastructure today is that it’s on the verge of collapse every day of the week.
Networking is often a “best effort” type of configuration. We monkey around with something until it works, then roll it into production and hope it holds. As we keep building more patches on to of patches or try to implement new features that require something to be disabled or bypassed, that creates a house of cards that is only as Continue reading
Cloud Apps And Pathways
Applications are king. Forget all the things you do to ensure proper routing in your data center. Forget the tweaks for OSPF sub-second failover or BGP optimal path selection. None of it matters to your users. If their login to Seibel or Salesforce or Netflix is slow today, you’ve failed. They are very vocal when it comes to telling you how much the network sucks today. How do we fix this?
Pathways Aren’t Perfect
The first problem is the cloud focus of applications. Once our packets leave our border routers it’s a giant game of chance as to how things are going to work next. The routing protocol games that govern the Internet are tried and true and straight out of RFC 1771(Yes, RFC 4271 supersedes it). BGP is a great tool with general purpose abilities. It’s becoming the choice for web scale applications like LinkedIn and Facebook. But it’s problematic for Internet routing. It scales well but doesn’t have the ability to make rapid decisions.
The stability of BGP is also the reason why it doesn’t react well to changes. In the old days, links could go up and down quickly. BGP was designed to avoid issues with Continue reading
AI, Machine Learning, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide
I had a great conversation with Ed Horley (@EHorley) and Patrick Hubbard (@FerventGeek) last night around new technologies. We were waxing intellectual about all things related to advances in analytics and intelligence. There’s been more than a few questions here at VMworld 2016 about the roles that machine learning and artificial intelligence will play in the future of IT. But during the conversation with Ed and Patrick, I finally hit on the perfect analogy for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). It’s pretty easy to follow along, so don’t panic.
The Answer
Machine learning is an amazing technology. It can extrapolate patterns in large data sets and provide insight from seemingly random things. It can also teach machines to think about problems and find solutions. Rather than go back to the tired Target big data example, I much prefer this example of a computer learning to play Super Mario World:
You can see how the algorithms learn how to play the game and find newer, better paths throughout the level. One of the things that’s always struck me about the computer’s decision skills is how early it learned that spin jumps provide more benefit than regular Continue reading
Cisco vs. Arista: Shades of Gray
Yesterday was D-Day for Arista in their fight with Cisco over the SysDB patent. I’ve covered this a bit for Network Computing in the past, but I wanted to cover some new things here and put a bit more opinion into my thoughts.
Cisco Designates The Competition
As the great Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) says, you always have to punch above your weight. When you are a large company, any attempt to pick on the “little guy” looks bad. When you’re at the top of the market it’s even tougher. If you attempt to fight back against anyone you’re going to legitimize them in the eye of everyone else wanting to take a shot at you.
Cisco has effectively designated Arista as their number one competitor by way of this lawsuit. Arista represents a larger threat that HPE, Brocade, or Juniper. Yes, I agree that it is easy to argue that the infringement constituted a material problem to their business. But at the same time, Cisco very publicly just said that Arista is causing a problem for Cisco. Enough of a problem that Cisco is going to take them to court. Not make Arista license the patent. That’s telling.