Building Fabric Infrastructure for an OpenStack Private Cloud

An attendee in my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course was asked to deploy numerous relatively small OpenStack cloud instances and wanted select the optimum virtual networking technology. Not surprisingly, every $vendor had just the right answer, including Arista:

We’re considering moving from hypervisor-based overlays to ToR-based overlays using Arista’s CVX for approximately 2000 VLANs.

As I explained in Overlay Virtual Networking, Networking in Private and Public Clouds and Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure (plus several presentations) you have three options to implement virtual networking in private clouds:

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Nutanix offers unified data backup and recovery, allies with AMD

Nutanix is adding a data backup and recovery software package called Nutanix Mine to its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offerings, which integrates third-party data backup and recovery software with Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software.This allows Nutanix customers to manage their primary and secondary data storage and backup and recovery through a single management console. Nutanix claims that Mine will streamline overall deployment and will simplify the full lifecycle of data backup operations, including ongoing management, scaling and troubleshooting.Nutanix Mine will support a number of data backup and recovery software products, including Veeam, HYCU, Commvault, Veritas, and Unitrends.To read this article in full, please click here

Tech Bytes: SnapRoute’s NOS Targets The Intersection Of NetOps And DevOps (Sponsored)

Today we welcome sponsor SnapRoute for a Tech Bytes conversation. SnapRoute makes CN-NOS, a network OS that runs on whitebox hardware. We discuss the NOS's containerized design that lets you update, test, and replace components; its use of Kubernetes to tie into automation pipelines; and customer use cases.

The post Tech Bytes: SnapRoute’s NOS Targets The Intersection Of NetOps And DevOps (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Gall’s Law and the Network

In Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, John Gall says:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

In the software development world, this is called Gall’s Law (even though Gall himself never calls it a law) and is applied to organizations and software systems. How does this apply to network design and engineering? The best place to begin in answering this question is to understand what, precisely, Gall is arguing for; there is more here than what is visible on the surface.

What does a simple system mean? It is, first of all, an argument for underspecification. This runs counter to the way we instinctively want to design systems. We want to begin by discovering all the requirements (problems to be solved and constraints), and then move into an orderly discussion of all the possible solutions and sets of solutions, and then into an orderly discussion of an overall architecture, then into a nice UML chart showing all the interaction Continue reading

Install the Antidote (NRE Labs) network emulator on a Linux system

Antidote is a network emulator combined with a presentation framework designed to create and deliver networking technology training. Its user interface operates in a web browser, including the terminals that students use to run commands on emulated network devices and servers.

Antidote is the engine that runs the Network Reliability Labs web site. Antidote is an open-source project, released under the Apache license. A standalone version of Antidote may be installed and run on your personal computer using the selfmedicate script. In this post, I will install Antidote on my Linux laptop and make a few changes that improve Antidote performance on my Linux system.

Antidote documentation

The Antidote documentation is being expanded regularly but, at the time I am writing this, the most helpful information is in the NRE Labs blog and in the videos produced by the developers. Most of these are accessible from the NRE Labs Community Resources page.

Also, Antidote is in active development and it is changing quickly as the developers create new features and content. Keep that in mind when following this blog post. Some things may already have changed about the way Antidote installs or operates.

Install prerequisite software

Antidote requires that you Continue reading

When to be concerned about memory levels on Linux

Running out of memory on a Linux system is generally not a sign that there's a serious problem. Why? Because a healthy Linux system will cache disk activity in memory, basically gobbling memory that isn't being used, which is a very good thing.In other words, it doesn't allow memory to go to waste. It uses the spare memory to increase disk access speed, and it does this without taking memory away from running applications. This memory caching, as you might well imagine, is hundreds of times faster than working directly with the hard-disk drives (HDD) and significantly faster than solid-state drives. Full or near full memory normally means that a system is running as efficiently as it can — not that it's running into problems.To read this article in full, please click here

Top auto makers rely on cloud providers for IoT

For the companies looking to implement the biggest and most complex IoT setups in the world, the idea of pairing up with AWS, Google Cloud or Azure seems to be one whose time has come. Within the last two months, BMW and Volkswagen have both announced large-scale deals with Microsoft and Amazon, respectively, to help operate their extensive network of operational technology.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

A Simple Virtual Network based on proxy ARP and Policy Based Routing

Introduction Choosing a Virtual networking to connect VMs or Containers across Hosts is always a complicated decision. Most of us would have found the virtual networking on a single VM/Container Host to be very simple, easy to implement and debug. Just plug the VM/Container to a bridge and your are done. For access from the … Continue reading A Simple Virtual Network based on proxy ARP and Policy Based Routing

Network Break 234: Windows Adds A Linux Kernel; Cisco Announces An SD-WAN Colo Option

Today's Network Break explores why Microsoft is adding a Linux kernel to Windows, examines a new SD-WAN colo option from Cisco, discusses a new offering from VMware and Dell EMC that lets you get infrastructure on premises but pay for it like the cloud, plus more tech news and a couple of follow-ups.

The post Network Break 234: Windows Adds A Linux Kernel; Cisco Announces An SD-WAN Colo Option appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Broadband Project to Nowhere

Dead end: ProPublica has a story about Kentucky’s $1.5 billion broadband expansion program, which the story calls an information highway to nowhere. The program is behind schedule and over budget, with the state’s IT chief directing money to other projects and partnering with commercial ISPs.

Broadband billions: Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says that bringing broadband to unserved areas of the country would generate $47 billion of new economic activity a year, according to a story at Talkbusiness.net. Broadband in rural areas would enable precision agriculture technologies, which allows high-tech crop management based on sensors and other connected data sources.

I can’t Google: Finally, our broadband access trifecta of stories concludes with a Cronkite News story about the lack of access in many U.S. tribal areas. “Just Google it” has become a bit of a joke among the Hopi tribe in Arizona because many areas don’t have Internet access.

The luxury of privacy: Consumer privacy online can’t be a luxury good that only the rich have access to, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said recently in an opinion piece at the New York Times. Speaking at a conference, Pichai also spoke in favor of privacy legislation Continue reading

Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone

Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone
Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone

Welcome to Speed Week! Each day this week, we’re going to talk about something Cloudflare is doing to make the Internet meaningfully faster for everyone.

Cloudflare has built a massive network of data centers in 180 cities in 75 countries. One way to think of Cloudflare is a global system to transport bits securely, quickly, and reliably from any point A to any other point B on the planet.

To make that a reality, we built Argo. Argo uses real-time global network information to route around brownouts, cable cuts, packet loss, and other problems on the Internet. Argo makes the network that Cloudflare relies on—the Internet—faster, more reliable, and more secure on every hop around the world.

We launched Argo two years ago, and it now carries over 22% of Cloudflare’s traffic. On an average day, Argo cuts the amount of time Internet users spend waiting for content by 112 years!

As Cloudflare and our traffic volumes have grown, it now makes sense to build our own private backbone to add further security, reliability, and speed to key connections between Cloudflare locations.

Today, we’re introducing the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone. It’s been in operation for a while now and links Continue reading

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