Mandatory Cisco DNA Licensing – is this the Future??

With the release of the new 9200 series switches many enterprise organizations are starting to look towards the future. Cisco has also been looking towards the future… of their profit margin. With the 2960x platform is nearing it’s EOS/EOL announcement, Cisco has been working to promote the new hardware. And by now most Cisco enterprise customers have realized that DNA Center licensing is mandatory on your initial hardware purchase. This is certainly a deviation from Cisco’s normal à la carte licensing, but what do you think is the driving force behind all of this?

The era of SaaS and Subscription based licensing has been upon us for some time. Last year Gartner predicted, “By 2020, all new entrants and 80% of historical vendors will offer subscription-based business models”. These shifts to recurring-revenue models are the latest adaptation for companies like Cisco to continue to pad their bottom line with dollars their customers may not be ready to spend. After all, why would Cisco miss out on dollars left on the table?

When I started laying out the network hardware roadmap for the next 24-36 months, I quickly realized that costs for the Catalyst 9200 series will raise per port Continue reading

3 steps to take before deploying SD-WAN

As enterprises develop network strategies and technical roadmaps, one hot technology that will be on their radar is SD-WAN, a significant transformational solution in networking and a major change  from the MPLS status quo that most enterprises have deployed.As bullish as we are on SD-WAN, we recommend that any enterprise contemplating its adoption take a few preliminary steps to minimize the disruption and costs associated with transitioning from the legacy network. To read this article in full, please click here

Networking Events in Europe

A European networking engineer sent me this question:

I'd like to know where other fellow engineers meet up especially in Europe and discuss Enterprise datacenter and regular networking. There are the Cisco Live stuff things to go to but are there any vendor neutral meetups?

Gabi Gerber is organizing networking-focused workshops in Switzerland every quarter (search under SIGS Workshops), and you’re most welcome to join us ;) It’s always a boutique event, but that gives us the ability to chat long into the evening.

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Cloud computing simplified: a Berkeley view on serverless computing

Cloud programming simplified: a Berkeley view on serverless computing Jonas et al., arXiv 2019

With thanks to Eoin Brazil who first pointed this paper out to me via Twitter….

Ten years ago Berkeley released the ‘Berkeley view of cloud computing’ paper, predicting that cloud use would accelerate. Today’s paper choice is billed as its logical successor: it predicts that the use of serverless computing will accelerate. More precisely:

… we predict that serverless computing will grow to dominate the future of cloud computing.

The acknowledgements thank reviewers from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft among others, so it’s reasonable to assume the major cloud providers have had at least some input to the views presented here. The discussion is quite high level, and at points it has the feel of a PR piece for Berkeley (there’s even a cute collective author email address: serverlessview at berkeley.edu), but there’s enough of interest in its 35 pages for us to get our teeth into…

The basic structure is as follows. First we get the obligatory attempt at defining serverless, together a discussion of why it matters. Then the authors look at some of the current limitations (cf. ‘Serverless Continue reading

VMware Cloud on AWS with Transit Gateway Demo

At AWS re:Invent 2018 last November, AWS introduced a regional construct called Transit Gateway (TGW). AWS Transit Gateway allows customers to connect multiple Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) together easily. TGW can be seen as a hub and all the VPCs can be seen as spokes in a hub and spoke-type model; any-to-any communication is made possible by traversing the TGW. TGW can replace the popular AWS Transit VPC design many customers have deployed prior for connecting multiple Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) together. In this post, I will discuss TGW and how it can currently be used with VMware Cloud on AWS. At the end of this post there’s also a video you can watch of a demo using the same setup described in this blog; feel free to jump to the video if you like. Continue reading

IPv6 Security for IPv4 Engineers

It is often argued that IPv4 practices should be forgotten when deploying IPv6, as after all IPv6 is a different protocol! But we think years of IPv4 operational experience should be leveraged as much as possible.

So we are publishing IPv6 Security for IPv4 Engineers as a roadmap to IPv6 security that is specifically aimed at IPv4 engineers and operators.

Rather than describing IPv6 in an isolated manner, it aims to re-use as much of the existing IPv4 knowledge and experience as possible, by highlighting the security issues that affect both protocols in the same manner, and those that are new or different for the IPv6 protocol suite. Additionally, it discusses the security implications arising from the co-existence of the IPv6 and IPv4 protocols.

Be sure also to check our IPv6 Security page as well!

Further Information

The post IPv6 Security for IPv4 Engineers appeared first on Internet Society.

Certification Exam Questions That I Hate

In my 11 year career as an IT instructor, I’ve had to pass a lot of certification exams. In many cases not on the first try. Sometimes for fair reasons, and sometimes, it feels, for unfair reasons. Recently I had to take the venerable Cisco CCNA R&S exam again. For various reasons I’d allowed it to expire, and hadn’t taken many exams for a while. But recently I needed to re-certify with it which reminded me of the whole process.

Having taken so many exams (50+ in the past 11 years) I’ve developed some opinions on the style and content of exams.

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In particular, I’ve identified some types of questions I utterly loath for their lack of aptitude measurement, uselessness, and overall jackassery. Plus, a couple of styles that I like.

This criticisms is for all certification exams, from various vendors, and not limited to even IT.

To Certify, Or Not To Certify

The question of the usefulness of certification is not new.

One one hand, you have a need to weed out the know-its from the know-it-nots, a way to effectively measure a person’s aptitude in a given subject. A certification exam, in its purest form, is meant to Continue reading

Some notes on the Raspberry Pi

I keep seeing this article in my timeline today about the Raspberry Pi. I thought I'd write up some notes about it.

The Raspberry Pi costs $35 for the board, but to achieve a fully functional system, you'll need to add a power supply, storage, and heatsink, which ends up costing around $70 for the full system. At that price range, there are lots of alternatives. For example, you can get a fully function $99 Windows x86 PC, that's just as small and consumes less electrical power.

There are a ton of Raspberry Pi competitors, often cheaper with better hardware, such as a Odroid-C2, Rock64, Nano Pi, Orange Pi, and so on. There are also a bunch of "Android TV boxes" running roughly the same hardware for cheaper prices, that you can wipe and reinstall Linux on. You can also acquire Android phones for $40.

However, while "better" technically, the alternatives all suffer from the fact that the Raspberry Pi is better supported -- vastly better supported. The ecosystem of ARM products focuses on getting Android to work, and does poorly at getting generic Linux working. The Raspberry Pi has the worst, most Continue reading

Making the Internet Better Together at APRICOT 2019

Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) 2019, said to be the largest technical conference in the region, drew hundreds of the world’s leading Internet engineers from over 50 countries to Daejeon, South Korea last week.

The Internet Society, a long-time partner of the event, contributed to the event by not only sponsoring over a dozen of fellows to travel there, but also made multiple high-profile appearances in various sessions, including the opening keynote speech.

The Internet Society’s President and CEO Andrew Sullivan delivered the keynote Up and Down the Stack Through a Nerd’s Eyes: Making the Internet Better the Internet Way with hundreds of people present, including Tae-Jeong Her, Mayor of Daejeon, and Dr Hee-yoon Choi, President of organiser the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), a government research institute.

Now that so many people depend on the Internet, it is no surprise that businesspeople, policymakers, regulators, and politicians all want a say in the way the Internet evolves. But some of the proposals for the future of the Internet, Sullivan said, betray fundamental misunderstandings of the way the Internet works. The talk urged us all to continue to engage with the big questions Continue reading

Wearable tech in the enterprise grows, but few workplace uses exist

Take a glance at the wrists of your co-workers, and you’re likely to see more and more of them adorned with smartwatches, fitness trackers, and other wearable technology. In meetings, you increasingly see colleagues surreptitiously glancing at their tiny screens, hoping in vain that no one is noticing.It isn’t just you. The latest smartwatch numbers all say that smartwatch shipments are growing fast, and the internet-connected devices are beginning to achieve mainstream acceptance: Last month, The NPD Group's new Smartwatch Total Market Report noted that smartwatch unit sales jumped 61 percent in 2018, while dollar volume rose 51 percent to approach $5 billion in sales. Some 16 percent of U.S. adults now own a smartwatch, the report said, up from 12 percent at the end of 2017.To read this article in full, please click here

Kernel of Truth season 2 episode 3: Storage solutions

Subscribe to Kernel of Truth on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Cast Box and Sticher!

Click here for our previous episode.

You asked for it, we listened, and now we’re delivering! This episode, host Brian calls on Pete Lumbis and special guest David Illes from Mellanox to answer a question we got on our community Slack channel: “What are middle-tier customers doing for storage of Cumulus enabled solutions?” David and Pete share not only what’s changing for middle-tier customers but also tackle the topic of storage solutions in general. What sort of things are we seeing as customers migrate to Ethernet storage? Listen and find out.

Guest Bios

Brian O’Sullivan: Brian currently heads Product Management for Cumulus Linux. For 15 or so years he’s held software Product Management positions at Juniper Networks as well as other smaller companies. Once he saw the change that was happening in the networking space, he decided to join Cumulus Networks to be a part of the open networking innovation. When not working, Brian is a voracious reader and has held a variety of jobs, including bartending in three countries and working as an extra in a German soap opera. You can find him Continue reading

Bridging the Gap

Mike Bushong and Denise Donohue join Eyvonne, Jordan, and I to discuss the gap between network engineering and “the business,” and give us some thoughts on bridging it.

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

BrandPost: Simplifying Operations: Managing Edge Data Centers

IT professionals have been honing their data center management expertise for decades. However, migrating these best practices to an edge computing environment can be challenging.That’s because many workers located in edge environments, such as retail store clerks, lack the necessary data center expertise to ensure edge sites are properly maintained. Complicating matters is the fact that edge data centers can be expensive and complex to run.Clearly, organizations need a new way forward. Fortunately, cloud-based platforms are designed for the edge, and can simplify remote monitoring and management. Here’s what every business should look for in a solution:To read this article in full, please click here

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