TFDx – Forward Networks

Forward Networks was one of the top presenters at TFDx at Cisco Live 2019 in Barcelona in my opinion.

I really didn’t know much about what they were all about before we had the presentation. One thing I did notice was that they were really organized, even handing out agendas before beginning the presentation. Also, we were told that their engineering department in San Jose were staying up late to watch the Live Stream! Talk about dedication.

So what does Forward Networks provide? – Very deep visibility into your network is the answer. This solution is by far the most comprehensive i have seen. But allow me to perform a breakdown of what im talking about.

These are the components of the solution:

  • Retrieval of both device configuration as well as device state. The later being far more important than just a configuration dump.
  • Common data modeling. A variant of Openconfig is used for this part.
  • Mathematical calculation and graphing based upen the data modeling.
  • Impressive GUI containing multiple “applications”.
  • Open API’s and a query engine.

So let me go into detail and explain the relevance of each.

Retrieval of information:

There are basically 2 different kinds of information that Continue reading

Certifications Are About Support

You may have seen this week that VMware has announced they are removing the mandatory recertification requirement for their certification program. This is a huge step from VMware. The VCP, VCAP, and VCDX are huge certifications in the virtualization and server industry. VMware has always wanted their partners and support personnel to be up-to-date on the latest and greatest software. But, as I will explain, the move to remove the mandatory recertification requirement says more about the fact that certifications are less about selling and more about supporting.

The Paper Escalator

Recertification is a big money maker for companies. Sure, you’re spending a lot money on things like tests and books. But those aren’t usually tied to the company offering the certification. Instead, the testing fees are given to the testing center, like Pearson, and the book fees go to the publisher.

The real money maker for companies is the first-party training. If the company developing the certification is also offering the training courses you can bet they’re raking in the cash. VMware has done this for years with the classroom requirement for the VCP. Cisco has also started doing in with their first-party CCIE training. Cisco’s example also shows Continue reading

Light-based computers to be 5,000 times faster

Electrical currents are best created using semiconductor crystals that absorb light, say researchers who have announced a significant, potential computer-speed breakthrough. The team obtained ultrafast clock rates in the terahertz of frequencies, using light. That is significantly higher than existing single-gigahertz computer clock rates.The “bursts of light contain frequencies that are 5,000 times higher than the highest clock rate of modern computer technology,” researchers at the Forschungsverbund research association in Germany announced in a press release last month. A chip's oscillating frequencies, called clock rate, is one measurement of speed.To read this article in full, please click here

Light-based computers to be 5,000 times faster

Electrical currents are best created using semiconductor crystals that absorb light, say researchers who have announced a significant, potential computer-speed breakthrough. The team obtained ultrafast clock rates in the terahertz of frequencies, using light. That is significantly higher than existing single-gigahertz computer clock rates.The “bursts of light contain frequencies that are 5,000 times higher than the highest clock rate of modern computer technology,” researchers at the Forschungsverbund research association in Germany announced in a press release last month. A chip's oscillating frequencies, called clock rate, is one measurement of speed.To read this article in full, please click here

Light-based computers to be 5,000 times faster

Electrical currents are best created using semiconductor crystals that absorb light, say researchers who have announced a significant, potential computer-speed breakthrough. The team obtained ultrafast clock rates in the terahertz of frequencies, using light. That is significantly higher than existing single-gigahertz computer clock rates.The “bursts of light contain frequencies that are 5,000 times higher than the highest clock rate of modern computer technology,” researchers at the Forschungsverbund research association in Germany announced in a press release last month. A chip's oscillating frequencies, called clock rate, is one measurement of speed.To read this article in full, please click here

Working with ExaBGP 4

One of my goals this year was to spend more time doing Python development so I thought I’d take a break from the MPLS deep dives (no worries – there are still lots more coming) and insert some development type things along the way. One of the opensource projects I’ve used in the past was ExaBGP by the folks over at Exa-Networks. Since then – they’ve released a new version (4) and I’ve been keen to play around with it some more.

The last time I played with ExaBGP was strictly from a testing perspective. This time – I want to focus on some use cases that are closer to real life. Things you might actually do – or at the very least – try. So to start things off – we’re going to once again start with a basic lab that looks like this…

So here we have our 2 friendly end users connected at the head to a small simple network. left_user is attached to an Ubuntu 18 server called ‘bgp_peer’ which is then connected to two other routers (Juniper vMX) and finally our friendly right_user. To start with – we’re going to configure the routers vMX1 and Continue reading

Juniper RIPng

4 steps to configure RIPng. Define a RIPng group Assign interfaces to the RIPng group Define a routing policy to export routes Assign the routing policy to the RIPng group Configuration Define a RIPng group. cmd set protocols ripng group RIPNG-GROUP Assign...continue reading

Deep Dive on cli_command for Network Automation

Ansible-Agnostic-Network-Automation

In October Ansible 2.7 was released and brought us two powerful agnostic network modules, cli_command and cli_config. Do you have two or more network vendors within your environment? The goal of agnostic modules is to simplify Ansible Playbooks for network engineers that deal with a variety of network platforms. Rather than having to deal with platform specific modules (e.g. eos_config, ios_config, junos_config), you can now use cli_command or cli_config to reduce the amount of tasks and conditionals within a playbook, and make the playbook easier to use. This post will demonstrate how to use these modules and contrast them to platform specific modules. I’ll show some playbook examples and common use cases to help illustrate how you can use these new platform agnostic modules.

Both the cli_command and cli_config only work with the network_cli connection plugin. For those unfamiliar with the network_cli connection plugin check out this blog post I did last April. The goal of network_cli is to make playbooks look, feel and operate on network devices, the same way Ansible works on Linux hosts.

What can you do with the cli_command?

The cli_command allows you to run arbitrary commands on network devices. Let’s show a simple Continue reading

Creating a Net-DevOps environment.

TL;DR : Code is here. Help yourself ? Introduction to the Net-DevOps Container: Recently, Ethan Banks posted a very interesting blog post where he struggled a little bit to set up a Python environment. If I understood correctly, he wanted to increase his skills set in particular with NetDevOps. He fairly pointed that it could be a bit complicated to handle all the dependencies you might need. Based on the fact that you also want to start fresh between projects you want to spend the least amount of time resolving these kinds of issues and maximize your time on something that is valuable: Learn how to Automate or just Automate your network environment. A lot of people are in a [Read More...]

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