Layer 3 can do it better. I’m convinced. You should be too.

There are lots of reasons why we have a tendency to stick to what we know best, but when new solutions present themselves, as the decision makers, we have to make sure we’re still bringing the best solution to our business and our customers. This post will highlight the virtues of building an IP based fabric of point to point routed links arranged in a Clos spine and leaf topology and why it is superior to legacy layer 2 hierarchical designs in the data center.

It’s not only possible, but far easier to build, maintain and operate a pure IP based fabric than you might think. The secret is that by pushing layer 2 broadcast domains as far out to the edges as possible, the data center network can be simpler, more reliable and easier to scale. For context, consider the existing layer 2 hierarchical model illustrated below:


This design depends heavily on MLAG. The peer link is compulsory between two switches providing an MLAG. An individual link failure on the peer link would be more consequential than any of the other links. Ideally, we try to avoid linchpin situations like this. This design does provide redundancy, but depending on Continue reading

VMware NSX Cloud at AWS re:Invent 2018

Howdy… if you have managed to check-in and get your AWS re:Invent pass, congratulations! Looks like running between AWS sessions across hotels in Las Vegas is the new Turkey Trot – welcome to the “Cloud First” world! Amongst all the craziness, we just wanted to take a moment and send a note to you from the NSX team.

As all of you know, NSX Cloud supports Azure and AWS since our latest NSX release – NSX 2.3. NSX Cloud will be showcased at the NSX demo pod at the VMware booth (Booth#2201) at AWS re:Invent (Sands Expo, Venetian). Our product experts are looking forward to meeting customers, answering product and use-case questions, and showcasing demos.

During the event, there will be multiple theatre presentations on NSX Cloud with a lot of swags to grab. For customer/partner meetings on NSX Cloud during the event, please reach out to the PM team (Percy Wadia, Shiva Somasundaram and Amol Tipnis). If you would like to take a look at all the Past Blogs and YouTube Videos on NSX Cloud, we have got it sorted for you.

 

Big Announcements:

The excitement is going to continue even after re:Invent as we will Continue reading

VMware NSX Cloud Now in AWS Solution Space

We are excited to announce that NSX Cloud, the VMware networking and security solution for AWS-native applications and hybrid-cloud, is now available in the AWS Solution Space! AWS created the Solution Space as a place for AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partners to showcase customer-ready solutions that combine AWS services with partner technologies and, optionally, consulting offers from APN consulting Partners. This is an especially notable milestone for NSX Cloud because it will be one of the first offerings in the Networking category for Solution Space.

NSX Cloud will be featured at AWS re:Invent this week, so be sure to stop by our theater sessions at the VMware booth (#2201) on Tuesday at 3:30pm or Thursday at 11:30am. We look forward to seeing you there, and are giving away an exciting prize to a lucky winner at each session!

What is NSX Cloud?

NSX Cloud is an extension of VMware’s NSX Data Center technology that brings the NSX networking and security framework to cloud-native applications in AWS. With NSX Cloud, IT administrators can apply the exact same networking and security policies they use in the data center to AWS-native applications, and they can manage those applications through the same interface Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 3 types of IoT platform analytics

Enterprises rely on their IoT platforms for many services. One of the most important is analytics. In layman’s terms, IoT analytics is the science and art of trying to find patterns in the massive quantity of data generated by connected assets. Or a more careful definition from MachNation’s IoT platform testing lab might be, analytics is the ability of a platform administrator or operator to monitor trends, identify abnormalities, and produce business insights from ingested IoT data.As a first step to identifying a best-in-class IoT platform for analytics, an enterprise should deploy the various platform analytics services. In particular, the enterprise should at least configure an on-platform analytics service for live streaming and stored/historical data; configure a platform for live streaming external analytics service integrations; and then export on-platform data to an external analytics service. These configuration tests will help an enterprise determine if an IoT platform vendor has designed exceptional or lackluster management tools and usability into its platform.To read this article in full, please click here

BiB 059: Recover From Cyber Attacks & Ransomware With Dell EMC

In this briefing, Dell EMC focused on their Cyber Recovery 18.1 product. You might be thinking, “Oh, another backup product. I already have one of those.” Sort of. Cyber Recovery is more than simply backup, and it’s more than what a decent disaster recovery plan gets you. The Cyber Recovery Vault is an orchestrated Data Domain storage platform that provides an isolated copy of known good data that can be used to recover from a security breach.

The post BiB 059: Recover From Cyber Attacks & Ransomware With Dell EMC appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Lessons from Andromeda

A common complaint I hear among network engineers is that the lessons and techniques used by truly huge scale networks simply are not applicable to more “standard scale” networks. The key point, however, is balance—to look for the ideas and concepts that are interesting and at least somewhat novel, and then see how they might be applied to products and systems in all networks. Learning concepts can help you understand design patterns you might encounter almost anywhere. One recent paper, for instance, details Andromeda, a large scale networking system designed and operated by Google, one of the few truly huge networks in the world—

Andromeda is designed around a flexible hierarchy of flow processing paths. Flows are mapped to a programming path dynamically based on feature and performance requirements.

While the paper describes the general compute environment, and the forwarding process on individual nodes, the most interesting part from a network engineering perspective is hoverboard. While this concept behind hoverboard has been implemented in previous systems, it is usually hidden under the covers of a vertically integrated system, and therefore not normally something you see the inner workings of. To understand hoverboard, you have to begin with a little theory Continue reading

Mass data fragmentation requires a storage rethink

Companies are experiencing a growing problem of mass data fragmentation (MDF). Data is siloed and scattered all over the organization — on and off premises — and businesses are unable to use the data strategically.When data is fragmented, only a small portion of it is available to be analyzed. In my last post, I described MDF as a single trend, but it can occur in a number of ways. Below are the most common forms of MDF: Fragmentation across IT silos: Secondary IT operations such as backups, file sharing/storage, provisioning for test/development and analytics are typically being done in completely separate silos that don’t share data or resources, with no central visibility or control. This results in overprovisioning/waste, as well as a challenge to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) or availability targets.   Fragmentation within a silo: There are even "silos within silos." Example: backup, where it is not uncommon to have four to five separate backup solutions from different vendors to handle different workloads such as virtual, physical, satabase, and cloud. On top of that, each solution needs associated target storage, dedupe appliances, media servers, etc., which propagate the silo problem. Fragmentation due to copies: Continue reading

Mass data fragmentation requires a storage rethink

Companies are experiencing a growing problem of mass data fragmentation (MDF). Data is siloed and scattered all over the organization — on and off premises — and businesses are unable to use the data strategically.When data is fragmented, only a small portion of it is available to be analyzed. In my last post, I described MDF as a single trend, but it can occur in a number of ways. Below are the most common forms of MDF: Fragmentation across IT silos: Secondary IT operations such as backups, file sharing/storage, provisioning for test/development and analytics are typically being done in completely separate silos that don’t share data or resources, with no central visibility or control. This results in overprovisioning/waste, as well as a challenge to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) or availability targets.   Fragmentation within a silo: There are even "silos within silos." Example: backup, where it is not uncommon to have four to five separate backup solutions from different vendors to handle different workloads such as virtual, physical, satabase, and cloud. On top of that, each solution needs associated target storage, dedupe appliances, media servers, etc., which propagate the silo problem. Fragmentation due to copies: Continue reading

Murphy the Chaos Manager

I had the opportunity to sit in on a great briefing from Gremlin the other day about chaos engineering. Ken Nalbone (@KenNalbone) has a great review of their software and approach to things here. The more time I spent thinking about chaos engineering and IT, the more I realized that it has more in common with Murphy’s Law that we realize.

Anything That Can Go Wrong

If there’s more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do it that way. – Edward Murphy

 

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. – Major John Paul Stapp

We live by the adage of Murphy’s Law in IT. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And usually it goes wrong at the worst possible time. Database query functions will go wrong when you need them the most. And usually at the height of something like Amazon Prime Day. Data center outages only seem to happen at 4 am on a Sunday during a holiday.

But why do things go wrong like this? Is it because the universe just has it out for IT people? Are we Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: France Approves Fake News Law, Looks to Regulate Further

France tackles the Internet: The French government has been making news in recent days for examining ways to regulate the Internet. Its parliament has passed a controversial new law that would allow judges to order the immediate removal of online articles they deem to be fake news, Euronews.com reports. Critics warned the law, which allows for jail sentences for fake news creators, could lead to censorship.

Regulation or autocracy? French President Emmanuel Macron pushed the fake news law, and he also called for more government regulation of the Internet at a recent Internet Governance Forum in Paris. Macron called for international cooperation on Internet issues, as a way to tame disinformation, with CFR.org suggesting governments must adapt to fight modern problems. But TechDirt suggested Macron was acting like an autocrat in his call for more regulation.

Broadband plan MIA: Canada’s government, meanwhile, has “no plan” to bring broadband to rural and remote areas, a government auditor said. Canada’s rural broadband efforts so far have led to “a series of moving targets, lofty proclamations, piecemeal programs, and ultimately big letdowns,” Motherboard says.

Where the money is: Research firm IDC expects investments in Artificial Intelligence to triple in the next three Continue reading

Selectively deploying your superpowers on Linux

The sudo command is very handy when you need to run occasional commands with superuser power, but you can sometimes run into problems when it doesn’t do everything you expect it should. Say you want to add an important message at the end of some log file and you try something like this:$ echo "Important note" >> /var/log/somelog -bash: /var/log/somelog: Permission denied OK, it looks like you need to employ some extra privilege. In general, you can't write to a system log file with your user account. Let’s try that again with sudo.$ sudo !! sudo echo "Important note" >> /var/log/somelog -bash: /var/log/somelog: Permission denied Hmm, that didn't work either. Let's try something a little different.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Getting smarter about managing the SD-WAN last-mile

Delivering global SD-WAN is very different from delivering local networks. Local networks offer complete control to the end-to-end design, enabling low-latency and predictable connections. There might still be blackouts and brownouts but you’re in control and can troubleshoot accordingly with appropriate visibility.With global SD-WANs, though, managing the middle-mile/backbone performance and managing the last-mile are, well shall we say, more challenging. Most SD-WAN vendors don’t have control over these two segments, which affects application performance and service agility.In particular, an issue that SD-WAN appliance vendors often overlook is the management of the last-mile. With multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), the provider assumes the responsibility, but this is no longer the case with SD-WAN. Getting the last-mile right is challenging for many global SD-WANs.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Getting smarter about managing the SD-WAN last-mile

Delivering global SD-WAN is very different from delivering local networks. Local networks offer complete control to the end-to-end design, enabling low-latency and predictable connections. There might still be blackouts and brownouts but you’re in control and can troubleshoot accordingly with appropriate visibility.With global SD-WANs, though, managing the middle-mile/backbone performance and managing the last-mile are, well shall we say, more challenging. Most SD-WAN vendors don’t have control over these two segments, which affects application performance and service agility.In particular, an issue that SD-WAN appliance vendors often overlook is the management of the last-mile. With multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), the provider assumes the responsibility, but this is no longer the case with SD-WAN. Getting the last-mile right is challenging for many global SD-WANs.To read this article in full, please click here

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