Like Watching the Caveman Invent the Rock – Cisco “Discovers” Software

In truth, today’s legacy enterprise networks — many now decades overdue for replacement — were built to fight Cold Wars among the vendor powers.  Cisco “big iron” battled Wellfleet “big iron” and, later, Juniper “big iron,” and the throughput/density contests are now the stuff of NetOps legend.  But these aging networks are completely ill-suited to fight today’s data-oriented guerilla warfare, where hackers, DevOps, IoT, mobile, open source, and cloud services clamor for attention and have NetOps IT people desperately trying to manage an environment that feels more like a third-world airport terminal flooded with people fleeing a coup than a predictable business utility.

To be fair, Cisco was able to successfully weaponize account control far better than Juniper, Extreme, et al, so they ended up “winning” – and keeping — the large enterprise business to the tune of some 80 percent market share.  But this business stranglehold can no longer be defended by the moral equivalent of a proprietary Maginot Line.  The new name of the networking guerilla warfare game is software.  The new “best practice?” — disaggregated Linux-based open white box switching with a full enterprise feature set – one that is future-proofed with Continue reading

Like Watching the Caveman Invent the Rock – Cisco “Discovers” Software

In truth, today’s legacy enterprise networks — many now decades overdue for replacement — were built to fight Cold Wars among the vendor powers.  Cisco “big iron” battled Wellfleet “big iron” and, later, Juniper “big iron,” and the throughput/density contests are now the stuff of NetOps legend.  But these aging networks are completely ill-suited to fight today’s data-oriented guerilla warfare, where hackers, DevOps, IoT, mobile, open source, and cloud services clamor for attention and have NetOps IT people desperately trying to manage an environment that feels more like a third-world airport terminal flooded with people fleeing a coup than a predictable business utility.

To be fair, Cisco was able to successfully weaponize account control far better than Juniper, Extreme, et al, so they ended up “winning” – and keeping — the large enterprise business to the tune of some 80 percent market share.  But this business stranglehold can no longer be defended by the moral equivalent of a proprietary Maginot Line.  The new name of the networking guerilla warfare game is software.  The new “best practice?” — disaggregated Linux-based open white box switching with a full enterprise feature set – one that is future-proofed with Continue reading

Recent BGP Peering Enhancements

BGP is one of the foundational protocols that make the Internet “go;” as such, it is a complex intertwined system of different kinds of functionality bundled into a single set of TLVs, attributes, and other functionality. Because it is so widely used, however, BGP tends to gain new capabilities on a regular basis, making the Interdomain Routing (IDR) working group in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) one of the consistently busiest, and hence one of the hardest to keep up with. In this post, I’m going to spend a little time talking about one area in which a lot of work has been taking place, the building and maintenance of peering relationships between BGP speakers.

The first draft to consider is Mitigating the Negative Impact of Maintenance through BGP Session Culling, which is a draft in an operations working group, rather than the IDR working group, and does not make any changes to the operation of BGP. Rather, this draft considers how BGP sessions should be torn down so traffic is properly drained, and the peering shutdown has the minimal effect possible. The normal way of shutting down a link for maintenance would be to for administrators to shut Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 4 considerations when replacing managed WAN services with SD-WAN

The enterprise wide area networks are mission-critical resources for most enterprises. And when it came to managing and running the WAN, enterprises could choose between two distinct models: Do it Yourself (DIY) or managed WAN services. But with the evolution of SD-WANs, we’re seeing a new type of telco solution that merges elements of both capabilities.Traditional WAN management models With DIY, enterprise IT procures last-mile access at a location and deploys routers, WAN optimization, and network security appliances from several vendors. Continuous monitoring and management is done in house or via a managed service provider. In short, enterprise IT owns the complex task of maintaining, configuring and monitoring the WAN for availability and optimal performance.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 4 considerations when replacing managed WAN services with SD-WAN

The enterprise wide area networks are mission-critical resources for most enterprises. And when it came to managing and running the WAN, enterprises could choose between two distinct models: Do it Yourself (DIY) or managed WAN services. But with the evolution of SD-WANs, we’re seeing a new type of telco solution that merges elements of both capabilities.Traditional WAN management models With DIY, enterprise IT procures last-mile access at a location and deploys routers, WAN optimization, and network security appliances from several vendors. Continuous monitoring and management is done in house or via a managed service provider. In short, enterprise IT owns the complex task of maintaining, configuring and monitoring the WAN for availability and optimal performance.To read this article in full, please click here

Complexity Sells

According to Roman philosophers, simplicity is the hallmark of truth. And yet, networks have become ever more complex over time. Why is this? Because complexity sells. In this short take, I talk about why complexity sells, and some of the mental habits you can use to overcome our natural tendency to prefer the complex.

The Next Installment of Our CCIE Security V5 Technology Series is Here!

This course was created by Piotr Kaluzny and is 2 hours and 32 minutes long. It consists of multiple videos where the Instructor discusses all relevant theoretical concepts and technologies, (in-depth explanations, whiteboarding) and shows how to implement them on the current CCIE Security v5 lab exam hardware.



Why You Should Watch:

Security is no longer just an “important” component of an organization. A constantly-increasing number of aggressive cyber criminals launch their attacks not only from the outside, but also inside of the organization, making security an inherent component of any modern network/system design.

This course, like all other courses that are part of the “CCIE Security v5 Technologies” series, is meant to teach you Cisco security technologies and solutions using the latest industry best practices to secure systems and environments against modern security risks, threats, vulnerabilities, and requirements.


Who Should Watch:

This course is not only intended for students preparing to the current CCNA/CCNP/CCIE Security exam, but also for experienced Network (Security) Engineers or Administrators looking to refresh their knowledge on important Network Security concepts before moving forward with other certifications.


What You’ll Learn:

By completing this course, you will understand and learn about the different Layer 2 attacks and Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Networking anomalies

Recently, I had the great opportunity to discuss network security over dinner with one of the world’s best security practitioners. I learned that keeping bad actors from eventually getting inside a network is nearly impossible. While we maintain our vigilance at our borders over time we should assume our network would be penetrated, so the key to preventing exfiltration (which generally follows) is to look for networking anomalies.Look for network uses that are abnormal, unusual, or different in some way from the norm. Techniques for doing this “hunting” are expensive to implement and hard to interpret with frequent false positives but are a necessary evil.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 192: Dell Goes Public Again; Vodafone Trials Whitebox Optical

Take a Network Break! Dell Technologies is heading back to the public market, Vodafone tests a whitebox optical switch, and an LTE vulnerability rears its head.

Diane Bryant leaves Google Cloud after less than a year. Is Intel beckoning?

A Swedish private equity firm spins out SUSE, Micron products get banned in China, ZTE shuffles its executive ranks to comply with US requirements, and China approves Marvell’s acquisition of Cavium.

We’ve got links to all these stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. If you re not doing optics correctly, you re going to pay for it upfront (and then later too). Don t be fooled by lesser optics. The difference between generic third-party and brand-equivalent optics matters.

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Ignition

The Packet Pushers have launched a brand new membership site called Ignition. Ignition offers free and premium memberships and hosts exclusive content for subscribers, including videos, reports, blogs, and more. Check it out at ignition.packetpushers.net.

Show Links:

Dell moves to go public, spurns IPO – Reuters

Vodafone begins its trek with Voyager – Cumulus Networks Blog

Vodafone deploys TIP s Voyager in a live network Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Solving for serverless: How do you manage something that’s not there?

Function-as-a-service (FaaS) technologies, including AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and IBM/Apache OpenWhisk, are experiencing mass adoption, even in private clouds, and it’s easy to see why. The promise of serverless is simple: developers and IT teams can stop worrying about their infrastructure, system software and network configuration altogether. There’s no need to load-balance, adjust resources for scale, monitor for network latency or CPU performance. Serverless computing can save you a lot of time, money and operational overhead, if you play your cards right.Say goodbye to the idle instance There’s also less waste with serverless computing. You only pay for infrastructure in the moment that code gets executed (or, each time a user processes a request). It’s the end of the server that just sits there. But with all these advantages, IT practitioners are also faced with an avalanche of complexity and new challenges.  To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Solving for serverless: How do you manage something that’s not there?

Function-as-a-service (FaaS) technologies, including AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and IBM/Apache OpenWhisk, are experiencing mass adoption, even in private clouds, and it’s easy to see why. The promise of serverless is simple: developers and IT teams can stop worrying about their infrastructure, system software and network configuration altogether. There’s no need to load-balance, adjust resources for scale, monitor for network latency or CPU performance. Serverless computing can save you a lot of time, money and operational overhead, if you play your cards right.Say goodbye to the idle instance There’s also less waste with serverless computing. You only pay for infrastructure in the moment that code gets executed (or, each time a user processes a request). It’s the end of the server that just sits there. But with all these advantages, IT practitioners are also faced with an avalanche of complexity and new challenges.  To read this article in full, please click here

Q&A: Bill Hoffman of the Industrial Internet Consortium talks AI, IoT and more

Bill Hoffman, president of the Industrial Internet Consortium, has worked with artificial intelligence (AI) for decades. He's been with the IIC since its inception, and he worked with IIC executive director Richard Soley at various AI firms for years before that. Hoffman recently sat down with Network World's Jon Gold for a chat about IoT and the role of automation and AI.NWW: Is this what you guys expected to be working on 20-30 years ago?BF: For us it’s fascinating to see, three decades later, that the term AI actually has a good connotation. It’s funny, but a lot of the systems that we were involved with, which were primarily renamed “decision support systems” – for liability reasons, they didn’t want to call them “expert” systems – a lot of those are still functioning today. So it never really went away, it just went somewhat underground, and people said “OK, that works.”To read this article in full, please click here

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