The Winds of Change From January

Some quick thoughts on networking from my last couple of weeks at Networking Field Day 17 and Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe:

  • Cisco is in the middle of turning a big ship away from hardware. All their innovation is coming in the software side of the house. Big announcements around network assurance. It’s not enough any more to do the things. Now you need to prove they were done and show your work. Context and Intent only work if you can quantitatively show that they were applied.
  • Containers are still a thing. Cisco has a new container platform. I also had the chance to chat with a startup called AppOrbit that’s doing some interesting things around containers but including storage and networking. They should be primed for some announcements soon, so stayed tuned for that!
  • Automation is cool again. Well, maybe it never stopped being cool. But thanks to Extreme Networks and Juniper people are really hopping on the train to talk more about removing the limitations of the CLI and doing it with tools like Slack. Check out Lindsay Hill and Matt Oswalt showing this off to people in some finely crafted demos.
  • 2018 is Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 9th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

 

To those living in the past: the future is coming. (launch, great sound).

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics.

  • 7.2 terabytes: data used during Super Bowl;  $220 million: projected podcast revenue this year; $127 billion: total addressable value of drone-powered solutions in all applicable industries; 100 billion billion billion: living microbial cells underlying all the worlds oceans, 200x biomass of humans; 110 billion: total market for memory; 1,000: drones North Korea may have, possibly with chemical or biological weapons, ready to attack South Korea; $123 billion: US apparel market; 100 million: iOS devices sold in Q4; $3: earnings in 24 hours from conscripting 5,000 Android devices into a mining botnet; 46%: cloud market growth in Q4; 104%: YoY Alibaba cloud growth; 

  • Quotable Quotes:

Just How Large Can Nvidia’s Datacenter Business Grow?

The combination of the excitement for new video games, the machine learning software revolution, the buildout of very large supercomputers based on hybrid CPU-GPU architectures, and the mining of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have combined into a quadruple whammy that is driving Nvidia to new heights for revenues, profits, and market capitalization. And thus it is no surprise Nvidia is one of the few companies that is bucking the trend in a very tough couple of weeks on Wall Street.

But having demand spiking for both its current “Volta” GPUs, which are currently aimed at HPC and AI compute, …

Just How Large Can Nvidia’s Datacenter Business Grow? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Technology Short Take 94

Welcome to Technology Short Take 94! Ready for another round of links, articles, and thoughts on data center technologies? (Who knows, maybe I’ll throw a rant or two in there.) OK, enough rambling…here’s the good stuff!

Networking

  • Amit Aneja has a two-part series (so far) explaining the routing architecture in NSX-T (which brings multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud support to the NSX platform). This is some good content and reminds me of the the old NVP/NSX content I generated back in the day. Ah, good times…anyway, check out Amit’s stuff here and here.
  • Sam McGeown has a nice diagram of the communications channels between the various VMware NSX components.
  • Roie Ben Haim has a post providing an introduction to NSX and Kubernetes.
  • Matt Oswalt tackles the idea of “intent-driven” or “intent-based” networking—all the rage right now—and outlines how something like this must interact with domains outside of networking in order to be effective. I particularly liked his (mini-)rant about how network automation can’t be only about making the network engineer’s life easier. Oh, snap!
  • I’m not really sure if this belongs in networking or not (how does one classify OS kernel-level work on networking and security?), but we’ll stick it Continue reading

Tips to improve IoT security on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips to improve IoT security on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips for securing IoT on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips for securing IoT on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Video: What Is PowerNSX?

One of the beauties of VMware NSX is that it’s fully API-based – you can automate any aspect of it by writing a script (or using any of the network automation tools) that executes a series of well-defined (and well-documented) API calls.

To make that task even easier, VMware released PowerNSX, an open-source library of PowerShell commandlets that abstract the internal details of NSX API and give you an easy-to-use interface (assuming you use PowerShell as your automation tool).

Read more ...

AT&T’s dNOS Initiative Spotlights Fake News from Cisco (et al.)

network-serverOne thing that’s clear from recent events is that the “alternative” path for network infrastructure refresh and build-outs – disaggregation – has just become exciting again due, in part, to AT&T’s recent announcement of the company’s dNOS (disaggregated Networking Operating System) initiative. Actually, prior to this proposal the fact that Pica8 and Cumulus – the only two pure open-standards-based NOS vendors in the market – combined have close to 2,000 current customers running on common hardware suggests that it’s been pretty exciting for some time now.

But AT&T’s new proposal does present us with a perfect opportunity to finally throw a bright spotlight on the palette of Fake News that has been tossed around the industry about disaggregated networking solutions and white-box networking in general. Of course, the elephant in the networking room is always Cisco, so let’s start there to see why AT&T pushed out this proposal in the first place.

Over the years, Cisco has successfully stared down any real threats to its account-control-plus-per-hardware-port-revenue business model, building itself up to the hegemony that it has today and, in the process, inadvertently laying waste to its customers’ ability to innovate in their own market segments based on differentiated network services. Continue reading

AT&T’s dNOS Initiative Spotlights Fake News from Cisco (et al.)

network-serverOne thing that’s clear from recent events is that the “alternative” path for network infrastructure refresh and build-outs – disaggregation – has just become exciting again due, in part, to AT&T’s recent announcement of the company’s dNOS (disaggregated Networking Operating System) initiative. Actually, prior to this proposal the fact that Pica8 and Cumulus – the only two pure open-standards-based NOS vendors in the market – combined have close to 2,000 current customers running on common hardware suggests that it’s been pretty exciting for some time now.

But AT&T’s new proposal does present us with a perfect opportunity to finally throw a bright spotlight on the palette of Fake News that has been tossed around the industry about disaggregated networking solutions and white-box networking in general. Of course, the elephant in the networking room is always Cisco, so let’s start there to see why AT&T pushed out this proposal in the first place.

Over the years, Cisco has successfully stared down any real threats to its account-control-plus-per-hardware-port-revenue business model, building itself up to the hegemony that it has today and, in the process, inadvertently laying waste to its customers’ ability to innovate in their own market segments based on differentiated network services. Continue reading

5 Ways you can leverage the Linux community for your data center network

Here at Cumulus, we often talk about the benefits of having an operating system on Linux (if you need to be re-schooled on the benefits of unifying the stack, head here). But something that possibly goes overlooked, or at least under appreciated, is the value of the Linux community itself. The community is made up of 50,000 or so engineers all passionate about learning, improving and creating code. People like to say that when you go with a Linux operating system, you’re “standing on the shoulder of giants,” meaning that you don’t only have to rely on your inhouse engineering team (even if they’re world-class engineers), but rather you’re relying on thousands of engineers, including some of the absolute best in the business. Since Cumulus Linux runs on Linux, our customers have this community at their disposal. So why does that really matter? Here are five reasons to consider.

1. Security

The most widely cited benefit of having a community of 50,000 behind you is security. Basically it looks something like this. Let’s say you’re with a proprietary vendor (*cough* Cisco *cough* Juniper *cough*), and there is a glitch in your latest package installation causing a security vulnerability. Maybe Continue reading

Don’t Forget! Tune Into Our CCNA/CCNP Q&A: February 2018

Presented by INE instructor Keith Bogart (CCIE #4923), this free 60 minute session is an open forum for anyone seeking information regarding the Cisco CCNA or CCNP Routing & Switching exam and related technologies. Ask questions live with an experienced industry expert!

 

When: February 9th AT 10 am (PST)/1 pm (EST)

Who Should Watch: Anyone with questions about earning their associate or professional level Cisco certification

Instructor: Keith Bogart CCIE #4923

Aerohive’s Atom boldly goes where no Wi-Fi has gone before

The opening to “Star Trek: The Original Series” featured Captain Kirk proclaiming that space was the “Final Frontier” and that the Enterprise was going to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”In networking, Wi-Fi is really the final frontier, as it lets us explore strange new apps and seek out new tweets regardless of where we are. Untethered from cables, we are as free to roam around as the Enterprise was in space. There should be no question that good Wi-Fi is as important to us today as dilithium crystals were to the Enterprise.But what happens when Wi-Fi isn’t available? Or just as bad, when the connectivity is almost there but not quite strong enough to be useful. I recall being in a hotel where I couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi at the desk in the room, but I could connect if I sat in the hallway by the entry door, so I wound up sitting there all night trying to get work done.  It’s easy to say that Wi-Fi should be everywhere, but sometimes it’s hard to achieve that because of interference or cabling problems.To read this article in full, please click here

Different Server Workhorses For Different Workload Courses

Co-design is all the rage these days in systems design, where the hardware and software components of a system – whether it is aimed at compute, storage, or networking – are designed in tandem, not one after the other, and immediately affect how each aspect of a system are ultimate crafted. It is a smart idea that wrings the maximum amount of performance out of a system for very precise workloads.

The era of general purpose computing, which is on the wane, brought an ever-increasing amount of capacity to bear in the datacenter at an ever -lower cost, enabling an …

Different Server Workhorses For Different Workload Courses was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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