Manage user performance, not the network, with machine learning-based tools

Over the past decade, network management tools have evolved from being fault based to performance based. This has become a critical element in running infrastructure because faults don’t matter as much.That might seem like a strange thing to say, but consider the fact that critical infrastructure such as switches, routers, Wi-Fi access points and servers are deployed in a way to protect against outages. Infrastructure is built so redundantly today that any hardware device can go down and its likely no one will notice.Also on Network World: 7 must-have network tools A bigger problem is managing user performance. Often users calling about a certain application not working well, but when the engineer looks at the dashboard, everything is green. Performance problems are much harder to diagnose and can kill employee productivity. To read this article in full, please click here

Real-time WiFi heat map

Real-time Wifi-Traffic Heatmap (source code GitHub: cod3monk/showfloor-heatmap) displays real-time WiFi traffic from SC17 (The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, November 12-17, 2017). Click on the link to see live data.

The Cisco Wireless access points in the conference network don't currently support sFlow, however, the access points are connected to Juniper EX switches which stream sFlow telemetry to an instance of sFlow-RT analytics software that provides real-time usage metrics for the heat map.

Wireless describes the additional visibility delivered by sFlow capable wireless access points, including: air time, channel, retransmissions, receive / transmit speeds, power, signal to noise ratio, etc. With sFlow enabled wireless access points, additional information could be layered on the heat map. The sFlow.org web site lists network products and vendors that support the sFlow standard.

Next-Generation Assurance in NFV Networks

next-generation assurance Download the Huawei White Paper,  In the digital era, communications service providers (CSPs) are undergoing a technological evolution, and network virtualization is playing a key role—in particular, network functions virtualization (NFV).  NFV offers reduced time to market, agility, innovation, an open ecosystem to avoid vendor lock-in, and future CAPEX and OPEX reduction. However, operational transformation... Read more →

Developing a Hybrid Plan for SD-WAN Q&A

Developing a Hybrid Plan for SD-WAN Q&A Thanks to all who joined us for the Comcast Business 2017 SD-WAN and Virtual Edge Report webinar, Developing  a Hybrid Plan for SD-WAN, where they discussed how to ease into SD-WAN to test and experience new business capabilities across a distributed enterprise. After the webinar we took questions from the audience. Unfortunately we ran out... Read more →

Wi-Fi Capacity Infographic

Learn tips and tricks for building a high-performance WLAN!

I teamed up with the great staff at Ekahau to put together this infographic about how to design and deploy high capacity Wi-Fi. It's the second poster in the series, following the Wi-Fi Design Poster that focused on radio frequency (RF) factors.

The Wi-Fi Capacity Infographic covers:

  • An overview of airtime and why it is important
  • Understanding the two primary factors affecting airtime:
    1. Airtime within a cell
    2. Airtime across cells
  • Methods to maximize airtime efficiency to get the most out of your WLAN
  • Channel inventory as it relates to capacity
  • How client capabilities affect airtime consumption, and hence capacity, in a WLAN
  • Factors to consider when selecting infrastructure to deploy
  • Factors to consider with infrastructure placement and configuration
  • Features available within Ekahau Site Survey to set you up for success

Download the Wi-Fi Capacity Infographic today!

High capacity-magnifying glass-landing page image.png

Making AWS re:Invent More Family-Friendly

AWS re:Invent is just around the corner, and Spousetivities will be there to help bring a new level of family friendliness to the event. If you’re thinking of bringing a spouse, partner, or significant other with you to Las Vegas, I’d encourage you to strongly consider getting him or her involved in Spousetivities.

Want a sneak peek at what’s planned? Have a look:

  • Monday’s activity is a full-day trip to Death Valley, including a stop at Bad Water Basin (significant because it is 280 feet below sea level, making it the lowest place in the Western Hemisphere!). Lunch is included, of course.
  • On Tuesday, Spousetivities participants will get to visit a number of locations on the Las Vegas Strip, including Siegfried and Roy’s Secret Garden, the Wildlife Habitat at the Flamingo, and the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay. Transportion is provided for longer connections, but there will be some walking involved—wear comfortable shoes!
  • Wednesday includes a visit to Red Rock Canyon and Hoover Dam. There will some opportunities for short sightseeing walks in Red Rock Canyon (plus the 13-mile scenic drive), and the Hoover Dam tour includes access to the generator room (a very cool sight).
  • Wrapping up the Continue reading

NetDevOpEd: The power of network verification

Microsoft just published information on their internal tool called “CrystalNet” which Microsoft defines as “a high-fidelity, cloud-scale network emulator in daily use at Microsoft. We built CrystalNet to help our engineers in their quest to improve the overall reliability of our networking infrastructure.” You can read more about their tool in this detailed ACM Paper. But what I want to talk about is how this amazing technology is accessible to you, at any organization, right now, with network verification using Cumulus VX.

What Microsoft has accomplished is truly amazing. They can simulate their network environment and prevent nearly 70% of the network issues they experienced in a two-year period. They have the ability to spin up hundreds of nodes with the exact same configurations and protocols they run in production. Then applying network tests, they verify if proposed changes will have negative impact on applications and services. This work took the team of Microsoft researchers over two years to develop. It’s really quite the feat!

What I find exciting about this is it validates exactly what we at Cumulus have been preaching for the last two years as well. The ability to make a 1:1 mirror of Continue reading

Learning to Ask Questions

One thing I’m often asked in email and in person is: why should I bother learning theory? After all, you don’t install SPF in your network; you install a router or switch, which you then configure OSPF or IS-IS on. The SPF algorithm is not exposed to the user, and does not seem to really have any impact on the operation of the network. Such internal functionality might be neat to know, but ultimately–who cares? Maybe it will be useful in some projected troubleshooting situation, but the key to effective troubleshooting is understanding the output of the device, rather than in understanding what the device is doing.

In other words, there is no reason to treat network devices as anything more than black boxes. You put some stuff in, other stuff comes out, and the vendor takes care of everything in the middle. I dealt with a related line of thinking in this video, but what about this black box argument? Do network engineers really need to know what goes on inside the vendor’s black box?

Let me anser this question with another question. Wen you shift to a new piece of hardware, how do you know what you are Continue reading

THE ENTERPRISE IT CHECKLIST FOR DOCKER OPERATIONS

At Docker, we believe the best insights come from the developers and IT pros using the Docker platform every day. Since the launch of Docker Enterprise Edition, we learned three things from our customers.

  1. First, a top goal in enterprise IT is to deliver value to customers (internal business units or external clients)…and to do so fast.
  2. Second, most enterprises believe that Docker is at the center of their IT platform.
  3. Finally, most enterprises’ biggest challenge is moving their containerized applications to production in time to prove value. My DockerCon talk focused on addressing the third item, which seems to be a critical one for many of our customers.

In our recent customer engagements, we’ve seen a pattern of common challenges when designing and deploying Docker in an enterprise environment. Particularly, customers are struggling to find best practices to speed up their move to production. To address some of these common challenges, we put together a production readiness checklist (https://github.com/nicolaka/checklist) for Docker Enterprise Edition. This list was discussed thoroughly during my DockerCon EU 2017 session. Here’s a video of that talk:

I go through 10 key topics (shown below) that a typical enterprise should  go through when deploying Continue reading

5 tricks for using the sudo command

The sudoers file can provide detailed control over user privileges, but with very little effort, you can still get a lot of benefit from sudo. In this post, we're going to look at some simple ways to get a lot of value out of the sudo command in Linux.Trick 1: Nearly effortless sudo usage The default file on most Linux distributions makes it very simple to give select users the ability to run commands as root. In fact, you don’t even have to edit the /etc/sudoers file in any way to get started. Instead, you just add the users to the sudo or admin group on the system and you’re done.Adding users to the sudo or admin group in the /etc/group file gives them permission to run commands using sudo.To read this article in full, please click here

ARM Benchmarks Show HPC Ripe for Processor Shakeup

Every year at the Supercomputing Conference (SC) an unofficial theme emerges. For the last two years, machine learning and deep learning were focal points; before that it was all about data-intensive computing and stretching even farther back, the potential of cloud to reshape supercomputing.

What all of these themes have in common is that they did not focus on the processor. In fact, they centered around a generalized X86 hardware environment with well-known improvement and ecosystem cadences. Come to think of it, the closest we have come to seeing the device at the center of a theme in recent years …

ARM Benchmarks Show HPC Ripe for Processor Shakeup was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Turn Network Engineers into Software Engineers

Peyton Koran, Director of Technical Engagement at Electronic Arts, delivered a great session on why network vendors are losing to open source and whitebox. His view is that network engineers need to embrace software engineering, be flexible. Vendors and VARs are no longer working to benefit of the customer but to benefit themselves with increased […]

Cassandra NoSQL Data Model Design

We at Instaclustr recently published a blog post on the most common data modelling mistakes that we see with Cassandra. This post was very popular and led me to think about what advice we could provide on how to approach designing your Cassandra data model so as to come up with a quality design that avoids the traps.

There are a number of good articles around that with rules and patterns to fit your data model into: 6 Step Guide to Apache Cassandra Data Modelling and Data Modelling Recommended Practices.

However, we haven’t found a step by step guide to analysing your data to determine how to fit in these rules and patterns. This white paper is a quick attempt at filling that gap.

Phase 1: Understand the data

This phase has two distinct steps that are both designed to gain a good understanding of the data that you are modelling and the access patterns required.

Define the data domain

The first step is to get a good understanding of your data domain. As someone very familiar with relation data modelling, I tend to sketch (or at least think) ER diagrams to understand the entities, their keys and relationships. However, Continue reading

Mellanox Poised For HDR InfiniBand Quantum Leap

InfiniBand and Ethernet are in a game of tug of war and are pushing the bandwidth and price/performance envelopes constantly. But the one thing they cannot do is get too far out ahead of the PCI-Express bus through which network interface cards hook into processors. The 100 Gb/sec links commonly used in Ethernet and InfiniBand server adapters run up against bandwidth ceilings with two ports running on PCI-Express 3.0 slots, and it is safe to say that 200 Gb/sec speeds will really need PCI-Express 4.0 slots to have two ports share a slot.

This, more than any other factor, is …

Mellanox Poised For HDR InfiniBand Quantum Leap was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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