Network Engineer Evolution

About two years ago I made a learning roadmap for network engineers who want to transform their skills towards Software Defined Networking. I presented it at various events including Cisco Live. It was good, but it looks like I didn't provide the full story. So let's discuss it again, and we will start from the very beginning.


Any network engineer who just starts his or her career today will begin in Phase 1: as the User of networking products where the engineer only knows how to configure the product, hopefully by reading the documentation from the vendor's website first. This type of engineer is what I call "Config Monkey" (sorry, monkey!). If you think you are still in this phase, please don't get offended: I started my career here too. There is no innovation at all, only follow the manual to make the products run.

Then we will move to Phase 2: as Advanced User of networking products. This is the phase where the engineer understands how networking protocols work in detail. He is a domain expert now and can start fine tuning the protocols to optimize the infrastructure. IGP timers, fast re-route, BGP attributes etc. and the engineer Continue reading

Ten Years of Spousetivities

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (OK, so it was 2008 and it was here in this galaxy—on this very planet, in fact), I posted an article about bringing your spouse to VMworld. That one post sparked a fire that, kindled by my wife’s passion and creativity, culminates this year in ten years of Spousetivities! Yes, Spousetivities is back at VMworld (both US and Europe) this year, and Crystal has some pretty nice events planned for this year’s participants.

Registration is here, and here’s a quick look at some of the activities planned for VMworld US in Las Vegas:

  • On Monday, August 28, Spousetivities will kick the week off with a “Welcome Breakfast”, including—as usual!—the opportunity to win some great prizes. iPads, Apple Watches, VR headsets, GoPro cameras, and more have all been prizes in previous years. (What? You expected me to spill the beans on what’s being given away this year?)
  • The breakfast is followed by a scavenger hunt, including a visit to an ice bar and the chance for more prizes. Veeam is sponsoring the scavenger hunt.
  • On Tuesday, August 29, there is an option for a very cool helicopter tour Continue reading

Ten Years of Spousetivities

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (OK, so it was 2008 and it was here in this galaxy—on this very planet, in fact), I posted an article about bringing your spouse to VMworld. That one post sparked a fire that, kindled by my wife’s passion and creativity, culminates this year in ten years of Spousetivities! Yes, Spousetivities is back at VMworld (both US and Europe) this year, and Crystal has some pretty nice events planned for this year’s participants.

Registration is here, and here’s a quick look at some of the activities planned for VMworld US in Las Vegas:

  • On Monday, August 28, Spousetivities will kick the week off with a “Welcome Breakfast”, including—as usual!—the opportunity to win some great prizes. iPads, Apple Watches, VR headsets, GoPro cameras, and more have all been prizes in previous years. (What? You expected me to spill the beans on what’s being given away this year?)
  • The breakfast is followed by a scavenger hunt, including a visit to an ice bar and the chance for more prizes. Veeam is sponsoring the scavenger hunt.
  • On Tuesday, August 29, there is an option for a very cool helicopter tour Continue reading

Ten Years of Spousetivities

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (OK, so it was 2008 and it was here in this galaxy—on this very planet, in fact), I posted an article about bringing your spouse to VMworld. That one post sparked a fire that, kindled by my wife’s passion and creativity, culminates this year in ten years of Spousetivities! Yes, Spousetivities is back at VMworld (both US and Europe) this year, and Crystal has some pretty nice events planned for this year’s participants.

Registration is here, and here’s a quick look at some of the activities planned for VMworld US in Las Vegas:

  • On Monday, August 28, Spousetivities will kick the week off with a “Welcome Breakfast”, including—as usual!—the opportunity to win some great prizes. iPads, Apple Watches, VR headsets, GoPro cameras, and more have all been prizes in previous years. (What? You expected me to spill the beans on what’s being given away this year?)
  • The breakfast is followed by a scavenger hunt, including a visit to an ice bar and the chance for more prizes. Veeam is sponsoring the scavenger hunt.
  • On Tuesday, August 29, there is an option for a very cool helicopter tour Continue reading

Cumulus content round up

To help you stay in the know on all things data center networking, we’ve gathered some of our favorite content from both our own publishing house and from around the web. We hope this helps you stay up to date on both your own skills and on data center networking trends. If you have any suggestions for next time, let us know in the comment section!

Our fav new pieces at Cumulus Networks

BGP in the data center: Are you leveraging everything BGP has to offer? Probably not. This practical report peels away the mystique of BGP to reveal an elegant and mature, simple yet sophisticated protocol. Author Dinesh Dutt, Chief Scientist at Cumulus Networks, covers BGP operations as well as enhancements that greatly simplify its use so that practitioners can refer to this report as an operational manual. Download the guide.

Magic Quadrant report:  Cumulus Networks has been named a “Visionary” in the Data Center Networking category for 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant. With 96% of their survey respondents finding open networking to be a relevant buying criterion and with the adoption of white-box switching to reach 22% by 2020, it’s clear that disaggregation is the answer for forward-looking companies. Continue reading

Worth Reading: Converge your network with priority flow control

Back in April, we talked about a feature called Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). We discussed how ECN is an end-to-end method used to converge networks and save money. Priority flow control (PFC) is a different way to accomplish the same goal. Since PFC supports lossless or near lossless Ethernet, you can run applications, like RDMA, over Converged Ethernet (RoCE or RoCEv2) over your current data center infrastructure. Since RoCE runs directly over Ethernet, a different method than ECN must be used to control congestion. In this post, we’ll concentrate on the Layer 2 solution for RoCE — PFC, and how it can help you optimize your network. —Cumulus

The post Worth Reading: Converge your network with priority flow control appeared first on rule 11 reader.

What is IoT?

The Internet of Things, at its simplest level, is smart devices - from refrigerators that warn you when you’re out of milk to industrial sensors – that are connected to the Internet so they can share data, but IoT is far from a simple challenge for IT departments.For many companies, it represents a vast influx of new devices, many of which are difficult to secure and manage. It’s comparable to the advent of BYOD, except the new gizmos are potentially more difficult to secure, aren’t all running one of three or four basic operating systems, and there are already more of them.A lot more, in fact – IDC research says that there are around 13 billion connected devices in use worldwide already, and that that number could expand to 30 billion within the next three years. (There were less than 4 billion smartphone subscriptions active around the world in Ericsson’s most recent Mobility Report.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is IoT?

The Internet of Things, at its simplest level, is smart devices - from refrigerators that warn you when you’re out of milk to industrial sensors – that are connected to the Internet so they can share data, but IoT is far from a simple challenge for IT departments.For many companies, it represents a vast influx of new devices, many of which are difficult to secure and manage. It’s comparable to the advent of BYOD, except the new gizmos are potentially more difficult to secure, aren’t all running one of three or four basic operating systems, and there are already more of them.A lot more, in fact – IDC research says that there are around 13 billion connected devices in use worldwide already, and that that number could expand to 30 billion within the next three years. (There were less than 4 billion smartphone subscriptions active around the world in Ericsson’s most recent Mobility Report.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is IoT?

The Internet of Things, at its simplest level, is smart devices - from refrigerators that warn you when you’re out of milk to industrial sensors – that are connected to the Internet so they can share data, but IoT is far from a simple challenge for IT departments.For many companies, it represents a vast influx of new devices, many of which are difficult to secure and manage. It’s comparable to the advent of BYOD, except the new gizmos are potentially more difficult to secure, aren’t all running one of three or four basic operating systems, and there are already more of them.A lot more, in fact – IDC research says that there are around 13 billion connected devices in use worldwide already, and that that number could expand to 30 billion within the next three years. (There were less than 4 billion smartphone subscriptions active around the world in Ericsson’s most recent Mobility Report.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The System Bottleneck Shifts To PCI-Express

No matter what, system architects are always going to have to contend with one – and possibly more – bottlenecks when they design the machines that store and crunch the data that makes the world go around. These days, there is plenty of compute at their disposal, a reasonable amount of main memory to hang off of it, and both Ethernet and InfiniBand are on the cusp of 200 Gb/sec of performance and not too far away from 400 Gb/sec and even higher bandwidths.

Now, it looks like the peripheral bus based on the PCI-Express protocol is becoming the bottleneck, …

The System Bottleneck Shifts To PCI-Express was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: How to plan your successful cloud migration

Recent Accenture Strategy research found that four out of five companies run up to half of their business functions in the cloud. Moreover, that figure is likely to increase significantly over the next few years. The research reveals that a clear majority of business leaders see the cloud platform as a critical enabler of greater innovation and competitive edge.Yet, companies still struggle when it comes to structuring the cloud transformation, beginning with the fundamental first step — planning a successful migration. What’s lacking is a solid comprehension of what value the cloud brings, its potential and its elasticity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 14th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

 

We've seen algorithms expressed in seeds. Here's an algorithm for taking birth control pills expressed as packaging. Awesome history on 99% Invisible.

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

 

  • 2 trillion: web requests served daily by Akamai; 9 billion: farthest star ever seen in light-years; 10^31: bacteriophages on earth; 7: peers needed to repair ransomware damage; $30,000: threshold of when to leave AWS; $300K-$400K: beginning cost of running Azure Stack on HPE ProLiant; 3.5M: files in the Microsoft's git repository; 300M: Google's internal image data training set size; 7.2 Mbps: global average connection speed; 85 million: Amazon Prime members; 35%: Germany generated its electricity from renewables;

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Jessica Flack: I believe that science sits at the intersection of these three things — the data, the discussions and the math. It is that triangulation — that’s what science is. And true understanding, if there is such a thing, comes only when we can do the translation between these three ways of representing the world.
    • gonchs: “If your whole business relies on us [Medium], you might Continue reading

Worth Reading: Implementing security as a set of services

In this post, I will focus on the implementation of the security services in terms of an ITIL-type framework. This is a blog post that took a long time to write — but some of the considerations here are essential if you are in the process of implementing security as a service, and especially if you are looking at ITIL as a service delivery methodology. —APNIC

The post Worth Reading: Implementing security as a set of services appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Technology Requirements for Deep and Machine Learning

Having been at the forefront of machine learning since the 1980s when I was a staff scientist in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos performing basic research on machine learning (and later applying it in many areas including co-founding a machine-learning  based drug discovery company), I was lucky enough to participate in the creation and subsequently to observe first-hand the process by which the field of machine-learning grew to become a ‘bandwagon’ that eventually imploded due to misconceptions about the technology and what it could accomplish.

Fueled by across-the-board technology advances including algorithmic developments, machine learning has again become a …

Technology Requirements for Deep and Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

1 … 2,061 2,062 2,063 2,064 2,065 … 3,921