Hot Storage Skills For The Modern Data Center
Find out what skills storage administrators will need as SSDs, object storage and other trends gain traction.
Response: BGP in 2016 – Geoff Huston
Geoff Huston taking a withering look at the crapness of BGP in the Internet. As always, its quite crap excluding the fact that it actually works (more or less).
It has become either a tradition, or a habit, each January for me to report on the experience with the inter-domain routing system over the past year, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.
The long predicted apocalypse in the Internet routing table hasn’t come to pass so the those 15-year old Catayst 6500 switches will still be used in the Internet backbone for many years to come. Oh, yay.
None of the metrics indicate that we are seeing such an explosive level of growth in the routing system that it will fundamentally alter the viability of carrying a full BGP routing table anytime soon. In terms of the projections of table size in the IPv4 and IPv6 networks, the BGP sky is firmly well above us, and it’s not about to fall on our heads just yet!
Tap DANZing for Visible Cloud Networking
Networking is running blind. It is akin to driving a car in the fog at night without street lights, signs or a navigation system. Simply put, it’s a scary visibility problem, and it impacts the security and availability of the network. When coupled with massive shifts to virtualization, containerization, cloud-native applications and unstructured data, the...Continue reading »
Managing Network Services Configuration with Ansible
In the last few weeks I’ve seen numerous questions along the lines of “how do I manage VLANs on my switch with Ansible”. You can look at this question from two perspectives: the low-level details (which modules do I use, how do I push commands to the box…) or the high-level challenges (how do I make sure actual device state matches desired device state). Obviously I’m interested in the latter.
All of Ethan’s Podcasts & Articles for January 2017
Packet Pushers Community Blog
Packet Pushers News
Packet Pushers Weekly Podcast
- Episode 322: Can We Put An End To Stupid Network Tricks?
- Episode 323: Making The Most Of Wireshark
- Episode 324: An Introduction To Docker Networking
Datanauts Podcast
- Episode 66 – The Harsh Realities Of Scaling Out
- Episode 67 – All About Containers As A Service
- Episode 68 – System Management With Redfish
Citizens of Tech Podcast
- Episode 58 – When can you call yourself a cyborg?
- Episode 59 – Booze makes you think you’re starving.
- Episode 60 – Stealing fingerprints from photos.
- Episode 61 – Lake Michgan’s underwater Stonehenge.
Video
NetIntro Book
- I’m contributing to a book along with Jeremy Filliben and Russ White explaining fundamental networking problems and their solutions. In January, I began work on a chapter on QoS.
Newsletters
EthanCBanks.com
Radware Acquires Security Company Seculert
Seculert takes Radware behind just the front lines of the data center.
The Linux Migration: Final Linux Distro Selection
In my Linux migration initial progress report, I provided an early assessment of the Linux distribution that I thought I would use moving forward. At that time, I had selected Ubuntu. Since that time, though, I’ve pivoted a bit and selected a different Linux distribution as the operating system (OS) for my primary laptop moving forward. In this post, I’d like to describe why I selected Fedora.
My original reasons for selecting Ubuntu 16.04 were as follows:
- Hardware support
- Performance
- Leading but not bleeding edge
- User interface
These are all valid reasons, but as I continued to compare Ubuntu against Fedora 25 I realized that some of these factors weren’t as critical as I’d originally thought:
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Hardware support: I initially targeted Ubuntu because it runs really well on Apple hardware. Fedora, on the other hand, doesn’t run quite as well on Apple hardware. Since I’m coming from the OS X world, I initially placed some emphasis on support for Apple hardware. The reality is, though, that I need a Linux distribution that does a great job of supporting my new work laptop, not one of my leftover Mac laptops. My experience with Fedora 25 on the Dell E7370 Continue reading
Juniper Helps Enterprises Unite All Their Clouds
Network Director helps bring it all together.
Anuta Networks NCX: Overcoming Skepticism
Anuta Networks demonstrated their NCX network/service orchestration product at Network Field Day 14.
Disclaimer
Anuta Networks page at TechFieldDay.com with videos of their presentations
Anuta's promise with NCX is to provide a vendor and platform agnostic network provisioning tool with a slick user interface and powerful management / provisioning features.
I was skeptical, especially after seeing the impossibly long list of supported platforms.
Impossible!
Network device configurations are complicated! They've got endless features, each of which is tied to others the others in unpredictable ways. Sure, seasoned network ops folks have no problem hopping around a text configuration to discover the ways in which ACLs, prefix lists, route maps, class maps, service policies, interfaces, and whatnot relate to one another... But capturing these complicated relationships in a GUI? In a vendor independent way?
I left the presentation with an entirely different perspective, and a desire to try it out on a network I manage. Seriously, I have a use case for this thing. Here's why I was wrong:
Not a general purpose UI
Okay, so it's a provisioning system, not a general purpose UI. Setup is likely nontrivial because it requires you to consider the types of services Continue reading
5 Common tech hiring mistakes to avoid
This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editors
Finding the right hire for IT can be a chore, and if you get it wrong, the consequences can be substantial. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a bad hire costs at least 30% of the initial annual salary, but that number is believed to be much higher. It’s a mistake that companies simply can’t afford to make in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace.
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