Gartner: Get onboard the algorithm train!

ORLANDO -- Algorithms are hot and will be a major driver in the future of IT and business. That was the driving thought from the opening keynote session at this week’s Gartner Symposium/IT Expo.In five years 1 million new devices will come online every hour and these devices will create billions of new relationships. These relationships are not driven solely by data but algorithms, said Peter Sondergaard senior vice president of research withGartner.+More on Network World: Gartner: Top 10 Technology Trends for 2015 IT can’t ignore+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network Design Best Practices – Simplicity

Network Design should be simple.Simplicity is the first of the network design best practices which I want you to remember. If you are in the field for enough time, you probably heard the KISS principle. If you are a good follower of my blog , you maybe heard SUCK principle as well. KISS stands for… Read More »

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Your Load Generator is Probably Lying to You – Take the Red Pill and Find Out Why

Pretty much all your load generation and monitoring tools do not work correctly. Those charts you thought were full of relevant information about how your system is performing are really just telling you a lie. Your sensory inputs are being jammed. 

To find out how listen to the Morpheous of performance monitoring Gil Tene, CTO and co-founder at Azul Systems, makers of truly high performance JVMs, in a mesmerizing talk on How NOT to Measure Latency.

This talk is about removing the wool from your eyes. It's the red pill option for what you thought you were testing with load generators.

Some highlights:

  • If you want to hide the truth from someone show them a chart of all normal traffic with one just one bad spike surging into 95 percentile territory. 

  • The number one indicator you should never get rid of is the maximum value. That’s not noise, it’s the signal, the rest is noise.

  • 99% of users experience ~99.995%’ile response times, so why are you even looking at 95%'ile numbers?

  • Monitoring tools routinely drop important samples in the result set, leading you to draw really bad conclusions about the quality of the performance of Continue reading

Cisco ups investment in PHY supplier

Cisco Systems has made another investment in a chip supplier it’s been funding since 2005.Cisco Investments contributed to Aquantia’s $37 million Series H funding, joining new investors Credit Suisse’s Direct Equity Partners, Global Foundries, and Walden Riverwood. Aquantia, which employs 160 people, has raised a total of $199 million since its first round of funding in 2005.Cisco has participated in each round, Aquantia says.Aquantia make PHY chips for copper-based 10GBASE-T and multigigabit 2.5G/5G Ethernet networks for enterprise, data center and mobile applications. Cisco is the leading vendor in these markets, and in Ethernet networking overall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Memorize — or Think?

I have several friends with either photographic, or near photographic, memories. For instance, I work with someone (on the philosophical side of my life) who is just astounding in this respect. If you walk into his office and ask about some concept you’ve just run across, no matter how esoteric, he can give you a rundown of every major book in the field covering the topic, important articles from several journals, and even book chapters that are germane and important. I’ve actually had him point me to the text of a footnote when I asked about a specific concept.

It seems, to me, that the networking industry often focuses on this sort of thing. Quick, can you name the types of line cards available for the Plutobarb CNX1000, how many of each you can put in the chassis, what the backplane speed is, and what the command is to configure OSPF type 3 filters on Tuesdays between three and four o’clock? When we hit this sort of question, and can’t answer it, people look at us like we’re silly or something.

Right?

I know, because I’ve been there. I’ve had people ask me the strangest questions in interviews, such as Continue reading

Beyond SDN, Now What?

When we started Plexxi almost 5 years ago, SDN was about to become a “thing.” The topic of advancing networking soon went from obscure to being coined with a name to the full fledge hay day of acquisition euphoria and main stream press. It’s fair to say we have followed the proverbial hype curve quite predictably, and some might say we are now well into the trough of disillusionment. Which leaves some asking, now what?

I’m probably not the only one that feels that we, as an industry, should have moved past the point of showing up at a conference with a “What is SDN” slide. That is, once we move beyond trying to define SDN, we see that perhaps that is the least important thing to do.

Instead of trying to define SDN, I like to try to understand why we’re even discussing it. To me, this entire journey we’ve been on has always been an indication of user discontent. By user, I don’t just mean network engineers and operators, but also the constituents that rely on the network (like the other IT stack components and their respective operators/owners), and ultimately the users that rely on the applications Continue reading

Some Thoughts on the Open Internet

I’m sure we’ve all heard about "the Open Internet." The expression builds upon a rich pedigree of term "open" in various contexts. We seem to have developed this connotation that "open" is some positive attribute, and when we use the expression of the "Open Internet" it seems that we are lauding it in some way. But in what way? So let’s ask the question: What does the "Open Internet" mean?

Automation Testing: Tools and Concepts

One of the key tenets of DevOps is automation, or more specifically, “Infrastructure as Code.” That means your system configuration is expressed as a series of scripts that can be executed by your configuration management software, repeatedly, across multiple machines.

Treating infrastructure as code has many benefits, including the abilities to control when and how changes are applied, to apply changes quickly and to manage your changes with version control. Most importantly, because it’s code, you can test it.

If you’ve been maintaining computer systems for any amount of time, you’ve probably accidentally broken something important when you were making a configuration change; either the change didn’t work as you expected or you typed the wrong command. What if you had been able to write your changes ahead of time and test them before you applied them to production? Infrastructure as Code enables you to do just that.

Software developers have been testing their code for a long time, and we can leverage their experience and knowledge and apply it to Infrastructure as Code. So, just as there are a series of testing tools available for software engineers, automation engineers can also draw from a collection of tools and build themselves a complete end-to-end Continue reading

HP goes after Cisco, Arista with open source OS

HP is spearheading multivendor development of an open source network operating system for data centers in an effort to address scale, dynamic operation and vendor independence.HP is banding together with three other hardware companies and a hypervisor vendor to launch the OpenSwitch Community, which will seek community-like participation in the development of a Linux-based OpenSwitch NOS. The other participants are Intel, Broadcom, Accton and VMware.Though the community lacks a pure operating system vendor, HP says it has plenty of OS and NOS expertise to lend OpenSwitch credibility in that regard. VMware also provides software-based network virtualization and control experience through its NSX product line and developers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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