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Creating a Network Community for the Network’s New Operational Models

The way in which networks are configured, deployed, and managed is changing. The network industry is in a shift from managing devices box by box via the CLI to having more centralized ways to manage and deploy devices. While the CLI isn’t going away anytime soon, we can look at the two operational models that are gaining traction within the network community.

SDN Controllers

SDN controllers do two major things that increase operational efficiencies. They offer a central point of management and visibility for the network team, but also offer a single point of integration for 3rd party systems – these systems could be anything from cloud management platform, monitoring or automation systems, to native business applications. Note: even when there are controllers being used by a human, there is risk. There is the risk of clicking the wrong button, forgetting the order of operations of which buttons needs to be clicked, etc. This doesn’t go away. Change control windows still have risk.

DevOps for Networking

We’ve also seen an increased amount of focus on the intersection of DevOps and networking. I’m really referring to DevOps automation tools and the network. For example, Puppet announced $40M in funding in June Continue reading

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Agile development: Adopt gradually or dive in?

When the Agile Manifesto was introduced almost 15 years ago, it proposed a radical methodology change as an alternative to traditional project management. With agile, project requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration in development cycles that break tasks into small increments. While this methodology helps businesses manage unpredictability, it also requires those businesses to adopt a different mindset in order to be successful.

Agile is designed to drive collaboration, transparency, and quality within product and software development lifecycles, but it isn’t always the right answer for every organization. In fact, the signers of the Manifesto will tell you that, while there is value in examining what agile is, there is just as much value in examining what it is not.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Debunking SSD Myths

 By now everyone is aware of the performance leap offered by solid-state drives (SSDs) compared to hard disk drives (HDDs), but some SSD myths persist. It’s time to separate fact from fiction.

Myth 1: SSDs are prohibitively expensive

An SSD can cost more than its HDD equivalent when you look simply at the price tag for a given capacity. However, cost savings can be seen when you look at the amount of real-world performance each of your dollars buys. For example, one SSD can do the work of about 40 HDDs, but that SSD doesn’t cost 40 times as much. In fact, an SSD costs less when you consider the work it accomplishes.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Data center, cloud, SDN driving Ethernet switch market to $25B

The Layer 2-3 Ethernet switch market is expected to exceed $25 billion in 2019, a compounded annual growth of over 2% from 2014, according to Dell’Oro Group.Data center switching will drive most of the growth in the market.  Data center switching growth will be driven exclusively by the cloud, with the enterprise market declining slowly, towards the end of the decade, Dell’Oro expects. MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Will enhanced servers do away with the need for switches?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Viptela brings Software-Defined WANs to the enterprise

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  In April 2014, Zeus Kerravala wrote in Network World that the software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is now a business imperative. He cites several reasons why the time is right for companies to reconsider their WAN architecture.First of all, cloud and mobile computing, as well as applications such as video and voice over the network, are creating vastly different traffic patterns than the old style of client/server computing. Next, business agility is the enterprise mantra today, but traditional WAN architectures are too inflexible to enable the much-needed application agility. And last but not least, the complexity of the WAN makes it increasingly difficult to make even small changes in a reasonable timeframe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Poster: How To Make a Single Pane of Glass

A Poster for your desk on building a "single pane of glass" network management system.

The post Poster: How To Make a Single Pane of Glass appeared first on EtherealMind.

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The first place to tackle SDN? In the WAN

Disruptive innovation in infrastructure is on the rise, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Software Defined Networking movement. But while much of the SDN discussion has focused on the data center, the better initial use case might be in the wide area network. One advocate of that approach is Michael Elmore, IT Senior Director of the Enterprise Network Engineering Infrastructure Group at Cigna, a global health service company headquartered in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Michael is also on the board of Open Network Users Group (ONUG). Network World Editor in Chief John Dix asked Elmore to participate in an email-based Q&A to explore the promise of Software Defined WANS. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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OpenGear at Interop – Introducing the CM7100

During my all too brief visit to Interop in New York last year, I did a quick tour of the expo hall to see if there were any interesting products around. I followed Greg Ferro’s suggestion which, to paraphrase, is to seek out the booths around the edge of the show in preference to the huge booths in the middle of the floor, because the small booths around the outside are more likely to be the startups with interesting products.

Towards the end of my “small booth” tour, I bumped into some familiar faces at the Opengear booth. I first heard of OpenGear at Networking Field Day 4 where they impressed me with the flexibility of their console server products, though to call the products “console servers” rather understates some of the product capabilities which can include RPS control, TTL I/O, GPS and 3G cellular capabilities. If you haven’t seen these products before I would encourage you to look at some of my other posts about OpenGear.

OpenGear CM7100

New for OpenGear at Interop was their CM7100 Console Server.

There’s not a lot going on on the front panel of the device, but as you’d probably expect, the back panel Continue reading

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A Deeper Look at Cisco’s SDN Certifications

It’s time to look in depth at one of the SDN certs in the market: Cisco’s Network Programmability certs. I’ve written about the emerging SDN certifications before, and will continue to update those certs as news appears. However, I’ve not yet blogged to any depth about any one certification here at SDNSkills.com. This post begins a new series that does exactly that with a deeper dive into one branch of SDN certifications: those currently offered by Cisco Systems.

Series Intro

The plan for this series is as follows: Work through some details about at least half of the 8 Cisco exams related to SDN (billed as network programmability by Cisco). I think half of them should be enough to get a sense for the whole, even if I don’t look at every single one of the eight exams. For each exam, I’ll look at the associated courses, the exam topics, take the exams, and write a summary of impressions. I’ll probably weave in and out of this topic over the coming months, hitting the first exam here in January.

 

SDN Market and Certifications Perspective

Some of you might already be thinking: Cisco and SDN? Isn’t SDN what Continue reading

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Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015

In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space.

Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Python

This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the topics that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.

I am going to separate this workshop into three main parts. I’m going to start with some of the basics, and move up in “difficulty” from there.

1. YAML and Jinja2 - These are text-based specifications that allows tools like Ansible to do what they need to do. I will be making the assumption that attendees have little to no experience with either of these things, so I will spend some time exploring how these work. There’s not enough time in the workshop to be totally exhaustive, so I will only be covering the portions of either specification that are totally relevant for use with Ansible.

2. Ansible - These Continue reading

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Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015

In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space.

Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Schprokits

This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the two tools that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.

I am going to separate this workshop into three main parts:

1. YAML and Jinja2 – These are text-based specifications that allow Ansible and Schprokits to do what they need to do. I will be making the assumption that attendees have little to no experience with either of these things, so I will spend some time exploring how these work. There’s not enough time in the workshop to be totally exhaustive, so I will only be covering the portions of either specification that are totally relevant for use with Ansible and Schprokits.
2. Ansible – These days, it’s hard to talk about automation generally without Ansible being Continue reading

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News Analysis: Brocade Vyatta Controller Gets a Developer Wiki

A little bird pointed out this link to me, a wiki for the developer community for the Brocade Vyatta Controller (BVC). The big idea is to help foster community for folks building SDN applications for the BVC. What do I mean by “SDN applications”? I mean an application that does something interesting, and interacts with […]

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Configure a Highly-Available IPSec VPN tunnel on IOS

It is possible to configure Highly-Available IPSec VPN tunnel on IOS so that the SA information is replicated between the routers. This ensures that a potential failover will be transparent to users and it will not require adjustments or reconfiguration of any remote peers.

There are two protocols used to deploy this feature, HSRP and Stateful Switchover (SSO). HSRP is one of the First Hop Redundancy Protocols that provide network redundancy for IP networks, ensuring that user traffic immediately and transparently recovers from failures in network edge devices. The protocol monitors the interfaces so that if either interface goes down, the whole router is deemed to be down and the ownership of IKE and IPSec SAs is passed to the standby router (which now transitions to the HSRP active state). SSO allows the active and standby routers to share IKE and IPSec state information so both routers have enough information to become the active router at any time.

Before we take a look at the configuration, let’s have few words about our topology. The internal network (VLAN 146 below) configuration is outside the scope of this post, but it would be normally configured with a separate HSRP instance, tracking not Continue reading

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A Deeper Look at Cisco’s SDN Certifications

It’s time to look in depth at one of the SDN certs in the market: Cisco’s Network Programmability certs. I’ve written about the emerging SDN certifications before, and will continue to update those certs as news appears. However, I’ve not yet blogged to any depth about any one certification here at SDNSkills.com. This post begins a new series that does exactly that with a deeper dive into one branch of SDN certifications: those currently offered by Cisco Systems.

Series Intro

The plan for this series is as follows: Work through some details about at least half of the 8 Cisco exams related to SDN (billed as network programmability by Cisco). I think half of them should be enough to get a sense for the whole, even if I don’t look at every single one of the eight exams. For each exam, I’ll look at the associated courses, the exam topics, take the exams, and write a summary of impressions. I’ll probably weave in and out of this topic over the coming months, hitting the first exam here in January.

 

SDN Market and Certifications Perspective

Some of you might already be thinking: Cisco and SDN? Isn’t SDN what Continue reading

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Cisco Wireless Transmit Power Control

I’m going to start out by telling you something you probably already know. Every vendor has their own way of doing things. Sometimes it makes perfect sense, and other times you end up scratching your head wondering why that particular vendor implemented this feature or product. Since I have been spending a lot more time on wireless these days, I came across an issue that forced me to reconsider how transmit power control(TPC) actually works in a Cisco wireless deployment. I thought I would impart some of this information to you, dear reader, in the hopes that it may help you. If you spend a lot of time inside Cisco wireless LAN controllers, this may not be anything new to you.

The Need For TPC

If you have been around wireless long enough, you have probably dealt with wireless installs where all of the access points(AP) were functioning autonomously. While this isn’t a big deal in smaller environments, consider how much design work goes into a network with autonomous access points that number into the hundreds. It isn’t as simple as just deciding on channels and spinning all the access Continue reading

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Updated Big Switch Labs

Just a quick note to say that Big Switch have updated their demo lab system. This is an entirely virtual lab environment that simulates a Big Switch network. You can try out both Big Cloud Fabric and Big Tap Monitoring Fabric.

The lab gives you full CLI & GUI access to a sandboxed environment, with controllers, leaf/spine switches, and endpoints. Big Switch have written a sample lab you can work through, to show off the features, but you’re not limited there. You’re free to try out whatever features you like.

If you’re interested in what they’re doing, I recommend signing up.

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Needs more Hitler

Godwin's law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons with Nazis. The law would not apply to mainstays of Nazi Germany such as genocide, eugenics, racial superiority, or to a discussion of other totalitarian regimes, if that was the explicit topic of conversation, because a Nazi comparison in those circumstances may be appropriate.

Last week, I wrote a piece about how President Obama's proposed cyber laws were creating a Cyber Police State. The explicit topic of my conversation is totalitarian regimes.

This week, during the State of the Union address, I compared the text of Mein Kampf to the text of President Obama's speech. Specifically, Mein Kampf said this:

The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.

Obama's speech in support of his cyber legislation says this:

No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets, or Continue reading

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Tech Talks: Load Sharing and Entropy Labels in MPLS Networks

Load sharing in MPLS networks is always an interesting topic, and we couldn’t possibly avoid it during our MPLS-focused Tech Talks – watch the video.

After discussing the load sharing intricacies we briefly dabbled with the concept of entropy labels.

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Docker Networking 101 – Host mode

In our last post we covered what docker does with container networking in a default configuration.  In this post, I’d like to start covering the remaining non-default network configuration modes.  There are really 4 docker ‘provided’ network modes in which you can run containers…

Bridge mode – This is the default, we saw how this worked in the last post with the containers being attached to the docker0 bridge.

Host mode – The docker documentation claims that this mode does ‘not containerize the containers networking!’.  That being said, what this really does is just put the container in the hosts network stack.  That is, all of the network interfaces defined on the host will be accessible to the container.  This one is sort of interesting and has some caveats but we’ll talk about those in greater detail below.

Mapped Container mode – This mode essentially maps a new container into an existing containers network stack.  This means that while other resources (processes, filesystem, etc) will be kept separate, the network resources such as port mappings and IP addresses of the first container will be shared by the second container.

None – This one Continue reading

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PQ Show 43 – HP Networking – Beyond Traditional Network Management

This is the last in a series of podcasts sponsored by HP, all recorded at HP’s Discover conference in Barcelona, Spain in early December 2014. The series is made up of interviews and technical discussions with HP engineers and lab geeks about products in HP’s networking portfolio. Ken Gott, Product Line Manager, joins Chris Young, Senior Solutions […]

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The post PQ Show 43 – HP Networking – Beyond Traditional Network Management appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.