PlexxiPulse—Facebook’s New Network

The internet has been buzzing about Facebook’s redesigned datacenter architecture. Facebook, which is used by more than 1.35 billion people, recently restructured their infrastructure to increase flexibility and agility to rapidly adjust to application requirements. Our own Marten Terpstra shared his take on the redesigned infrastructure this week on the Plexxi blog—it’s definitely worth a read. Below we share some of the articles that covered Facebook’s new datacenter architecture, as well as other happenings in the networking space this week.

In this week’s PlexxiTube of the week, Dan Backman explains how much fiber is required to connect datacenters using Plexxi’s datacenter transport fabric solution.

Gigaom: Facebook Redesigned the Data Center Network: 3 Reasons It Matters
By Derrick Harris
Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new data center networking architecture that it calls, fittingly, “data center fabric.” The company explained the design and the rationale in an engineering blog post, and Gigaom’s Jonathan Vanian covered the news, but it’s a big enough deal that we had Facebook Director of Network Engineering Najam Ahmad on the Structure Show podcast this week to talk about the new fabric in more detail.

CIO: How (and Why) Facebook Excels at Data Center Continue reading

Friday News Analysis: D-Link for Business Adds New Wireless Controller

D-Link Expands its Unified Wireless Portfolio with New Wireless Controller Supporting up to 256 Access Points D-Link today announced the Unified Wireless Controller (DWC-2000), a new centralized Wireless LAN manager designed specifically for education, hospitality and medium-to-large enterprises. The DWC-2000 can support up to 256 access points per controller, and up to 1,024 […]

Imposing Artificial Limitations to Develop Skills

I'm a big fan of imposing artificial limitations on yourself in order to aid skill development. Here are some quick ideas:

  • When troubleshooting network devices from the CLI, try not to look at the configuration. Use only "show" or "debug" commands instead. I found this enormously beneficial when practicing for CCIE.
  • When troubleshooting larger operational issues or learning a new environment, try not to log into individual devices at all. Force yourself to use only your network management system, NetFlow, packet captures, or host-based tools like ping, traceroute, or nmap.
  • When learning automation or orchestration skills, force yourself to write scripts, run API calls, or use your favorite orchestration tool to do simple things, even if it doesn't seem like they merit the extra effort.

Imposing Artificial Limitations to Develop Skills

I'm a big fan of imposing artificial limitations on yourself in order to aid skill development. Here are some quick ideas:

  • When troubleshooting network devices from the CLI, try not to look at the configuration. Use only "show" or "debug" commands instead. I found this enormously beneficial when practicing for CCIE.
  • When troubleshooting larger operational issues or learning a new environment, try not to log into individual devices at all. Force yourself to use only your network management system, NetFlow, packet captures, or host-based tools like ping, traceroute, or nmap.
  • When learning automation or orchestration skills, force yourself to write scripts, run API calls, or use your favorite orchestration tool to do simple things, even if it doesn't seem like they merit the extra effort.

iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 12/05/2014

Please Join us in congratulating the following iPexpert clients who have passed their CCIE lab!

  • Mathew Varghese, CCIE #45557 (Collaboration)
  • Nick Thompson , CCIE #45731 (Collaboration)

We Want to Hear From You!

Have you passed your CCIE lab exam and used any of iPexpert’s or Proctor Labs self-study products, or attended a CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!

Hotel California Effects of Public Clouds

In his The Case for Hybrids blog post Mat Mathews described the Hotel California effect of public clouds as: “One of the most oft mentioned issues with public cloud is the difficulty in getting out.” Once you start relying on cloud provider APIs to provide DNS, load balancing, CDN, content hosting, security groups, and a plethora of other services, it’s impossible to get out.

Interestingly, the side effects of public cloud deployments extend into the realm of application programming, as I was surprised to find out during one of my Expert Express engagements.

Read more ...

The Attributes of a Great Network Device API

What makes a good API? A device providing an API is only the start of the story; if its unusable, or unreliable its useless. This post is a response to one of a couple of points I made about Kirk Byers’ recent post on Arista’s API and the comments that followed. Much respect to (and admiration for) Arista […]

Author information

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 15 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books and is a regular contributor at DevCentral.

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The post The Attributes of a Great Network Device API appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

Guests Needed for Design + Build 2015 Podcasts

Updated 12-January-2015 to include survey form. I’m working on a series of “design and build” podcasts in 2015 for Packet Pushers. The idea is to take a network protocol, project, business challenge, reference architecture, etc. and talk through the why and how. Are you willing to be a guest to share your real-world experience? I’d […]

Author information

Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 3M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Guests Needed for Design + Build 2015 Podcasts appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Ansible Chicago Meetup Recap

If you don't follow Ansible's VP of Community, Greg DeKoenigsberg, on Twitter you may have missed his recap of the Ansible Chicago Meetup.

Dean Strelau and Rick Pollak of Trunk Club invited us to host our inaugural Ansible Chicago meetup at their headquarters in downtown Chicago.  This is often how it happens: a company that uses Ansible volunteers to host a meetup, and gets the benefit of being seen as a technology leader in their community; we get to show the local community how a prominent user puts Ansible to best use. Everybody wins! We’ve done similar meetups in New York, San Francisco, London, and many other cities.  

Trunk Club, though, was one of the most fascinating yet. For those who aren’t familiar with the business model,check out their site for a detailed description. The short version: they talk to you about what you like, they use business intelligence to help their stylists pick out the best clothes for you, and then they send you a trunk full of clothes they think you’ll like. And then you keep what you like, send back what you don’t, and they charge you appropriately.  Great model, Continue reading

Using Cisco VIRL for CCIE Preparation

Click here to download the INE VIRL topology and initial configs

After long anticipation, Cisco’s Virtual Internet Routing Lab (VIRL) is now publicly available. VIRL is a network design and simulation environment that includes a GNS3-like frontend GUI to visually build network topologies, and an OpenStack based backend which includes IOSv, IOS XRv, NX-OSv, & CSR1000v software images that run on the built-in hypervisor. In this post I’m going to outline how you can use VIRL to prepare for the CCIE Routing & Switching Version 5.0 Lab Exam in conjunction with INE’s CCIE RSv5 Advanced Technologies Labs.

The first step of course is to get a copy of VIRL. VIRL is currently available for purchase from virl.cisco.com in two forms, a “Personal Edition” for a $200 annual license, and an “Academic Version” for an $80 annual license. Functionally these two versions are the same. Next is to install VIRL on a hypervisor of your choosing, such as VMWare ESXi, Fusion, or Player. Make sure to follow the installation guides in the VIRL documentation, because the install is not a very straightforward process. When installing it on VMWare Player I ran into a problem with the NTPd Continue reading

Automating SAN Zoning with Schprokits

I’m always on the lookout for ways to simplify the configuration of integrated systems through automation. I also currently work for a systems integrator, and I take any opportunity I can get to automate a process, a la “assembly line”, creating a consistent, predictable outcome.

One particular task that both integrators and customers alike are having to do manually is the act of Fibre Channel Zoning. For those that aren’t familiar, Fibre Channel doesn’t work in the same way that Ethernet does (i.e. Flood and Learn). In order to get two nodes to communicate over a SAN fabric, a configuration must be put into place to allow them to talk – roughly equivalent to a Layer 2 ACL. Each server’s HBA must be given permission to access a storage target on the fabric, which means that any time compute power is added or removed, this configuration needs to be revisited. This is a prime candidate for automation.

This article will show how I am using Schprokits to simplify zoning configuration. I am tightly adhering to the idea that this kind of information should be pulled directly from live infrastructure (in this example, I’m using Cisco UCS), not a (usually) stagnant spreadsheet, or Continue reading

Show 215 – SDN Training & Certifications with Wendell Odom

Software defined networking (SDN) has arrived in the form of vendor released products. If you follow this show, you know that these products are largely incompatible. Certainly there’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to SDN technologies today. In SDN’s awkward tween years, what are network engineers trying to stay current to do? […]

Author information

Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Show 215 – SDN Training & Certifications with Wendell Odom appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Automating SAN Zoning with Schprokits

Since this post was written, the company behind Schprokits has unfortunately gone out of business. Though this approach is no longer something that you can read and follow along with, I have left this post active as an academic exercise in network automation. I hope it is useful in some way. I recorded an in-depth explanation of the process (~42 mins), and it can be found here, as well as at the end of this post.

Automating SAN Zoning with Schprokits

Since this post was written, the company behind Schprokits has unfortunately gone out of business. Though this approach is no longer something that you can read and follow along with, I have left this post active as an academic exercise in network automation. I hope it is useful in some way. I recorded an in-depth explanation of the process (~42 mins), and it can be found here, as well as at the end of this post.

Lima, Peru: CloudFlare’s 29th data center

Just when you thought we’d reached the end, CloudFlare’s Latin America data center expansion continues. Hot on the heels of our recent expansion into Santiago, São Paulo, and Medellin, this holiday season commences in Lima with our 29th data center globally, and our fourth in Latin America.

Latin America is the fastest growing source of traffic to CloudFlare's network, with nearly 10x growth in just the last twelve months. Our new data center in Lima reduces the latency to access any site using CloudFlare, increases web performance for users in the region from Iquitos to Tacna, and adds another point of redundancy. It also increases the capacity and surface area of the CloudFlare network to absorb massive cyber attacks. This is of particular benefit to CloudFlare customers the Presidency of Peru and the ONPE, Peru’s National Election Office. In the lead up to the Peruvian elections this month, CloudFlare partnered with the Government of Peru to ensure that local elections go off without a hitch — no easy feat when voter turnout is expected to reach nearly 90%. Whether you are running a site, mobile app, or national election we have an offering for you.

Coming Continue reading

A tale of two perspectives: IT Operations with NSX

This year I had the honor and privilege to co-present a session at VMworld 2014 with my esteemed colleague Scott Lowe. As many of you know, Scott is a celebrity at VMworld and one of the most famous virtualization bloggers and the author of many best selling books on VMware vSphere.

In this session Scott and I pretended to be colleagues at a company that decided to deploy VMware NSX for their software-defined data center. I played the role of the “Network Guy”, and of course Scott played the role of the “Server Guy”. So then, how do we work together in this environment?

  • How do we gain operational visibility into our respective disciplines using existing tools?
  • How do we preserve existing roles and responsibilities?
  • What opportunities exist to converge operational data for cross-functional troubleshooting?
  • How does the Network team gain hop-by-hop visibility across virtual and physical switches?
  • How can the Network and Server teams work together to troubleshoot issues?

These are just some of the questions we attempt to role play and answer in this 35 min session:

***Update: this VMworld session video was removed from YouTube by VMware and is no longer available.***

A tale of two perspectives: IT Operations with NSX

This year I had the honor and privilege to co-present a session at VMworld 2014 with my esteemed colleague Scott Lowe. As many of you know, Scott is a celebrity at VMworld and one of the most famous virtualization bloggers and the author of many best selling books on VMware vSphere.

In this session Scott and I pretended to be colleagues at a company that decided to deploy VMware NSX for their software-defined data center. I played the role of the “Network Guy”, and of course Scott played the role of the “Server Guy”. So then, how do we work together in this environment?

  • How do we gain operational visibility into our respective disciplines using existing tools?
  • How do we preserve existing roles and responsibilities?
  • What opportunities exist to converge operational data for cross-functional troubleshooting?
  • How does the Network team gain hop-by-hop visibility across virtual and physical switches?
  • How can the Network and Server teams work together to troubleshoot issues?

These are just some of the questions we attempt to role play and answer in this 35 min session:

***Update: this VMworld session video was removed from YouTube by VMware and is no longer available.***

A tale of two perspectives: IT Operations with NSX

This year I had the honor and privilege to co-present a session at VMworld 2014 with my esteemed colleague Scott Lowe. As many of you know, Scott is a celebrity at VMworld and one of the most famous virtualization bloggers and the author of many best selling books on VMware vSphere.

In this session Scott and I pretended to be colleagues at a company that decided to deploy VMware NSX for their software-defined data center. I played the role of the “Network Guy”, and of course Scott played the role of the “Server Guy”. So then, how do we work together in this environment?

  • How do we gain operational visibility into our respective disciplines using existing tools?
  • How do we preserve existing roles and responsibilities?
  • What opportunities exist to converge operational data for cross-functional troubleshooting?
  • How does the Network team gain hop-by-hop visibility across virtual and physical switches?
  • How can the Network and Server teams work together to troubleshoot issues?

These are just some of the questions we attempt to role play and answer in this 35 min session:

***Update: this VMworld session video was removed from YouTube by VMware and is no longer available.***

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