If you’ve ever done a network audit or a stock inventory check, you’ll know that it is possible one of the most boring activities you could possibly undertake, unless the stock you’re checking is particular salacious, I suppose. Certainly it’s … Continue reading
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My entire career has been spent finding disruption and cultivating the technologies needed to convert that disruption into real business value for customers. It is with that objective in mind that I am thrilled to join the Plexxi team as Chief Executive Officer, alongside my good friend and colleague Dave Husak, who will lead our product development efforts.
We are in a unique moment in time, with massive technological and business model changes underway in parallel. Everything we know about compute, storage, networking, and applications is in transformation. Changes like this have not occurred in over twenty years. And change of this magnitude breeds opportunity.
My decision to join Plexxi was actually many months in the making. In my previous job leading EMC’s Unified Storage Division, I drove over $30B in revenue during my tenure with over 2000 people in the global organizational for which I was responsible. In that role, I had a fairly unique vantage point of the IT industry as a whole. I certainly spent time viewing the landscape from my position within a major infrastructure manufacturer. But I also got to engage with channel and technology partners across the entire IT spectrum to see how they Continue reading
This week I was reading through various RSS feeds, and ran across a couple that fell within the scope of last week’s topic. So, rather than moving on to more practical concerns, as I had planned to do — well, I thought I should respond to some common lines of thinking.
First of all, the IT space is in constant change, and the speed of change is just increasing. That change manifests itself in new technologies coming about, and new processes associated with the technologies. Secondly is work experience: What you’ve done in the past is not necessarily useful for the future. Like in the financial realm, where it’s recognized that past performance is no guarantee of future performance, it’s also true in the work environment. When you look at past experience, it’s already dated, from a technology perspective. -IT Business Edge
Now, I’m not one to argue with the idea that the IT world is always changing. Certainly new technologies come, and old technologies go. As the saying goes, legacy just means what you’re currently installing. And certainly there will always be a need to learn the new language, the new command line, the new hardware choices, the Continue reading
Are the number of #SDN jobs catching up to traditional networking skills, for instance, for jobs that require OSPF skills? Today’s post wraps this short series about the SDN job market in the 3rd quarter of 2014, with a comparison of the number of SDN jobs versus other search terms. Other posts in the series for this quarter:
Let’s say the SDN numbers show us 25 new jobs/week in the US. Is that a lot? Not many? I have no idea. So I pondered how we could get some perspective, with just a little effort (translated: only a little time and money). The solution seemed obvious: track some traditional networking terms with the same kinds of searches that we were already tracking with “SDN”.
So, we’ve been tracking a few other terms for a while now:
Note that we didn’t track for each type of CCIE or CCNP, but simply that single term. So our data counts any and every job with CCIE in the title or description, and another counter for CCNP.
However, Continue reading
If you run BGP in your network, you need to think about BGP security. It might not seem like it’s important if you’re not a provider, but two points to consider: First, if you’re connected to the Internet, making certain your little corner of the Internet is secure is important Second, no matter where you […]
MPLS bottom-of-stack bit confused one of my readers. In particular, he had a problem with the part where the egress MPLS Label Switch Router (LSR) should go from labeled (MPLS) to unlabeled (IPv4, IPv6) packets and has to figure out what’s in the packet.
Read more ...I had the opportunity to attend last week’s OpenStack summit. With 4500 attendees, it clearly demonstrates that OpenStack is the clear mindshare leader for organizations interested in building cloud infrastructure. It is also significant to note that approximately half of the participants came from Europe which demonstrates that the “Old World” is not far behind the “New” when it comes to the desire to adopt cloud technology.
Parallel to the summit, the OpenContrail community organized both a user group meeting as well as an Advisory Board meeting. Both of these events ended up focusing the discussion in operations. While the user group presentations typically started with a description of the goals of the project most of the discussion in the room focused on topics such as automating and documenting deployment, provisioning, software upgrades and troubleshooting.
As a software developer, one often tends to focus on expanding the feature set. In both of these events there was a clear message that the user community takes reliability, scale and performance as the main reasons they adopted OpenContrail but is grappling with operational aspects. This means in one hand that testing, specifically unit testing of each component, is absolutly key is maintaining users Continue reading
I’m currently reading and enjoying “The Practice of Cloud System Administration.” It doesn’t go into great depth in any one area, but it covers a range of design patterns and implementation considerations for large-scale systems. It works for two audiences: A primer for junior engineers who need a broad overview, or as a reference for more experienced engineers. It doesn’t cover all the implementation specifics, nor should it: it would date very quickly if it tried.
I’ve long disliked the term “non-functional requirements,” so I enjoyed this passage:
Rather than the term “operational requirements,” some organizations use the term “non-functional requirements.” We consider this term misleading. While these features are not directly responsible for the function of the application or service, the term “non-functional” implies that these features do not have a function. A service cannot exist without the support of these features; they are essential.
It is all the fashion today to separate requirements into ‘functional’ and ‘non-functional,’ but the authors are right to point out that this can be misleading. Perhaps it’s the old Operations Engineer in me, but if a product doesn’t have things like Backup & Restore, or Configuration Management, then it’s a Continue reading
This week we walk through the news of the week (there wasn't much).
The post Network Break 20 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
Periodically, I get a message from someone asking for troubleshooting help. The most recent of these went something like the following (paraphrasing)–
I have the following routers, R1 through R5, and I cannot ping R5 from R1. Please tell me what the problem is.
In these cases, I could review the configuration or import them into my lab. Inevitably, that might solve the problem for the individual. However, it doesn’t really help the individual solve problems in the future. I prefer to try to help others think through the problem and reach the solution on their own.
Given the symptom of R1 not being able to ping R5, what could that mean? My initial thoughts are–
The first step in troubleshooting this is to understand that there should be two flows being produced. The first flow is a series of echo requests from R1 to R5 and the other flow is a Continue reading
Taking a little side-step from the normal networking-based Sunday hero worship, today’s Secret Sunday is a pointer to Microsoft’s Raymond Chen, sometimes referred to as “Microsoft’s Chuck Norris“. But John, you say, it’s Microsoft; why would you do that to … Continue reading
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Everything is so gloomy these days isn’t it? SDN is going to put us out of a job so you have to learn Python or go make burgers (been there done that). The CCIE is now irrelevant so why would anyone pursue it? While there are some good arguments for its demise there are also […]
The post How the CCIE changed my life appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Keith Humphreys.
We all know that IT changes rapidly, but we still don’t always accept what that means. Companies and technologies change over time, and good engineers recognise this. Poor engineers cling to past beliefs, refusing to accept change. Try to keep an open mind, and periodically re-evaluate your opinions.
Consider the Linux vs Microsoft debate. I’ve been an Open Source fan for a long time, and have plenty of experience running Linux on servers and desktops. Today I use OS X as my primary desktop. I’ve cursed at Microsoft many times over the years, usually when dealing with some crash, security issue, or odd design choice.
But it annoys the hell out of me when I hear engineers spouting tired old lines about Microsoft products crashing, or having poor security. This is usually accompanied by some smug look “Hur hur hur…Microsoft crash…Blue Screen of Death…hur hur hur”
I get frustrated because these people aren’t paying attention to what Microsoft has been doing. They have come a very long way since the 2002 Bill Gates email setting security as the top priority. It’s a big ship to turn, and it took time. Their overall security model and practices are far better than they were, Continue reading
I’m a long way from being the first person to comment that some of the icons we use in our software are somewhat anachronistic. The example we hear most often is that of the Save icon in most software: It … Continue reading
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Last week Midokura decided to follow Juniper’s lead and make MidoNet an open-source product (after all, a similar move worked really well for Contrail, right?).
I may be too skeptical (again), but I fail to see how this could possibly work.
Read more ...
