SDN: Déjà vu all over again?

SDN: Déjà vu all over again?

Having been in this industry longer than I care to think about (I cut my teeth in operations and systems programming on mainframes and early Intel 8080-based ‘microcomputers’), I’ve seen a few technology innovations that were truly disruptive and some that claimed to be but ultimately morphed into something else or were relegated to a niche (remember the Infiniband ‘revolution’ in the early 2000s?). Software defined networking and network functions virtualization clearly threaten to upset the status quo, which in this case, is the vast ecosystem of hardware-based switched and routed networks, and the network equipment manufacturers who build the gear. Cisco, arguably, has the most to lose, but potentially, the most to win also. 

In Peter Burrows’ recent Bloomberg article, reflecting how SDN has become mainstream news, he points out that the existing market for switches and routers is growing at the very modest rate of three percent a year. While this business is the lifeblood of companies like Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, it is becoming commoditized with downward price pressure and diminishing technological differentiation. These players can certainly Continue reading

Docker Networking

Briefing: Corsa Technology

Takeaway - Corsa Networks is focussed on provided a hardware data plane for SDN WAN use cases.

The post Briefing: Corsa Technology appeared first on EtherealMind.

Response: John Chambers sold more than 30% of his Cisco shares in last month. Heavy sales from others. Thats not good.

This article at Seeking Alpha shows that John Chambers sold more than 30% his Cisco shares last month and is just one of 8 other executives who sold significant numbers of shares in the last month.

The post Response: John Chambers sold more than 30% of his Cisco shares in last month. Heavy sales from others. Thats not good. appeared first on EtherealMind.

Video over Internet

Couple days ago I made an interesting talk about Video Traffic over Internet. Sales engineer goes to company and he claims that Video traffic can be carried over Internet without any problem. This is of course wrong and to understand why I have to explain some technical concepts. Main take away from this article is […]

Author information

Orhan Ergun

Orhan Ergun, CCIE, CCDE, is a network architect mostly focused on service providers, data centers, virtualization and security.

He has more than 10 years in IT, and has worked on many network design and deployment projects.

In addition, Orhan is a:

Blogger at Network Computing.
Blogger and podcaster at Packet Pushers.
Manager of Google CCDE Group.
On Twitter @OrhanErgunCCDE

The post Video over Internet appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

Planning a Project Before Your Execution

This year I have worked on a number of projects and most of them had no planning while others had very little. The planning phase of a project is the most critical part of a project. Planning can not only make or break a project, but your reputation as well. If a project doesn’t go […]

Author information

Charles Galler

Charles is a network and UC engineer for a mainly Cisco reseller. He has worked in the networking industry for about 13 years. He started as a network administrator for a small CLEC (carrier) where he did it all in IT and worked on the carrier network. After the CLEC, Charles went to work for a large healthcare organization in the Houston area and stayed with them for about three and a half years. Now he works for a reseller in the professional services part of the organization. He is currently studying for his CCIE in Routing and Switching and plans on passing it before the end of 2014. You can find him on the Twitter @twidfeki.

Twitter

The post Planning a Project Before Your Execution appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Charles Galler.

Lets Meet: Travelling in San Francisco Jun16-22, 2014

I'm be in San Francisco next week and available of meetings and #BeerOclocks

The post Lets Meet: Travelling in San Francisco Jun16-22, 2014 appeared first on EtherealMind.

Starting with Chef

You might be asking yourself why a network engineer would be concerning himself with a product like Chef.  It’s a long story, but lets start by saying that my interest was first peaked when I heard that the new line of Cisco Nexus switches would have a integrated Chef client.  I’ve known about Chef and Puppet for a long time, but I’ve never really sat down and looked to see how they worked.  So rather than starting with Chef on Nexus, I thought it would be prudent to get some base experience with the application in a more ‘normal’ application.

So how does this fit into networking?  I think we can all agree that data center networking can change.  I’m carefully phrasing that statement by using the word ‘can’.  If you don’t know it already, I don’t buy the ‘SDN will change everything you do’ line of thinking.  In fact, I try as hard as I can not even to use the term SDN.  Why?  Because it’s far too vague of a term that can mean almost anything depending on you how you want to interpret it.  Beyond being a Continue reading

“This account is locked. You can’t log in” for super user in Junos Space

After a few fat-fingered attempts to get the password entered, i realised I had locked myself out of a new Space installation.  There’s only one user at that stage – ‘super’.  And now I’ve locked the account.  Damn.

To unlock this, you will need to go on the console and enter debug mode.  This means you need to know the admin and maintenance mode passwords.  Assuming you do, do the following:

mysql> use build_db

Database changed
mysql> select * from USER_IP_ADDRESS;
+--------+--------------+---------------------+--------------+----------+---------+
| id     | ipAddress    | ipLockedTime        | failureCount | isLocked | user_id |
+--------+--------------+---------------------+--------------+----------+---------+
| 229377 | 172.20.45.85 | 2014-06-11 16:29:07 |            0 |        1 |     610 |
+--------+--------------+---------------------+--------------+----------+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

 Update the table to make isLocked 0:

mysql> update USER_IP_ADDRESS set isLocked=0;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.08 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from USER_IP_ADDRESS;
+--------+--------------+---------------------+--------------+----------+---------+
| id     | ipAddress    | ipLockedTime        | failureCount | isLocked | user_id |
+--------+--------------+---------------------+--------------+----------+---------+
| 229377 | 172.20.45.85 | 2014-06-11 16:29:07 |            0 |        0 |     610 |
+--------+--------------+---------------------+--------------+----------+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit

An introduction to Zero Trust virtualization-centric security

This post will be the first in a series that examine what I think are some of the powerful security capabilities of the VMware NSX platform and the implications to the data center network architecture. In this post we’ll look at the concepts of Zero Trust (as opposed to Trust Zones), and virtualization-centric grouping (as opposed to network-centric grouping).

Note: Zero Trust as a guiding principle to enterprise wide security is inspired by Forrester’s “Zero Trust Network Architecture”.

What are we trying to accomplish?

We want to be able to secure all traffic in the data center without compromise to performance (user experience) or introducing unmanageable complexity. Most notably the proliferation of East-West traffic; we want to secure traffic between any two VMs, or between any VM and physical host, with the best possible security controls and visibility – per flow, per packet, stateful inspection with policy actions, and detailed logging – in a way that’s both economical to obtain and practical to deploy.

Trust Zones of Insecurity

Until now, it hasn’t been possible (much less economically feasible or even practical) to directly connect every virtual machine to its own port on a firewall. Because of this, the Continue reading

An introduction to Zero Trust virtualization-centric security

This post will be the first in a series that examine what I think are some of the powerful security capabilities of the VMware NSX platform and the implications to the data center network architecture. In this post we’ll look at the concepts of Zero Trust (as opposed to Trust Zones), and virtualization-centric grouping (as opposed to network-centric grouping).

Note: Zero Trust as a guiding principle to enterprise wide security is inspired by Forrester’s “Zero Trust Network Architecture”.

What are we trying to accomplish?

We want to be able to secure all traffic in the data center without compromise to performance (user experience) or introducing unmanageable complexity. Most notably the proliferation of East-West traffic; we want to secure traffic between any two VMs, or between any VM and physical host, with the best possible security controls and visibility – per flow, per packet, stateful inspection with policy actions, and detailed logging – in a way that’s both economical to obtain and practical to deploy.

Trust Zones of Insecurity

Until now, it hasn’t been possible (much less economically feasible or even practical) to directly connect every virtual machine to its own port on a firewall. Because of this, the Continue reading

An introduction to Zero Trust virtualization-centric security

This post will be the first in a series that examine what I think are some of the powerful security capabilities of the VMware NSX platform and the implications to the data center network architecture. In this post we’ll look at the concepts of Zero Trust (as opposed to Trust Zones), and virtualization-centric grouping (as opposed to network-centric grouping).

Note: Zero Trust as a guiding principle to enterprise wide security is inspired by Forrester’s “Zero Trust Network Architecture”.

What are we trying to accomplish?

We want to be able to secure all traffic in the data center without compromise to performance (user experience) or introducing unmanageable complexity. Most notably the proliferation of East-West traffic; we want to secure traffic between any two VMs, or between any VM and physical host, with the best possible security controls and visibility – per flow, per packet, stateful inspection with policy actions, and detailed logging – in a way that’s both economical to obtain and practical to deploy.

Trust Zones of Insecurity

Until now, it hasn’t been possible (much less economically feasible or even practical) to directly connect every virtual machine to its own port on a firewall. Because of this, the Continue reading

An introduction to Zero Trust virtualization-centric security

The 24 Rules I Work By – Infographic

I came across this infographic from Anna Vital of Funders and Founders and loved it. As relevant as some of it is, there is an obvious focus on running a startup and not working in IT. Because of that I thought it might be useful to do something similar around the ‘rules’ I work by; my workplace and career philosophy […]

Author information

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 24 Rules I Work By – Infographic appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

Perspective on Arista IPO and Market Positioning

For the last 20 years, a “silicon moat” that has protected Cisco and other networking vendors from market competition. Arista was one of the first startups to embrace merchant silicon,open source software and a modern software development methodology to focus on core value like reliability and features.

The post Perspective on Arista IPO and Market Positioning appeared first on EtherealMind.

Briefing: HP Helion, Virtual Cloud Networking, FlexFabric 7900, SDN and OpenStack at HP Discover

HP Discover is happening this week and have three announcements that I'm summarising here. They are Virtual Cloud Network (VCN), FlexFabric 7900 switch and a supporting package of consulting to implement cloud in your organisation.

The post Briefing: HP Helion, Virtual Cloud Networking, FlexFabric 7900, SDN and OpenStack at HP Discover appeared first on EtherealMind.

Introduction and LAB tutorial of HP Helion Community Edition, the OpenStack based “cloud” system that can give you a personal cloud!

For best article visual quality, open Introduction and LAB tutorial of HP Helion Community Edition, the OpenStack based “cloud” system that can give you a personal cloud! directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is a long enterprise  supporter of cloud technologies and early this year, they released publicly HP Helion Community Edition (CE). HP Helion is HP’s OpenStack based cloud system with which HP plans to provide value added services (both in sense of software and service) with the upcoming release of HP Helion Enterprise edition later this year. In this article, I plan to introduce you to the HP Helion CE, quickly guide you through the installation, basic operations and in the end get you a quick view on the OpenStack architecture in general.

HP and “clouds”

For a long time HP has been providing cloud solution based on their internal Cloud Service Automation or “CSA” system to enterprise grade customers as part of their portfolio. I had access to several projects using this environment and although I still have mixed feelings about their effectiveness, they were a step in the right direction as classical (now called “legacy”) data-centers are loosing popularity to cloud and other automated systems.  The Continue reading

Snort rules for Etumbot

Since publication of the Etumbot blog on Friday, June 6th, we’ve received numerous requests to publish Snort rules for the network indicators described therein. You can find Snort rules for the Etumbot C&C communications on Arbor’s github at

https://github.com/arbor/snort/blob/master/etumbot.rules

While we are not Snort syntax experts, we have performed basic testing for the Etumbot communications we’ve been able to observe over the wire. Specifically, the first three Snort rules for Etumbot RC4 Key Request, Etumbot Registration Request, and EtumBot Ping all triggered successfully when the corresponding network traffic was observed.

Remember to change the SIDs as appropriate for your environment. We also anticipate these rules will be incorporated into the EmergingThreats Open feed in the very near term.

RESTful control of Cumulus Linux ACLs

Figure 1: Elephants and Mice

• Visibility: Cumulus recently added sFlow support, providing the network wide visibility needed for control - see Cumulus Networks, sFlow and data center automation.
• Control: Cumulus Linux Netfilter (ACLs) describes how standard Linux ebtables / iptables configuration files are used to manage the ACL/policy capabilities of the hardware.

Network Diagrams: Font Selection and Production Context. Choosing Slab or Thin fonts

Sometimes it looks right in the drawing tool but doesn't look right in the document. I forgot about balancing the image with the way that it looks on the page with words around it. Another post in my series on Network Diagrams.

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