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Pioneers vs. Protectors in Cloud Networking Innovation

The innovation of hundreds of startup companies created the Internet, and the Internet has changed the world. Innovation continues to have a dramatic impact on networking in recent years. These new developments have changed the way applications, workloads and networks interact. Having been involved in this industry for more than three decades, I have witnessed and been part of these transformations from the 1980s to the 2015 era. Each phase of innovation has been characterized by new companies and entrants, as depicted below:

PHASES OF NETWORK INNOVATION
Epoch	Vendors	Network Technologies	Trends
First 1980–1995	AT&T, Sun, 3Com, NET, Proteon, UB, BBN, DEC, IBM	ARPANET, Circuits, Hubs, SNA, Ethernet, Token Ring, Routers	Terminal-Mainframes and Minis, Channel Attach
Second 1995–2010	Cisco, Juniper, Nortel/Bay, Alcatel, Lucent, Avaya	Switching, Multiprotocol Routing, LAN-WAN, TCP/IP	PC, Client-Server, Web, North-South traffic
Third 2010–present	Arista, VMware, Facebook, Microsoft, Splunk, Red Hat, Palo Alto, Aruba, many others	The SDN Era of Open, Programmable Networking, DevOps meets NetOps, Universal Cloud Networks	Mobile Virtual Workloads and Workflows, Big Data, Hyperscale Web, Virtual Machines / Containers

Traits of a Pioneering Innovator vs. Protector

Dominant companies often fall by the wayside when they do not anticipate and react to clear market trends as Continue reading

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Ansible on AWS: Free Best Practices Webinar on December 17th!

We'd like to invite you to a free webinar on December 17th featuring Ansible and our friends at DualSpark, an expert Amazon Web Services consulting partner.

Register for the Webinar Here

Ansible Automation on AWS: Best Practices by Battle-Hardened Experts

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BGP hijack incident by Syrian Telecommunications Establishment

The Syrian national Telecommunications Establishment (STE) has been in the news numerous times over the last few years, mostly because of the long lasting large scale Internet outages in Syria. This morning however we observed a new incident involving the two Autonomous systems for STE (AS29386 and AS29256). Starting at 08:33 UTC we detected  that hundreds of new prefixes were being announced by primarily AS 29386. The new BGP announcements by STE (AS29386) were for prefixes that are not owned or operates by the Syrian Telco and as a result triggered ‘hijack / origin AS’ alerts for numerous BGPmon users. The announcements lasted for a few minutes only and we saw paths changing back to the original origin AS at about 08:37 UTC.

RIPE stat has some great tools that visualize the event, this example shows what happened to the youtube prefix 208.117.232.0/24

Propagation
STE buys upstream connectivity to the rest of the Internet via three providers, AS3491 (PCCW Global), AS3320 (Deutsche Telekom AG) and AS6762 (Telecom Italia Sparkle). The ‘bad’ BGP updates from this morning were only seen via Telecom Italia. This is either because STE only announced it to Telecom Italia, or because the other two providers filtered Continue reading

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Vendor Whitebox Switches – Better Together?

Whitebox switching has moved past the realm of original device manufacturers and has been taken up by traditional networking vendors. Andre Kindness (@AndreKindness) of Forrester recently posted that he fields several calls from his customers every day asking about a particular vendor’s approach to whitebox switching. But what do these vendor offerings look like? And can we predict how a given vendor will address the whitebox market?

Chocolate In My Peanut Butter

Dell was one of the first traditional networking vendors to announce a whitebox switch offering that decoupled the operating system from the switching hardware. Dell offered packages from Cumulus Linux and Big Switch Networks alongside their PowerConnect lineup. This makes sense when you consider that the operating system on the switch has never been the strong suit of Dell. The PowerConnect OS is not very popular with network engineers, being very dissimilar from more popular CLIs such as Cisco IOS and its look-alikes.  Their attempts to capitalize on the popularity of Force Ten OS (FTOS) and adapt it or use on PowerConnect switches has been difficult at best, due to the divide been hardware architecture of the two platforms.

What Dell is very good at is Continue reading

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The Big YANG Theory

The Big YANG Theory

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by Hariharan Ananthakrishnan, Distinguished Engineer - December 9, 2014

At this point in the evolution of the network, we think it is important to outline the history, pros, cons, and future of YANG. The data model in YANG helps in managing configuration for both traditional and software defined networks (even SDN needs some persistent state). Standardized YANG models will help in managing true multi-vendor networks. 

What Is YANG Exactly?
As I outlined in “The Current State of SDN Protocols,” YANG is a data modeling language used to model configuration and state data manipulated by the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF), NETCONF remote procedure calls and NETCONF notifications. YANG was developed by the NETMOD working group in the IETF and was published as RFC 6020. 

In the past few years, YANG gained a lot of traction with the open-source community. There are tools developed to validate YANG and transform YANG specification into other formats. Some tools can even generate JAVA code given a YANG specification. Router vendors noticed the traction and started contributing to model definitions, standardization and eventual support in their products. 

My Experience
I got involved with YANG when Continue reading

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Last Call: Overlay Virtual Networks in Software Defined Data Centers

If you want to get a free copy of my Overlay Virtual Networks in Software-Defined Data Centers book, download it now. The offer will expire by December 15th.

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Just published: Enterprise IPv6 videos

The edited videos for my Enterprise IPv6 webinars have been published on my.ipspace.net. Enjoy!

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Operations Manager to OMi Migration Path

HP has finally announced a migration path for Operations Manager to OMi. It’s about time too. This looks like a good path. If you want to stick with HP Software for managing your services, you should be investigating it.

The writing’s been on the wall for a while. HP has stopped investment in Operations Manager. I asked last year if HP had abandoned Operations Manager. This year I noted that it was kicking, but only just. My advice was:

To customers using HP OM…start planning your migration away from it, if you haven’t already. To customers considering purchasing it: Don’t, unless you’re buying it as part of an overall BSM/OMi implementation, and the salesfolk have guaranteed you can change your licensing over at no cost in future.

Well, HP has finally announced the OM2OMi Evolution program. Key points:

• License entitlement – OM servers can get equivalent licenses for OpsBridge Premium
• Operations Agent 11 works with both OM and OMi, so you don’t have to do the Agent migration at the same time
• Migration tools to assist with switching over

They do include this quote:

Well no one at HP is going to try to force you into replacing a product you love. Rest Continue reading

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Johannesburg: CloudFlare’s 30th data center

Fire up the celebration braai, Jozi! CloudFlare is here, and it’s a big one. An important milestone (our 30th data center) calls for an equally important new location: Johannesburg, South Africa, our first data center in Africa.

For the local audience: Steek aan 'n braai ter viering, Jozi! CloudFlare is hier en dis 'n groot een. 'n Belangrike mylpaal (ons 30ste datasentrum), vra vir ewe belangrike en nuwe ligging: Johannesburg, Suid-Afrika, ons eerste datasentrum in Afrika.

Now serving Southern Africa

Prior to now nearly all CloudFlare traffic delivered to Africa was served from our London, Amsterdam and Hong Kong data centers with round trip latency of 200-350ms. Bandwidth in the region is notoriously expensive (it would make even the Australians blush) making it prohibitive to enter into the continent. That is, before now. Just a few months ago we were fortunate to enter into discussions with a number of partners in the region that share CloudFlare’s vision to help build a better Internet.

Our Johannesburg data center will not only make sites on CloudFlare more performant for Internet users in South Africa, but also for Internet users across all of Southern Africa (and beyond). From Botswana to Kenya, users Continue reading

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Wireshark tid-bit: Quickly gathering the contents of a PCAP.

I don’t know about you but when I find myself performing packet captures and analyzing PCAPs I usually only know the symptoms of the issue I am attempting to troubleshoot. IE: Connection timeouts, slow response, long transfer times, etc. I usually don’t know much more than that, only in rare occasions do I get a […]

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phpipam v1.1 released :: security fixes, performance improvements, mod_rewrite optional

Dear all, I am happy to announce new version of phpipam IP address management – version 1.1.

This release fixed some bugs, provided some new features, but most importantly it was focused on:

• Security fixes (SQL injection, XSS scripting, crypting DB passwords, brute-force attack prevention, …)
• Performace improvements (Caching, reusing SQL connection),..
• mod_rewrite no longer required, selectable URL structure under settings

Some screens:

If you find phpIPAM useful for your company donations would be highly appreciated

You can demo it here: http://demo.phpipam.net/
You can download it on sourceforge site: phpipam-1.1.

Special thanks to all the people submitting bug reports, translators and feature testers!

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Full changelog for this release is:

Enhancements:
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+ Caching of SQL results to avoid multiple queries;
+ Reduced number of DB queries;
+ Added selected mail notifications to admins to be notified on IP/subnet change;
+ Added new subnetId index to ipaddresses table that significantly improves network loading;
+ Now using only 1 network connection towards MySQL server;
+ Updated pagination;
+ mod_rewrite no longer required, selectable URL structure under settings;
+ Added option not to display free ranges;
+ Added option to set maximum VLAN number;
+ Selectable custom fields to  Continue reading

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Load Balancing in Google Network

Todd Hoff (of the HighScalability fame) sent me a link to an interesting video describing load-balancing mechanisms used at Google and how they evolved over time.

If the rest of the blog post feels like Latin, you SHOULD watch the Load Balancing and Scale-Out Application Architecture webinar.

The beginning of the story resembles traditional enterprise solutions:

Read more ...

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phpipam v1.1 released :: security fixes, performance improvements, mod_rewrite optional

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Powerpoint Doesn’t Stink

“Presentations are just a waste of time.”

“Powerpoint stinks.”

“Can’t we do something other than another long, boring, presentation?”

“We should just ban Powerpoint.”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone complain about Powerpoint, or presentations, I’d be rich enough to quit work and stop blogging. Isn’t it about time we were honest with ourselves, though? Isn’t it about time we told the truth about this particular problem? Blaming Powerpoint for bad presentations is like blaming word processors for badly written books.

The problem isn’t Powerpoint. The problem is the person you see every morning looking at you in the mirror. The problem isn’t the tool, it’s that we stink at organizing and presenting our thoughts in any sort of reasonable way. So let’s talk about how to build a better presentation.

To begin: forget everything you’ve ever read in a book about making elevator pitches, making a presentation that impacts, with dash, flair, or whatever. There is a set of presentations that present as a story, with flair and dash, and there is another set that just doesn’t.

As an example, I was the Routing Protocols SGM for Cisco Live for Continue reading

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Christmas Change Freeze – Good or Bad?

We’re approaching Christmas, and for many of us, that means we’re about to enter an extended change freeze. This means an extended period when we shouldn’t change anything, hoping to improve stability. ITIL Change Management tells us this is good. I’m not convinced.

The Christmas Change Freeze

Many businesses impose some form of change freeze across all production systems during the Christmas/New Years period. In theory, all network/compute/storage changes are deferred until January. In practice, high priority changes will still be made if you jump up and down enough. The rate of change should still be lower during this period though.

Some change freezes may only run from just before Christmas until early January. Other businesses will go into a change freeze for as long as five weeks. My experience is that Southern Hemisphere businesses have a longer change freeze than Northern Hemisphere ones. I assume this is because many staff take extended leave over the Austral summer.

Why Have One?

There are differing opinions about the usefulness Continue reading

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Cisco VIRL ESXi Installation Notes

Note: I was part of the early VIRL beta program. For my efforts in that beta, I was provided a free one year subscription to VIRL, worth $199. I’ve got Cisco VIRL up and running on ESXi 5.5. The installation was mostly smooth, but there were some hurdles to overcome. Here are my installation notes […]

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3 Months With Little Streaming Boxes

You might recall that I dropped Dish Network a few months back, using a Roku 3 and Apple TV instead. How’s it been going? Just fine, really. No regrets. Here’s what I’ve learned. 1. We use the Roku 3 for almost everything. The Roku has a clean, intuitive, simple, responsive interface. Plus, the Roku […]

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Scaling Distributed Systems Is Hard

Stumbled upon a hilarious description of challenges encountered when trying to scale distributed systems (cluster of controllers running centralized control plane comes to mind).

It starts with “If someone tells you that scaling out a distributed system is easy they are either lying or drunk, and possibly both,” and gets better and better. Enjoy!

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Monitoring leaf and spine fabric performance

A leaf and spine fabric is challenging to monitor. The fabric spreads traffic across all the switches and links in order to maximize bandwidth. Unlike traditional hierarchical network designs, where a small number of links can be monitored to provide visibility, a leaf and spine network has no special links or switches where running CLI commands or attaching a probe would provide visibility. Even if it were possible to attach probes, the effective bandwidth of a leaf and spine network can be as high as a Petabit/second, well beyond the capabilities of current generation monitoring tools.

The 2 minute video provides an overview of some of the performance challenges with leaf and spine fabrics and demonstrates Fabric View - a monitoring solution that leverages industry standard sFlow instrumentation in commodity data center switches to provide real-time visibility into fabric performance. Fabric View is an application running on InMon's Switch Fabric Accelerator SDN controller. Other applications can automatically respond to problems and apply controls to protect against DDoS attacks, reduce latency and increase throughput.

Visit sFlow.com to learn more, evaluate pre-release versions of these products, or discuss requirements.

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Alteon’s REST API

AlteonOS has a reach REST API for monitor, operation, and configuration.

REST can be used/called with verity of programming languages, or even just using wget. However, since this blog was already using TCL for AppShape++ scripting, we may as well keep using TCL for REST too. However, RESTing with TCL is a bit pain in the ..., so this time I'll use python instead.

All most forgot to explain what REST is. Its a way to run remote procedures calls using HTTP. Example calls:

1. Read interface counters
2. Update real's weight
3. Bring down a real inside a group

I strongly recommend using  a browser plugin for testing out REST calls. I use HttpRequest for firefox.

Here are two screenshots. The first is how I get the current status of real 1, and the second is how I disable real 1.

 

 

 Lab goal

 

Setup