Community Show – CCDE Preparation and Recommendations

Cisco Certified Design Expert exam is the popular expert level vendor independent certification. In my first podcast I talked   with my three guests who have CCDE as well ,  about preparation, resources, recommendations and many other topics. We also discussed whether CCIE is losing its value. Please share your comments about this podcast.   Participants […]

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 Community Show – CCDE Preparation and Recommendations appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

Cisco Live 2014 Schedule

Show 188 – Introducing A10 Networks

In this sponsored show we introduce A10 Networks and it's all about application deliver controllers, load balancers and speed like you have never seen because of smart software architecture.

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

TwitterFacebookGoogle+

The post Show 188 – Introducing A10 Networks appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Packet pushers podcast – Hardware Resources

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted here but I wanted to highlight some work I’ve been doing with Greg Ferro and Simon Chatterjee on the Packet Pushers podcast. We recorded a three part series where we dive deep … Continue reading →

The post Packet pushers podcast – Hardware Resources appeared first on The Network Sherpa.

Anycast HSRP and Design Considerations

HSRP is the first hop redundancy Cisco property protocol which allows a transparent failover of the first-hop gateway. Many technologies have been slightly modified to use it efficiently. In this article although Anycast hsrp will be explained but first I want to first explain how basically HSRP works.   HSRP has Version 1 and 2. […]

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 Anycast HSRP and Design Considerations appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

HTIRW: The Business Side of DNS (2)

</a>continued from part 1 The top level server is either paid for by the domain owner (if they are managing the TLD name space internally), or by the company contracted to manage the TLD name space. This accounts for the top level servers in our diagram. What about the thirteen root servers? These are owned […]

Author information

Russ White

Principle Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about, or don't really care about. You want numbers and letters? Okay: CCIE 2635, CCDE 2007:001, CCAr, BSIT, MSIT (Network Design & Architecture, Capella University), MACM (Biblical Literature, Shepherds Theological Seminary). Russ is a Principal Engineer in the IPOS Team at Ericsson, where he works on lots of different stuff, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, and is a cochair of the Internet Society Advisory Council. Russ will be speaking in November at the Ericsson Technology Day. he recently published The Art of Network Architecture, is currently working on a new book in the area Continue reading

Making Sense of the SDN Landscape

Making Sense of the SDN Landscape

Understanding SDN, as a concept, is relatively simple. But understanding the SDN landscape can be difficult. Here are some of the major players in the SDN standards bodies landscape and why they're significant. 

The Open Networking Foundation: 

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is in charge of the OpenFlow standard, which defines how the control layer and delivery layer are meant to function, and the protocols for how they interact. It enables remote controllers to correctly route packets through the network, separating control from forwarding – the technological foundation of SDN. OpenFlow allows for remote administration of packet forwarding tables, and can add, modify, and remove packet matching rules and actions. ONF is a user-led organization that promotes the adoption of SDN. A number of switch and router vendors have announced to support or are shipping supported gear for OpenFlow, including Alcatel-Lucent, Big Switch Networks, Brocade Communication, Arista Networks, Cisco, Dell Force10, Extreme Networks, IBM, Juniper Networks, Larch Networks, HP, NEC, and MikroTik. 

OpenDaylight Project: 

OpenDaylight is a collaborative open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation. It's a consortium of about 20 Continue reading

PSA: Global IPv4 Routing Table Hits 500k Routes

Last week, the global IPv4 routing table has surpassed the 500 thousand route benchmark, according to the CIDR Report. The graph below shows its progression since the early nineties:

I last wrote about global IPv4 growth in August of 2009, when the table size was at a mere 300 thousand routes. While that benchmark was largely ceremonial, this one crosses a threshold which should may be of grave concern for many.

As has been pointed out on the NANOG mailing list, we are quickly approaching the hard forwarding plane capacity limits which exists on several very popular platforms, namely the Cisco 7600/6500 and RSP720/Sup720. The default TCAM partitioning scheme of these platforms allows for a maximum of 512 thousand IPv4 routes.

If you accept full Internet routes anywhere on your network, you'll want to verify the maximum table sizes for those platforms. On the 6500/7600 platform, the current partitioning scheme can be inspected with show mls cef maximum-routes:

Router# show mls cef maximum-routes
FIB TCAM maximum routes :
=======================
Current :
---------
 IPv4 + MPLS         - 512k (default)
 IPv6 + IP Multicast - 256k (default)

The good news is that it's easy to repartition the default scheme (e. Continue reading

NFV and SDN – The death knell for the huge clunky routers?

Last IETF i ran into a couple of hallway discussions where the folks were having a lively debate on whether Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) will eventually sound the death knell for huge clunky hardware vendors like Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent, etc. I was quickly apprised about some Wall Street analyst’s report that projected a significant drop in Cisco’s revenue over the next couple of years as service providers moved to SDN and NFV solutions . I heard claims about how physical routers (that i so lovingly build in AlaLu) will get replaced by virtual routers (vRouters) and other server based software that even small startups could build. The barrier to entry in the service provider markets had suddenly been lowered and the monopoly of the big 3 was being ominously challenged. There was talk about capex spending reduction happening in the service provider networks and how a few operators were holding on to their purchase orders to see how the SDN and NFV story unfurled. There was then a different camp that believed that while SDN and NFV promised several things, it would take time before things got really deployed and started affecting capex spending and OEM’s revenues.

So whats the deal?

Based on my conversation with several Continue reading

Netvisor powers the Rackscale Architecture from Intel/Supermicro

On May 5th, 2014, we announced that Pluribus Networks Netvisor is now powering the switch blades on the new Intel blade chassis announced by Supermicro Inc. Its creating quite a stir and is a proud moment for everyone at Pluribus Networks and Supermicro who made this possible.

There are several reasons why Netvisor is the ideal Hypervisor to power the switching blades:

• Integrated Openstack Controller with Horizon and REST APIs as the only management that is needed – The entire Netvisor cluster-fabric and the virtual/physical switching on the compute blades is exported to Openstack via neutron plugins and extensions. Our Freedom series Server-Switches also bundle the full Openstack controller allowing the entire rack of microblades to be managed as one unit via Openstack Horizon GUI. For people wanting to manage the network layer via traditional tools, Netvisor also offers a full featured cli to manage teh cluster-fabric along with high performance and multithreaded native C and Java APIs. Netvisor also provides multiple virtualized services with H/W offload. So services like NAT, DNS/DHCP, IP-Pools, Routing, Load balancing, etc are integrated via Openstack Horizon to support multi-tenancy at scale.
• Netvisor is a Distributed Plug and Play Hypervisor – The Supermicro blade chassis Continue reading

Artificial Intelligence, Brains, Networks, Bugs, and Complexity

As a Computer Science graduate student in the late 70s/early 80s, I often wondered what would happen if the problems that  would later come to be known as the  “AI-complete” problems, which included vision, knowledge representation, natural language, and machine learning [0], were all actually solved. Would the resultant code be self-aware (whatever that means)?  Would it […]

Author information

David Meyer

David Meyer is currently CTO and Chief Scientist at Brocade Communications, where he works on future directions for Internet technologies. Prior to joining Brocade, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems, where he also worked as a developer, architect, and visionary on future directions for Internet technologies. He is currently the chair of the Technical Steering Committee of the OpenDaylight Project. He has been a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) of the the IETF (www.ietf.org) and the chair/co-chair of many working groups. He is also active in the operator community, where he has been a long standing member of the NANOG (www.nanog.org) program committee (and program committee chair from 2008-2011). He is also active in other standards organizations such as ETSI, ATIS, ANSI T1X1, the Open Networking Foundation, and the ITU-T.

Mr. Meyer Continue reading

You Won’t Get Better Internet Until Old One Is Broken. 500K BGP Routes Good Start.

Some people have pointed out the Internet BGP table is now at 500,000 IP Routes. I'm must say I'm disappointed. If you people don't hurry up and blow this to a million entries, we will never get decent routers and greater bandwidth in the carrier backbones.

The post You Won’t Get Better Internet Until Old One Is Broken. 500K BGP Routes Good Start. appeared first on EtherealMind.

Updated DevStack OpenDaylight VM Image for OpenStack IceHouse

Cisco Live San Francisco Contests!

Review: FireEye fights off multi-stage malware

You can't see some malware until it's too late. Sophisticated attacks arrive in pieces, each seemingly benign. Once these advanced attacks reassemble, the target is already compromised.FireEye takes a new approach to malware detection with its NX appliances. As this Clear Choice test shows, the FireEye device allows advanced malware to proceed – but only onto virtual machines running inside the appliance.In our tests, the FireEye appliance performed flawlessly. It detected all the multi-stage malware samples we threw at it, including some involving recent zero-day exploits. The top-of-the-line NX 10000 ran at speeds beyond 4Gbps in inline mode, and at better than 9Gbps in tap mode, both with and without attack traffic present.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Unisys unveils invisibility cloak for network traffic

If you are ultra paranoid, what could be better than hiding your network traffic in such a way that no one could possibly intercept it? This is what Unisys is offering with its new Stealth appliance, which could make man-in-the-middle attacks and keylogger exploits obsolete, or at least more difficult to mount.Stealth has been around since 2005 when it was developed exclusively for the Defense Department. Several years ago Unisys took it to commercial enterprises and has paid for various independent tests to try to compromise the system, all of which have failed.This is because Stealth uses four layers of security: each packet is encrypted with AES256, then split into three separate pieces and dispersed across the network, destined for a particular group of users that have to be running its protocols.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Poster: Only Two Problems With IP Routing

      It is often said that there are only problems in the design of IP Routing protocols. Propagation – how routes are notified to all elements on the network. Expiration – how to detect and notify that routes are no longer valid. But most people quickly realise that silent third problem – recursion. […]

The post Poster: Only Two Problems With IP Routing appeared first on EtherealMind.

CWNA

Open Networking User Group Conference 2014

Today I’m off to NYC for Open Networking User Group 2014. Tech Field Day was at the last ONUG back in October, 2013 and they were kind enough to invite me out to this one. Here’s a quick intro video of ONUG for those that aren’t aware of it – Tom Hollingsworth interviews ONUG creator Nick Lippis:

We have a good group of vendors lined up for similar round-table discussions. I happen to LOVE this format of conversation, especially with the smart folks we’ve seen from vendors like Nuage and Cumulus. I am really looking forward to sitting down and talking tech.

My original outsider’s perspective was that ONUG in general (not counting nerdy Tech Field Day round table discussions) wasn’t really aimed towards the technical folks, but rather at executives, and at other IT decision makers looking for additional choices in networking infrastructure. While there’s certainly a lot of that, I’d like to call out a few sessions/events that really interest the nerd in me (as if I’m not 100% nerd).

Back in February, I had the pleasure of sitting in Kyle Mestery’s presentation on integration with OpenDaylight and OpenStack at the OpenDaylight Summit:

Aside from a few Continue reading

Open Networking User Group Conference 2014