Like it or Not, You ARE in the Customer Service Business
Unless you work in research and development, where the value of your work may not be realized for many years, you are in the customer service business. That’s everyone from sales to finance to engineering.
I find this statement is a great conversation starter because it invariably gets mixed reactions.
Sales people and customer service representatives who are already close to the customers nod politely at this self-evident truth. The statement causes barely a ripple, because people in these roles meet with customers each day. They hear about customer goals, needs, and problems and help address the variety of issues that customers face.
People who work in supporting roles like human resources or finance often respond with raised eyebrows. The accounts receivable group may only rarely meet with the customers who pay the bills. And human resources teams, for example, sometimes fail to recognize that their efforts to establish retirement and insurance plans impact the quality of talent a company can attract. They may miss the connection between hiring the best people and strong financial Continue reading
In my last EEM post I provided a simple means to change an IP address and default route of a Cisco router using a script that makes the change without requiring interactive user input. This is helpful if you are remotely changing a device’s WAN/Internet IP and waiting for some on-site hands to move a cable over to a new ISP or WAN SP connection. That first script, however, would make the change and then exit. What would happen if the new Internet connection had a problem, or the on-site help couldn’t move the cable for some reason? Proper testing and preparation should help you avoid most of those issues but you just never know.
One way to deal with this possibility is to issue a “reload in 10” before kicking off the EEM change script. If the change can’t be completed, the router will reboot back to its previous configuration. That’s fine, but I like to avoid a full reboot whenever possible, and “reload in” has always been a rather clunky rollback mechanism.
Another idea mentioned by Jody Lemoine in the comments of the last post, is taking advantage of the newer configuration archive and rollback features. While my Continue reading
It's been a few weeks since Cisco announced OpFlex and I've just finished gathering my thoughts...
It's been a few weeks since Cisco announced OpFlex and I've just finished gathering my thoughts...
It's a protocol for delivering policy to endpoints. Policy is declarative, based on promise theory and can therefore scale well vs. imperative models (like OpenFlow)
Kyle Mestery assures us that OpFlex is not an OpenFlow killer and while I agree, I'm starting to have my doubts. Vendors have been dragging their heels when it comes to implementing OpenFlow due to its pipeline and table structures not being a good fit to current hardware. OpFlex offers them a way out as they no longer need to care "how" something is implemented, just that the "promise" is kept (read: policy is enforced).
I can see Cisco deploying OpFlex across their entire portfolio and declaring victory - we've got SDN. Who cares about OpenFlow? This begs the question of whether OpFlex is just a move from Cisco to protect it's core business?
The future of networking is "Open"
The key benefit to using OpenFlow is disaggregation. It's beneficial to everybody for the proprietary stack to be broken down to allow Continue reading
I've been evaluating Cisco Nexus products for a customer. So far, its taken 10h20m to check which licenses are required for each platform. And I'm still not confident that it's correct and accurate.
The post The Cost of Software Licensing in Networking – Is the Price Worth It ? appeared first on EtherealMind.
It's been a few weeks since Cisco announced OpFlex and I've just finished gathering my thoughts...
It’s been a while since the trainwreck of a “study” commissioned by Brocade and performed by The Evaluator Group, but it’s still being discussed in various storage circles (and that’s not good news for Brocade). Some pretty much parroted the results, seemingly without reading the actual test. Then got all pissy when confronted about it. I did a piece on my interpretations of the results, as did Dave Alexander of WWT and J Metz of Cisco. Our mutual conclusion can be best summed up with a single animated GIF.
But since a bit of time has passed, I’ve had time to absorb Dave and J’s opinions, as well as others, I’ve come up with a list of the Top 5 Reasons by The Evaluator Group Screwed Up. This isn’t the complete list, of course, but some of the more glaring problems. Let’s start with #1:
Reason #1: I Have No Idea What I’m Doing
Their hilariously bad conclusion to the higher variance in response times and higher CPU usage was that it was the cause of the software initiators. Except, they didn’t use software initiators. The had actually configured hardware initiators, and didn’t know it. Let that sink Continue reading
The future of private infrastructure ownership is moving to a new model combines the old with the new that I describe as “dolls and babies” where the major transformation in infrastructure ownership is the transition from having babies to owning dolls. Infrastructure as Babies Enterprises buy infrastructure like people have babies. It takes months to […]
The post Blessay: We Need To Buy Infrastructure Dolls Not Babies For The Private Cloud appeared first on EtherealMind.
This is “The Coffee Break”. A podcast on state of the networking business where we discuss vendors moves and news, analysis on product and positioning, and look at the business of networking. In the time it takes to have coffee break.
The post Coffee Break 7 appeared first on Packet Pushers.
This is “The Coffee Break”. A podcast on state of the networking business where we discuss vendors moves and news, analysis on product and positioning, and look at the business of networking. In the time it takes to have coffee break. Topics Cisco Reveals OpenFlow SDN Killer:OpFlex protocol for ACI offered to IETF, OpenDaylight Researchs […]
The post Coffee Break 7 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
Lede: In discussions with a stealthy networking startup today, we were discussing how their overlay network technology for the SDN WAN was able to to detect network blackouts and brownouts in the physical network. Their answer was to run Bi-directional Forwarding Detection (BFD) in the overlay tunnels. Now you have effective quality and service detection in the overlay network.
The post Blessay: Overlay Networking, BFD And Integration with Physical Network appeared first on EtherealMind.
Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 24th April 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: Why I quit writing internet standards — Tech News and Analysis – Vidya Narayanan writes at GigaOm about the dysfunction and problems of the IETF. I have similar […]
The post Internets of Interest for 24th April 2014 appeared first on EtherealMind.
Today’s Networks are auto-configuring and self-orchestrating. When you connect a server to network device, the device will identity the MAC address of the server and update it’s database. The server can make a request to a DHCP server and self configure. A network can be intentionally designed so that multiple paths exist through the network. […]
The post Thought for My Day: Existing Networks are Self Automated and Policy Driven appeared first on EtherealMind.
Just a slight note to clarify some VxLAN deployment for an hybrid network (Intra-DC).
As discussed in the previous post, with the software-based VxLAN, only one single VTEP L2 Gateway can be active for the same VxLAN instance.
This means that all end-systems connected to the VLAN concerned by a mapping with a particular VNID must be confined into the same leaf switch where the VTEP GW is attached. Other end-systems connected to the same VLAN but on different leaf switches isolated by the layer 3 fabric cannot communicate with the VTEP L2 GW. This may be a concern with hybrid network where servers supporting the same application are spread over multiple racks.
To allow bridging between VNID and VLAN, it implies that the L2 network domain is spanned between the active VTEP L2 Gateway and all servers of interest that share the same VLAN ID. Among other improvements, VxLAN is also aiming to contain the layer 2 failure domain to its smallest diameter, leveraging instead layer 3 for the transport, not necessarily both. Although it is certainly a bit antithetical to VxLAN purposes, nonetheless if all leafs are concerned by the same mapping of VNID to VLAN ID, it is Continue reading
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| Figure 1: Hybrid Programmable Forwarding Planes |
sudo apt-get install apache2Install the sFlow-RT integrated hybrid OpenFlow controller, either on the Mininet virtual machine, or on a different system (Java 1.6+ is required to run sFlow-RT):
Continue reading
