Where to Start with SDN

For the 3^rd installment on my three part SDN series, building on A Business Case for SDN, and the SDN Ecosystem,  the most practical way to start exploring an SDN deployment is with a proof of concept (POC). But even if you have the approval to go ahead with an SDN POC, it can be difficult to know where to start. Let’s cut through the uncertainty and lay out what it takes to do a successful SDN POC.

Identify a pain point

Start by identifying a key pain point in networking that you’d like to address with SDN. For example, you might want to improve campus security, or improve the performance of collaborative tools, or streamline your data center. Specific tasks in these areas include adding a network tap, increasing the speed of a LAN link, or reassigning VLANs.

We’ll assume you have surveyed business unit leaders, ranked overall IT strategies and come back with one SDN application to start your evolution. Similar to a cloud or BYOD initiative, giving visibility for SDN can help you bring the company together, and can also build support for improving how IT can drive the business. If you understand the Continue reading

ANET Cloud Infrastructure – Arista Definition of ACI

You may have noticed Arista being uncharacteristically quiet throughout an imposed “quiet period” leading up to our IPO (ANET). While the industry continued to speak out on behalf of, or against, Arista, the company remained true to its focus on solving customer problems through disruptive cloud networking architectures and technology. Enabling innovative applications to take advantage of modern networking through Arista EOS remains a key priority for the company.

The migration from legacy “policy per application” to universal cloud networks is crystal clear and underway. The classical 1990s web, file and database tier in client-server architectures, with north-south traffic, is migrating to universal workflow telemetry and workload automation for east-west, server-to-server traffic of the 21st Century. This is particularly true as networks move to mandates of terabit scale for data, control, and management. Arista invented the concept of “Leaf-Spine” and late last year introduced the “SplineTM” as architectures to support these next generation network requirements. Five years later others are still trying to mimic the approach but lack the fundamental software or scale to achieve it.

Through the years we’ve witnessed many failed attempts to lock-in customers with proprietary fabrics (FabricPath, QFabric, etc.) and once again we are witnessing Continue reading

Switch Prices Will Get Cheaper. Design Models Will Change.

For the last 20 years, L2 tree-based network topologies meant that the only practical design methodology was to buy large, vertically scaled switch chassis for the core of the data centre. This limitation was largely due to the tree-structure forced on LAN networking by Spanning Tree Protocol. For every new device at point Access/1 we […]

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Show 192 – Logging Design & Best Practices

Jay Swan, Lennart Koopman, and Wes Kennedy join the Packet Pushers co-hosts Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro in this discussion of effectively managing event logging. Why discuss logging on a show about networking? Because networking has a huge volume of logs coming from routers, switches, and firewalls that need to be managed. And frankly, it’s […]

Author information

Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks

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Not So Random Thoughts on Privacy and Positioning

The Disconnect. Good Enough Is Good Enough.

A Meeting room. Discussing the possible options for product and vendor strategy. Company urgently needs to avoid capital expenditure and reduce maintenance costs. The engineer across the table is wearing a vendor t-shirt, a few years old and looks a bit tatty. The table and chairs are tired and a bit worn. I took a […]

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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.

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The post The Disconnect. Good Enough Is Good Enough. appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

6125XLG console/aux port access for IRF renumber

Getting Started with Docker

It can’t be helped.  There’s just too much cool stuff out there and not enough time to spend dedicating myself to one piece of technology.  That being said, I fully intend on continuing the Chef posts, but Im going to be mixing in some docker posts as well.  Im hoping that there’s some cross-connect as well where we can talk about using docker in conjunction with Chef as well.

Docker is something that I haven’t seen before.  From what I have seen so far, it appears to be an incredibly easy way to containerize applications and software on a linux system.  The docker website summarizes docker as..

“An open platform for distributed applications for developers and sysadmins.”

That summarizes things nicely, but again, why is a network guy interested in this?  First off, I’m a little tired of VMware.  Don’t confuse me being tired with a general dislike of the product.  I’ve been using VMware for years and for the most part, it works well and provides the functions I need.  On the flip side, Im not convinced there’s anything particularly special about VMware.

I’ve been using ProxMox at home for some time and it does everything that I Continue reading

What’s in a Name?

Most home users select their wireless network name without much thought to the actual name except to make it easy for them to see and connect to. So many people never think that the networks name also known as the Service Set Identifier or SSID could be a security risk. Okay, a security risk may be a reach, but let’s just say some SSIDs are more secure than others, and I will list some dos and don’ts when selecting an SSID.

Before the list lets discuss what makes the SSID important. Hackers need to gather several pieces of information including the SSID to crack a networks WPA/WPA2 password. Hackers have pre-configured tables with this information including common or default SSID names and if you’re using one of these common names you have made their job easier and your network more of a target.

• Do change the SSID from the factory set default wireless network name.
• Don’t select a name in top 1000 most common SSIDs. Now this list is very long and at first glance you will notice a lot of factory given default names (dlink, Linksys, 2wire, Netgear, etc…), so as mentioned above change the default name.
• Don’t use your Continue reading

Internets of Interest for 12th June 2014

  Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 12th June 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: Will Network Engineers Become Programmers? « ipSpace.net by @ioshints – Ivan explains his view on the ways that network folks will work with programmers. I think he describes […]

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Amid raging violence, Iraq orders Internet shutdowns

Update (10:00ET, 14-Jun-2014): See below for a copy of Friday’s Iraqi MoC order to disconnect social media.

Iraq is descending into further violence, as militant group ISIL takes control of Mosul and beyond. Renesys has observed two large Internet outages this week (here and here) that our sources confirmed to be government-directed outages. These interruptions appear to coincide with military operations, amid concerns that ISIL forces are using Internet websites to coordinate their attacks.

2nd massive outage this week in Iraq at 14:27UTC lasted over 3hrs. ISPs Earthlink, IQNetworks impacted pic.twitter.com/pR8ab7jFAa

— Renesys Corporation (@renesys) June 12, 2014

#iraq-i government to shutdown internet in #Nenwah #Kirkuk #salah_al_deen #alanbar #leaked -no prove- #email #ISIS pic.twitter.com/eM3OqkVzyo

— Jassey (@eng_mohamedarif) June 12, 2014

The screencapture image in this tweet shows an email message announcing the latest shutdown. It reads:

Dear Valued customers

Due to the current security situation in iraq and as per the MOC instruction sent by the PM Mr Nori Kamel Al-Maliki ,the internet service will be suspended for the below provinces until further notice starting from today Thursday 12/6/2014 , Continue reading

Musing: Cisco Playing the Underdog

Couple of quotes from John Chambers keynote during Cisco Live that I seemed to leap out at me: “You are going to see a brutal, brutal consolidation of the IT industry where out of the top five players, only two or three of us will be meaningful in as quick as five years.” “When we […]

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Coffee Break Show 9

Coffee Break Show 9

[player] 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. Show Links Cisco’s 3 Commandments – Drew’s take on Chambers’ CLUS keynote Cisco […]

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Coffee Break Show 9

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. Show Links Cisco’s 3 Commandments – Drew’s take on Chambers’ CLUS keynote Cisco Faces […]

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.

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The post Coffee Break Show 9 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

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.

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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.

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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.