Dell, Cumulus, Open Source, Open Standards, and Unified Management


On Thursday, at Network Field Day 7, Arpit Joshipura described Dell's networking strategy. He started by polling the delegates to see which topics were most on their mind.
The first topic raised by many of the delegates was the recently announced Dell/Cumulus partnership (listed as Open NW on the white board), see Dell Unlocks New Era for Open Networking, Decouples Hardware and Software. Next on the list was an interest in Dell's Open Source networking strategy, understanding Dell's Differentiation strategy, and plans for L3.
Dell's open networking strategy is described at time marker 14:55 in the video. Dell was one of the first vendors to move to merchant silicon, now they are opening up the switch platform, allowing customers to choose from standard merchant silicon based switch platforms (Broadcom, Intel) and switch software (currently FTOS / Cumulus).

Arpit suggests that customers will choose Cumulus Linux as the operating system for the layer 3 features and because they can use the same expertise and tools (Puppet, Chef etc.) to manage Linux servers and the switches connecting them. He also suggested that customers would choose FTOS for legacy networks and layer 2 features. Support for the Open Networking Install Environment Continue reading

Comware: Clearing an Interface Configuration

HP released the “default” command on interface-view in the latest version of Comware in order to restore to default configuration of an interface.

This command is useful when you want to clear an interface configuration and reuse the interface for some other task. Normally you would need to issue the “undo” command for each line.

Following below the configuration (the command was tested on HP 7500 Switches Release 6626P02)

 

[HP-GigabitEthernet1/0/1] display this
! checking interface configuration before clean up
#
interface GigabitEthernet1/0/1
port link-mode bridge
port link-type trunk
port trunk permit vlan all
#
return

[HP-GigabitEthernet1/0/1]default
This command will restore the default settings. Continue? [Y/N]:y
! Setup default command on interface
!
[HP-GigabitEthernet1/0/1]display this
#
interface GigabitEthernet1/0/1
port link-mode bridge
#

See you soon :)

Changing Data Center Workloads

Networking-wise, I’ve spent my career in the data center. I’m pursuing the CCIE Data Center. I study virtualization, storage, and DC networking. Right now, the landscape in the network is constantly changing, as it has been for the past 15 years. However, with SDN, merchant silicon, overlay networks, and more, the rate of change in a data center network seems to be accelerating.

speed

Things are changing fast in data center networking. You get the picture

Whenever you have a high rate of change, you’ll end up with a lot of questions such as:

  • Where does this leave the current equipment I’ve got now?
  • Would SDN solve any of the issues I’m having?
  • What the hell is SDN, anyway?
  • I’m buying vendor X, should I look into vendor Y?
  • What features should I be looking for in a data center networking device?

I’m not actually going to answer any of these questions in this article. I am, however, going to profile some of the common workloads that you find in data centers currently. Your data center may have one, a few, or all of these workloads. It may not have any of them. Your data center may have one of the Continue reading

Out with the old, in with the new

A few weeks ago I was asked to help a client turn up and move everything over to a new network. I have done this many times and this is not an uncommon type of project. In doing network assessments for clients I have found some old equipment still in service, still part of the […]

Author information

Charles Galler

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 Out with the old, in with the new appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Charles Galler.

Big Switch, Cumulus, and OpenFlow

Two of the three companies promoting white box, now more commonly known as bare metal, switching are Cumulus and Big Switch Networks.  There has been coverage on each of these companies, but the question always arises, “does Cumulus support OpenFlow?”  I had the chance to talk to JR Rivers, Cumulus CEO, at the last Open Networking User Group (ONUG) during a Tech Field Day video and heard the answer from him then, but hadn’t seen anything documented publicly. 
There was a SDN Meetup at Stanford last week where JR gave his take on SDN and a great overview on Cumulus, which happens to be on Vimeo.  More importantly, he touches upon the question regarding OpenFlow support in the Cumulus Linux software stack during the video.

Coming directly from JR, his response (around the 58 minute mark):
“The only way you can truly be successful in meeting the customer needs around OpenFlow is to be truly focused on a great OpenFlow agent that lives on the switch platform.   Trying to come up with a hybrid approach or half approach inevitably end up in unhappy customers… In general, when customers want to use OpenFlow, Cumulus will say, Continue reading

Comware: STP disable

As default, STP and other features are disable on some HP device based on Comware. In this case it is important to always check the Spanning-Tree Protocol status before include a device in a network in production. And if necessary enable it. ;)

 

[Switch] display stp
Protocol Status :disabled
Protocol Std. :IEEE 802.1s
Version :3
Bridge-Prio. :32768
MAC address :000f-e203-0200
Max age(s) :20
Forward delay(s) :15
Hello time(s) :2
Max hops :20
! Identify that STP is enabled on Switch

[Switch]stp enable
%Jun 18 16:21:10:253 2012 Switch MSTP/6/MSTP_ENABLE: STP is now
enabled on the device.
! enabling Spanning-Tree

See you soon.

Redundant Default Gateway solutions in IPv4 networks

How does the internet work - We know what is networking

This article is an introduction to different default gateway solutions. Those technologies are enabling devices on IPv4 local subnets to have more than one Default gateway configured or at least some configuration that make them work half the way of ideal redundant solution. Idea behind this article is to be an introduction to a set […]

Redundant Default Gateway solutions in IPv4 networks

ICMP – Internet Control Message Protocol

How does the internet work - We know what is networking

ICMP protocol is a bunch of error, queries and response messages that are helping us every day to troubleshoot and manage our networks. At least if you found yourself in a networking engineer role. Network protocol “ICMP” is known as a control protocol because it is used for the purpose of administration and management within an […]

ICMP – Internet Control Message Protocol

The 5 Year Plan

I was recently asked what my 5 year career plan was and whether I wanted to go down the architect route. It threw me a little bit because I’ve never really been a 5 year type person. I have real trouble seeing where I’ll be beyond a year to 18 months.

So, this is my attempt to try and put something together. It doesn’t hurt to have a plan right?

Ideally, you need a short, medium and long term plan. A couple of these could be tech related (e.g: get to CCIE), but the pace technology moves at means the longest term one (if it’s longer than 3 years could well have moved goalposts, or died out). So, without ado, I give you the 3 – 6- 12 – 24 – 36 plan. Or 3,6,1,2,3 plan. This is my way of putting down what I want to have achieved in the next 3-6 months, year, 2 and 3 years.

3-6 months: Get my CCNP Security finished with, and maybe another associate level non-Cisco vendor certification.

1 year: Complete my CCIE written and be on my way to lab revision.

2 years: Completed, or have attempted the CCIE lab once.

Continue reading

Why you should want metered INET?

When people think about metered, they may think about mobile roaming or old outrageous per minute PSTN billing. Those are not fair prices, they are not what I'm talking about.

Also INET should be always on, billing should take this into consideration, maybe once you exceed your paid capacity, your connection is policed to 256kbps unless you pay for more. You could get notice when this limit is nearing by SMS and Email.

Flat-rate billing is based on assumption that on average INET is not used much at all, in such scenario it works. Consumers get flat-rate stove-gas in Helsinki, because its use is almost non-existing. But services like Youtube and Netflix which are relatively new can alone be 2/3 of all your traffic, meaning what ever average use you planned for, it's not true, average use is increasing as more services users care for appear.

1. Quality

When you pay flat rate there is financial incentive for your operator not to provide you bits, every bit not provided improves your margins. Operators today regularly keep some ports congested, because it would be expensive to upgrade, instead they try get someone else to pay for it, if they have the Continue reading

#NFD7 Real Time SDN and NFV Analytics for DDoS Mitigation


Today, at Networking Field Day 7, Ramki Krishnan of Brocade Networks demonstrated how the sFlow and OpenFlow standards can be combined to deliver DDoS mitigation as a service. Ramki is a co-author of related Internet Drafts: Large Flow Use Cases for I2RS PBR and QoS and Mechanisms for Optimal LAG/ECMP Component Link Utilization in Networks.
The talk starts by outlining the growing problem of DDoS attacks and the market opportunity for mitigation solutions, referencing the articles, Prolexic Publishes Top 10 DDoS Attack Trends for 2013, World's largest DDoS strikes US, Europe.
The diagram shows the unique position occupied by Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Internet Exchange (IX) networks, allowing them to filter large flood attacks and prevent them from overwhelming Enterprise customer connections - provided they can use their network to efficiently detect attacks and automatically filter traffic for their customers.
This diagram shows how standard sFlow enabled in the switches and routers provides a continuous stream of measurement data to InMon sFlow-RT, which provided real-time detection and notification of DDoS attacks to the DDoS Mitigation SDN Application. The DDoS Mitigation SDN Application selects a mitigation action and instructs the SDN Controller to push the action to Continue reading

Faking an ASA as a DNS Forwarder

I came across a good tip the other day that was very helpful during a small site firewall migration. Here’s the back story:

I was migrating a small single-site customer that had, up to this point, been using a FIOS-provided consumer-type router/firewall/access point to some Cisco gear including an ASA firewall for better firewall/VPN capabilities. This is fairly common with small businesses that start out with essentially consumer-style connectivity and finally begin to grow to a point of needing business-grade capabilities. My preparation went fine, and when the time came I swapped the ASA firewall in place of the FIOS-provided one. Then everything broke.

I had meticulously prepared the ASA to take over immediately from the old FIOS router, even going so far as to spoof the FIOS router’s MAC address on the ASA’s inside interface for now so as not to disrupt the 60-or-so clients that were all on the single attached internal subnet while their ARP caches timed out since we were doing the install and cut-over during working hours. I had set up a DHCP scope on the ASA as well, which instructed clients to use some public DNS resolvers as this small business has, so far, Continue reading

Goodbye Snowpocalypse, Hello Networking Field Day 7!

Snowpoc Resized

It’s been a long winter here in Pennsylvania. Near record-breaking for snowfall. But yesterday I traveled to beautiful and temperate San Jose to attend Networking Field Day 7!
I’m honored to have been selected as a delegate for another Tech Field Day event, as these events are a fantastic opportunity to engage with vendors and industry peers. I use the term “peers” only because we work in the same industry. Everyone else is smarter than me.

I’m excited to rub elbows and network with the exceptional delegate list. I have met nearly all of this event’s delegates before and I respect the expertise and experience of every single participant. I feel I have learned so much and made so many valuable connections through TFD events and I’m grateful to Gestalt IT and the TFD community for another opportunity to participate.

Most of all, I’m excited for the opportunity to represent you, the networking/IT community at large. Asking the questions you would ask. I will be live Tweeting during the presentations, so direct your questions my way and I’ll do my best to ask your questions if I miss something you want to know about.

Sponsors

I was going to Continue reading

BGP in 2013 – The Churn Report

When looking at the Internet's Inter-domain routing space, the number of routed entries in the routing table is not the only metric of the scale of the routing space – it’s also what the routing protocol, BGP, does with this information that matters. As the routing table increases in size do we see a corresponding increase in the number of updates generated by BGP as it attempts to find a converged state? What can we see when we look a the profile of dynamic updates within BGP, and can we make some projections here about the likely future for BGP?

25 – Why the DC network architecture is evolving to fabric?

The Datacenter network architecture is evolving from the traditional multi-tier layer architecture, where the placement of security and network service is usually at the aggregation layer, into a wider spine and flat network also known as fabric network ( ‘Clos’ type), where the network services are distributed to the border leafs.

This evolution has been conceived at improving the following :

  • Flexibility : allows workload mobility everywhere in the DC
  • Robustness : while dynamic mobility is allowed on any authorised location of the DC, the failure domain is contained to its smallest zone
  • Performance: full cross sectional bandwidth (any-to-any)  – all possible equal paths between two endpoints are active
  • Deterministic Latency : fix and predictable latency between two endpoints with same hop count between any two endpoints, independently of scale.
  • Scalability : add as many spines as needed to increase the number of servers while maintaing the same oversubscription ratio everywhere inside the fabric.

If most of qualifiers above have been already successfully addressed with traditional multi-tier layer architecture, today’s Data centres are experiencing an increase of East-West data traffic that is the result of:

  • Adoption of new software paradigm of highly distributed resources
  • Server virtualization and workload mobility
  • Migration to IP Continue reading

The Power of a Programmable Abstraction Layer

In the previous post, I talked about a common programmable abstraction layer (CPAL).  To better understand the thought process behind having a common PAL, it makes sense to review some of the work Jeremy Schulman has been doing.  Jeremy often refers to the Python interactive shell as the new CLI for networking.  When you watch him give a demo using the Python shell as a CLI, it is second nature and looks exactly like a network CLI.  It makes perfect sense.
It gives real time access to the network devices in a programmatic fashion.  Being programmatic is key here – no screen scraping, etc.  The downside --- you need to know Python.  Well, yes and no.  Of course, you would be using the Python interpreter so you’ll be leveraging programming concepts -- things like variables, functions, classes, etc. 

But, before you think you need to become a professional software developer, the other good news is that Jeremy has created the Junos OS PyEZ library that drastically simplifies the interaction and baseline knowledge to start programming Juniper devices.  Juniper supports native XML APIs, but the PyEZ module abstracts that and eliminates Continue reading

Cisco Nexus 9000 NX-API

A robust built-in API is not something you traditionally see in a Cisco router or switch. My first experience with anything like this on Cisco was with Unified Computing System. Though it’s a high-level API that interacts only with the UCSM application managing the entire stack, it’s still a robust way to configure policy and resources within UCS. ACI is recieving the same treatment, and though it’s true that there will be a slew of programmability options built into the APIC controller that is the cornerstone of the ACI fabric that we’ll be hopefully seeing later this year, there are also some very cool options on each individual switch in NXOS or Standalone mode as well.
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