No, Software Defined Networking will not Doom Engineers

No, Software Defined Networking will not Doom Engineers

by Brian Boyko, Technology Contributor - April 15, 2014

With the advent of SDN, there is a lot of speculation these days about the future of network engineers. An article in PCWorld written by Stephen Lawson of IDG News Service caught our eye a while back for doing an excellent job dissecting the situation: 

“Will software-defined networking doom the command line interface?” “Will SDN spell doom for the tool that network engineers have used throughout their careers?” Lawson asks. 

“If done properly, yes, it should kill the CLI. Which scares the living daylights out of the vast majority of CCIEs,” Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa said. “Certainly all of those who define their worth in their job as around the fact that they understand the most obscure Cisco CLI commands for configuring some corner-case BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol 4) parameter.” 

Now, Lawson did a great job of examining the question he set up. In our opinion though, the main issue is not with the CLI. Sure, command line interfaces were eventually replaced in many places with graphical user interfaces in the general history of computers. But CLIs have Continue reading

Deploying Datacenter MPLS/VPN on Junos

One of my recent projects has been deploying an MPLS/VPN architecture across a pair of smallish datacenters comprised entirely of Juniper gear. While I'm no stranger to MPLS/VPN, I am still a bit green to Junos, so it was a good learning exercise. My previous articles covering MPLS/VPN on Cisco IOS have been fairly popular, so I figured it would be worthwhile to cover a similar implementation in the Juniper world.

For our datacenters, we decided to implement a simple spine and leaf topology with a pair of core routers functioning as IBGP route reflectors and a pair of layer three ToR switches in each server rack. The spine is comprised of four layer three switches which run only MPLS and OSPF; they do not participate in BGP.

mpls-ospf.png

This article assume some basic familiarity with MPLS/VPN, so if you're new to the game, consider reading through these previous articles for some background before continuing:

Continue reading · 12 comments

Building a business case for an SDN deployment

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

Twitter War !

Through a court-mandated decision, access to Twitter has officially been blocked across all of Turkey. Weather or not this was the right decision; it is evident that people are not happy about it at all. As you already may know, I am originally from Turkey but have been living elsewhere for many years now while […]

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 Twitter War ! appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

The Economic Value of Unlicensed Spectrum $228 Billion Annually in the U.S.

According to a new report completed by Telecom Advisory Services, LLC (Raul Katz, Columbia Business School) commissioned by WiFiForward, the economic value of unlicensed spectrum is over $228 Billion per-year in the U.S. alone!
WiFiForward Value of
Unlicensed Spectrum
Infographic

FINAL REPORT - ASSESSMENT OF THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF UNLICENSED SPECTRUM IN THE UNITED STATES

The Report Overview (1 page) highlights the use-cases and value of each. WiFiForward has also produced an infographic (shown at right) to highlight the various ways in which unlicensed spectrum provides economic value in the U.S.

The report details the value of unlicensed spectrum in the U.S. based on two different economic impacts:
  1. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - direct sales of technologies, services and applications that run on unlicensed spectrum. This results in $6.7 Billion per-year in value ($4.559 Billion of which is attributed to Wi-Fi).
  2. Economic Surplus - use of technologies that rely on unlicensed spectrum that add value to the economy. This results in $222 Billion per-year in economic value ($91.474 Billion of which is attributed to Wi-Fi).
Missing Data?
I am a bit confused since the value from enterprise Wi-Fi sales and resulting efficiencies appears Continue reading

Understanding FabricPath

Fabric Path


- L2 routing protocol (MAC in MAC Routing).

- Alternative to running STP, built-in loop prevention and mitigation.
  - Even with vPC, you still have STP.
  - vPC is a physical triangle and logical P2P link.
  - can have only 2 vPC peers.
  - thus distribution blocks can be only 2 upstream switches.

- FP builds arbitrary topologies.
  - full mesh
  - partial mesh
  - triangle
  - square

- Single CP for unknown ucast, ucast, bcast and mcast traffic.

- Enhances mobility and virtualization in FP network.
 - MAC mobility : physically move L2 node, but retain the same MAC address and VLAN association for the VM.

- FP retains config across an ISSU.

- FP is not TRILL.

Requirements:

- FP is not Ethernet (hence HW support is limited), it is not Ethernet in Ethernet, is Ethernet in FP tunneling.
 - F line card.
 - Enhanced L2 license (on every system that enables FP).
 - NX7K and NX55K.
 - Beginning NX-OS 6.1, FEX with vPC+ on F2 cards is supported.

FP terminology

CE : Classical Ethernet
- regular ethernet with regular flooding, STP

Windows ISATAP Client, Part 1

Last month I had the opportunity to work with a company to perform an IPv6 pilot.  There are a lot of elements to light up for an organization to use IPv6, most of them (but not all) being technical in nature.  One of the mechanism I used was ISATAP. In the past I have not […]

Author information

Dan Massameno

Dan Massameno is the president and Chief Engineer at Leaf Point, a network engineering firm in Connecticut.

The post Windows ISATAP Client, Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Dan Massameno.

The Difference Between Arista and Competitors (Factories not Babies)

I was asked to describe how Arista has been able to penetrate the networking switch market relatively quickly. Arista was founded in 2004 and ten years later has achieved a competitive position against all the major vendors in networking and specifically against Cisco who has a dominant market position. Most vendors develop product like an […]

The post The Difference Between Arista and Competitors (Factories not Babies) appeared first on EtherealMind.

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