Fibre Channel: The Heart of New SDN Solutions

From Juniper to Cisco to VMware, companies are spouting up new SDN solutions. Juniper’s Contrail, Cisco’s ACI, VMware’s NSX, and more are all vying to be the next generation of data center networking. What is surprising, however, is what’s at the heart of these new technologies.

Is it VXLAN, NVGRE, Openflow? Nope. It’s Fibre Channel.

Seriously.

If you think about it, it makes sense. Fibre Channel has been doing fabrics since before we ever called Ethernet fabrics, well, fabrics. And this isn’t the first time that Fibre Channel has shown up in unusual places. There’s a version of Fibre Channel that runs inside certain airplanes, including jet fighters like the F-22.

Keep the skies safe from FCoE (sponsored by the Evaluator Group)

New generation of switches have been capable of Data Center Bridging (DCB), which enables Fibre Channel over Ethernet. These chips are also capable of doing native Fibre Channel So rather than build complicated VPLS fabrics or routed networks, various data center switching companies are leveraging the inherent Fibre Channel capabilities of the merchant silicon and building Fibre Channel-based underlay networks to support an IP-based overlay.

Buffer-to-buffer (B2B) credit system and losslessness of Fibre Channel, plus the new 32/128 Continue reading

Route Analytics in the Age of SDN – Now, More than Ever.

Route Analytics in the Age of SDN - Now, More than Ever.

One of the biggest problems that may delay widespread SDN adoption is not a problem of coding or engineering, but one of poetry.

Network management is about logic and reason, but our nomenclature was written by poets. Even the word “networking” calls to the image a “netting work” - like you would find on a hammock or trapeze artist's safety net. We talk about network “pipes,” and conjure throughput like liquid water flowing through Roman aqueducts or modern PVC piping. We think of the “flow” of data through those pipes, though the only “fluid” is the movement of electrons – if that.

Metaphors that are inelegant or uninformative (“Information Superhighway” for example) fail.

Which is why SDN can be hard to envision. Intellectually, we know that it is about separating the control of where data is sent and the hardware that actually sends it. But what metaphor can we conjure that makes sense to explain this concept?

This is a problem for poets.

One metaphor that was recently used in IT Business Edge was the idea of “relying Continue reading

FCC Eases Restrictions on 5GHz UNII-1 Band

By its action the Commission significantly increased the utility of the 100 megahertz of spectrum, and streamlined existing rules and equipment authorization procedures for devices throughout the 5 GHz band.

• Removes restriction on indoor use. Now the UNII-1 band can be used outdoors as well. This will allow use of the band by WISPs and for outdoor hotspot deployments which are rapidly growing with the support of telecommunications and cable operators.
  
  
• Increases the allowed power output. The power output had been lower in UNII-1 than other 5 GHz UNII bands due to indoor-only use (50mW IR, 200mW EIRP). Exact details of the new power limits have not been released, but it is fair to assume the UNII-1 band will have similarly capable power output as UNII-2/2e bands (250mW IR, 1W EIRP) the UNII-3 band (1W IR, 4W EIRP). (Update after reviewing Commissioner Rosenworcel's Continue reading

The Packet Pushers At Dell’s Interop Booth Tuesday & Wednesday @ 3:45pm

The Dell networking team has asked the Packet Pushers to co-host a couple of Interop sessions at their booth. Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks will be at the Dell booth on Tuesday, 1-April and Wednesday, 2-April at 3:45pm. In the Tuesday session, we’ll be discussing the new Dell Z9500. In the Wednesday session, we’ll discuss […]

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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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The post The Packet Pushers At Dell’s Interop Booth Tuesday & Wednesday @ 3:45pm appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Beware the Ides of March: Subsea Cable Cut Trend Continues

Earlier this month, the International Cable Protection Committee, a submarine cable advisory group, held their annual plenary in Dubai. One question that they could have considered is: Why do so many submarine cables get cut in the February/March timeframe? In this blog, we’ll look back at the last three years and the submarine cable industry’s own version of March Madness.

2012

Two years ago in February 2012, we saw a rash of closely-timed submarine cable cuts, causing Internet disruptions extending into March. In one incident, three cables were simultaneously severed in the Red Sea on February 17th, and then a fourth was damaged on the 25th off the coast of Kenya. The fourth cable was the TEAMS (The East African Marine System) cable systems, which runs from Mombasa to Fujairah, UAE.

Encrypting sensitive data is a must; new key management tools make it easy

Encryption is one of the best ways to prevent the type of terrible headaches that many high-profile companies have experienced with stolen data. Even if experienced hackers are able to penetrate a system, having the data encrypted can mean that nothing useful is taken.But encryption can place a high burden on a network and its users. It's not too difficult to encrypt data, but providing access to protected files for authorized users while keeping everyone else away is extremely complicated. Small organizations may be able to manage encryption schemes manually, but for anything beyond a few dozen users, the task of doing that without help becomes monumentally difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Show 185 – Vendor Product Management

How do vendors decide to make network products ? What is the process and thinking behind what happens inside the wall of the vendor ? Today, Greg is join by Omar Sultan from Cisco to talk broadly about how vendors make big decisions

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 Show 185 – Vendor Product Management appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

FCoE, 10GBaseT and BER – problem managed

Some time ago I wrote that FCoE would have problems on 10GBaseT due to relatively high error rates of 10GBaseT deployment. New information suggests that this problem is solved under certain circumstances.

The post FCoE, 10GBaseT and BER – problem managed appeared first on EtherealMind.

Custom DHCP server configuration on Opengear

Healthy Paranoia Show 23: Phone Phreaking, Hacking and Fraud, Oh My!

That’s right listeners, you’re not in Kansas anymore! It’s time to follow that Yellow Brick Road to another episode of Healthy Paranoia. Today, we’ll be discussing phone phreaking, hacking and fraud, oh my! So we’re off to see Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of VoIP security, Patrick McNeil. Joining me over the rainbow for this trip […]

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Mrs. Y

Snarkitecht at Island of Misfit Toys

Mrs. Y is a recovering Unix engineer working in network security. Also the host of Healthy Paranoia and official nerd hunter. She likes long walks in hubsites, traveling to security conferences and spending time in the Bat Cave. Sincerely believes that every problem can be solved with a "for" loop. When not blogging or podcasting, can be found using up her 15 minutes in the Twittersphere or Google+ as @MrsYisWhy.

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The post Healthy Paranoia Show 23: Phone Phreaking, Hacking and Fraud, Oh My! appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

Turkish Internet Censorship Takes a New Turn

Internet censorship in Turkey took a new and ominous turn yesterday. In order to better seal off access to social media sites like YouTube and Twitter, the incumbent TurkTelecom began hijacking the IP address space of public DNS resolvers like those of Google. This allows TurkTelecom servers to masquerade as Google DNS servers, returning whatever answers they want. Under normal circumstances, such queries would have been destined for servers outside the country, which is how Turkish users were circumventing the ban on YouTube imposed earlier this week. However, now local users of these global DNS services are surreptitiously redirected to alternate providers within TurkTelekom. You can see this route redirection for yourself, here and here.

Recap

Turkey’s 25th and current Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has publicly and repeatedly expressed his dislike of social media, instructing various sites to be blocked. The current attempt to curtail this important medium began on March 21st via DNS poisoning of Twitter by Turkish ISPs, probably trying to implement the government-mandated ban in a minimally invasive way.

Twitter blocked in Turkey via local DNS poisoning, global DNS providers not impacted: http://t.co/qFEBPXAho8 pic.twitter.com/JDL8SNv62G

— Renesys Corporation (@renesys) March 21, 2014

But Continue reading

Turkey Hijacking IP addresses for popular Global DNS providers

At BGPmon we see numerous BGP hijacks every single day, some are interesting because of the size and scale of the hijack or as we’ve seen today because of the targeted hijacked prefixes. 
It all started last weekend when the Turkish president ordered the censorship of twitter.com. This started with a block of twitter by returning false twitter IP addresses by Turk Telekom DNS servers.  Soon users in Turkey discovered that changing DNS providers to Google DNS or OpenDNS was a good method of bypassing the censorship.
But as of around 9am UTC today (Saturday March 29) this changed when Turk Telekom started to hijack the IP address for popular free and open DNS providers such as Google’s 8.8.8.8, OpenDNS’ 208.67.222.222 and Level3’s 4.2.2.2.

BGP hijack
Using the Turk Telekom looking glass we can see that AS9121 (Turk Telekom) has specific /32 routes for these IP addresses. Since this is the most specific route possible for an IPv4 address, this route will always be selected and the result is that traffic for this IP address is sent to this new bogus route.

Turk Telekom route server displaying the Continue reading

Network Test Automation with Ansible

Over Layer Versus Under Layer

Do you feel like you are in data center acronym soup these days?   I sure feel it, and I think sometimes tech-speak can help mask the real driver for change. In the data center, we are striving for a new model.  The idea of real time resource allocation and reallocation, the ideal organism that responds perfectly to every request and oh, did I mention resiliency in the whole stack for instant recovery from any fault. Wow, that would be great!  I think we have a ways to go. For now, the latest craze is to add the word virtualization to each topic.

Why is that?  I think it is because virtualization has helped us learn that you can decouple the hardware and software and create layers of abstraction that lead to better systems.  And here “better” could be lower power / cooling and space utilization, or it could the idea that a virtual machine (VM) can be your 18 wheeler, or container ship, and move the application or data anywhere you want, to help in that resource allocation / re allocation or resiliency story I mentioned above.

Now if we look on the network side, Continue reading

When Good NICs Do Bad Things: A Blast of IPv6 Multicast Listener Discovery Queries

This is the write-up of a recent event we experienced on our network.  This will be combination of a  journal of symptoms, troubleshooting steps taken, and a brief overview of the environment and platforms involved. This isn’t a forensic analysis of the cause or of different behaviors in various environments.  Rather, it’s meant to be […]

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Andrew Gallo

Senior Information Systems Engineer

Andrew Gallo is a Washington, DC based Senior Information Systems Engineer
and Network Architect, responsible for design and implementation of the
enterprise network for a large university.

Areas of specialization include the University's wide area connections,
including a 150 kilometer DWDM ring, designing a multicampus routing
policy, and business continuity planning for two online datacenters.

Andrew started during the internet upswing of the mid to late 90s
installing and terminating fiber. As his career progressed, he has had
experience with technologies from FDDI to ATM, and all speeds of Ethernet,
including a recent deployment of several metro area 100Gbps circuits.

Focusing not only on data networks, Andrew has experience in traditional
TDM voice, VoIP, and real-time, unified collaboration technologies.

Areas of interest include optical transport, network virtualization and
software defined networking, and network science and graph Continue reading

Internets of Interest for 28th March 2014

  Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 28th March 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: Brocade – Brocade Extends Ethernet Fabric Leadership – Brocade hasn’t given up on the Campus. This announcement from February talks about their switch platform, most interesting is that […]

The post Internets of Interest for 28th March 2014 appeared first on EtherealMind.

Cisco Internal VLAN Usage

About a month ago I worked on an old CatOS switch. Working on this switch reminded me about some of the differences between CatOS and IOS. One of the big differences is how a Layer 3 routed interface is configured between the two OS versions. On a Catalyst running IOS, it is almost identical as […]

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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.

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The post Cisco Internal VLAN Usage appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Charles Galler.

Does Network Lifecycle Management Make Sense?

SAN Automation with Python and Jinja

SAN Automation with Python and Jinja