Networking at Cisco Live for Your Technical Career

Cisco Live is a wonderful opportunity to meet people and have in-depth technical discussions. For me, I find this event to be a great venue to finally see those that I have had numerous online interactions with. It serves as a way to elevate these relationships to a new level. In John’s article entitled “Build […]

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Paul Stewart

Paul is a Network and Security Engineer, Trainer and Blogger who enjoys understanding how things really work. With nearly 15 years of experience in the technology industry, Paul has helped many organizations build, maintain and secure their networks and systems. Paul also writes technical content at PacketU.

The post Networking at Cisco Live for Your Technical Career appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Stewart.

Fun With Unmanaged Switches + Port Security

I’ve just passed a year of my job working at a smallish non-profit, and one part that I really am enjoying is passing on knowledge to the front-line staff. This week, there was an interesting case, and I had to explain to my colleagues what was happening and why. So, I did a little demo, and […]

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Matthew Mengel

Matthew was a Senior Network Engineer for a regional educational institution in Australia for over 15 years, working with Cisco equipment across many different product areas. However, in April 2011 he resigned, took seven months of long service leave to de-stress and re-boot before becoming a network engineer for a medium sized non-profit organisation. At the end of 2013, he left full-time networking behind after winning a scholarship to study for a PhD in astrophysics. He is on twitter infrequently as @mengelm.

The post Fun With Unmanaged Switches + Port Security appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Matthew Mengel.

Straight talk about the enterprise data center network.


Building a mission critical system requires the careful selection of constituent technologies and solutions based on their ability to support the goals of the overall system.   We do this regardless of whether we subscribe to one approach or another of building such a system.

It is well known that the network technologies commonly used today to build a data center network have not adequately met the needs of applications and operators.  However, what is being drowned out in the media storm around "SDN" is that many of the current day challenges in the data center network can be addressed within an existing and familiar toolkit.  The vision of SDN should be beyond where today’s data center networks could have been yesterday.

In this "treatise" I highlight what I believe has been lacking in todays data center core network toolkit as well as address certain misconceptions.  I'll begin by listing key aspects of a robust network, followed by perspectives on each.  

A robust network should be evolved in all of the following aspects:
  1. Modularity - freedom to choose component solutions based on factors, such as bandwidth, latency, ports, cost, serviceability, etc.,  This generally requires the network to Continue reading

Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Tools

The other day I came across an article, “Industry execs: Network admins an endangered species,” and I have to say, the headline did its job. I had to read more.

Executives from HP and Juniper, in particular, contend that network virtualization, and specifically Software-Defined Networking (SDN), will bring new levels of automation to networks, which in turn will lower operational costs because network administrators will no longer be needed. Specifically, their argument is that administrative or “people” expense is much higher than equipment costs, so automating will eliminate significant expense.

That’s one way to look at it I suppose. However, I would suggest that automation presents new opportunities for the networking team.

It is true that achieving significant OPEX savings is a key part of our discussion with customers when we talk about Embrane’s network services automation solutions that are being implemented today in enterprise data centers. However, we don’t talk about it in the context of, “how many heads can I cut?” Instead,  our conversations center around how our customers can best use the people they have, and what tools are needed to enable the right level of talent to perform the right tasks.

The reason we’re having Continue reading

You’ve Changed – SDN’s Casualties

I’ve a few things to thank Ivan for this last week. First off, this post led me to some great career-related articles and really got me thinking on the subject. Also, should I ever feel the need, I can now don my smarty pants, slip on my clever clogs and impress those around me by somehow […]

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Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 15 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books and is a regular contributor at DevCentral.

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The post You’ve Changed – SDN’s Casualties appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

Healthy Paranoia Show 13: To CISSP, Or Not To CISSP

Welcome to another lofty episode of Healthy Paranoia where we take on the profound problem of security certifications, specifically the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). Joining Mrs. Y and Greg Ferro is an illustrious cast of infosec luminaries, including; well-known security analyst Wendy Nather, Novainfosec.com founder Grecs, IPv6 fanatic Joe Klein, and the enigmatic […]

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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 13: To CISSP, Or Not To CISSP appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

Packet Pushers Show 149 – Discussion of Real World Problems with Entry Techs

When I refreshed my pod catcher today, I found that Packet Pushers had just released an episode that deals with career issues. This particular episode is a discussion between Greg Ferro and two less experienced technicians. Of these two gentleman, one has two years of experience and the other has only about one year of […]

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Paul Stewart

Paul is a Network and Security Engineer, Trainer and Blogger who enjoys understanding how things really work. With nearly 15 years of experience in the technology industry, Paul has helped many organizations build, maintain and secure their networks and systems. Paul also writes technical content at PacketU.

The post Packet Pushers Show 149 – Discussion of Real World Problems with Entry Techs appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Stewart.

The Software Defined Datacenter Symposium 2013 – Tech Field Day

About a year and a half ago, arguably well before the biggest of all the SDN hype that we’ve come to know and love, Stephen Foskett and company organized a fantastic OpenFlow Symposium aimed at getting deep into the state of the protocol at that time and what was being done with it at some of the leading tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Brocade, and others. For those keeping track, Dave Meyer was on the panel at the time representing Cisco but is now CTO and Chief Scientist with Brocade and getting to do some really cool stuff with OpenDaylight.

When The World Runs As Software

I have heard so many sweeping statements in the past few weeks like “network engineers’ jobs are in danger” or “will my CCIE have any value when networking is run in the hypervisor”? Clearly the social media community is preaching “software or bust” these days, clearly leaving those that are not used to this kind of talk, or have been doing infrastructure the same way for years, quite alienated. I want to make one thing extremely clear - It’s okay to be an infrastructure person.

The Software Defined Datacenter Symposium 2013 – Tech Field Day

About a year and a half ago, arguably well before the biggest of all the SDN hype that we’ve come to know and love, Stephen Foskett and company organized a fantastic OpenFlow Symposium aimed at getting deep into the state of the protocol at that time and what was being done with it at some of the leading tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Brocade, and others. For those keeping track, Dave Meyer was on the panel at the time representing Cisco but is now CTO and Chief Scientist with Brocade and getting to do some really cool stuff with OpenDaylight.

When The World Runs As Software

I have heard so many sweeping statements in the past few weeks like “network engineers’ jobs are in danger” or “will my CCIE have any value when networking is run in the hypervisor”? Clearly the social media community is preaching “software or bust” these days, clearly leaving those that are not used to this kind of talk, or have been doing infrastructure the same way for years, quite alienated. I want to make one thing extremely clear - It’s okay to be an infrastructure person.

The Software Defined Datacenter Symposium 2013 – Tech Field Day

About a year and a half ago, arguably well before the biggest of all the SDN hype that we’ve come to know and love, Stephen Foskett and company organized a fantastic OpenFlow Symposium aimed at getting deep into the state of the protocol at that time and what was being done with it at some of the leading tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Brocade, and others. For those keeping track, Dave Meyer was on the panel at the time representing Cisco but is now CTO and Chief Scientist with Brocade and getting to do some really cool stuff with OpenDaylight.

Show 149 – Questions on the Sweet Spot for the Network Engineer Career

A common discussion in the Packet Pushers Forums and on the #packetpushers IRC channel is questions about career development, focus and doing a good job. These are always good discussions so Greg invited Giulio Chiappini - @its_gcand Jon Garrison – @jpwgarrison to bring their questions & Greg’s does his best to give a perspective, opinions and ideas on worklife as 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 Show 149 – Questions on the Sweet Spot for the Network Engineer Career appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

MAC address tracking with NMS

Let’s assume that I have a port open in my Cisco switch for guest users and I would like to keep track of the new mac-addresses that are added or existing mac-addresses that are removed from that port. I have a NMS (Network Management System), capable of receiving SNMP, traps that will send me an […]

Let’s 6rd!

6rd mechanism belongs to the same family as automatic 6to4, in which IPv6 traffic is encapsulated inside IPv4. The key difference is that with 6rd, Service Providers use their own 6rd prefix and control the transition of their access-aggregation IPv4-only part of their networks to native IPv6. In the same time, SPs transparently provide IPv6 availability service […]

Information Hoarders

I make no secret of my love for Seth Godin and his amazing insight into the world. Besides being a marketing genius, he’s like Ockham’s Razor in getting to the essence of a problem. Take today’s posting, which really resonated with me, because it seems to reflect my own frustration with a common problem in […]

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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 Information Hoarders appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

Salary Negotiation For Technical Jobs

I wanted to take just a moment and share a video that one of my twitter friends shared with me. This video is of the final stage of the interview process and outlines the negotiation required to come to a mutually agreeable compensation level. Of key importance, it highlights several items that should be understood […]

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Paul Stewart

Paul is a Network and Security Engineer, Trainer and Blogger who enjoys understanding how things really work. With nearly 15 years of experience in the technology industry, Paul has helped many organizations build, maintain and secure their networks and systems. Paul also writes technical content at PacketU.

The post Salary Negotiation For Technical Jobs appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Stewart.

How to Become CCDE

Wow. I still can't believe it.

The moment I clicked Next at the end of the CCDE practical exam today in London, and it showed Congratulations word, I was literally jumping out my chair. It was a bad move, I admit, because it was really distracting and it made many other candidates in the room to look at me furiously since we still had more than an hour to complete this 352-011 exam. But I couldn't help it. I passed!

I'm a CCDE now. Part of the group consists around 100 people only, in the world. Wow. Thank God.
(I haven't received my number yet. So I hope CCDE team don't change their mind)


How did I prepare for CCDE exam?

Well, it's been a long journey. I passed my first CCDE written exam four years ago. I have taken the practical exam when it was version v1.0. And now I passed with v2.0.

Before I took the exam today I thought I would have lots of things to write about my preparation for CCDE exam. But I'm typing this while having my "CCDE dinner" at Hard Rock Cafe in London, and I can only came up with Continue reading

Scale, SDN, and Network Virtualization

[This post was put together by Teemu Koponen, Andrew Lambeth, Rajiv Ramanathan, and Martin Casado]

Scale has been an active (and often contentious) topic in the discourse around SDN (and by SDN we refer to the traditional definition) long before the term was coined. Criticism of the work that lead to SDN argued that changing the model of the control plane from anything but full distribution would lead to scalability challenges. Later arguments reasoned that SDN results in *more* scalable network designs because there is no longer the need to flood the entire network state in order to create a global view at each switch. Finally, there is the common concern that calls into question the scalability of using traditional SDN (a la OpenFlow) to control physical switches due to forwarding table limits.

However, while there has been a lot of talk, there have been relatively few real-world examples to back up the rhetoric. Most arguments appeal to reason, argue (sometimes convincingly) from first principles, or point to related but ultimately different systems.

The goal of this post is to add to the discourse by presenting some scaling data, taken over a two-year period, from a production network virtualization Continue reading

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