Packet Design will be exhibiting at Cisco Live 2013, June 23-27 in Orlando, Florida. We'll be showcasing Route-Flow Fusion℠ from booth #1612 near the Cisco Live Lounge where you can pick up one of our new 'Now I know everything' T-shirts.
Plus, wear the shirt at the conference to enter a raffle to win a Beats-by-Dre Wireless Speaker.
Register to attend the event here:
www.ciscolive.com/us/registration-packages
Regular hosts Greg Ferro & Ethan Banks are joined by Brandon Carroll, Josh O’Brien, and Tom Hollingsworth in Packet Pushers Weekly Show 139. We translate all the SDN hype into a more practical conversation about what network engineers should be doing to update their skills. This is a mostly raw podcast with little editing – just […]
The post Show 139 – Making Your Way Down The Path To Nirvana appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
Vendors love nothing more than getting in front of their customers and talking about their products. You’ll always learn something from a presentation, but mostly they are an exercise in death-by-powerpoint. In this post, I’ll provide some some tips on getting the most from your time in these presentations. Vendor presentations can be really informative […]
The post Extracting The Most Value From Network Vendor Presentations appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.
I’m in San Jose, California as a member of the Network Field Day 5 delegation this week. NFD is under the Tech Field Day umbrella of events, and is not a Packet Pushers event as such – although we’ve been a part of them, and Greg in particular has helped to organize some of them. […]
The post Why Would A Vendor Care About Network Field Day Events? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
Whats the big deal about Data centers and why do they need special routers and switches anyway? Why cant they use the existing switches that folks use in their back offices or service providers in their networks. What’s so special, really, about a bunch of servers that need Internet connectivity, huh?
Working in the metro Ethernet space all my life I wasn’t sure if I really understood the hype and the reason why Data centers required specialized HW.
It’s only once I started reading about Data centers and how they work and what they’re supposed to do that I was able to appreciate their need for specialized HW – and why the existing products may not be cut for them.
In the world of Wall Street, milliseconds can mean billions of dollars. Really, am not kidding here. Packets carrying Wall Street transactions get delivered to the switch and are then forwarded to the server in the Data Center. There they ride up the protocol stack to the application that executes the trade. The commit message then has to go back down the stack and then be sent over the wire to the switch. The switch does a lookup in its Continue reading
Show 138 – HP’s Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Strategy and Solution [Written by HP.] There has been a lot of interest in the market place recently around software-defined Networking (SDN). HP has been a leader in SDN technologies from the very beginning. HP has played an instrumental role in the development of OpenFlow and continues to […]
The post Show 138 – HP’s Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Strategy and Solution appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
There is a lot of hype around OpenFlow as a technology and as a protocol these days. Few envision this to be the most exciting innovation in the networking industry after the vaccum tubes, diodes and transistors were miniaturized to form integrated circuits. This is obviously an exaggeration, but you get the drift, right?
The idea in itself is quite radical. It changes the classical IP forwarding model from one where all decisions are distributed to one where there is a centralized beast – the controller – that takes the forwarding decisions and pushes that state to all the devices (could be routers, switches, WiFi access points, remote access devices such as CPEs) in the network.
Before we get into the details, let’s look at the main components – the Management, Control and the Forwarding (Data) plane – of a networking device. The Management plane is used to manage (CLI, loading firmware, etc) and monitor the device through its connection to the network and also coordinates functions between the Control and the Forwarding plane. Examples of protocols processed in the management plane are SNMP, Telnet, HTTP, Secure HTTP (HTTPS), and SSH.
The Forwarding plane is responsible for forwarding frames Continue reading
Q-in-Q
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Consider a situation where service providers want to offer transparent LAN services that preserve a customers VLAN tags across your Layer-2 network.This can be done by the Q-in-Q IEEE 802.1q standard which allows us to use a single VLAN to transport multiple VLANS across the MAN or WAN. In doing so, we stack on an extra 802.1q tag to the customer’s traffic at the provider’s edge (PE). The original 802.1Q specificationallows a single VLAN header to be inserted into an Ethernet frame.A port configured to support 802.1Q tunneling is called a tunnel port. When you configure tunneling, you assign a tunnel port to a VLAN that is dedicated to tunneling. Each customer requires a separate VLAN, but that VLAN supports all of the customer’s VLANs.
How It works
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Referece pic: Cisco Site
Customer Edge1——(802.1Q Trunk port having cutomer Vlan Ids)
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Service Provider edge switch1 —-(Packets entering the tunnel port on the service-provider edge switch, which are already 802.1Q-tagged with the appropriate VLAN IDs, are encapsulated with another layer of an 802.1Q tag that contains a VLAN ID unique to the customer).
I've been working on something that at this point in my career I never thought I'd be doing: another Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification. The CCNA Voice, to be exact. Now that I'm in a job role where I'm expected to be somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades, I can no longer avoid learning voice :-) For a long time I've focused on just the underlying network bits and left the voice “stuff” to others. Since I now need to talk intelligently about Cisco voice solutions, products, and architectures, I decided to go through the CCNA Voice curriculum as a way to establish some foundational knowledge.
This post is about the tools and methods I used to build a small lab to support my studies.
Earlier today Ethan Banks wrote a really good blog posts about “Thoughts on Working as a Consultant for a VAR“. I found his point of view quite interesting and I will say I can understand his points. I can also say that I would rather be a consultant than a full time engineer at a customer site. As a little bit of background I have spent most of my career working as a consultant. I did do a two year stint as network operations manager for a wireless ISP which itself was quite fast paced, but other than that Ive work as a consultant in one form or another.
Maybe I have ADD, maybe I just need to focus, but I have found that constantly having different projects going allows me to satisfy these tendencies. I feel I work better with more than one thing to occupy my time. I see friends who work for enterprise customers who spend their days submitting change requests that third party support companies fulfil, or spend months writing detailed design guides for projects that inevitably get canceled and all that time is spent without getting to touch the things they got into this Continue reading
