Ravello Systems review and use case study

There are a vast number of entities that offer the seemingly ubiquitous “cloud”. “SaaS”, “IaaS”, “BLAHaaS”, buzzword compliance is truly a sought after thing by marketing folks. With the proliferation of virtualization, containers and other “time slicing” of hardware by software the chatter can quickly become noise. As technical professionals and the warm bodies with the responsibility for actually making things work and keeping them running, the onus is on us to be able to decipher the useful from the fluff.

The NEC surprise

When NEC began talking about SDN at Network Field Day 9, I was not sure what to expect. I knew they had been heavily involved with openflow since the early days, and many years ago I was able to get my hands on their early OpenFlow controller and was immediately frustrated by its cryptic nature and frankly, poor documentation. Their switches were fine and were heavily utilized in early OpenFlow deployments.

Network Field Day #9

In a few weeks I’ll have the opportunity to participate in another Network Field Day. I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to attendin the past and have done some remote participation when possible, but like some of the other rare opportunities I have had in my career, NFD is fairly unique in that it is constantly evolving in both the information provided and the individuals involved. As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life.

BigSwitch Labs for SDN learning: a sneak peek!

I was recently granted access to the beta BigSwitch Networks lab site, a purpose built classroom in the cloud focused on teaching the BigSwitch SDN environment. I had seen some of the BSN offerings in the past and always held them in high regard, but I was thoroughly impressed with both the completeness of the lab and how polished the controller environment was.At the time of this writing, the lab consists of 3 modules: Building cloud fabric, monitoring fabric and dynamic provisioning of monitoring fabric.

Tail-F NCS: upsetting network management…in a good way.

“Hopefully there are some things here that will make you really upset in a very good way” is how Carl Moberg of Swedish based company tail-f opened up to the crowd at Networking Field Day 7 onFeb 19, 2014. Tail-f is a sleeper, I had actually never heard of them before NFD7, but they’ve got a very unique product in NCS and in my opinion it can change the way existing and future networks are managed.

CentOS KVM Install – Quick Start to a VM

I am a network engineer by profession, but with the proliferation of SDN and OpenFlow, I have had to spend a lot of time re-learning a lot of system admin skills that I’d shelved years ago. Now, I’ve been a virtualization user forever. From VMware (Fusion, ESX), VirtualBox, to Parallels, I’ve used them at least in testing if not in production environments. I’d not really spent any mentionable amount of time with XEN, qEMU or KVM, but some projects I was working on suggested it for the virtualization mechanism, so I figured I’d try to pick it up.

Watch out, Gigamon (and others), Arista is bringing their A game

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the model Arista Networks is using to make gear and provide innovative services and products. In my opinion, they’re changing the landscape of campus and data center networking gear. I’m always a fan of the little guy trying to change the world and this falls under that category. For those that don’t know, Arista Networks is a “hardware” networking company that is using merchant silicon wrapped in their custom linux based operating system (which is very much like IOS).

Where will Cisco go from here?

After reading Stephen Fosketts post “How Will Cisco Recover From The Consumer Strategy Blunder?”, it got me thinking. It’s a very different world than when Cisco got started all those years ago. I don’t have any brand loyalty to Cisco, I learned on cisco gear 14-15 years ago for the most part, but I try to keep the mentality of “the right tool for the job”, which means constantly surveying th emarket for new and interesting ways to do things.

Random Tech Predictions for 2013

I have a love-hate feeling about “predictions” about the upcoming year, especially tech predictions. I don’t like media sensationalism of any kind, and a lot of the tech predctions are just that, sensational, extreme talk to draw in readers or viewers. I’m choosing to go down a more subtle path, these are things I’ve thought about lately but will likely forget in the upcoming year, unless they actually happen, in which case I’d likely do an “ah, I remember thinking that may happen” gesture.

Plexxi could be WDM for the rest of us.

Plexxi is an interesting product that has recently emerged in the data center space. While data center, fabric and cloud are all the rage in the buzzword world of data networking, this one caught my attention because it was something unique that I’d not seen before. Their TOR boxes have a few interesting additions to them, the first of which is a WDM port on the back. Now, I’m not really a stranger to the WDM world.

Brocade VDX First Impressions….

I recently had the opportinity to work with the much-anticipated Brocade VDX “Ethernet Fabric” platform. I do admit tha tI’m intrigued by this product. I’d seen it work multiple times in demos and it worked so well and looked to easy that we actively tried to throw curve balls at the demo organizer to prove it wasn’t canned. It succeeded. The hardware hashing across the VLAGs is very slick. The VMware VSwitch integration worked well and was handy.

Data Centers…..

Data centers are one of the hot things in networking tech right now. Combine SDN, cloud, buzzword of the day, mix with data center and serve over ice. I end up doing a lot with data centers for whatever reason. This, however, is something I found interesting. “DCTCP is an enhancement to the TCP congestion control algorithm for data center networks. It leverages Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), a feature which is increasingly becoming available in modern data center switches.