Show 131 – Golf Cart in My Fibre Tunnel

Talking with Senior Engineers from University Campus in the US with tens to hundreds  of thousands of Ethernet ports, and up to 50 000 wireless clients.What are the technology challenges of managing such huge networks. Not only do these networks handle student and academic traffic, but they also have commercial aspects including hospitals.

  • Vendor Interoperability and heterogeneous networking in a large environment
  • Attempting to manage thousands of edge ports efficiently
  • Reasons to avoid proprietary protocols and solutions.
  • Network management and provisioning tools.
  • Logical and physical campus network designs for core, * distribution, access and data centers.
  • VLANs and VRFs for path isolation.
  • MPLS vs. static mapping of VRFs.
  • Network vendor hardware pros and cons in the campus.
  • Remote site connectivity and designs.
  • Peering into regional networks and commercial carriers.
  • Firewall and security policies in the data center and Internet edge.
  • 100GB Ethernet connections.
  • CDN peering to optimize and offload software updates at scale.

 

 

Guests

Nick Buraglio @buraglio ForwardingPlane.net

Brent Salisbury – @netwirjstatic Networkstatic.net

Chris Johnson – @bytesofchris bytesofchris.com

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About 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.

  • http://twitter.com/jockeyshortz jockey shortz

    re: CDN peering to optimize and offload software updates at scale.
    I had always assumed that the content provider would use a CDN to deliver content not the customer, local ISP for consumers of the content. Question: if an benevolent organization in U.S. realized that most of their traffic goes to commercial sites probably connected to a CDN , what type of service/device would they ask Akamai or Limelight Networks to provide a quote for and would one decide solely on price per GB or Content Providers or Network Bandwidth or Caching Algorithms or RAM/SSD in the edge device?