There is an African proverb that it takes a whole village to raise a child. The basic meaning is that child upbringing is a communal effort. The responsibility for raising a child is shared with the extended family. Everyone participates especially the older children, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins – even neighbors and friends….
Archives for April 2016
Does Your Ethernet Switch Break Application Performance?
Test results show that a Tomahawk-based switch unfairly allocates bandwidth, while a Mellanox Spectrum-based switch allocates bandwidth fairly regardless of which ports are used.
Evolving my NAS with SmartOS
What follows is an article about how I recently rebuilt a single-purpose home NAS into a multi-purpose data services machine, all while keeping the data storage structures untouched and completely intact. Plan for about 10 minutes to read this article. Data storage is boring A couple years ago I built a NAS for personal use….
Verizon Deploys NFV Infrastructure Platform From Interchangeable Parts
Verizon has deployed an OpenStack infrastructure, using software from Red Hat and Big Switch Networks and hardware from Dell, on which it will offer NFV services.
Riverbed Announces Its SteelConnect SD-WAN Product
Riverbed today announced SteelConnect, its long-forecasted SD-WAN product line.
The Packet Pushers Are On Google Play Music
Packet Pushers podcasts are now available on Google Play Music. You’ll need to sign in with a Google account to listen.
Got SD-WAN Questions? Get Answers At The Big SD-WAN Mixer
Join the Packet Pushers for The Big SD-WAN Mixer and enjoy lively conversations about SD-WAN deployment and operations with network pros who make it work for their users.
Jenkins as system job scheduler
Jenkins is an open software tool, typically used for continuous integration in software development. Network or system changes can be treated in a similar way as code changes are: developed, tested and deployed. Test frameworks are coming to Network world (look at TODD) but are not popular yet. Even without unit tests we can still use developer tools like Jenkins…
Leveraging IXP Colocation as an Enterprise
Providing a comprehensive solution for global connectivity is still not a trivial task. As most global enterprises know, the scale both geographically and organizationally can kill almost any well engineered network design. Size and complexity aside, just designing for the next “XaaS” solution and cloud sprawl can greatly challenge most network engineers One approach to…
Back to Basics: Cooling – Part 1
In this pair of articles I will be dissecting the fundamentals of cooling and refrigeration from an IT engineering perspective, then going over the process of sizing a cooling system. As infrastructure engineers, we likely deal with the topic of cooling on occasion, and those occasions tend to be during a facility buildout/upgrade or outage…
Breaking down the Ivory Tower part 1 – Vision
Network engineers and operators may often feel themselves at odds with network architects, who live in ivory towers and make pronouncements from on high about how a network should be set up, but aren’t actually responsible for making it work. Now for those that have listened to the Datanauts show on VCDX certification (at around…
Startup Radar: Veriflow Uses Math To Prevent Network Outages
Startup Veriflow aims to eliminate the human configuration errors that lead to outages and breaches by verifying changes against a near-real-time network state model.
Eat, Drink And SD-WAN With The Packet Pushers & Viptela At Interop
Share a drink with the Packet Pushers at Skyfall Lounge in Las Vegas and talk with network architects who’ve deployed SD-WAN in the real world.
Power9, GPUs, FPGAs will have a profound effect on the data center
Last week brought us, in my opinion some of the biggest news that I’ve read recently. In a nutshell the news was that Google is working with Rackspace and IBM and that they have created an OpenPower Foundation. In essence, they’re collaborating on open hardware designs based on the Power9 architecture from IBM and, at the…
cPacket Provides Distributed, Line-Rate, Real-Time Packet Analysis
The core cPacket value proposition is that of deep packet inspection and analysis at line rate in a scalable, distributed manner. Rather than merely directing traffic to various tools for analysis by creating a visibility fabric, cPacket handles both the functions of visibility fabrics as well as traffic analysis tools.
Savvius Insight Review
Recently, I had the opportunity to evaluate a Savvius Insight appliance. Like most freelance network professionals, much of my interaction with my clients’ networks is remote. This leaves me with fewer options for network analysis and troubleshooting, so I jumped at the chance to look at something that might fill that gap. The Hardware The appliance…
Badu Networks WarpGateway Improves Internet for Wifi
Badu Networks WarpGateway is a TCP proxy appliance improving Internet performance for wireless clients.
How To Build Your Certification Roadmap
Certifications happen when you break them down into their component parts and take them on one at a time. This 11-point methodology helped me complete several certifications. I hope it might help you too.
Intel’s Network Ambitions
Intel is aggressively positioning itself to become the dominant platform for virtual networking and NFV. That’s my takeaway from Intel Cloud Day.
Brocade Acquires Ruckus Wireless To Tap WLAN Growth
Brocade will acquire Ruckus Wireless, which sells WLAN hardware and software for enterprises and carriers, to tap into the growth of wireless networking.
Ethernet Roadmap 2016 – Ethernet Alliance
The IEEE 802.3 committee isn’t very good at getting standards work completed so there is a pre-standards body called the Ethernet Alliance. Its like a “pre-meeting meeting” (yes, we have all had those) for Ethernet standards where vendors thrash out most of the obvious stuff so that the committee has less work to consider and, theoretically, should…
