Tag: network design

Remember the Big Picture

I have the luxury and privilege to work on some very interesting projects. Sometimes it’s advanced routing, sometimes it’s working with brand-new technology, and sometimes it’s a very interesting and unique use case.

However, it never ceases to amaze me that some the most important skills and technical knowledge I’ve gained over the years is understanding how to calculate a power budget for an IDF, the difference between an L620P and 620P cord, the difference between various types of fiber, and remembering to ask my customer about the direction of airflow in their data center.

When designing real-world networks, it really is the overall picture we have to keep in mind. Speeds and feeds, bits and bytes, and all the syntax in the world isn’t enough to properly design a real-work network that you can actually power on and plug into.

Thanks,

Phil

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Whitebox Switching at the Access Layer

Whitebox switches make use of generic and generally inexpensive hardware along with a network operating system that can be purchased and installed separately. Often the hardware and software come from different vendors, and there are several reasons this practice is becoming more common especially in the data center. What I’m interested in lately is how this is relevant to the non-webscale enterprise.

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By Engineers, For Engineers

If you haven’t heard, the networking community is awesome. I’ve made some great friends, developed strong new relationships, and I’ve had the incredible luxury to bounce ideas off some seriously talented people. However, whether it’s through various Slack groups, Google hangouts, or private email chains, it’s all been relatively private. Not much makes its way onto Twitter, and not as much as I’d like makes it into blog posts.

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BGP Default Route Failover Using Reachability

Sometimes political, financial, or logistical hurdles determine how we solve networking problems. In these tricky situations we may not be able to solve the problem the way we’d prefer, but we still need to solve the problem.

In this post I’m going to look at how we can solve a WAN failover scenario when we have a default route learned from both of our service providers and a reachability problem via our primary ISP.

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Amazon S3 Outage: We’ve All Been There

I’ve been thinking a little bit about the Amazon S3 incident. Not really the incident, actually, but the responses to it. More than once I read something along the lines of “I’m sure that guy got fired” with regard to the engineer who entered the fatal command.

Sure, that’s kind of funny for a quick tweet or in the greater context of a blog post on change control, but for me, I’m not sitting at my desk shaking my head right now. Instead, I’m reminded about the times I did the exact same thing (on a much smaller scale) and will probably do it again.

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Apstra: The Intent-Driven Cure for Network Blindness

Apstra, Incorporated isn’t focused on new features, more advanced silicon, or some new widget. Instead, they’re offering a different way to look at networking. Apstra offers an early form of intent-driven networking that abstracts network programmability and allows network engineers to configure intent rather than device features. We expect the network to behave in a specific way, so we configure our intent accordingly. I was very excited to meet the Apstra team at Networking Field Day 13, and they didn’t disappoint.

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SD-WAN with VeloCloud at Networking Field Day 13

It looks like we’re going to have some SD-WAN goodness next week at Networking Field Day 13. I love the technology itself because of the real-world use case and practical benefits a good SD-WAN solution can offer.  Many of the SDN-labeled offerings out there are still a little immature, but adding intelligence to the WAN edge is something that is already being adopted wholeheartedly in even small enterprises.

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Intent-Driven Networking with Apstra at Networking Field Day 13

In a couple weeks I’ll be headed to sunny San Jose for Networking Field Day 13. If you’re not familiar with Networking Field Day and other Field Day events, check out their website, YouTube channel, Twitter feed, and LinkedIn page. Tech Field Day does a great job bringing technology influencers, bloggers, and craft beer enthusiasts together with some of the biggest and newest names in the tech industry.

I’m particularly interested in Apstra’s presentation on Thursday afternoon. I recently wrote an article about intent-driven networking, something of particular interest to me, so I’m really interested to hear what they have to say about their platform, the Apstra Operating System, or AOS.

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Network Automation: Another Tool in the Toolbox

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a few tweets and blog posts regarding the immaturity of network automation methods and the danger in utilizing those methods in production networks. Though I agree that processes always have room to mature and that wiggling wires in a production environment always poses some risk, I believe this new emerging narrative in social media makes several assumptions that aren’t necessarily true.

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Routing at the Access Layer

Network devices have become so powerful that concern over hardware resources have all but disappeared. Modern routers, switches and firewalls can handle much more than their predecessors, and network designs are changing as a result. Network designs are shifting from the classic three-tiered model of a switched access layer and routed distribution and core layers to a completely routed design. Read the rest of the article at TechTarget’s SearchNetworking site.

 

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Fate Sharing in the Network Core

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Network engineers like redundancy. It’s not that we just want double of everything – we want the networks we design and manage to be super fast, super smart, and super resilient. In the LAN and in the data center we’ve been logically joining network switches using technologies such as Cisco StackWise, the Virtual Switching System and Virtual Port Channels with fabric extenders in order to consolidate control and data plane activities and provide greater fault tolerance, easier management and multichassis etherchannel for path redundancy. These are great benefits, but they can be reaped only by proper design. Otherwise, an engineer may introduce more risk into the network rather than make it more resilient.

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