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About networkingnerd

Tom Hollingsworth, CCIE #29213, is a former network engineer and current organizer for Tech Field Day. Tom has been in the IT industry since 2002, and has been a nerd since he first drew breath.

Should Microsoft Buy Big Switch?

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Network virtualization is getting more press than ever.  The current trend seems to be pitting the traditional networking companies, like Cisco and Juniper, against the upstarts in the server virtualization companies, like VMware and OpenStack.  To hear the press and analysts talk about it makes one think that these companies represent all there is in the industry.

Whither Microsoft?

One company that seems to have been left out of the conversation is Microsoft.  The stalwarts of Redmond have been turning heads with their rapid pace of innovation to reach parity with VMware’s offerings.  However, when the conversation turns to networking Microsoft is usually left out in the cold.  That’s because their efforts at networking in the past have been…problematic.  They are very service oriented and care little for the world outside their comfortable servers.  That won’t last forever.  VMware will be able to easily shift the conversation away from feature parity with Hyper-V and concentrate on all the networking expertise that it has now that is missing in the competitor.

Microsoft can fix that problem with a small investment.  If you can innovate by building it, you need to buy it.  Microsoft has the cash to buy several startups, even after sinking a load of it into Nokia.  But which SDN-focused company makes the most sense for Microsoft?  I spent a lot of time thinking about this very question and the answer became clear for me:  Microsoft needs to buy Big Switch Networks.

A Window On The Future

Microsoft needs SDN expertise.  They have no current networking experience outside of creating DHCP and DNS services on their platforms.  I mean, did anyone ever use their Network Access Protocol solution as a NAC option?  Microsoft has traditionally created bare bones network constructs to please their server customers.  They think networking is a resource outside their domain, which coincidentally is just how their competitors used to look at it as well.  At least until Martin Casado changed their minds.

Big Switch is a perfect fit for Microsoft.  They have the chops to talk OpenFlow.  Their recent shift away from overlays to software on bare metal would play well as a marketing point against VMware and their “overlays are the best way” message.  They could also help Microsoft do more development on NV-GRE, the also ran to VxLAN.  Ivan Pepelnjak (@IOSHints) was pretty impressed with NV-GRE last December, but it’s dropped of the radar in the wake of VMware embracing VxLAN in NSX.  I think having a bit more development work from the minds at Big Switch would put it back into the minds of some smaller network virtualization companies looking to support something other than the de facto standard.  I know that Big Switch has moved away from the overlay model, but if NV-GRE can easily be adapted to the work Big Switch was doing a few months ago, it would be a great additional offering to the idea of running everything in an SDN-enabled switch OS.

Microsoft will also benefit from the pile of SDN applications that Big Switch has rumored to be sitting around and festering for lack of attention.  Applications like network taps sell Big Switch products now.  With NSX introducing the ideas of integrated load balancers and firewalls into the base product, Big Switch is going to be hard pressed to charge extra for them.  Instead, they’re going to have to go out on a limb and finish developing them past the alpha stage and hope that they are enough to sell more product and recoup the development costs.  With the deep pockets in Redmond, finishing those applications would be a drop in the bucket if it means that the new product can compete directly on an even field with VMware.

Building A Bigger Switch

Big Switch gains in this partnership also.  They get to take some pressure of their overworked development team.  It can’t be easy switching horses in mid-stream, especially when it involves changing your entire outlook on how SDN should be done.  Adding a few dozen more people to the project will allow you to branch out and investigate how integrating software into your ideas could be done.  Big Switch has already done a great job developing Project Floodlight.  Why not let some big brains chew on other ideas in the same vein for a while.

Big Switch could also use the stability of working for an established company.  They have a pretty big target on their backs now that everyone is developing an SDN strategy.  Writing an OS for bare metal switches is going to bring them into contention with Cumulus Networks.  Why not let an OS vendor do some of the heavy lifting?  It would also allow Microsoft’s well established partner program to offer incentives to partners that want to sell white label switches with software from Big Switch to get into networking much more cheaply than before.  Think about federal or educational discounts that Microsoft already gives to customers.  Do you think they’d be excited to see the same kind of consideration when it comes to networking hardware?

Tom’s Take

Little fish either get eaten by bigger ones or they have to be agile enough to avoid being snapped up.  The smartest little fish in the ocean may be the remora.  It survives by attaching itself to a bigger fish and providing a benefit for them both.  The remora gets the protection of not being eaten while also not taking too much from the host.  Microsoft would do well to setup some kind of similar arrangement with Big Switch.  They could fund future development into NV-GRE compatible options, or they just by the company outright.  Both parties get something out of the deal: Microsoft gets the SDN component they need.  Big Switch gets a backer with so much industry clout that they can no longer be dismissed.

No Total Recall – Outlook Message Recall

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We’ve all had that moment when we hit send on something only to realize that we shouldn’t have.  Either there’s a glaring typo or a forgotten attachment or you attached a file you shouldn’t have.  Quickly you rush up to the Actions menu to take back that errant email via Outlook Message Recall.  And, much like every else on the planet, you click Recall This Message only to find out that it never works.

What is Outlook Message Recall?  And why does it fail almost every time?  Message recall is an Exchange feature that allows the server to reach into a connected Exchange user’s mailbox and pull out the bad message.  There are a lot of rules that govern whether or not a message can be recalled.  In most cases it comes down to whether or not the user is connected to your Exchange server and whether or not the message has been read.

The first condition is easy.  You can’t recall a message you sent to a Gmail address.  You can’t recall messages from a POP or IMAP mail store.  You can’t recall a message if the user you sent it to isn’t a user on your Exchange server.  The server only has authority to delete the original message if both users are on the same mail system.  There’s no point in recalling a message sent outside your organization.  In fact, attempting to do so usually results in the recall request calling attention to the original message.

The other condition seems to be whether or not the message was read.  If the user has read the message it will not be recalled.  Instead, the user will be notified that you want to recall the message and keep the original in their mailbox.  If you’re using a caching mailbox like I tend to do on my laptop, the original recalled message can’t be pulled out due to the nature of the mailbox.

I think the viewing status of the email is a pretty dumb conditional.  I habitually read all the email that comes into my inbox, even if I don’t intend to do something with it right away.  I need to glance at things to see how critical they are.  That means message recall would never work for messages in my inbox.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that message recall has never worked based on an informal poll I conducted with people.

I’ve gotten used to doing other things to ensure that my messages don’t escape before they’re ready.  I don’t put the recipients in until the text has been edited.  I don’t put a subject line in until the penultimate step so that I’ll be prompted to add it in.  I essentially write my emails backwards on purpose.

The best way to avoid using a broken, non-functional feature is to not need it in the first place.  Attention to detail will save you much more often than the recall button.  Taking a few moments to cool off before you ship out that burning missive will also protect you a whole lot better than a ham-handed attempt to pull back something that shouldn’t have been sent in the first place.

Vendorpendent

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May you live in interesting times. – Purported Ancient Chinese Curse

Life is never boring for the independent blogger.  Especially when the vendors come calling.  In recent months, Sean Rynearson (@SRynearson) and Rocky Gregory (@BionicRocky) have taken up residence at Aruba Networks.  Gurusimran Khalsa (@gurusimran) has headed over to VMware.  Most recently, Ryan Adzima (@RAdzima) has joined the ranks of the wireless elite at AirTight Networks.  There’s still more to come if my guesses are right.  In many of those cases, I’ve been asked what I think about so many independent influencers heading for vendors.  My response is always the same: It’s a great thing.

A Cog In The Machine

So many independent people being hired by vendors shows the value of their thinking and analysis.  It’s much easier to interview for a job when your entire resume is online in the form of a blog full of deep thoughts and impressive research.  If the employer can Google your name and find not only your commentary but the commentary of people that have discussed things with you then the actual interview process is a formality.  I personally like it that way because I’m horrible at telling people about myself.  I’d much rather let my words do the talking for me.

Vendors know that having an independent thinker on staff is a huge asset.  If the independent is detached for the existing process, they can point out weaknesses or quickly adjust strengths to make things better for the vendor.  A dispassionate third party view is useful when determining if marketing efforts are working correctly or if a product line needs to be refreshed or removed entirely.  Sometimes you can’t get the objectivity needed from someone that’s been entrenched at a vendor for too long.

Independents worry about working for vendors.  They are afraid they will lose their objectivity.  They want to be sure that their opinions are their own and don’t reflect the views of their employers.  I’ve been asked on more than one occasion by those folks if it’s even possible.  My response: Yes, but it’s hard.

It’s Not Easy Being Free

You have to be vigilant when you want to make sure you are independent.  Your thoughts and ideas should never be suppressed because someone doesn’t like them or because they don’t fit a marketing campaign.  The value in having an independent on your payroll is the objectivity that person brings to the table.  Hiding that objectivity for the sake of a few dollars on the bottom line is the road to ruin.

Likewise, you as the independent need to be sure you don’t cross the line when it comes to reducing your own independence.  I’ve seen more than one person go to work for vendor and slowly transform themselves from an independent thinker to a corporate mouthpiece.  When you put the leash on yourself and impinge you own credibility you’ve done a disservice to your employer as well as yourself.  Attacking a competitor via blog posts or social media serves no real purpose.  Debating salient issues is a better use of time for everyone.  Don’t let yourself be dragged into the fray.  Rise above and keep the discussions focused on technology and not on the logo on the device.

Tom’s Take

I’ve stayed independent because of my own stubbornness.  I feel that my views are better voiced outside the vendor community.  That doesn’t mean that vendors are evil and should be avoided.  On the contrary, vendors are a great fit for a great number of bloggers.  Any time someone comes to me and tells me they’ve taken a position with a vendor I applaud their choice.  It ultimately comes down to the person making the choice.  If you feel you can stay independent inside the greater organization then a vendor is a great fit.  Just remember to be vigilant and stay true to who you are.  Not the logo on your shirt.

Building A Lego Data Center Juniper Style

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I think I’ve been intrigued by building with Lego sets as far back as I could remember.  I had a plastic case full of them that I would use to build spaceships and castles day in and day out.  I think much of that building experience paid off when I walked into the real world and I started building data centers.  Racks and rails are network engineering versions of the venerable Lego brick.  Little did I know what would happen later.

Ashton Bothman (@ABothman) is a social media rock star for Juniper Networks.  She emailed me and asked me if I would like to participate in a contest to build a data center from Lego bricks.  You could imagine my response:

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I like the fact that Ashton sent me a bunch of good old fashioned Lego bricks.  One of the things that has bugged me a bit since the new licensed sets came out has been the reliance on specialized pieces.  Real Lego means using the same bricks for everything, not custom-molded pieces.  Ashton did it right by me.

Here’s a few of my favorite shots of my Juniper Lego data center:

My rack setup. I even labeled some of the devices!

My rack setup. I even labeled some of the devices!

Ladder racks for my Lego cables. I like things clean.

Ladder racks for my Lego cables. I like things clean.

Can't have a data center with a generator. Complete with flashing lights.

Can’t have a data center with a generator. Complete with flashing lights.

The Big Red Button. EPO is a siren call for troublemakers.

The Big Red Button. EPO is a siren call for troublemakers.

The Token Unix Guy. Complete with beard and old workstation.

The Token Unix Guy. Complete with beard and old workstation.

Storage lockers and a fire extinguisher. I didn't have enough bricks for a halon system.

Storage lockers and a fire extinguisher. I didn’t have enough bricks for a halon system.

The Obligatory Logo Shot. Just for Ashton.

The Obligatory Logo Shot. Just for Ashton.

Tom’s Take

This was fun.  It’s also for a great cause in the end.  My son has already been eyeing this set and he helped a bit in the placement of the pirate DC admin and the lights on the server racks.  He wanted to put some ninjas in the data center when I asked him what else was needed.  Maybe he’s got a future in IT after all.

JDC-Overview

Here are some more Lego data centers from other contest participants:

Ivan Pepelnjak’s Lego Data Center

Stephen Foskett’s Datacenter History: Through The Ages in Lego

Amy Arnold’s You Built a Data Center?  Out Of A DeLorean?

FaceTime Audio: The Beginning or The End?

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The world of mobile devices is a curious one. Handset manufacturers are always raising the bar for features in both hardware and software in order to convince customers to use their device. Yet, no matter how much innovation goes into the handset the vendors are still very reliant upon the whims of the carriers. Apple knows this perhaps better than anyone

In Your FaceTime

FaceTime was the first protocol to feel the wrath of the carriers. Apple developed it as a way to facilitate video communication between parties. The idea was that face-to-face video communications could be simplified to create a seamless experience. And it did, for the most part. Except that AT&T decided that using FaceTime over 3G would put too much strain on their network. At first, they forced Apple to limit FaceTime to only work with wireless connections. That severely inhibited the utility of the protocol. If the only place that a you can video call someone is at home or in a coffee shop (or on crappy hotel wireless) that makes the video call much less useful.

Apple finally allowed FaceTime to operate over cellular networks in iOS 6, yet AT&T (and other carriers) restricted the use of the protocol to those customers on the most current data plans. This eliminated those on older, unlimited data plans from utilizing the service. The carriers eventually gave in to customer pressure and started rolling out the capability to all subscribers. By then, it was too late. Apple had decided to take a different track – replace the need for a carrier.

Message For You

The first shot in this replacement battle came with iMessage. Apple created a messaging protocol like the iChat system for Mac, only it ran on iPhones and iPads (and later Macs). It was enabled by default, which was genius. The first time you sent an Short Message Service (SMS) text to a friend, the system detected you were messaging another iPhone user on a compatible version of software. The system then flipped the messaging over to use iMessage instead of SMS and the chat bubbles turned blue instead of green. Now, you could send pictures of any size as well as texts on any length with no restrictions. 160-character limits were no longer a concern. Neither was paying your carrier for an SMS plan. So long as the people you spoke with were all iDevice users the service was completely free.

iMessage was Apple’s first attempt to sideline the carriers. It removed a huge portion of their profitability. According to an article published at the launch of iMessage, carriers were making $.20 per message outside of an SMS plan for data that would cost about $.0125 on a data plan. Worse yet, that message traversed a control channel that was always present for the user. There was no additional cost to the carrier beyond flipping a switch to enable message delivery to the phone. It was a pure-profit enterprise. Apple seized on the opportunity to erode that profitability.

Today, you can barely find a cellular plan that *doesn’t* include unlimited text messaging. The carriers can no longer reap the rewards of a high profit, low cost service like SMS because of Apple and iMessage. Carriers are instead including it as a quality of life feature that they make nothing from. Cupertino has eliminated one of the sources of carrier entanglement. And they’re poised to do it again in iOS 7.

You Can Hear Me Now

FaceTime Audio was one of the features of iOS 7 that got swept under the rug in favor of talking about flat design or parallax wallpaper. FaceTime Audio uses the same audio codec from FaceTime, AAC-ELD, to initiate a phone call between two iDevice users. Only it doesn’t use the 3G/LTE radio to make the call. It’s all done via the data connection.

I tested FaceTime Audio for the first time after my wife upgraded her phone to iOS 7. The results were beyond astonishing. The audio quality of the call was as crisp and clear as any I’d every heard. In fact, I would compare it to the use of Cisco’s Wideband G.722 codec on an enterprise voice system. My wife, a non-technical person even noticed the difference by remarking, “It’s like you’re right next to me in the same room!” I specifically tried it over 3G/LTE to make sure it wasn’t blocked like FaceTime video. Amazingly, it wasn’t.

The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) rating that telephony network use to rate call clarity runs from 1 to 5. A 1 means you can’t hear them at all. A 5 means there is no difference between talking on the phone and talking in the same room. Most of the “best” calls get a MOS rating in the 4.1-4.3 range. I would rate FaceTime audio at a 4.5 or higher. Not only could I hear my wife clearly on the calls we made, but I also heard background noise clearly when she turned her head to speak to someone. The clarity was so amazing that I even tweeted about it.

FaceTime Audio calling could be poised to do the same thing to voice minutes that iMessage did to SMS. I’ve already changed the favorite for my wife’s number to dial her via FaceTime Audio instead of her mobile phone number. The clarity makes that much of a difference. It also helps that I’m not using any of my plan minutes to call her. Yes, I realize that many carriers make mobile-to-mobile calls free already. However, I was also able to call my wife via FaceTime Audio from my iPad as a test that worked perfectly. Now, I not only don’t use voice minutes but have the flexibility to call from a device that previously had no capability to do so.

Who Needs A Phone?

Think about the iPod Touch. It is a device that is very similar to the iPhone. In fact, with the exception of the cellular radio one might say they’re identical. With iMessage, I can get texts on an iPod touch using my Apple ID. So long as I’m around a wireless connection (or have a 3G MiFi device) I’m connected to the world. With FaceTime audio, the same Apple ID now allows me to take phone calls. The only thing the carriers now have to provide is a data connection. You still can’t text or call non-Apple devices with iMessage and FaceTime. However, you can reduce the amount of money you are paying for their services due to a reduction in the amount of minutes and/or texts you are sending. That should have the mobile carriers running scared.

Tom’s Take

I once said I would never own a cellular phone because sometimes I didn’t want to be found. Today, I get nervous if mine isn’t with me at all times. I also didn’t get SMS messaging at first. Now I spend more time doing that than anything else. Mobile technology has changed our lives. We’ve spent far too much time chained to the carriers, however. They have dictated what when can do with our phones. They have enforced how much data we use and how much we can talk. With protocols like FaceTime Audio, the handset manufacturers are going to start deciding how best to use their own devices. No carrier will be able to institute limits on minutes or texts. I think that if FaceTime Audio takes off in the same way as iMessage, you’ll see mobile carriers offering unlimited talk plans alongside the unlimited text plans within the next two years. If 50% of your userbase is making calls on their data plans, they need for all those “rollover” minutes becomes spurious. People will start reducing their plans down to the minimum necessary to get good data coverage. And if a carrier decides to start gouging for data service? Just take your device to another carrier. Or drop you contact in favor of a MiFi or similar data-only connection. FaceTime Audio is the beginning of easy Voice over IP (VoIP) calling. It’s the end of the road for carrier dominance.

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SpectraLogic: Who Wants To Save Forever?

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Data retention is a huge deal for many companies.  When you say “tape backup”, the first thing that leaps to people’s minds is backup operations.  Servers with Digital Audio Tape (DAT) drives or newer Linear-Tape Open (LTO) units.  Judiciously saving those bits for the future when you might just need to dig up one or two in order to recover emails or databases.  After visiting with SpectraLogic at their 2013 Spectra Summit, I’m starting to see that tape isn’t just for saving the day.  It’s for saving everything.

Let’s Go To The Tape

Tape is cheap.  As outlined in this Computer World article, for small applications of less than 6 tape drives, tape is 1/6th the cost of disk backup.  It also lasts virtually forever.  I’ve still got VHS tapes from the 80s that I can watch if I so desire.  And that’s consumer grade magnetic media.  Imagine how well enterprise grade stuff would work?  It’s also portable.  You can eject a tape and take it home on the weekends as a form of disaster recovery.  If you have at least one tape offsite in the grandfather-father-son rotation, you can be assured of getting at least some of your data back in the event of a disaster.

Tape has drawbacks.  It’s slow.  Really slow.  The sequential access of tape drives makes them inefficient as a storage medium.  You can batch writes to a cluster of drives, but good luck if you ever want to get that data back in a reasonable time frame.  I once heard someone refer to tape as “Write Once, Read Never”.  It also has trouble scaling very large.  In the end, you need to cluster several tape units together in order to achieve the kind of scale that you need to capture data from the the virtual firehose today.

Go Deeper

T-Finity. Photo by Stephen Foskett

T-Finity. Photo by Stephen Foskett

SpectraLogic launched a product called DeepStorage.  That is in no way affiliated with Howard Marks (@DeepStorageNet).  DeepStorage is the idea that you can save files forever.  It uses a product called BlackPearl to eliminate one of the biggest issues with tape: speed.  BlackPearl comes with SSD drives to use as a write cache for data being sent to the tape archive.  BlackPearl uses a SpectraLogic protocol called DS3, which stands for DeepS3, to hold the data until it can be written to the tape archive in the most efficient manner.  DS3 looks a lot like Amazon S3.  That’s on purpose.  With the industry as a whole moving toward RESTful APIs and more web interfaces, making a RESTful API for tape storage seems like a great fit for SpectraLogic.

It’s goes a little deeper than that, though (pardon the pun).  One other thing that made me pause was LTFS – the Linear Tape File System.  LTFS allows for a more open environment to write data.  In the past, any data that you backed up to tape left you at the mercy of the software you used to write that data.  CommVault couldn’t read Veritas volumes.  ARCServe didn’t play nicely with Symantec.  With LTFS, you can not only read data from multiple different backup vendors, but you can also stop treating tape drives like Write Once, Read Never devices.  LTFS allows a cluster of tape units to look and act just like a storage array.  A slow array to be sure, but still an array.

SpectraLogic took the ideas behind LTFS and coupled them with DeepStorage to create an idea – “buckets”.  Buckets function just like the buckets you find in Amazon S3.  These are user-defined constructs that hold data.  The BlackPearl caches these buckets and optimizes the writes to your tape array.  Where the bucket metaphor works well is the portability of the bucket.  Let’s say you wanted to transfer long-term data like phone records or legal documents between law firms that are both using DeepStorage.  All you need to do is identify the bucket in question, eject the tape (or tapes) needed to recreate that bucket, and then send the tapes to the destination.  Once there, the storage admin just needs to import the bucket from the tapes in question and all the data in that bucket can be read.  No software version mismatches.  No late night panicked calls because nothing will mount.  Data exchange without hassles.

The Tape Library of Congress

The ideas here boggle the mind.  While at the Spectra Summit, we heard from companies like NASCAR and Yahoo.  They are using BlackPearl and DS3 as a way to store large media files virtually forever.  There’s no reason you can’t do something similar.  I had to babysit a legal server migration one night because it had 480,000 WordPerfect documents that represented their entire case log for the last twenty years.  Why couldn’t that be moved to long-term storage?  For law offices that still have paper records of everything and don’t want to scan it all in for fear of an OCR mistake, why not just make an image of every file and store it on an LTFS volume fronted by DS3?

The flexibility of a RESTful API means that you can created a customized interface virtually on the fly.  Afraid the auditors aren’t going to be able to find data from five years ago?  Make a simple searching interface that is customized to their needs.  Want to do batch processing across multiple units with parallel writes for fault tolerance?  You can program that as well.  With REST calls, anything is possible.

DS3 is going to enable you to keep data forever.  No more worrying about throwing things out.  No need to rent storage lockers for cardboard boxes full of files.  No need to worry about the weather or insects.  Just keeping the data center online is enough to keep your data in a readable format from now until forever.

For more information on SpectraLogic and their solutions, you can find them at http://www.spectralogic.com.  You can also follow them on Twitter as @SpectraLogic.

Disclaimer

I was a guest of SpectraLogic for their 2013 Spectra Summit.  They paid for my flight and lodging during the event.  They also provided a t-shirt, a jacket, and a 2 GB USB drive containing marketing collateral.  They did not ask for any consideration in the writing of this review, nor were they promised any.  The conclusions reach herein are mine and mine alone.  In addition, any errors or omissions are mine as well.

Avaya and the Magic of SPB

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I was very interested to hear from Avaya at Interop New York.  They were the company I knew the least about.  I knew the most about them from the VoIP side of the house, but they’ve been coming on strong with networking as well.  They are one of the biggest champions of 802.1aq, more commonly known as Shortest Path Bridging (SPB).  You may remember that I wrote a bit about SPB in the past and referred to it as the Betamax of networking fabric technologies.  After this presentation, I may be forced to eat my words to a degree.

Paul Unbehagen really did a great job with this presentation.  There were no slides, but he kept the attention of the crowd.  The whiteboard supported his message.  While informal, there was a lot of learning.  Paul knows SPB.  It’s always great to learn from someone that knows the protocol.

Multicast Magic

One of the things I keyed on during the presentation was the way that SPB deals with multicast.  Multicast is a huge factor in Ethernet today.  So much so that even the cheapest SOHO Ethernet switch has a ton of multicast optimization.  But multicast as implemented in enterprises is painful.  If you want to make an engineer’s blood run cold, walk up and whisper “PIM“.  If you want to watch a nervous breakdown happen in real time, follow that up with “RPF“.

RPF checks in multicast PIM routing are nightmarish.  It would be wonderful to get rid of RPF checks to eliminate any loops in the multicast routing table.  SPB accomplishes that by using a Dijkstra algorithm.  The same algorithm that OSPF and IS-IS use to compute paths.  Considering the heavily roots of IS-IS in SPB, that’s not surprising.  The use of Dijkstra means that additional receivers on a multicast tree don’t negatively effect the performance of path calculation.

I’ve Got My IS-IS On You

In fact, one of the optimized networks that Paul talked about involved surveillance equipment.  Video surveillance units that send via multicast have numerous endpoints and only a couple of receivers on the network.  In other words, the exact opposite problem multicast was designed to solve.  Yet, with SPB you can create multicast distribution networks that allow additional end nodes to attach to a common point rather than talking back to a rendezvous point (RP) and getting the correct tree structure from there.  That means fast convergence and simple node addition.

SPB has other benefits as well.  It supports 16.7 million ISIDs, which are much like VLANs or MPLS tags.  This means that networks can grow past the 4,096 VLAN limitation.  It looks a lot like VxLAN to me.  Except for the reliance on multicast and lack of a working implementation.  SPB allows you to use a locally significant VLAN for a service and then defined an ISID that will transport across the network to be decapsulated on the other side in a totally different VLAN that is attached to the ISID.  That kind of flexibility is key for deployments in existing, non-green field environments.

If you’d like to learn more about Avaya and their SPB technology, you can check them out at http://www.avaya.com.  You can also follow them on Twitter as @Avaya.

Tom’s Take

Paul said that 95% of all SPB implementations are in the enterprise.  That shocked me a bit, as I always thought of SPB as a service provider protocol.  I think the key comes down to something Paul said in the video.  When we are faced with applications or additional complexity today, we tend to just throw more headers at the problem.  We figured that wrapping the whole mess in a new tag or a new tunnel will take care of everything.  At least until it all collapses into a puddle.  Avaya’s approach with SPB was to go back down to the lower layers and change the architecture of things to optimize everything and make it work the right way on all kinds of existing hardware.  To quote Paul, “In the IEEE, we don’t build things for the fun it.”  That means SPB has their feet grounded in the right place.  Considering how difficult things can be in data center networking, that’s magical indeed.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Avaya was a presenter at the Tech Field Day Interop Roundtable.  They did not ask for any consideration in the writing of this review nor were they promised any.  The conclusions and analysis contained in this post are mine and mine alone.

HP Networking and the Software Defined Store

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HP

HP has had a pretty good track record with SDN.  Even if it’s not very well-known.  HP has embraced OpenFlow on a good number of its Procurve switches.  Given the age of these devices, there’s a good chance you can find them laying around in labs or in retired network closets to test with.  But where is that going to lead in the long run?

HP Networking was kind enough to come to Interop New York and participate in a Tech Field Day roundtable.  It had been a while since I talked to their team.  I wanted to see how they were handling the battle being waged between OpenFlow proponents like NEC and Brocade, Cisco and their hardware focus, and VMware with NSX.  Jacob Rapp and Chris Young (@NetManChris) stepped up to the plate to talk about SDN and the vision on HP.

They cover a lot of ground in here.  Probably the most important piece to me is the SDN app store.

The press picked up on this quickly.  HP has an interesting idea here.  I should know.  I mentioned it in passing in an article I wrote a month ago.  The more I think about the app store model, the more I realize that many vendors are going to go down the road.  Just not in the way HP is thinking.

HP wants to curate content for enterprises.  They want to ensure that software works with their controller to be sure that there aren’t any hiccups in implementation.  Given their apparent distaste for open source efforts, it’s safe to say that their efforts will only benefit HP customers.  That’s not to say that those same programs won’t work on other controllers.  So long as they operate according to the guidelines laid down by the Open Networking Foundation, all should be good.

Show Me The Money

Where’s the value then?  That’s in positioning the apps in the store.  Yes, you’re going to have some developers come to HP and want to simple apps to put in the store.  Odds are better that you’re going to see more recognizable vendors coming to the HP SDN store.  People are more likely to buy software from a name they recognize, like TippingPoint or F5.  That means that those companies are going to want to have a prime spot in the store.  HP is going to make something from hosting those folks.

The real revenue doesn’t come from an SMB buying a load balancer once.  It comes from a company offering it as a service with a recurring fee.  The vendor gets a revenue stream. HP would be wise to work out a recurring fee as well.  It won’t be the juicy 30% cut that Apple enjoys from their walled garden, but anything would be great for the bottom line.  Vendors win from additional sales.  Customers win from having curated apps that work every time that are easy to purchase, install, and configure.  HP wins because everyone comes to them.

Fragmentation As A Service

Now that HP has jumped on the idea of an enterprise-focused SDN app store, I wonder which company will be the next to offer one?  I also worry that having multiple app stores won’t end up being cumbersome in the long run.  Small developers won’t like submitting their app to four or five different vendor-affiliated stores.  More likely they’ll resort to releasing code on their own rather than jump through hoops.  That will eventually lead to support fragmentation.  Fragmentation helps no one.

Tom’s Take

HP Networking did a great job showcasing what they’ve been doing in SDN.  It was also nice to hear about their announcements the day before they broke wide to the press.  I think HP is going to do well with OpenFlow on their devices.  Integrating OpenFlow visibility into their management tools is also going to do wonders for people worried about keeping up with all the confusing things that SDN can do to a traditional network.  The app store is a very intriguing concept that bears watching.  We can only hope that it ends up being a well-respect entry in a long line of easing customers into the greater SDN world.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

HP was a presenter at the Tech Field Day Interop Roundtable.  In addition, they also provided the delegates a 1TB USB3 hard disk drive.  They did not ask for any consideration in the writing of this review nor were they promised any.  The conclusions and analysis contained in this post are mine and mine alone.

SDN 101 at ONUG Academy

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Software defined networking is king of the hill these days in the greater networking world.  Vendors are contemplating strategies.  Users are demanding functionality.  And engineers are trying to figure out what it all means.  What’s needed is a way for vendor-neutral parties to get together and talk about what SDN represents and how best to implement it.  Most of the talk so far has been at vendor-specific conferences like Cisco Live or at other conferences like Interop.  I think a third option has just presented itself.

Nick Lippis (@NickLippis) has put together a group of SDN-focused people to address concerns about implementation and usage.  The Open Networking User Group (ONUG) was assembled to allow large companies using SDN to have a semi-annual meeting to discuss strategy and results.  It allows Facebook to talk to JP Morgan about what they are doing to simplify networking through use of things like OpenFlow.

This year, ONUG is taking it a step further by putting on the ONUG Academy, a day-long look at SDN through the eyes of those that implement it.  They have assembled a group of amazing people, including the founder of Cumulus Networks and Tech Field Day’s own Brent Salisbury (@NetworkStatic).  There will be classes about optimizing networks for SDN as well as writing SDN applications for the most popular controllers on the market.  Nick shares more details about the ONUG academy here:

If you’re interested in attending ONUG either for the academy or for the customer-focused meetings, you need to register today.  As a special bonus, if you use the code TFD10 when you sign up, you can take 10% of the cost of registration.  Use that extra cash to go out and buy a cannoli or two.

I’ll be at ONUG with Tech Field Day interviewing customers and attendees about their SDN strategies as well as where they think the state of the industry is headed.  If you’re there, stop by and say hello.  And be sure to bring me one of those cannolis.

Cisco CMX – Marketing Magic? Or Big Brother?

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The first roundtable presenter at Interop New York was Cisco. Their Enterprise group always brings interesting technology to the table. This time, the one that caught my eye was the Connected Mobile Experience (CMX). CMX is a wireless mobility technology that allows a company to do some advanced marketing wizardry.

CMX uses your Cisco wireless network to monitor devices coming into the air space. They don’t necessarily have to connect to your wireless network for CMX to work. They just have to be beaconing for a network, which all devices do. CMX can then push a message to the device. This message can be a simple “thank you” for coming or something more advanced like a coupon or notification to download a store specific app. CMX can then store the information about that device, such as whether or not they joined the network, where they went, and how long they were there. This gives the company to pull some interesting statistics about their customer base. Even if they never hop on the wireless network.

I have to be honest here. This kind of technology gives me the bit of the creeps. I understand that user tracking is the hot new thing in retail. Stores want to know where you went, how long you stayed there, and whether or not you saw an advertisement or a featured item. They want to know your habits so as to better sell to you. The accumulation of that data over time allows for some patterns to emerge that can drive a retail operation’s decision making process.

A Thought Exercise

Think about an average person. We’ll call him Mike. Mike walks four blocks from his office to the subway station every day after work. He stops at the corner about halfway between to cross a street. On that street just happens to be a coffee shop using something like CMX. Mike has a brand new phone that uses wifi and bluetooth and Mike keeps them on all the time. CMX can detect when the device comes into range. It knows that Mike stays there for about 2 minutes but never joins the network. It then moves out of the WLAN area. The data cruncher for the store wants to drive new customers to the store. They analyze the data and find that lots of people stay in the area for a couple of minutes. They equate this to people stopping to decide if they want to have a cup of coffee from the shop. They decide to create a CMX coupon push notification that pops up after one minute on devices that have been seen in the database for the last month. Mike will see a coupon for $1 off a cup of coffee the next time he waits for the light in front of the coffee shop.

That kind of reach is crazy. I keep thinking back to the scenes in Minority Report where the eye scanners would detect you looking at an advertisement and then target a specific ad based on your retina scan. You may say that’s science fiction. But with products like CMX, I can build a pretty complete profile of your behavior even if I don’t have a retina scan. Correlating information provides a clear picture of who you are without any real identity information. Knowing that someone likes to spend their time in the supermarket in the snack aisles and frozen food aisles and less time in the infants section says a lot. Knowing the route a given device takes through the store can help designers place high volume items in the back and force shoppers to take longer routes past featured items.

Tom’s Take

I’m not saying that CMX is a bad product. It’s providing functionality that can be of great use to retail companies. But, just like VHS recorders and Bittorrent, good ideas can often be used to facilitate things that aren’t as noble. I suggested to the CMX developers that they could implement some kind of “opt out” message that popped up if I hadn’t joined the wireless network in a certain period of time. I look at that as a way of saying to shoppers “We know you aren’t going to join. Press the button and we’ll wipe our your device info.” It puts people at ease to know they aren’t being tracked. Even just showing them what you’re collecting is a good start. With the future of advertising and marketing focusing on instant delivery and data gathering for better targeting, I think the products like CMX will be powerful additions. But, great power requires even greater responsibility.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Cisco was a presenter at the Tech Field Day Interop Roundtable.  They did not ask for any consideration in the writing of this review nor were they promised any.  The conclusions and analysis contained in this post are mine and mine alone.