Time For A Data Diet?

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I’m running out of drive space. Not just on my laptop SSD or my desktop HDD. But everywhere. The amount of data that I’m storing now is climbing at an alarming rate. What’s worse is that I often forget I have some of it until I go spelunking back through my drive to figure out what’s taking up all that room. And it’s a problem that the industry is facing too.

The Data Junkyard

Data is accumulating. You can’t deny that. Two factors have lead to this. The first is that we now log more data from things than ever before. In this recent post from Chris Evans (@ChrisMEvans), he mentions that Virgin Atlantic 787s are generating 500GB of data per flight. I’m sure that includes telemetry, aircraft performance, and other debugging information that someone at some point deemed crucial. In another recent article from Jacques Mattheij (@JMattheij), he mentions that app developers left the debug logging turned on, generating enormous data files as the system was in operation.

Years ago we didn’t have the space to store that much data. We had to be very specific about what needed to be capture and stored for long periods of time. I can remember having a 100MB hard drive in my first computer. I can also remember uninstalling and deleting several things in order to put a new program on. Now there is so much storage space that we don’t worry about running out unless a new application makes outrageous demands.

You Want To Use The Data?

The worst part about all this data accumulation is that once it’s been stored, no one ever looks at it again. This isn’t something that’s specific to electronic data, though. I can remember seeing legal offices with storage closets dedicated to boxes full of files. Hospitals have services that deal with medical record storage. In the old days, casinos hired vans to shuffle video tapes back and forth between vaults and security offices. All that infrastructure just on the off-chance that you might need the data one day.

With Big Data being a huge funding target and buzzword source today, you can imagine that every other startup in the market is offering to give you some insight into all that data that you’re storing. I’ve talked before about the drive for analysis of data. It’s the end result of companies trying to make sense of the chaos. But what about the stored data?

Odds are good that it’s going to just sit there in perpetuity. Once the analysis is done on all this data, it will either collect dust in a virtual file box until it is needed again (perhaps) in the far future or it will survive until the next SAN outage and never be reconstructed from backup. The funny thing about this collected data cruft is that no one misses it until the subpoena comes.

Getting Back To Fighting Weight

The solution to the problem isn’t doing more analysis on data. Instead, we need to start being careful about what data we’re storing in the first place. When you look at personal systems like Getting Things Done, they focus on stemming the flow of data quickly to give people more time to look at the important things. In much the same way, instead of capturing every bit coming from a data source and deciding later what to do with it, the decision needs to be made right away. Data Scientists need to start thinking like they’re on a storage budget, not like they’ve been handed the keys to the SAN kingdom.

I would be willing to bet that a few discrete decisions in the data collection process about what to keep and what to throw away would significantly cut down on the amount data we need to store and process. Less time spent querying and searching through that mess would optimize data retrieval systems and make our infrastructure run much faster. Think of it like spring cleaning for the data garage.

Tom’s Take

I remember a presentation at Networking Field Day a few years ago when Statseeker told us that they could scan data points from years in the past down to the minute. The room collectively gasped. How could you look that far back? How big are the drives in your appliance? The answer was easy: they don’t store every little piece of data coming from the system. They instead look at very specific things that tell them about the network and then record those with an eye to retrieval in the future. They optimize at storage time to help the impact of lookup in the future.

Rather than collecting everything in the world in the hopes that it might be useful, we need to get away from the data hoarding mentality and trim down to something more agile. It’s the only way our data growth problem is going to get better in the near future.

If you’d like to hear some more thoughts on the growing data problem, be sure to check out the Tech Talk sponsored by Fusion-io.

 

A Bright And Happy 2015 Ahead

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Welcome to a new year finally divisible by five! This is a year devoid of extra February days, Olympics, or anything else. It’s a chance for us to take a look at technology and make things better and easier for users and IT staff. It’s also probably going to be called the year of VDI, NFV, and SDN. Again.

Rather than writing a wrap up post for the end of 2014 like so many other sites, I like to look at what I said I was going to do 365 days ago and see if I followed through on them. It’s a way to keep myself honest and also to see how the year transformed around me and my goals.

Looking at 2014

Thankfully, my goals for 2014 were modest. I wanted to get more involved with the people in the IT industry. And I did that in a big way. I went to a ton of conferences and events through the year. Cisco Live, VMworld, and HP Discover Barcelona were all on my list this year, as well as all of the Tech Field Day events I took part in as an organizer. It was a grand opportunity to meets lots of people in the technology space. I got to interact with the old guard and see the rise of new stars. Jobs changed. People sought out new careers. And through it all I got a real sense that the people that are going to change the world in technology are passionate about what they do.

Passion is the key to making sense out of what we do. I’m not saying that you have to be so in love with your job that you are blinded to the world. What I mean is that you need to have passion about the things that matter to you. For me, it’s about seeing new technology and exposing people to it. I love Tech Field Day. It warms my heart when people come to me during and after the event and tell me that they were able to see so much more than they imagined. When a delegate tells me they finally had a chance to meet one of their tech idols or had a game changing conversation during the limo ride between presenters I genuinely smile. Those are the kinds of moments that make everything worth it for me.

What’s In Store For 2015?

For now, the major things aren’t going to change any time soon. My Bruce Wayne job is still going to be Tech Field Day. My Batman job is going to be writing on this blog. But I’m going to try a few new things and see how they work out.

Markdown

I’ve played around with the idea of writing in Markdown for a while now. It’s a simple language that turns thoughts into HTML with out needing to remember some of the more irritating code sections. I’ve never really committed to it before, looking at it more as a hobby or a thing I would eventually get to. Well, for 2015 I’m going to commit to writing all of my posts in Markdown. There’s no better way to learn than a trial by fire. I don’t think the regular posts are going to be a big deal, but the 2015 Cisco Live Twitter List could be fun.

If you’d like to see a great reference sheet for Markdown, check out Greg Ferro’s (@EtherealMind) page on Markdown Reference.

Blog Themes

I wanted to retheme my blog for 2015. I investigated several options and ultimately abandoned all of them because I could never find the right combination. I’m picky about many things I work with every day, including my blog theme, my backpack/messenger bag, and my computer desk. Since I’m hosted on WordPress.com, I can’t just install any theme I want or make modifications to it as I would like. I’m going to keep investigating some ideas and may try them out now and then. Just don’t be surprised if things look slightly different one day in the near future.

Cisco Live Managmement

One of the ideas that I’m going to float out here six months early for Cisco Live is a poll/form for picking the best time to take the Twitter photo. Every year for the last four years we’ve taken a huge photo with all the social media crew at Cisco Live. In the past couple of years we’ve had some issues getting everyone in the picture due to scheduling. This year, Jeff Fry (@FryGuy_PA) and I want to make sure that no one is left out that wants to be in the big photo because of their schedule. I’m going to put up a poll in the next couple of months to pick the best possible time for the photo. And we’ll make sure to publish the results and work with the Cisco Live Social Media staff to get the photographer for that time.

I’m also looking at creating some other spreadsheets to keep track of other information during the event, so if you get a random email from me about it keep in mind that I’m trying to keep myself sane this year.

Tom’s Take

I’m excited for 2015. There’s going be a lot of technology to write about. Tech Field Day will be in Austin, Boston, and Silicon Valley. We’re going to be talking about wireless, networking, storage, and event Big Data! I’m also looking forward to reconnecting with my friends and peers this year and meeting new and exciting people. Through it all, I’m going to be writing away here as well to put my thoughts down about trends and ideas in the industry. There may be the occasional technical piece now and then, since explanation of complex tech subjects is something I think there needs to be more of.

To my readers, thanks for helping me realize how important blogging is the community. Keep posting comments and sharing my thoughts with the world. And in 2015 we’ll have more fun that we’ve had in a long while.

Q And A Should Include The E

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The IT world is cyclical for sure. I’ve seen trends and topics repeating themselves over and over again in my relatively short time here. I find it interesting that we keep solving similar problems over and over again. I also find it fascinating that this particular issue leads to the reason why blogs are so important.

Any Questions?

Questions abound in IT. It’s the nature of the industry. However, it’s not just new questions that we create when technology leaps past us. We keep asking the same questions over and over again. This is the field of study that created the FAQ, remember?

In recent memory, I find the same questions being asked over and over again:

  • What is SDN?
  • How can SDN help me?
  • What makes this different from what we’ve done before?

You’ve probably asked those very same questions. Perhaps you found the answers you were looking for. Perhaps you’re still trying to figure it out. The problem is that those questions are still being asked. The industry should have evolved to the point where the simple questions have been answered with simple answers. Complex questions, or those questions that need more in-depth discussion, should be treated as such. Yes, the question of what SDN really is would take more than a cursory paragraph on a blog, but we should be able to at least answer it with enough specificity to make the user not feel like they been slighted.

Questions will never stop coming in IT. But how should we handle them?

Any Answers?

Questions may abound in IT, but the answers drive IT. People make a career out of being the person with the answers. It’s in all the marketing jargon. It’s why we create blogs. Even though most of my writing in the last year has been focused on industry trends or non-technical focused posts, the top three posts on my blog are still answers to simple questions:

  1. When Is A Trunk Not A Trunk?
  2. Switchport Voice VLAN – What Does It Do?
  3. Why Is My SFP Not Working?

These posts are far and away the most popular. I even saw this a few months ago and it made me smile:

This would make it seem like people are in need of answers. Any blogger can look at the incoming search terms for their blog and see all the things that brought readers to them. People want answers and they will keep looking until they find them. But why?

Explain It

I never understood why people kept searching for answers until I thought about satisfaction. I think Randall Munroe summed up the satisfaction (or lack thereof) angle here:

Who are you, DenverCoder9?!? (Thanks XKCD)
Who are you, DenverCoder9?!? (Thanks XKCD)

People can find answers easily. But they won’t stop looking until they are satisfied with the answer. It’s easy to find people saying things like “That’s not supported” or “RTFM” when you’re looking for an answer to a particularly difficult problem. And if you’ve ever called a tech support line, you know how unfulfilling the unsupported answer can feel.

That’s when explanation comes into play for me. First, an admission: I’m a chronic explainer. If you’ve ever met me and had a conversation with me for more than three minutes, you know I explain things. I talk about comic books and movies and technical topics in more depth than I should. That’s because I want things explained to me. Explaining how OSPF area calculations are done is as important as explaining how Captain America ended up wielding Mjolnir.

Think about the following answers:

This is unsupported.

or

This is unsupported on that platform because the CPU doesn’t have enough horsepower to process the packets in real time. We tried cutting down on the processing time but it just overwhelmed the unit no matter how much we tried. So rather than dealing with poor performance, we marked it as unsupported.

Both answers are technically correct. But the second is much more satisfying because the explanation is there instead of just the distilled answer.

The IT world needs more explanation. We need to know why things work the way they do instead of just getting a response of a few words. The explanation has the keys to understanding the answer to the question in its totality. It prevents us from asking the same questions over and over again. It leaves us fulfilled and ready to seek out the next question that needs to be asked.

Expiring The Internet

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An article came out this week that really made me sigh.  The title was “Six Aging Protocols That Could Cripple The Internet“.  I dove right in, expecting to see how things like Finger were old and needed to be disabled and removed.  Imagine my surprise when I saw things like BGP4 and SMTP on the list.  I really tried not to smack my own forehead as I flipped through the slideshow of how the foundation of the Internet is old and is at risk of meltdown.

If It Ain’t Broke

Engineers love the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”.  We spend our careers planning and implementing.  We also spend a lot of time not touching things afterwards in order to prevent it from collapsing in a big heap.  Once something is put in place, it tends to stay that way until something necessitates a change.

BGP is a perfect example.  The basics of BGP remain largely the same from when it was first implemented years ago.  BGP4 has been in use since 1994 even though RFC 4271 didn’t officially formalize it until 2006.  It remains a critical part of how the Internet operates.  According to the article, BGP is fundamentally flawed because it’s insecure and trust based.  BGP hijacking has been occurring with more frequency, even as resources to combat it are being hotly debated.  Is BGP to blame for the issue?  Or is it something more deeply rooted?

Don’t Fix It

The issues with BGP and other protocols mentioned in the article, including IPv6, aren’t due to the way the protocol was constructed.  It is due in large part to the humans that implement those protocols.  BGP is still in use in the current insecure form because it works.  And because no one has proposed a simple replacement that accomplishes the goal of fixing all the problems.

Look at IPv6.  It solves the address exhaustion issue.  It solves hierarchical addressing issues.  It restores end-to-end connectivity on the Internet.  And yet adoption numbers still languish in the single digit percentage.  Why?  Is it because IPv6 isn’t technically superior? Or because people don’t want to spend the time to implement it?  It’s expensive.  It’s difficult to learn.  Reconfiguring infrastructures to support new protocols takes time and effort.  Things that are better spent on answering user problems or taking on additional tasks as directed by management that doesn’t care about BGP insecurity until the Internet goes down.

It Hurts When I Do This

Instead of complaining about how protocols are insecure, the solution to the problem should be two fold: First, we need to start building security into protocols and expiring their older, insecure versions.  POODLE exploited SSLv3, an older version that served as a fallback to TLS.  While some old browsers still used SSLv3, the simple easy solution was to disable SSL and force people to upgrade to TLS-capable clients.  In much the same way, protocols like NTP and BGP can be modified to use more security.  Instead of suggesting that people use those versions, architects and engineers need to implement those versions and discourage use of the old insecure protocols by disabling them.  It’s not going to be easy at first.  But as the movement gains momentum, the solution will work.

The next step in the process is to build easy-to-configure replacements.  Bolting security onto a protocol after the fact does stop the bleeding.  But to fix the underlying symptoms, the security needs to be baked into the protocol from the beginning.  But doing this with an entirely new protocol that has no backwards compatibility will be the death of that new protocol.  Just look at how horrible the transition to IPv6 has been.  Lack of an easy transition coupled with no monetary incentive and lack of an imminent problem caused the migration to drag out until the eleventh hour.  And even then there is significant pushback against an issue that can no longer be ignored.

Building the next generation of secure Internet protocols is going to take time and transparent effort.  People need to see what’s going into something to understand why it’s important.  The next generation of engineers needs to understand why things are being built the way they are.  We’re lucky in that many of the people responsible for building the modern Internet are still around.  When asked about limitations in protocols the answer remains remarkably the same – “We never thought it would be around this long.”

The longevity of quick fixes seems to be the real issue.  When the next generation of Internet protocols is built there needs to be a built-in expiration date.  A point-of-no-return beyond which the protocol will cease to function.  And there should be no method for extending the shelf life of a protocol to forestall it’s demise.  In order to ensure that security can’t be compromised we have to resign ourselves to the fact that old things need to be put out to pasture.  And the best way to ensure that new things are put in place to supplant them is to make sure the old things go away on time.

Tom’s Take

The Internet isn’t fundamentally broken.  It’s a collection of things that work well in their roles that maybe have been continued a little longer than necessary.  The probability of an exploit being created for something rises with every passing day it is still in use.  We can solve the issues of the current Internet with some security engineering.  But to make sure the problem never comes back again, we have to make a hard choice to expire protocols on a regular basis.  It will mean work.  It will create strife.  And in the end we’ll all be better for it.

Cisco Just Killed The CLI

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DeadCLI

Gallons of virtual ink have been committed to virtual paper in the last few days with regards to Cisco’s lawsuit against Arista Networks.  Some of it is speculating on the posturing by both companies.  Other writers talk about the old market vs. the new market.  Still others look at SDN as a driver.

I didn’t just want to talk about the lawsuit.  Given that Arista has marketed EOS as a “better IOS than IOS” for a while now, I figured Cisco finally decided to bite back.  They are fiercely protective of IOS and they have to be because of the way the trademark laws in the US work.  If you don’t go after people that infringe you lose your standing to do so and invite others to do it as well.  Is Cisco’s timing suspect? One does have to wonder.  Is this about knocking out a competitor? It’s tough to say.  But one thing is sure to me.  Cisco has effectively killed the command line interface (CLI).

“Industry Standards”

EOS is certainly IOS-like.  While it does introduce some unique features (see the NFD3 video here), the command syntax is very much IOS.  That is purposeful.  There are two broad categories of CLIs in the market:

  • IOS-like – EOS, HP Procurve, Brocade, FTOS, etc
  • Not IOS-like – Junos, FortiOS, D-Link OS, etc

What’s funny is that the IOS-like interfaces have always been marketed as such.  Sure, there’s the famous “industry standard” CLI comment, followed by a wink and a nudge.  Everyone knows what OS is being discussed.  It is a plus point for both sides.

The non-Cisco vendors can sell to networking teams by saying that their CLI won’t change.  Everything will be just as easy to configure with just a few minor syntax changes.  Almost like speaking a different dialect of a language.  Cisco gains because more and more engineers become familiar with the IOS syntax.  Down the line, those engineers may choose to buy Cisco based on familiarity with the product.

If you don’t believe that being IOS-like is a strong selling point, take a look PIX and Airespace.  The old PIX OS was transformed into something that looked a lot more like traditional IOS.  In ASA 8.2 they even changed the NAT code to look like IOS.  With Airespace it took a little longer to transform the alien CLI into something IOS-like.  They even lost functionality in doing so, simply to give networking teams an interface that is more friendly to them.  Cisco wants all their devices to run a CLI that is IOS-like.  Junos fans are probably snickering right now.

In calling out Arista for infringing on the “generic command line interface” in patent #7,047,526, Cisco has effectively said that they will start going after companies that copy the IOS interface too well.  This leaves companies in a bit of conundrum.  How can you continue to produce an OS with an “industry standard” CLI and hope that you don’t become popular enough to get noticed by Cisco?  Granted, it seems that all network switching vendors are #2 in the market somehow.  But at what point does being a big enough #2 get the legal hammer brought to bear?  Do you have to be snarky in marketing messages? Attack the 800-pound gorilla enough that you anger them?  Or do you just have to have a wildly successful quarter?

Laid To REST

Instead, what will happen is a tough choice.  Either continue to produce the same CLI year and year and hope that you don’t get noticed or overhaul the whole system.  Those that choose not to play Russian Roulette with the legal system have a further choice to make.  Should we create a new, non-infringing CLI from the ground up? Or scrap the whole idea of a CLI moving forward?  Both of those second choices are going to involve a lot of pain and effort.  One of them has a future.

Rewriting the CLI is a dead-end road.  By the time you’ve finished your Herculean task you’ll find the market has moved on to bigger and better things.  The SDN revolution is about making complex networks easier to program and manage.  Is that going to be accomplished via yet another syntax?  Or will it happen because of REST APIs and programing interfaces?  Given an equal amount of time and effort on both sides, the smart networking company will focus their efforts on scrapping the CLI and building programmability into their devices.  Sure, the 1.0 release is going to sting a little.  It’s going to require a controller and some rough interface conventions.  But building the seeds of a programmable system now means it will be growing while other CLIs are withering on the vine.

It won’t be easy.  It won’t be fun.  And it’s a risk to alienate your existing customer base.  But if your options are to get sued or spend all your effort on a project that will eventually go the way of the dodo your options don’t look all that appealing anyway.  If you’re going to have to go through the upheaval of rewriting something from the ground up, why not choose to do it with an eye to the future?

Tom’s Take

Cisco and Arista won’t be finished for a while.  There will probably be a settlement or a licensing agreement or some kind of capitulation on both sides in a few years time.  But by that point, the fallout from the legal action will have finally finished off the CLI for good.  There’s no sense in gambling that you won’t be the next target of a process server.  The solution will involve innovative thinking, blood, sweat, and tears on the part of your entire development team.  But in the end you’ll have a modern system that works with the new wave of the network.  If nothing else, you can stop relying on the “industry standard” ploy when selling your interface and start telling your customers that you are setting the new standard.

 

Vendor Whitebox Switches – Better Together?

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ChocoPeanut

Whitebox switching has moved past the realm of original device manufacturers and has been taken up by traditional networking vendors. Andre Kindness (@AndreKindness) of Forrester recently posted that he fields several calls from his customers every day asking about a particular vendor’s approach to whitebox switching. But what do these vendor offerings look like? And can we predict how a given vendor will address the whitebox market?

Chocolate In My Peanut Butter

Dell was one of the first traditional networking vendors to announce a whitebox switch offering that decoupled the operating system from the switching hardware. Dell offered packages from Cumulus Linux and Big Switch Networks alongside their PowerConnect lineup. This makes sense when you consider that the operating system on the switch has never been the strong suit of Dell. The PowerConnect OS is not very popular with network engineers, being very dissimilar from more popular CLIs such as Cisco IOS and its look-alikes.  Their attempts to capitalize on the popularity of Force Ten OS (FTOS) and adapt it or use on PowerConnect switches has been difficult at best, due to the divide been hardware architecture of the two platforms.

What Dell is very good at is offering hardware at a greatly reduced cost. By utilizing this strength, they can enter the whitebox market successfully by partnering with OS vendors to provide customer options. This also gives them time to adapt FTOS to more switches and attempt to drive acquisition posts down once the port of FTOS to PowerConnect is complete.

Peanut Butter In My Chocolate

What happens when a vendor sees software as their strength? You get an announcement like the one last week from Juniper Networks. Juniper has put a significant amount of time and effort into Junos. The FreeBSD base of the system gives it the adaptability that Cumulus enjoys. Since Juniper sees Junos as a huge advantage, their oath to whitebox switching was to offer hardware that reduces the acquisition cost. Porting Junos to run on the OCP-based OCX1100 allows Juniper to use silicon that is more in line with merchant offering price points. The value to the customer comes from existing experience with Junos allowing for reduced learning time on the new platform.

So how will the rest of the market adopt whitebox switching offerings? HP will likely go the same route as Dell, as their software picture is murky with products split evenly between HP Procurve OS and 3Com/H3C Comware. HP has existing silicon manufacturing facilities that allow for economy of scale to reduce acquisition costs to the customer. Conversely, Brocade will likely leverage existing Vyatta development and investment in projects like OpenDaylight to standardize their whitebox offerings on software while offering OCP-style hardware platforms.

The 800-pound Whitebox Gorilla

And what of Cisco? Cisco had invested significant time and effort into both hardware and software. IOS is being renovated with API access and being ported into containers to broaden the platforms on which it can operate. The Cisco investment in custom silicon development is significant as well, with only the Nexus 3000 and 9000 series using merchant offerings from Broadcom. Their eventual whitebox offering could take any form.

Cisco feels very strongly about keeping IOS and its variants exclusive to Cisco hardware. Given that they sued Arista Networks late last week for patent infringement in EOS, it should be apparent how strongly they feel about IOS. That will be the impetus that pushes them to offering some limited custom silicon that is capable of running third-party operating systems. This allows Cisco to partner closely with one of those developers to ensure peak performance and tight integrations with whatever hardware Cisco includes.  They would likely offer this platform with a bundle of SmartNET support services, recouping the costs of producing the switch with some very high margin services.

The possibility of porting IOS to an OCP-like reference platform is remote at best. A whitebox IOS offering would still carry a high price tag to reflect Cisco R&D and would be priced too high above what customers would be willing to pay for total acquisition cost.  It would also open the door for someone to “port” that version of IOS to run on platforms that it shouldn’t be running on.  At the very least, it will expose Cisco in the market as having too high a price tag on their intellectual property in IOS and give competitors like Juniper and Big Switch ammunition to fight back.

Tom’s Take

When evaluating vendor whitebox offerings, be sure your assessment of the strengths matches theirs. Wide adoption of a given strategy will solidify that approach in the future. Be sure to give feedback to your local account teams and tell them the critical features you need to be supported. That will ensure the vendor has you in mind when the time comes to produce a whitebox offering.  And remember that you always have the option of going your own way.  Nothing says that you have to buy a solution with bundled services from traditional networking vendors.  If you’re willing to fly without a safety net for a while, you can find some great deals on ODM switches and OSes to run on them.

HP Networking – Hitting The Right Notes

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HP has quietly been making waves recently with their networking strategies.  They recently showed off their technology around software defined networking (SDN) applications at Interop New York.  Here’s a video:

It would seem that HP has been doing a lot of hard work on the back end with SDN.  So why haven’t we heard about it?

Trumpet and Bugle

HP Networking hasn’t been in the news as much as Cisco and VMware as of late.  When you consider that both of those companies are pushing agendas related to redefining the paradigm of networking around policy and virtualization their trumpeting of those agendas makes total sense.  But even members of the League of Non-Aligned Vendors like Brocade are talking a lot about their SDN strategy with the Vyatta Controller and OpenStack integrations.  Vendors have layers and layers of plans for the “new” networking.  But HP has actually been doing it!  Why haven’t we known until now?

HP has been content to play the role of the bugler to the trumpeters of the bigger organizations.  Rather than talking over and over again about what they are planning on doing, HP waits until they’ve actually done it to talk about it.  It’s a sound strategy.  I love making everything work first and then discussing what you’ve done rather than spending week after week, month after month, talking about a plan that may or may not come to fruition.

The issue with HP is that they need to bugle a little more often to stay afloat in the space.  Only making announcements won’t cut it.  The breakneck pace of innovation and adoption is disrupting the ability of laggard developers to stay afloat.  New technologies are being supplanted by upstarts.  Docker is old news.  Now we’re talking about SocketPlane and Rocket.  You’d be forgiven if you haven’t been keeping up as a blogger or engineer.  But if you’ve missed the boat as a vendor, you’re going to have a hard time treading water.

The Tijuana Brass

How can HP solve their problem?  Technically, they need to keep doing what they’ve been doing all along.  They are making good decisions and innovating around ideas like the HP SDN App Store.  What they need to do it tell more people about it.  Get the word out.  Start some discussions around what you’re doing.  Don’t be afraid to engage.  The more you talk to people about your solutions, the more your name will come up in conversation. You need to be loud and on-key.  Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass weren’t popular right away.  It took years of recording and playing before the mainstream “discovered” them and popularized their music.

HP Networking has spent considerable time building SDN infrastructure.  The fact that their are OpenFlow images for a wide variety of their existing switch infrastructure is proof they are concerned about making everything fit together.  Now it’s time to tell the story.  With the impending divestiture of HP’s enterprise businesses from the consumer line, it will be far too easy to get lost in the shuffle of reorganization.  They way to prevent that is to step out and make yourself known.  Write blogs, record podcasts, and interact with the community.  Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn a little.

Disclaimer

HP invited me to attend HP Discover Barcelona as their guest.  They provided travel and lodging expenses during my time in Europe.  They did not require any blog posts or consideration for this invitation, nor where they offered any on my part.  The opinions and analysis expressed herein represents my thoughts alone.

Riding the SD-WAN Wave

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Software Defined Networking has changed the way that organizations think about their network infrastructure.  Companies are looking at increasing automation of mundane tasks, orchestration of policy, and even using white box switches with the help of new unbound operating systems.  A new class of technologies that is coming to market hopes to reduce complexity and cost for the Achilles Heel of many enterprises: the Wide Area Network (WAN).

Do You WANt To Build A Snowman?

The WAN has always been a sore spot for enterprise networks.  It’s necessary to connect your organization to the world.  If you have remote sites or branch locations, it is critical for daily operations.  If you have an e-commerce footprint your WAN connection needs to be able to handle the generated traffic.  But good WAN connectivity costs money.  Lots of money.

WAN protocols are constantly being refined to come up with the fastest possible transmission and the highest possible uptime.  Frame Relay, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are a succession of technologies that have shaped enterprise WAN connectivity for over a decade.  They have their strengths and weaknesses.  But it is difficult to build an enterprise WAN without one.

Some customers can’t get MPLS connectivity.  Or even Frame Relay for the matter.  Their locations are too remote or the cost of having the connection installed is far above the return on investment.  These customers are often forced to resort to consumer-class connections, like cable modems, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), or even 4G/LTE modem uplinks.  While cheaper and easy to install, these solutions are often not as robust as their business-grade counterparts.  And when it comes to support on a down circuit…

Redefining the WAN

How does Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) help?  SD-WAN technologies from companies like Silver Peak, CloudGenix, and Viptela function like overlay networks for the WAN.  They take the various inputs that you have, such as MPLS, cable, and 4G/LTE networks.  These inputs are then arranged in such a way as to allow you to intelligently program how traffic will behave on the links.  If you want only critical business traffic on the MPLS circuit during business hours you can do that.  If you want to ensure the 4G/LTE uplink is only used in the event of an emergency outage, you can do that too.  You can even program various costs and metrics into the system to help you make decisions about when a given link would be a better economic decision given the time of day or amount of transferred data.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “But I can do all of that today.” And you would be right. But all of this has to happen manually, or at the least require a lot of programming.  If you’ve ever tried to configure OER/PFR on a Cisco router you know what I’m talking about.  And that’s just one vendor’s equipment.  What if there are multiple devices in play?  How do you configure the edge routers for fifty sites?  What happens when a circuit goes down at 3 a.m.?  Having a simple interface for making decisions or even the ability to script actions based on inputs makes the system much more flexible and responsive.

It all comes down to a simple number for all parties involved.  For engineering, the amount of time spent configuring and maintaining complex WAN connectivity will be reduced.  Engineers love not needing to spend time on things.  For the decision makers (and bean counters), it all comes down to money.  SD-WAN technologies reduce costs by better utilizing existing infrastructure.  Eventually, their analysis can allow you to reduce or remove unnecessary connectivity.  That means more money in the pockets of the people that want the money.

Tom’s Take

I’ve referred to WAN applications as the “hello world” for SDN.  That’s because I saw so many people demoing them when SDN was first being talked about.  Cisco did this at Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego.  SD-WAN didn’t really become a concrete thing in my mind until is was the topic of discussion on the Spring ONUG meeting.  Those are the people with the money.  And they are looking at the cost savings and optimization from SD-WAN technologies.  You can better believe that the first wave of SD-WAN that you’ve seen in the last couple of months is just the precursor to a wider look at connectivity in general.  Better get ready to surf.

Wires Are The Exception

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cropped-dsc_0734.jpg

Last week I went to go talk to a group of vocational students about networking.  While I was there, I needed to send a couple of emails.  I prefer to write emails from my laptop, so I pulled it out of my bag between talks and did the first thing that came to mind: I asked for the wireless SSID and password.  Afterwards, I started thinking about how far we’ve come with connectivity.

I can still remember working with a wireless card back in 2001 trying to get the drivers to play nice with Windows 2000.  Now, wireless cards are the rule and wired ports are the exception.  My primary laptop needs a dongle to have a wired port.  My new Mac Mini is happily churning along halfway across the room connected to my network as a server over wireless.  It would appear that the user edge quietly became wireless and no tears were shed for the wire.

It’s also funny that a lot of the big security features like 802.1x and port security became less and less of an issue once open ports started disappearing in common areas.  802.1x for wired connections is barely even talked about now.  It’s more of an authentication mechanism for wireless now.  I’ve even heard some vendors of these solutions touting the advantages of using it with wireless and then throwing in the afterthought comment, “We also made it easy to configured for wired connections too.”

We still need wires, of course.  Access points have to connect to the infrastructure.  Power still can be delivered via microwave.  But the shift toward wireless has made ubiquitous cabling unnecessary.  I used to propose a minimum of four cable drops per room to provide connectivity in a school.  I would often argue for six in case a teacher wanted to later add an IP phone and a couple of student workstations.  Now, almost everything is wireless.  The single wire powers a desk phone and an antiquated desktop.  Progressive schools are replacing the phones with soft clients and the desktops with teach laptops.

The wire is not in any danger of becoming extinct.  But it is going to be relegated to the special purpose category.  Wires will only live behind the scenes in data centers and IDF closets.  They will be the thing that we throw in our bag for emergencies, like an extra console cable or a VGA adapter.

Wireless is the future.  People don’t walk into a coffee shop and ask, “Hey, where’s the Ethernet cable?” Users don’t crowd around wall plates with hubs to split the one network drop into four or eight so they can plug their tablets in.  Companies like Aruba Networks recognized this already when they started posing questions about all-wireless designs.  We even made a video about it:

While I don’t know that the all-wireless design is going to work, I can say with certainty that the only wires that will be running across your desktop soon will be power cables and the occasional USB cord.  Ethernet will be relegated to the same class as electrical wires connected to breaker boxes and water pipes.  Important and unseen.

The Trap of Net Neutrality

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net-neutrality

The President recently released a video and statement urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to support net neutrality and ensure that there will be no “pay for play” access to websites or punishment for sites that compete against a provider’s interests.  I wholeheartedly support the idea of net neutrality.  However, I do like to stand on my Devil’s Advocate soapbox every once in a while.  Today, I want to show you why a truly neutral Internet may not be in our best interests.

Lawful Neutral

If the FCC mandates a law that the Internet must remain neutral, it will mean that all traffic must be treated equally.  That’s good, right?  It means that a provider can’t slow my Netflix stream or make their own webmail service load faster than Google or Yahoo.  It also means that the provider can’t legally prioritize packets either.

Think about that for a moment.  We, as network and voice engineers, have spent many an hour configuring our networks to be as unfair as possible.  Low-latency queues for voice traffic.  Weighted fair queues for video and critical applications.  Scavenger traffic classes and VLANs for file sharers and other undesirable bulk noise.  These plans take weeks to draw up and even longer to implement properly.  It helps us make sense out of the chaos in the network.

By mandating a truly neutral net, we are saying that those carefully marked packets can’t escape from the local network with their markings intact.  We can’t prioritize voice packets once they escape the edge routers.  And if we move applications to the public cloud, we can’t ensure priority access.  Legally, the providers will be forced to remark all CoS and DSCP values at the edge and wash their hands of the whole thing.

And what about provider MPLS circuits?  If the legally mandated neutral provider is administering your MPLS circuits (as they do in small and medium enterprise), can they copy the DSCP values to the MPLS TE field before forwarding the packet?  Where does the law stand on prioritizing private traffic transiting a semi-public link?

Chaotic Neutral

The idea of net neutrality is that no provider should have the right to decide how your traffic should be handled.  But providers will extend that idea to say they can’t deal with any kind of marking.  They won’t legally be able to offer you differentiated service even if you were wiling to pay for it.  That’s the double-edge sword of neutrality.

You can be sure that the providers will already have found a “solution” to the problem.  Today, quality of service (QoS) only becomes an issue when the link becomes congested.  Packets don’t queue up if there’s bandwidth available to use.  So the provider solution is simple.  If you need differentiated service, you need to buy a bigger pipe.  Over provision your WAN circuits!  We can’t guarantee delivery unless you have more bandwidth than you need!  Who cares what the packets are marked?  Which, of course, leads to a little gem from everyone’s favorite super villain:

SyndromeEF

Of course, the increased profits from these services will line the pockets of the providers instead of going to build out the infrastructure necessary to support these overbuilt networks.  The only way to force providers to pony up the money to build out networks is to make it so expensive to fail that the alternative is better.  That requires complex negotiation and penalty-laden, iron-clad service level agreements (SLAs).

The solution to the issue of no prioritized traffic is to provide a list of traffic that should be prioritized.  Critical traffic like VoIP should be allowed to be expedited, as the traffic characteristics and protections we afford it make sense.  Additionally, traffic destined for a public cloud site that function as internal traffic of a company should be able to be prioritized across the provider network.  Tunneling or other forms of traffic protection may be necessary to ensure this doesn’t interfere with other users.  Exempt traffic should definitely be the exception, not the rule.  And it should never fall on the providers to determine which traffic should be exempted from neutrality rules.

Tom’s Take

Net neutrality is key to the future of society.  The Internet can’t function properly if someone else with a vested interest in profits decides how we consume content.  It’s like the filter bubble of Google.  A blind blanket policy doesn’t do us any good, either.  Everyone involved in networking knows there are types of traffic that can be prioritized without having a detrimental effect.  We need to make smart decisions about net neutrality and know when to make exceptions.  But that power needs to be in the hands of the users and customers.  They will make decisions in their best interest.  The providers should have the capability to implement the needs of their customers.  Only then will the Internet be truly neutral.