Wireless Field Day 2 – Nerds Without Wires

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Wouldn’t you know it?  I’m headed back for round two of Wireless Field Day.  I was fortunate enough to be invited to the first assemblage of the preeminent wireless minds in the industry today.  Now it appears an encore is in order.  January 25th through the 27th I’ll be joining some August company for 3 days of immersion in the hottest technology driving business and personal computing today:

Not bad, eh? These people represent the brightest minds in wireless networking and having so many back from the first Wireless Field Day makes this event a very good opportunity for me to interact and learn from the best.  Of course, I’ll be sure to pass my learning on to each and every one of you with a multitude of blog posts and discussion at the event.

Getting Involved with Tech Field Day

With this being my fourth Tech Field Day event, I’ve had a lot of experience with the people around Tech Field Day.  They are always looking for thought leaders to join in the fun and impart knowledge while they absorb a large amount of knowledge from the best and brightest in the industry.  There are a couple of ways for you to get involved:

1.  Read the TFD FAQ and the Becoming a Field Day Delegate pages first and foremost.  Indicate your desire to become a delegate.  You can’t go if you don’t tell someone you want to be there.  Filling out the delegate form submits a lot of pertinent information to Tech Field Day that helps in the selection process.

2.  Realize that the selection process is voted upon by past delegates and has selection criteria.  In order to be the best possible delegate for a Tech Field Day, you have to be an open-minded blogger willing to listen to the presentations and think about them critically.  There’s no sense in bringing in delegates that will refuse to listen to a presentation from Meru because all they’ve ever used is Aruba and they won’t accept Meru having good technology.  If you want to learn more about all the products and vendors out in the IT ecosystem, TFD is the place for you.

3.  Write about what you’ve learned.  One of the hardest things for me after Tech Field Day was consolidating what I had learned into a series of blog posts.  TFD is a fire hose of information, and there is little time to process it as it happens.  Copious notes are a must.  As is having the video feeds to look at later to remember what your notes meant.  But it is important to get those notes down and put them up for everyone else to see.  Because while your audience may have been watching the same video stream you were watching live, they may not have the same opinion of things.  Tech Field Day isn’t just about fun and good times.  Occasionally, the delegates must look at things with a critical eye and make sure they let everyone know where they stand.

Be sure to follow the Tech Field Day account on Twitter (@TechFieldDay) for information and updates about Wireless Field Day 2 as the date gets closer.  There will also be live streaming video of each presentation on-site, and the videos will be uploaded shortly after the presentation.  If you want to participate in the fun, you can use the Twitter hashtags #TechFieldDay or #WFD2 to make comments or ask questions during the presentations.  I will have a Twitter client open during the presentations and will be happy to relay your questions or comments to the presenters and delegates (if no one else beats me to it, that is).  I’m going to tag all my event-related tweets with those hashtags, so if you are being overwhelmed with the volume coming from the event, feel free to filter those tags or unfollow me for the duration of the event.  There’s usually so much to talk about that I get carried away sometimes, so I won’t see it as an affront, I promise.

Tech Field Day Sponsor Disclaimer

Tech Field Day is made possible first and foremost by the sponsors.  Each of them is responsible for a portion of the travel and lodging costs.  In addition, the sponsors also chip in to pay for the after-event gatherings each day.  However, the sponsors also understand that their underwriting of Tech Field Day in no way guarantees them any consideration during the analysis and writing of any blog posts or reviews.  That independence allows the delegates to give honest and direct feedback and opinions of the technology and the companies that present it.

Network Consumer Reports

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I’m a huge fan of Consumer Reports magazine.  They do a great job of reviewing all manner of products from household appliances to SUVs.  They provide unbiased reviews for all products because they do not accept any outside advertising from companies nor do they accept any free samples from manufactures, instead choosing to purchase all of the items they review outright.  This gives them a substantial amount of credibility in the industry and their opinion has been known to influence the direction of many manufacturers, especially in the automotive arena.

Why is it that reviews in the networking space don’t have the same reputation?  Networking manufacturers are quick to refer to Gartner numbers or Tolly reports that back their equipment as being superior to their competitors.  For the most part, mention of either of these two names around network rock stars brings groans and cat calls.  The general consensus that I get from people I’ve talked to is that many of these reports are simply bought and paid for.  Joe Onisick has a great blog post about talking with the founder of Tolly about this very subject.  Many reports that are sponsored by a company are (suprisingly) critical of the sponsor’s competitors and give favorable reviews to said sponsors.  Not all that shocking when you think about it.  Even discounting the idea that the report could be massaged in favor of the sponsoring company, the odds are good that an unfavorable review would just be buried and never see the light of day.

This pattern of sponsored reports tends to leave the average network rock star jaded and distrustful of any testing that they haven’t done themselves.  Alas, when moving into a new field or testing equipment outside of the comfort zone it becomes quite easy to get lost and being making mistakes or missing key features or options.  Why can’t we do something about that?  Maybe we can…

I’d like to see a Consumer Reports type of service for networking.  It would have to adhere to the same rules that the Consumer’s Union uses for Consumer Reports.  No advertising, which also means that the reports can’t be used by the vendors for the purposes of selling their product.  That means no touting of the latest scores of the newest switches from Network Consumer Reports (NCR).  Also, all the equipment would need to be purchased outright from the vendors or through distributors or value added resellers (VARs).  This would also introduce some difficulties, as many vendors require complex designs before equipment will be sold or require the interaction of a VAR in order ensure the equipment will be installed correctly.  In order to ensure they fairness and impartiality of the tests, these people must be excluded from the configuration process and only be around for purchasing and delivery.  Only members of NCR would be allowed to install and configure the equipment.  Naturally, it’s going to take some skilled people to do that.

When the equipment for a given test or scenario arrives, it will be configured based on best practice guidelines for the vendor/manufacturer.  These practices should be found on the vendor’s website and be easily available.  No shortcuts or undocumented configurations would be allowed at first.  This is to ensure fairness as well as making the vendors responsible for the documentation that is provided to customers.  For a given test, traffic generators would be used to simulate all kinds of traffic patterns in a real world environment.  That would be similar to things that the real Consumer Reports does, like measuring fuel economy themselves rather than relying on the manufacturer’s EPA fuel economy numbers.  I’d rather see numbers I can believe with strict definitions of traffic rather than seeing tests that provide advantages, such as using different packet sizes for throughput versus latency.  Numbers you can trust are very important.

Once the tests are run and the reports have been generated, each vendor will be contacted with the reports and offered a small window of time to “tweak” things.  You have to offer this chance because invariably vendors begin grousing about not having a chance to fix the broken things.  Let’s say they are given 24 hours to modify the base configurations to increase throughput or reduce latency with the same traffic types used in the first test.  After the 24 hours, the tests will be readministered and the results recorded. However, any changes from the best practices will be documented.  If the new, “tweaked” configuration provides additional advantages, the report should then ask why those tweaks are not included in the best practices.  Each vendor will only be able to work on their own equipment and will not be informed of the results of any other vendor’s test.  In fact, they won’t even be informed which other vendors are being tested.  This is to ensure that no one has the opportunity to spread fear, uncertainty, or doubt (FUD) about a different competing solution.  Facts only here, folks.

After all of this, the reports will be published for all to see.  Perhaps there would be some kind of subscription service to reduce the astronomical cost associated with the acquisition and setup of the equipment.  This would only be necessary to avoid the need to rely on angel investors or the independently wealthy to capitalize such a large project.  Once the reports are published, the subscribers can trust in the content and use it however they see fit to begin to plan new projects or purchase equipment.

Tom’s Take

Why is it so hard to find a voice to trust when it comes to network reviews?  Why do I have to constantly ask myself “Who is behind this report?” I never worry about that when I read Consumer Reports.  I can trust the information they provide because I know it isn’t bought and paid for.  It would be wonderful to have something like that in the networking/storage/server space.  I’m sure the people out there right now do decent jobs of reviewing equipment, but none of them are the go-to type of publication like Consumer Reports.  Of course, bringing that kind of reporting to the IT world has a lot of huge challenges. Between getting capitalized and trying to find a way to buy large amounts of gear without raising any fuss from vendors, it would be a large undertaking.  However, if you can provide credibility with your reports and aid people in making good decisions for their businesses, I think you could make a go of it.  Let’s hope that this isn’t a pipe dream sometime down the road.

*Note: Consumer Reports is a trademark of Consumer’s Union and my use of their publications for examples in this post should not infer any kind of endorsement.

Aerohive Branch on Demand – Bring Your Own Office

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Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is enabling people to provide their own equipment for work.  But what happens when people aren’t just satisfied bringing their own Macbook to the party?  What happens if they want to bring their office to your office as well?  With the large surge in teleworkers and contractors being brought on inside companies and their ability to do the majority of their jobs without having to step foot into the corporate office, the need to provide connectivity and security for a home workspace is now becoming paramount if the Bring Your Own Office (BYOO) movement is going to take off.

The current solutions to this problem either involve using some off-the-shelf consumer product to address the issue or buying an enterprise grade solution to implement.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses.  Consumer-grade devices are dirt cheap and get the job done.  However, there is very little in the way of scalability and configuration management.  Unless your remote worker is good at configuring Linksys or D-Link, you could be in for a fight.  Also, consumer grade equipment doesn’t have the service and support necessary to run an enterprise on a regular basis.  On the flip side, enterprise equipment does have a great degree of manageability and support to provide robust service for your teleworkers.  Provided, that is, you are willing to invest the large amount of money that it takes to get it setup.  In fact, the investment is usually so high that reclaiming the equipment is top priority in the event that the teleworker leaves the company or completes the contract.  How then do we as network rock stars balance our need for cheap remote connectivity with our desire to have manageability and security?

Enter Aerohive.  I saw Aerohive at Wireless Field Day back in March of this year and was pretty impressed by their HiveManager product that they use to provide configuration and management for their controller-less access points.  They’ve also given me a briefing about the 4.0 release of their HiveOS firmware.  They were kind enough to give me a sneak peak at their Branch on Demand product that was announced November 15th.

Aerohive Branch on Demand utilizes Aerohive’s experience with creating cloud based management for devices and couples it with a new branch router device that can provide simple connectivity for your branch/remote offices or teleworkers.  All of the provisioning for these devices is done in HiveManager, so the only instructions your remote workers need is “plug the yellow cable into the yellow slot and plug the other end into the Internet”.  I think even my mom could do that.  Afterwards, the router checks in with HiveManager and pulls down the configuration so your teleworker can connect back to the home office.  Your user connects via SSL IPSec VPN to allow any device to access corporate resources, whether it be a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone (EDIT – Stephen Phillip was kind enough to notice that I mixed up SSL and IPSec in my notes on this.  The BR series use IPSec to connect back to the central site due to the increased performance for special traffic like voice).   The same polices that you have in place in your corporate office are extended to the remote worker as well.  You can either choose to tunnel all traffic back to the home office to be scanner and permitted, or you can split tunnel the traffic so that non-corporate packets exit locally.  There is a bit of apprehension on the part of most network rock stars for a setup like this, as splitting the traffic does introduce the capability for nasty things to infect the remote machine and then be introduced back into the corporate network.  Aerohive thought of this too and uses a cloud proxy to redirect the split tunneled traffic to a filtering service such as Websense or Barracuda to ensure that all those packets are “cloud washed” before they are permitted back into the network.  That alleviates the stress of not knowing where your branch users are going as well as preventing large amounts of traffic from being needlessly tunneled back to the corporate sites just to go out to the Internet.

All of these features come with HiveOS 5.0, which means that current users of the AP 330 and AP 350 gain the ability for those devices to function as routers.  You can even connect a 3G/4G USB modem to the USB port on the device and turn it into a backup interface for connectivity in the event the primary WAN link goes down for some reason.  At launch, the branch routers will support a small list of USB modems such as the AT&T Shockwave or Momentum, but as the software matures and drivers become available a wider variety of these devices will be supported.  This would be a great idea for those that live in areas where solid Internet connectivity isn’t always a given or for a user that spends a lot of time on the road and needs corporate VPN capabilities where they aren’t always available, such as in the middle of an oilfield or a parking lot.  No need to setup a cumbersome VPN client or worry about usernames and passwords and tokens.  Just give them an Aerohive branch router and let them go.

There are two models of branch routers available.  The BR100 is a 10/100 5-port device that includes a 2.4GHz 802.11n radio and a USB port for 3G/4G backhaul.  It retails for $99, or if you’d like to use the Network-as-a-Service subscription, you can get the device for the same $99 price point, only it includes software updates as well as tech refreshes for two years, so when a new update to the BR100 comes out, you’ll get that device for nothing.  There is also a BR200 that will have 5 GigE ports and dual 2.4/5GHz 3×3:3 802.11n radios as well as two PoE ports and crypto acceleration.  The BR200 will be out sometime next year.

Tom’s Take

I think Aerohive has finally found a good use case for the cloud.  Having your hardware managed by a cloud-based application means that you can always find it no matter where it might be.  If you are already an Aerohive customer that finds yourself in need of a branch router solution, this is a no-brainer.  The same management platform now allows you to control your access points as well as your branch users.  The ability to push the same policies from desktop to Destin, FL is very powerful and cuts down on a lot of stress.  If you aren’t a current Aerohive customer but know that you are going to need to add some teleworking capacity in the future, you can’t go wrong looking at this solution.  For $99 a device (and $999 for the VPN termination software) the solution is very inexpensive and gives you a lot of flexibility to build out instead of needing to worry about scaling straight up.  After all, letting your users bring their own office should cost you yours.

If you’d like to learn more about Aerohive’s new solutions, head over to http://www.aerohive.com.  There’s also a nice short introduction to the product over at the Packet Pushers site.

Disclaimer

Aerohive provided me with an advanced briefing on the Branch on Demand product for the purposes of preparing this blog post.  The did not ask for nor were they promised any consideration in the creation of this article.  Any and all opinions expresses within are mine and mine alone.

Unable To Access User-Defined Storage Service

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In my VMware vSphere: What’s New [5.0] class this week, I learned why having a lab environment to test things is very important.  I also learned that some bugs are fun to try and fix.

vSphere 5 introduced a lot of new features focused on storage.  One of these is Profile Driven Storage.  This allows users to create tiers for datastores and ensure that those profiles can be attached to VMs at a later date.  This would be very useful for someone that has ultra-fast SSD arrays like those from PureStorage alongside SAS or SATA arrays.  You can define the gold tier as the SSD array for VMs that need fast storage access, silver tier for slightly slower SAS drives and bronze tier for the large-but-slow SATA datastore.  I like this idea of allowing users to define their storage capabilities into easy to assign tiers.  However, we hit a bug when we tried to implement it in the lab.

After we created the tiers in VIClient, we went to assign them to the datastores from the Home -> Datastores and Datastore Clusters section.  When we right clicked on the datastore and chose “Assign User-Defined Storage Capability” we got hit with this error:

Unable To Access User-Defined Storage Service

Huh?  You let me configure the silly thing?  It’s got to be there somewhere!  Let me assign it to something.

Odds are good that if you are seeing this error, you’ve also installed the vSphere Web Client.  Another great option for users that don’t want to install the VMware Infrastructure Client, the Web Client allows you to access VMs from Firefox or Internet Explorer and manage them just like you would from the VIClient.  This would be useful for those out there that are running OS X and currently don’t have a way to manage VMs unless they launch the VIClient from a virtual machine or other emulated environment.  The Web Client software needs to be installed on a Windows (or Linux) machine in order to respond to requests from web browsers.  For many users that run OS X, the logical choice would be to install the Web Client service on the Windows-based vCenter Server and then use Firefox to remotely access the web client afterwards.  That’s what we did in the lab.

The problem lies in that the Web Client service conflicts with the Profile Driven Storage service.  I’m not sure if they use the same port numbers or if they just collide in memory space or something.  As long as the Web Client service is running, the Profile Driven Storage options cannot be configured on a Data Store.  The fix is somewhat simple:

1.  Open the Service console on your vCenter server.

2.  Find the VMware Web Client service.

3.  Stop or disable it.

4.  Restart VIClient.

Simple, huh?  You can now assign the User-Defined Storage profiles to all the datastores you’d like.  When you finish, close out VIClient and restart the Web Client Service so your Mac folks can administer VMs.  Just remember that every time you want to use Profile Driven Storage, you’re going to have to bounce the Web Client service.

One can only hope that this particular bug gets fixed in an upcoming point release of vSphere 5.  Not a show stopper, but I can see how it could cause issues for those that don’t know from the less-than-helpful error message where to look for help.  I’m just glad I found it in a learning lab and not in production.

BYO(a)D

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I’ve talked about the whole Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement before and how it reminded me a lot of social circles in high school.  Now, a few months later, it appears that this movement has gained a lot of steam and is now in the phase of “If you aren’t dealing with it, you need to be” phase for enterprise and corporate IT departments.  I also know that it must be gaining more acceptance when my mom started asking me about that whole “Bring Your Own Computer to Work Day” stuff.  To give you an idea of where my mom falls on the tech adoption curve:

Yeah, it’s going to be popular if my mom has heard of it.  It also hit home last week when the new guy came into the office for his first day of work toting a MacBook and wondering what information he needed to setup in Mail to connect to Exchange.  Being a rather small company, the presence of a MacBook sent hushed whispers through the office along with anguished cries of fear at such a shiny thing.  We shackled him with a ThinkPad and took care of the immediate issue, but it did get my brain pondering something about BYOD and what represents it.

When I talk to people about BYOD and how I must now start supporting new devices and rewriting applications to support various platforms, the response I get is overwhelming in its unity: Will this work on my Mac/iPad/iPhone?  I hardly ever get asked about Ubuntu or Fedora or Froyo or Blackberry.  No one ever worries about using Ice Cream Sandwich to access the corporate Citrix farm, and not just because it isn’t out yet.  I find that far and away the largest number of people driving the idea of platform-agnostic service and application access tend to be fans of the Cupertino Fruit Company.  In fact, I am almost to the point where I’m going to start referring to it as BYOAD (Bring Your Own Apple Device).  Why is the representation so skewed?

At first I thought it might be a technical thing.  Linux users, after all, tend to be a little more technical than Mac users.  Linux folks aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty with file permissions or kernel recompiles.  They also seem to understand that while it would be nice to have certain things, other ideas are so difficult or impossible that it’s not worth trying.  Such as Exchange access in Evolution Mail.  Access to an Exchange server would make a Linux mail client an instant killer app.  The need to incorporate non-free code, however, is very much at odds with the “free as in freedom” mantra of many Linux stalwarts.  So we accept that we can’t access Exchange from anything other than a virtualized or emulated Outlook client and we move on.  Fix what you can, accept and work around what you can’t.  In a way, I tend to believe that kind of tinkering mentality filters down to many of the Android users out there.  Cyanogenmod is a perfect example of this, as is the ability with which users can root their devices to install things like VPN clients.  Android and Linux users like to see all the gory details of their systems.

I was lucky enough to attend a panel at the Oklahoma City Innotech conference that dealt with the new realities behind BYOD.  The panel fielded a lot of questions about software to ease transitions and security matters.  I did ask a question about Apple vs. Android/BlackBerry/Linux BYOD adoption and the panel said more or less that OS X/iOS access comprised up to 85% of their requests in many cases.  However, Eric Hileman was on the panel and said something that gave me pause in my thinking.  He told me that in his view, it wasn’t so much the device that was driving the BYOD movement as it was the culture behind each device.  As soon as he said it, I realized that I had been going down that road already and just hadn’t made it to the turn yet.

I had unconsciously put the Linux/Android users into a culture of tinkerers.  Curious engineers and kernel hackers that want to know how something works.  Nothing is magical for them.  They know every module loaded in their system and can modprobe for drivers like second nature.  Apple fans, on the other hand, are more artistic from what I’ve seen.  They don’t necessarily like to get under the hood of their aluminium marvels any more than they have to (if they even can).  To them, magic is important.  Applications should install with effort and just work.  Systems should never crash and kernels are pieces of popcorn, not parts of the operating system.  Their mantra is “It just works”.

Note that I didn’t say anything about intelligence levels.  Many of the smartest people I know use Macs daily.  I’ve also known some pretty inept Linux users that ran the OS simply because it couldn’t get as screwed up as Windows.  Intelligence is a non issue.  It comes down to cultures.  Mac people want the same access they’d have if they were running a PC.  After all, the hardware is all the same now with Intel chips instead of PowerPC.  Why should I get access to all my apps?  Apple is free to create interfaces into non-free software like Microsoft Office since they don’t have the “free as in freedom” battle cry to stand next to as much as the Debian fans out there.  For the Mac users, it doesn’t matter how something gets done.  It just needs to happen.  Software that doesn’t work isn’t looked at as a curiosity to be dissected and fixed.  Instead, it is discarded and other options are explored.

Tom’s Take

Thanks to Steve’s Cupertino Fruit Company, we have a revolution on our hands that is enabling people to concentrate more on creating content and less on having all the right tools on the right OS to get started.  Many of my peers have settled on using MacBooks so they can have a machine that never breaks and “just works”.  It’s kind of funny to think even just 3 or 4 years ago how impossible the idea of having OS-agnostic applications was.  Now I can go out and buy pretty much whatever I want and be assured that 85% of my applications will run on it.  As long as I’ve dabbled with Linux I’ve never felt that was a possibility.  To me, it seems that the artists and designers with an eye to form needed to cry out over the engineers and tinkerers that hold function in higher esteem.  We may yet one day get to the point where OS is an afterthought, but it’s going to take a lot more people bringing their own fruit to work.

Meeting Attention Span Request

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To Whom It May Concern:

Due to an overwhelmingly full schedule of meetings, I have decided that my participation in them is unnecessary.  Therefore, I would ask that you fill out the following form prior to the scheduled meeting so that I may know when it is appropriate to tune out whatever is being talked about and begin doing real work on my laptop/iPad/iPhone/Etch-a-Sketch.  Please indicate the meeting subject from the list below:

  1. This is a weekly scheduled meeting to discuss why things haven’t improved since the last weekly meeting.  About 3/4ths of the way through, we will begin to plan for next week’s meeting where we discuss why things haven’t improved since this meeting.
  2. Your attendance in this meeting is to provide an aura of professionalism and reassurance while I spout off randomness to a customer.  You will be required to listen to my ramblings without comment or dissention until the customer asks you if this is correct.  Your required response is to nod and answer in the affirmative while trying to avoid saying anything that might make me look foolish.
  3. This meeting is a complaint-based diatribe focused on one or more persons/departments/divisions.  Odds are very good that you are not among the subjects being complained about.  However, an audience is required so that the affected subjects may be shamed into proper behavior/performance.
  4. This conference call will begin 5 minutes late and continue with late attendees beeping in and forgetting to mute their speaker phones.  After restarting several times due to interruption, the call will progress to the third slide in the deck before a number of attendees begin asking where to obtain the slide deck so that they may follow along in another application besides watching the slides being shared.  After directing the attendees to a download site, the call will then devolve into endless pointless questions on pedantic subjects until the majority of the attendees disconnect in frustration.  We will then call a meeting the next day to discuss the effectiveness of the conference call.
  5. This customer call is a valiant attempt for you to talk them out of doing something terrible to their computer/network/data center.  The customer will explain what they are attempting to do in very generic terms.  After the look of incredulity, you will be required to explain the deep technical details of why this procedure or setting will not work and may in fact cause more harm than good.  After the customer reveals they have made the change already before this call, you may be excused to wander down the hall and mutter quietly to yourself.

Thank you for your assistance in expediting the discovery time of the useless point of this particular meeting.

If you would like to download a PDF of this document for your own use, you may do so from this link.

One Syllable Tech Support

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Shannon Hamilton: You wanna say something?

Brodie Bruce: Yeah, about a million things, but I can’t express myself monosyllabically enough for you to understand them all.

 – Mallrats

Full blame for this one gets laid at the feet of Erik Peterson for this little gem:

In an effort to avoid clogging the Twitters with endless hastags of #OneSyllableTechSupport, I instead decided to unleash a few of them on my blog.  After all, where’s the fun of not sharing some of my favorite short retorts to users?

I don’t know.

I think you broke it.

You should call TAC.

Did you bounce it?

I have no clue.

What did you touch?

Why did you call me?

What changed?

Can I talk to your boss?

I will go home.

Do I look mad?

Who else can you call?

That’s not my job.

My phone is off.

He said it would work.

I need to hang up now.

Don’t call me again.

I need a beer now.

Feel free to contribute in the comments below.  Remember, two syllables is too many for some people.

Declaration of Independence

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Independence Hall, Philadelphia PA

Blogging is a very fun way to get your ideas out in the open and generate discussion about them.  It’s a great way to show people how your mind works and how you can apply critical thinking skills to problems.  It’s also a wonderful way to sneak movie references into long form prose.  But what happens when the words coming out of your mouth aren’t necessarily yours?

This blog is the sole creation of myself.  I take ideas from all over the place and write about them.  Some people stoke the fires of my creative mind.  Others say things that get me going off on a tangent.  Ultimately though, the words that spill out on this page are mine.  They represent my thoughts and feelings.  Though inspired by many sources, in the end the posts and comments I make belong to me.  I don’t consult anyone before posting.  Only rarely do I inform anyone about a pending post, and even then it is simply to ensure I’m not revealing privileged information or breaking the law.  Sometimes I’ve been contacted about material I’ve written and questioned about my feelings on the matter.  While I do reserve the right to change my mind in relation to a subject, I do take umbrage at being told to change my mind against my wishes.

It’s no secret that some people out there are simply regurgitating information being fed to them.  Public relations people come up with creative ways to write about things that look very humble and interesting at first, only to find later on that you’ve been led into a sales pitch by the nose.  I don’t like this method of tricking me into forming an opinion.  At the same time, I also realize how easy it can be to fall into the same trap when I am the content creator in question.  I’ve always tried my hardest to stay independent when it comes to the opinions and information disseminated on this blog.  I’ve done this because I owe it to my readers to ensure my impartiality and disconnection from things.  I want people to know who *I* am, not who someone or something thinks I should be.  Due to my involvement with Tech Field Day and my related posts, some in the community have accused me of being a vendor shill.  I regurgitate information I’ve been told to post without regard for accuracy.  In return, I receive some unknown benefit or use my influence to gain an army of acolytes to stroke my ever-growing ego.

I hope you all know by now nothing could be further from the truth.

When I talk to vendors or companies about my blog, I make it very clear from the start that I am independent.  What does that mean?  It means I write with three tenants in mind:

I Write What I Want – You can show me presentation after presentation and speak to me for hours on end about your product or cool new widget.  I may whittle this down to a 3 paragraph post.  That’s my prerogative as a blogger.  I tend to cut the fat away from things when I post them as a courtesy to my readers.  If I think something you have is cool, I may focus on it.  I also reserve the right to talk about your presentation and delivery methods.  The point is that I choose the topic.  I’ve been sent “suggested topic” emails in the past from companies.  I trashed them as soon as I read the subject line.  These are my words, and I’ll be the one to choose them, thank you very much.

I Write When I Want – As a rule, I respect product embargoes.  If you have a big PR campaign that is firing up next month and you give me a product briefing, I’ll respect the street date for your information.  However, don’t expect me to churn out a post timed to be out on the day of launch.  I choose when to post my information.  I do this to avoid traps like a company asking me to hold any negative opinions until months after launch to ensure the hype machine is operating at full efficiency.  Or worse yet, asking me to post the day before a competitor’s new product comes out in an attempt to steal their thunder.  I time my posts so that I don’t overload people with information.  If I need to put off talking about something for a day or two, that is my choice.  Having a pushy PR person breathing down my neck to contribute to the hype machine before launch day tends to get on my nerves.

I Write If I Want – Obligation is a funny thing.  Once you’ve been locked in by it, you have effectively lost your free will.  Tech Field Day works like this: I write if I want to.  Sure, the companies involved with Tech Field Day usually see me as a way to generate some press about them.  However, it is never expected that I am required to write about a presenting company.  I write about you because *I* want to, not because you want me to.  Requiring me to make a post about your widget is a great way to make me not do it.  Imagine if Walter Cronkite was told he must write about the president’s new social security plan if he ever wanted a one-on-one interview again. Crazy, right?  Journalists choose their topics ahead of time and do research.  The topics they don’t think will be important get shelved.  Much is the same with me.  Rather than flood your RSS feeds with useless garbage, I try to bring entertainment and information.  Inviting me to a product briefing in Rome and then telling me I have to write five posts about it to “pay” for my trip will get you a kind “no thank you”.  Persistence will be met with less kind words.

Keeping those things in mind every time I sit down to write helps me ensure that my opinion is independent and accurate.  If my opinion is bought and paid for, it serves no purpose for anyone.  If I become a mouthpiece, my mind is no longer of use to the community.

What about you?  What about the bloggers that are just starting out?  How can you remain independent?  Sometimes the choices aren’t as easy as black and white.  PR people get paid to influence opinion.  At best, they are a useful tool to help a company’s image.  At worst, they aren’t much better than con men.  The shady ones can trick you into doing what the want quite subtly.  They will give you suggested posts or offer to help you have a more effective message.  They’ll ask you for editorial control over your writing.  They may even write your message for you over the course of communication.

The key to remaining independent is to remember: When the words coming out of your mouth aren’t yours, you are no longer independent.  If you find yourself being coached by a vendor in what they want you to post, you’re now an unpaid employee of their PR department.  Don’t give in.  Make sure your terms are clear up front.  Ensure that the vendors and manufacturers know your feelings.  Don’t start down the slippery slope of letting someone else choose your words for you.  It’s okay to ask for advice so long as you keep in mind where the advice is coming from.

I do want to make it clear that there are some vendor-employed bloggers that I consider to be independent.  Christofer Hoff and Brad Hedlund immediately come to mind.  These guys might be employed by a vendor, but they aren’t shills.  They give their thoughts freely without reservation and make sure to define themselves outside their day jobs.  I try to do much the same.  While I do work for a Value Added Reseller (VAR), I consider my blogging activities to be a totally different aspect of my career.  I refuse to kowtow to a vendor or manufacturer for preferential treatment.  I’m nice to those that have earned my respect.  I’m frosty to those that have earned a cold shoulder.  I’m consistent because there is nothing coloring my opinion beyond my own thoughts (and the occasional glass of bourbon).

Tom’s Take

I hold these blogging truths to be self evident: All bloggers have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of blogging happiness.  At the same time, they have the responsibility to be sure their voice is the one being heard, not someone else.  Bloggers are powerful tools in the new media because we are independent voices that express opinion without reservation.  Some won’t care what I have to say about the newest Acme Widget, but others most certainly will.  I won’t influence a product success or failure, but I can swing a few people one way or the other.  So I must be sure that my thoughts and words are carefully chosen to reflect what I feel.  I also need to be sure that no one else writes my words for me, either by overt action or shady inaction.  To let me readers be subjected to marketing fluff or untrue opinions that I didn’t write would be a great injustice in my mind.  To that I pledge my blogging honor.

Dell Force 10 – Network Field Day 2

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The final presentation of Network Field Day 2 came from Force 10.  Now, Force 10 is a part of the larger Dell Networking umbrella.  This includes their campus PowerConnect switching line as well as the datacenter-focused equipment from Force 10.  We arrived at the old Force 10 headquarters and noticed a couple of changes since last year.  Mainly lots of new round, four letter logos everywhere.  As well, the office seemed slightly rearranged.  We walked back to a large common area where tables and chairs were assembled for the presentation.

To say Dell Force 10 brought the big guns is an understatement.  I counted no less that 15 people in the room that were a part of Force 10, from engineers to marketing to executive.  They all turned out to see the traveling circus sideshow we put on.  Although we didn’t get the same zero-slide whiteboard-only affair from last year, Dell Force 10 took the time to ask each one of us what we would like to hear from them during the presentation.  That little touch helped put us at ease and allowed us to tell them up front what we were hoping to see.  I specifically asked about the branding of Dell Force 10 alongside the PowerConnect line.

Dell kept the slides somewhat short and did manage to address many topics that we put on the whiteboard before we started.  I was happy to learn that while Force 10 equipment would stay primarily in the data center realm, the Force10OS (FTOS) that is so beloved by many would be finding its way into the PowerConnect line at some point in the coming months.  One of my many gripes about the PowerConnect line is the horr^H^H^H^Hdifficult OS.  In fact, I was the only person in the office that knew CTRL+H was Backspace.  Whether or not the underlying packet flinging mechanism is superior, having a CLI coded by monkeys doesn’t really help me get my job accomplished.  Now that I can look forward to getting FTOS on all of Dell’s equipment, my ire may go down a little.

After the positioning talk, Dell Force 10 jumped into talking about some of its hardware, specifically the Z9000.  The specs are pretty impressive.  It can run all 128 ports at line rate 10GBE or use 40GBE modules in 32 ports at line rate.  The power draw for a fully loaded box is a svelte 800 watts (6.25 watts per port) which did generate some healthy discussion about the power consumption of a 10GBE SR fiber module.  I tend to err on the side that there is a little more power draw that 7 watts, but if Dell can produce numbers to support their claim I’ll be a believer.  Dell Force 10 also says that there is support for TRILL in the Z9000 which will help it create a spine-leaf node fabric, their term for the core and aggregation layers of switching in a data center.  I think the Z9000 has some interesting applications and am curious to see how it fares with the offerings put forth by Cisco and Juniper.

Tom’s Take

No one was more surprised than me that Dell bought Force 10 instead of Brocade.  But, after reflection it did make sense.  Now we get to see the fruit of that acquisition.  Dell has positioned Force 10 directly into the data center and it has allowed them to build a top to bottom strategy in the data center, which they lacked before.  Their hardware is fairly impressive from the information we were given and the familiarity of FTOS means that we aren’t going to spend days relearning things.  I wonder if Dell is going to use Force10 in a niche market alongside large server deployments or if they hope that Force10 will catch fire in existing data centers and start replacing legacy gear.  One can only hope for the former, as the latter won’t leave a lot of room for Dell to recoup their investment.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Dell Force10 was a sponsor of Network Field Day 2, as as such was responsible for paying a portion of my travel and lodging fees. They also provided us with a pint glass with the Dell Networking logo, a Dell sticker, and a USB drive containing presentations and markting collateral. At no time did Dell Force10 ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the drafting of this review. The analysis and opinions herein are mine and mine alone.

Brocade – Network Field Day 2

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Brocade was the second vendor up on day 2 of Network Field Day 2. We arrived at the resplendant Brocade offices and were immediately ushered in for lunch. A side note here: Brocade had the best lunch ever. No sandwiches and chips. Chicken Parmesan, salad, and pasta were the meal du jour. After feeding us, Brocade then proceeded to whet our appetite by hinting that there would be some time later for a competition.

Once we got underway, we got a quick intro from <<MARKETING PERSON>> followed by a great short presentation from Jon Hudson, also known as @the_socalist. He went into a quick overview of the Brocade line of products, touching on everything from wiring closet switches to massive fibre channel encryption boxes. He kept it short and light by playing to our strengths. As it has been noted before, presenting to Tech Field Day delegates is a very unique experience. Jon peppered his presentation with pictures of unicorns (the mascot of Networking Field Day) and talk of long-distance vMotion issues that could one day lead to roving packs of VM clusters vMotioning across the world and even into space. Good laughs were had all around. Overall, Brocade has some good products that they aim into the middle of the switching pack, but their real capability is their extensive fibre channel knowledge and how to integrate that in your environment. Their VCS take on fabric is equally interesting.

Afterwards, we were informed that we were going to have a lab. Not a demo, not a video. A hands-on configuration lab. We were broken up into teams and given the task of configuring a pair of Brocade 6720s into a fabric configuration. We had the disposal of the assembled Brocade engineers for assitance with configuration, as well as for escort to the data center down the hall where we had to (GASP!) plug in our own fiber jumpers. Just before the lab kicked off, the moderator Marcus Thordal informed us that they usually saw some sabotage occuring after a team completed their configuration tasks. Once we started, Jeff Fry  and I teamed up to start building fabric. As Jeff prepped the fiber cables, I quickly assigned a management address to the switch. My previous familiarty with the Brocade CLI came in handy, and I finally got to show off my Brocade Certified Network Engineer (BCNE) skills. Jeff commented that the CLI seemed very IOS-like, which I’m almost certain is no coincidence.

When it came time to go back to the data center and start cabling, the competition really started to heat up. Tony Mattke and Greg Ferro sat next to us in a team, and as we plugged our fiber jumpers in to cross-connect switches and fire up servers, Tony slipped in behind us to do the same. When I got back to the terminal to verifiy the fabric connections, the VMware host wasn’t pingable. I did some quick troubleshooting and found that it had simply disappeared. When I looked over, Tony was giggling like a schoolgirl, which told me he decided to play dirty. I walked back to the data center and checked our cables. I quickly discovered that the server fiber jumper was slightly unplugged, just enough to break the connection but not enough to be dangling there and give away the treachery. When I got back, I glared at Tony and Greg, sure that I would find a way to repay them in kind. As soon as I sat down, Tony and Greg both jumped up to repatch cables in the data center, sure I had sabotaged them. I decided to play different game, so I used the basic configuration given to the delegates and figured out the switch IP for Tony and Greg. I then telnetted in and used the default password to log on, at which point I rebooted the switch. The 6720s took a few minutes to come back up, at which point I could configure in peace. Greg and Tony came back as Jeff and I were vMotioning our host across the fabric to test resiliency. Greg took a minute to figure out that his switch wasn’t at the CLI prompt, but was instead running ASIC checks. He looked over at me, but my smile was just too hard to contain. As he plotted more revenge, Jeff turned it up a notch by suggesting I change the login info for Team Five’s switch and reboot once again. While they were distracted, I changed the ADMIN user password to “gregisatosser” and rebooted after saving the config. As the switch was coming back up, the Brocade engineers in the back were having a great time with our efforts to sabotage each other. I took special delight in telling Greg the new password to his switch.

Once we finished our configuration lab, the Brocade people used the remaining time to answer Q&A about their product and direction in areas like TRILL and FCoE. I was especially impressed by Jon Hudson as he was able to spar with Ivan Pepelnjak about many different TRILL ideas, while at the same time withering an assualt from Ivan and Tony Bourke about fiber channel. He recalled many things off the top of his head, but he was also not afraid to say “I don’t know” when faced with a unique take on a problem. That always impresses me when a presenter is willing to go under the gun on Q&A and ever more so when they admit that they don’t know something. As I overhead him say afterwards, Jon remarked, “There’s no sense in lying. If I don’t know, I don’t know. Lying about it never leads to anything good.

Here’s a video of Jon’s introduction to Brocade:

Tom’s Take

I liked Brocade’s presentation. The slide deck was short and funny, but the real gem was the hands-on lab. While many a Tech Field Day presentation has been saved by a great demo, there’s just something about getting your hands dirty on real hardware. We learned how Brocade implemented things that we do in our everyday jobs, as well as a couple of things that are unique to them. I really helps us decide how worthwhile their equipment might be to our environment. In fact, I’d wager to say that they moved into some serious consideration among one or two delegates for ease of use and features simply because we had a chance to take it for a test drive. Future Tech Field Day presenters take note: getting the delegates involved is never a bad idea.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Brocade was a sponsor of Network Field Day 2, as as such was responsible for paying a portion of my travel and lodging fees. They also provided us with lunch and a takeaway bag containing a USB drive with the presentation, chocolate covered espresso beans, and a VCS T-shirt in 2XL. At no time did Brocade ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the drafting of this review. The analysis and opinions herein are mine and mine alone.