Internets of Interest for 5th May 2013
Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 5th May 2013 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: Schneier on Security: The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership – Soon, governments won’t have to bother collecting personal data. We’re willingly giving it to a vast network of for-profit data [...]
Nerdgasm: Arista 100GB Ethernet Just Blew My Data Centre Design Up
Today, Arista announces the availability large scale 100GB Ethernet for 7500 chassis and it looks like a serious change in the way network hardware is priced and will change the way you look at network hardware.
SDN Is Tomorrows Reality but You Will Love It When It Gets Here – CloudCamp London
I was invited to speak at Cloud Camp, London last night. The Cloud Camp format is for just 5 minutes so this presentation is short and brief. The basic point is that SDN vendors are staging into the market but that mainstream adoption won’t happen in Enterprise networks until mid-2014. No doubt vendors will want [...]
Cloud Networking Is Not Virtual Networking – Presentation at London VMware Users Group 20130425
I was pleased to be able to present a talk at the London VMUG today. They even let me choose the topic and after some consideration I decided to talk about my recent experiences at Canopy Cloud in designing and testing Cloud Networks in a VMware vCloud. The presentation is in three parts: First I discuss the [...]
Mac OS X: Disable LCD Font Smoothing on Mac OS X
But somewhere in my upgrades, the LCD Font Smoothing has been enabled – this makes the fonts on the screen look blurry /fuzzy due to sub-pixel rendering which is not necessary on Apple screens or retina displays.
Internets of Interest for 16th April 2013
Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 16th April 2013 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: VMware Communities: vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide – Official Release – Can’t imagine too many network engineers that won’t need to be reviewing this. At least you should read [...]
Latest Posts
Thoughts on Choosing node.js for Network Automation
I’ve been looking at various languages, architectures and frameworks to perform an automation self-project. I’m going forward with node.js and JavaScript. Here is my defense.
Mac OS X: My Three Screen Setup for MacBook Pro Retina
Sometimes you need to try dumb things. I thought it was dumb to even consider having three screens at once on my MacBook Pro Retina but it turns that not only does it work, it works very well for me. I’ve tried it before but today I stumbled onto the thing that works for me. [...]
A Hosting Cathedral or a Cloud Bazaar ?
I woke up at three o’clock this morning with a thought racing around my brain – am I building a Hosting Cathedral or Cloud Bazaar ? My data centre is like a cathedral – regimented rows of seats, full of disciplined and controlled resources all looking towards the technical priests for inspiration and direction. Each [...]
Response: Application Visibility and Control | Aerohive Networks
More confirmation that the end of the firewall era (as we know it) is nearly here. Palo Alto and Aerohive are partnering to: Aerohive’s Cooperative Control networking infrastructure equipment along with Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls provide a comprehensive and robust solution for optimizing the user experience on a mobile first network Looks like a [...]
SDN White Paper Nuage Networks VSP – Delivers SDN in a Big Way
I wrote a white paper for Nuage Networks that is the first Packet Pushers White Paper. Nuage Networks have announced their version of SDN and I think it’s solid vision of what Software Defined Networking will become over the next couple of years – tunnel fabrics, software network agents in the server with load balancing and routing capabilities and controller/application software that can manage multiple data centres and their WAN networks.
Jump in and take a read.
Humour: Types of Networking Crap Poster
I figured this would make a good poster. So I made a poster about the “Types of Network Crap” (since I prefer not to use swear words on my blog) after a strong response to the tweet I did a couple of weeks ago.
◎ DevOps, Visual Representation, Monitoring for Humans
I was reviewing some presentations on monitoring and visual charts from the monitorama conference. This caught my eye for a 3D representation for unicast, Multicast and Broadcast traffic (using Barycentric co-ordinates if I understand correctly). Barycentric representation uses 3D-coordinate system. Presentation can be found here Monitoring for Humans Can’t remember how I found this link Monitoring [...]
Internets of Interest for 1st April 2013
I’ve been very busy lately with several large analyst/research writing projects so less links than usual this week. It will be sometime before I return to a more regular blogging schedule. You should check out Packet Pushers in the next few days where we will be launching a new feature – we are writing our own [...]
OS X: Comparing Microsoft Word Documents in Kaleidoscope on Mac OS X
Have you ever needed to compare two Microsoft Word documents to see what change have been been made by your editor ? I’m using Kaleidoscope to perform exactly that. Works for text, image and code too.
Response: What’s in a Name? Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel Changes the Game
OK. I’m stumped. I’m having a full blown WTF moment here. It seems the storage industry gets it’s spiral into dumb and dumber by the day. Here is lustrous and full bodied marketing failure from Brocade: I would often start product launch training meetings with the following rules: The first rule of this launch is [...]
Blessay – Serious or Technical Articles, Long Form Content
A Hosting Cathedral or a Cloud Bazaar ?
I woke up at three o'clock this morning with a thought racing around my brain - am I building a Hosting Cathedral or Cloud Bazaar ? My data centre is like a cathedral - regimented rows of seats, full of disciplined and controlled resources all looking towards the technical priests for inspiration … [Read More...]
◎ DevOps, Visual Representation, Monitoring for Humans
I was reviewing some presentations on monitoring and visual charts from the monitorama conference. This caught my eye for a 3D representation for unicast, Multicast and Broadcast traffic (using Barycentric co-ordinates if I understand correctly). Barycentric representation uses … [Read More...]
Webinar – Anuta Networks Demonstrates nCloudX – Register Now
This past January, Anuta Networks came out of stealth at Cisco Live in London, showing off their nCloudX platform, an SDN controller aimed at multitenant cloud providers. Anuta's nCloudX controller can manage hardware common to many networks. As such, Anuta isn't forcing providers to install … [Read More...]
Featured Articles – Popular
Poster: Manager, Engineer, Architect, ITIL Consultant
Because ITIL sucks the enjoyment out of working in technology by making pointless administrative work. Agile is the schizz. With apologies to Joey Roth for the inspiration.
Tired of Being Blamed, It’s Not the Network, It’s the Operating System
Many people blame networking for not being able to support dynamic server movement in virtualised environment while conveniently forgetting that server operating systems haven’t changed their networking software in twenty plus years. I think that a lot of the blame should be apportioned to operating system vendors.
Software Defined Networking & OpenFlow – So Far and So Future
Over the weekend I published the latest Packet Pushers show about Software Defined Networking in the Priority Queue feed which focussed on Cisco and how you can implement SDN in an EXISTING network with some of key people from Cisco.
As I was editing the show I realised that the first time we discussed OpenFlow was in May 2011 on Show 40 – Openflow – Upending the Network Industry – a show where we identified that the future of networking was going to change. I can remember clearly during the discussion with Matt Davey from Indiana University being struck by how obvious the idea was. It was obvious to me that once you grasped the technical concepts behind OpenFlow , any decent engineer can perceive the impact on networking. While OpenFlow makes sense, it took another six months before Software Defined Networking became a thing.
Strap yourself in, SDN is just starting and it’s going to be a fun ride.
