Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 29th June 2012 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: The SDN Opportunity – Juniper outlines their SDN “strategy” at Interop in Tokyo. It seems to me that they are only remessaging their existing (very good) APIs and [...]
Response: Cisco Blog – What Comes Next With Cisco and the ONF?
28th June 2012 by Leave a Comment
Omar Sultan writes on the Cisco Data & Cloud blog ….. We continue to strongly support ONF and its efforts related to SDN and our support has and will continue to been demonstrated in tangible ways. One of the elements of the Cisco ONE announcement is onePK, which is an enabling technology and one of the [...]
Cisco NX-OS CLI Tip – Feature Enabled, License and CLI Syntax
27th June 2012 by 4 Comments
When working on NX-OS it’s kind of annoying to attempt to use a feature that hasn’t been enabled and get an error message. Why not get an “not enabled” or “not licensed” error message ?
The Open and Shut Failure of BYOD. As a Narrative
27th June 2012 by 12 Comments
Manager: “Hello IT Department, this is the self important manager from the Inner Tanzanian sales team”
Helldesk: ” Hello again, sir”
Tech Note: Command Line for Alternate PAC File for Chrome
27th June 2012 by 1 Comment
Sometimes you need to use many different Proxy Auto Configuration files with a web browser, usually when testing or trying out new installation of the proxy servers.
Outsourced Data Centre Hosting and Wasted Time
26th June 2012 by 4 Comments
Over the last two years I’ve worked almost full time with customers who have outsourced their data centres. That is, their physical IT infrastructure is hosted in a facility owned by external company. What ever the reasons that drove that decision, I can certainly point to an painful outcome – time lost.
Internets of Interest for 23rd June 2012
23rd June 2012 by Leave a Comment
Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 23rd June 2012 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: The Pretty Girls of Ridge Tool, 1953 | Retronaut – Exactly what it says, drawings of pretty women on tools. Random but quite beautiful. While I’m not sure [...]
Cognitive Biases and Being a Fallible Human
21st June 2012 by Leave a Comment
I’m often involved in decisions, either on my own or as part of the team or providing information to someone else. When researching a product or a technology, I try to be conscious of how I perceive problems, how I react to the data I have available or whether I have the right data. I consider whether my current frame of mind is positive or negative, am I tired. Did some person from a particular company make me angry, or excite me ? Does this affect my perception of a vendor or their product ?
Response: Using an OpenFlow Switch as a Programmable Patch Panel
21st June 2012 by Leave a Comment
In this blog post, Dan Hershey (from Big Switch) gets some toys from the lab and shows how to build an SDN Controller application that uses OpenFlow. This application uses a Pronto switch as an “active patch panel” to connect two Cisco switches together. Things to think about: You can use OpenFlow to do things that [...]
Rant: Our Vendor Partners Dont Have an SDN Vision
19th June 2012 by 14 Comments
There is an old saying “A man with his eyes fixed on Heaven doesn’t see where he is going”. It’s an almost perfect description of how the major vendors are bringing Software Defined Networking to the market.
The consistent message from all the vendors and especially the Cisco, Juniper and Brocade is that there are “no use cases for SDN”. In the last three months, this has been a constantly repeated statement both publicly and privately. This beggars belief that vendors can’t see immediate needs that deliver long term gains.
I suspect that the root of this problem is the big companies want to solve big problems. And by solving big problems they figure that they can make big revenue. Alright, I get that. It’s understandable that large organisations need a constant revenue stream to feed the insatiable maws of their shareholders. However, the vendors re also missing the most real and immediate problem of networking today. Simply, Networking is too hard.
Vendors haven’t developed tools that keep the complexity of networking under control. Complexity can be reduced to this: “I don’t have big problems, I have lots of small problems.” You can have debates about addressing complexity and how to attack it, but it nearly always boils down to this: start small.
