Network design, architecture, thinking, working. Tech.
In this post, I’m looking at network designs with ECMP cores using TRILL or SPB, I’m realising that STP is equally improved in terms of risk and performance by reducing the STP domain size which leads to better stability, reduced risk and impact mitigation
A lot of people have talked extensively about OpenFlow making significant changes to the networking business. In particular, many writers have focussed on the possibility that OpenFlow enables a choice of using low cost network equipment instead of the expensive networking equipment that we use today.
Well, that’s highly unlikely.
I don’t use a Cloud for any of my blogs or email services. I’ve looked at three different cloud providers including Amazon, Rackspace and others. I guessed that they all would work, more or less. Except they cost between four to ten times the solution from a managed service provider. Here is my exit report for the fictitious consulting engagement with myself.
I’ve been asked a few times about how I organise my PDF files and keep track of documents. This post looks at my workflow for capturing, storing, tagging and organising my Knowledge Management system. This is Part 2
A few times I’ve mentioned about how I manage collections of PDF documents, Text files and the accreted detritus of a Network Engineer. Since a number of people have asked me to talk in more detail about how I organise this and what methods I use, here is some rough description of how I perform knowledge management.
Cisco is known for shipping products early to deliver new features quickly. But this leads to a reputation for buggy code which has customers report bugs (and Cisco fixing them). This means that you should never buy a newly released Cisco product unless you are willing to take this risk. This post looks a my process for analysing this risk and then selecting an IOS version by performing a bug scrub. In this case, I’ve been asked whether the Cisco C3750-X switches are ready for live deployment.
Following from my predictions on what WILL NOT be big in 2012, finally, my predictions for 2012. Not early, but hey, the future never arrives on time anyway.
Juniper QFabric is a new approach to Ethernet Switch Fabrics. When it was announced last year,it was noted that the underlying physical design is a completely different approach to building Switch Fabrics. Here I’m taking a loosely research based approach to understand how Juniper QFabric is different from all other approaches to the problem, and also a look at some of the challenges ahead.
I’ve been considering a small but vital problem in naming conventions in Networking. Namely, the use of underscores and hyphens in object names and devices. It’s a hot topic for argument when the time comes for corporate standards (and when Network Engineers have beverages in a public house). Now, I figure that there are three possible grammar options for making names – hyphens, underscore and CamelCase.
Embrane uses concepts of IP Flows to scale virtual appliances. Embrane does this by managing IP flows and then directing to other appliances, in effect creating what I would call a two tier load balancing.
