Posts Tagged ‘Networking Field Day 9’
Networking Field Day – Afterwards – Brocade SDN
I wanted to start off stating Brocade broke one of the biggest barriers with getting involved with SDN and labbing out the technology. Brocade offers a free download of their Vyatta Controller! With this free download you can run a 5x node SDN network for one year, included with 60x days of support! This eliminates a huge obstacle of actually purchasing the software, sure you may still require the hardware but Brocade SDN Solution features support for OpenDaylight/OpenFlow so you do have many different hardware options.
Now, that I got that out of the way my two favorite pieces of the Brocade was 1. The technical overview of the Vyatta controller and it’s architecture, it was great to see how to the services overlay on each other and what makes it tick. Usually when it comes to some type of SDN solution it’s usually presented as some type of application that does magic. In this case however Brocade definitely did their due-diligence to cover how their controller actually functions. The 2nd thing I loved about this presentation was just how frank and up-front the presentation was. My favorite quote of the whole the presentation was “We know how to code, we went to school. We chose not to program we went into networking.” I can’t say how happy I was to hear someone actually say this! However like it was mentioned in the presentation it appears to be a natural evolution of the field.
As the presentation continues, you really get a sense about how far along the Vyatta controller has come along once the conversation steers towards volumetric traffic management. Having the additional and built-in monitoring of the traffic flows with sFlow and OpenFlow addressing a level of application performance management many current-day data centers frankly do not even have in place today just shows how grown up the tool is becoming. This is built upon again with the flexibility to handle elephant flows differently than other typical data flows, if you are not familiar with the term elephant flows these are just traffic flows that transfer a very high amount of traffic (IE: Something like backup traffic). I can’t tell you how many few companies I’ve worked with in the past that have actually taken into account these ‘elephant flows’.
Now, I don’t want to ruin the whole presentation for you, if you have not watched it yet I highly recommend you give it a watch. There also a great slide in there about Ivan! If you think SDN is still a mystery it’s time to get that Vyatta controller downloaded and running! No more excuses!
You can download the Vyatta Controller here.
Brocade’s Networking Field Day #9 videos can be found here:
Networking Field Day – Afterwards – Cisco ACI
I first need to give a shout out to @_vCarly and her amazing skills at the white board, I only wish my white boarding design were half clean as that! If @_vCarly were to a host a white boarding session at CLUS this year I would most likely attend!
I suppose we should discuss the actual presentation now! Like probably many of you I have heard an awful lot about Cisco SDN and Controllers (Cisco ACI) however until now it has all been theory and hear-say. I can finally say I’ve seen the GUI and got to hear a deep dive of how this new architecture is supposed to work. Now, that I have seen it I am believer there is a lot of potential here and allow us to re-think the way we consider designing Data Center networks and here is why I think that:
- Building around the application, with this new design model we are almost forcing the application designer & server administrations to tell how their servers/applications work and communicate on the network. I have a spent a lot of time with AppDev’s going over what their application does and what else the App communicates in order to troubleshoot an issue. This approach removes much of the hassle without ever seeing the hassle. Future engineers might not know ‘the struggle’ of discovering an application via packet analysis and bridge calls.
- Deployment Orchestration – by specifically calling out the application and the service chaining from the get go, deploying a new application is much more streamlined and simplified in the long run when internal process are stream-lined. Eliminating the time-consuming need to:
- Login to multiple networking devices to configure SVI’s & Trunks
- Login to multiple firewalls creating the appropriate rules.
- Login to Load balancers and creating devices pools, health monitoring, virtual servers, and so forth.
- Troubleshooting and flow monitoring – Out of the box this box will be watching flow statistics. So tracking traffic statistics can easily pin-point packet loss and drops. Which may mean bad news some of the simpler NMS solutions out there unless they start looking beyond the typical Up/Down & Interface utilization mantra.
- Something that was brought up on Twitter post-event was the support for SNMP, which is a great question since SNMP was never mentioned (in any of the SDN-related presentations for that matter).
Now, with all that said and the fact Cisco ACI builds a Data Center around EPG’s (End Point Groups) I really look forward to this new design architecture. It’s probably going to be a bit more tedious up front since some applications will need to be called out specifically instead of going “O, that is a web server. Place it on this VLAN” but in the long run this will streamline many different parts of data center operations.
Links to the Networking Field Day 9 presentations below:
Understanding the Cisco ACI Policy Model
Cisco ACI Overview w/ Soni Jiandani & Joe Onisick
Networking Field Day – Afterwards – New SolarWinds features.
One thing I really liked about SolarWinds was the fact they were the first vendor to start with a white board discussion. Being a network engineer I am a big fan of drawing boxes and lines on a white board. To me it is a more engaging way to have a presentation compared pre-built PowerPoint slides with fancy sounds and motions.
SolarWinds initially started with a architecture overview of their product, involving each of their modules and how these modules are incorporated into the entire eco-system. If you are not familiar with this I highly recommend starting with that session.
Now to talk about the new announcements SolarWinds and the features that will be included in their newest releases.
1. Wireless Heat Map – I’ll admit (and this won’t be a surprise to any of my usual readers) I have been following this feature on the Thwack Forums through the different beta’s for some time now and it’s really had my attention since the initial announcement. I was very curious to see how this would match against other solutions such as MSE Controllers and other site survey tools. While this feature might not be as fully featured as the previous mentioned solutions, this is great addition to SolarWinds arsenal and will definitely be useful for smaller shops that run WLANs. However, also keep in mind this is the first implementation of the functionality and if Solarwinds has proven anything over the years they take an idea and run with it!
2. QoE – Quality of Experience. This in my opinion is one of the greatest new features SolarWinds has added in a long time. A trend I have been seeing over the years is the fact network monitoring needs to go beyond the typical Up/Down & Interface utilization model especially with the adapting trend of 10G, 40G, & 100G infrastructure (and there are some multi-GB architecture getting thrown around nowadays to). It’s time to start monitoring closer at the application level and that is what SolarWinds is starting to do.
Now there is definitely some thought that needs to go into the setup of this feature SolarWinds has a few articles discussing it here:
Configure QoE & a QoE dashboard
Remember one of the biggest factors of Network monitoring is the perspective in which you are monitoring the network! take into account where you deploy these QoE sensors and how you interpret the statistics!
3. LEM – SolarWinds also did a presentation of their Log & Event Viewer, which I found very useful. I’ve known about this product for a while, however I was not quite sure how it goes up against a typical syslog collection. As it turns out the SolarWinds LEM product is in a league of it’s own touting to be a full SIEM product. One thing that makes LEM a little unique is the fact it is a completely separate & isolated product not tied into any other SolarWinds product.
The Networking Field Day 9 SolarWinds presentations can be found here:
Log & Event Viewer Technical Overview
Network Troubleshooting Discussion
Also, I want to throw it out there. SolarWinds has a Demo Website where you can click around and explore many of their different modules. I highly recommend looking around if there is a modules you are curious about. Found here: Oriondemo.Solarwinds.com
Field Trip: Networking Field Day
Very excited to announce I was invited to participate in Networking Field Day #9.
The first question is: What is Networking Day? Well it is an event where we (networkers) get to participate, listen, and interact with various different vendors.
And I’ll be joining a great group, a few of which I’ve met at the last few Cisco Live’s and some of which I’ll be meeting for the first after many interactions on Twitter and the Web.
- Bob McCouch
- Brandon Carroll
- Brandon Mangold
- Charles Galler Jr.
- Ivan Pepelnjak
- Jody Lemoine
- John Herbert
- Jonathan Davis
- Jordan Martin
- Lindsay Hill
- Nick Buragilo
- Pete Welcher
- Me – Steve Occhiogrosso
Which vendors will be at Networking Field Day #9, well there will be a few of them:
This looks like a very interesting line-up It’s got some bigger players and some newer players that look to be offering some very intriguing products products. Everything from ‘SDN WANs’ to Network Monitoring.
This whole event will be streamed live so you can watch as everything unfolds! I’ll post the link soon!
CCIE or Null! 