Heavy Networking

QoS is difficult to implement over the Internet, because hey, you don’t own all the gear between you and the destination.

And even if you do own all the bits, QoS is hard to monitor. How do you know you’ve gotten it right? If it’s not working the way you want, how can you tell?

When you’ve got all of that sorted, what do you do about it?

These, among other things, are QoS “gotchas” you’ve maybe run into. To help us form a network design strategy to cope with these gotchas is Peter Welcher, a network architect at NetCraftsmen, a consultancy in the Washington DC area that supports folks around the world.

We’re going to hit some QoS limitations to lead off the show, and then spend the rest of our time focused on how to monitor QoS in an actionable way.

Sponsor: ExtraHop

Today’s show is sponsored in part by ExtraHop, the enterprise cyber analytics company delivering performance and security from the inside out. ExtraHop offers complete visibility with machine learning to help you make quick, confident decisions about your IT environment. Explore the ExtraHop Performance Platform at extrahop.com/packetpushers.

Show Links:

Some QoS Gotchas – NetCraftsmen

NetCraftsmen

Peter Welcher’s blogs at NetCraftsmen

Peter Welcher on Twitter

Quality of Service (QoS) Fundamentals In 27 Lessons – Packet Pushers Ignition

On Heavy Networking we spend a lot of time digging into the technologies that underpin SD-WAN: bonding multiple links, application ID, encryption and overlays, controllers, policy enforcement and more.

And while it’s essential to understand what makes SD-WAN work, before you adopt the technology, you have to build a business case.

Then, after the product or service is deployed, the business side of the house probably wants to know if the money they spent was worth it–that is, they’ll want to see a return on investment, or ROI.

To walk us through the intricacies and elements of building a business case and measuring ROI we welcome Jason Gintert, co-founder WAN Dynamics.

Jason is also the author of a new whitepaper available on the Packet Pushers Ignition site called SD-WAN: Building The Business Case & Understanding Your ROI, and we thought this was a good time to pick his brain.

So sharpen your pencils and grab your accounting eyeshades and let’s talk some business.

Show Links:

SD-WAN: Building The Business Case & Understanding Your ROI – Packet Pushers Ignition Whitepaper

Packet Pushers Ignition

List Of SD-WAN Vendors – Packet Pushers

Jason Gintert On Twitter

Ohio Networking User Group

On today’s Heavy Networking we look at one organization’s journey to SDN, including pitfalls, triumphs, and lessons learned.

My guest is Sal Rannazzisi, principal network architect at Merck, a global pharmaceuticals company.

Sal discusses how the company experimented with early SDN products, how they tested them in the lab, and how they’re approaching SDN today. He also offers details on the vendors he’s using.

We discuss:

* The organization’s journey to SDN

* Building internal standards and processes

* Dealing with legacy equipment

* Whether to recruit or train for engineering talent

* Managing vendor relations

* Areas of concern

* More

Show Links:

Intelligent Network Automation: Gluware Intent ’19 Podcast (Sponsored) – YouTube

As your network perimeter expands into public cloud and mobile, how do you secure it? The answer has been some combination of endless firewalls, host agents, and VPNs, maybe from a variety of vendors. How’s that working out for you? Getting a little hard to keep up with it all?

Our sponsor is Open Systems. Open Systems offers an integrated solution that combines a secure cloud access security broker with cloud integrated SD-WAN and a DevOps mentality that gives you a new way to design your increasingly complex perimeter security.

Moritz Mann, Head of Product Management, joins us from Open Systems for our security chat.

What We Discuss

In our conversation with Moritz, we chat through the following big ideas:

1. Open Systems as an SD-WAN company with integrated security.

2. Whether or not security is table stakes for SD-WAN solutions.

3. The components of the Open Systems security offering, including a firewall, web gateway, DNS filter, and security monitor.

4. The architecture of the appliance delivering these services.

5. Open Systems’ role in securing hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

6. How Open Systems secures mobile users.

7. Why inline firewall approaches struggle in the cloud era.

8. The Open Systems approach to securing cloudy conversations, including their Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) service.

For More Information

* Website: https://open-systems.com/

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/securesdwan

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/open-systems

* Moritz Mann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moritz-mann-34b24/

Harry Quackenboss is long time veteran of infrastructure technology. In networking he was a VP of Sales of Crescendo for FDDI networking (to the desktop) which was acquired by Cisco. He later founded Woven Systems as a high speed Ethernet company of the time and more lately CEO of cPlane, a SDN company now relaunched as CPLANE NETWORKS, .  Today, Harry is investor and advisor to a number of companies in the infrastructure space.

Harry talks with Greg about the state of networking based on his experiences.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Get over 65 hours of free technical training from ITProTV. ITProTV offers online instruction in CompTIA, Cisco, VMWare, Microsoft and more. You can stream courses live and on demand on your favorite device. Sign up for a free membership at itpro.tv/packet-pushers and try it with no obligation.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can migrate to the cloud, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

Topics Covered

* Ethernet, FDDI and did we make the right choice and why ?

* Bundling and unbundling of products

* The invisible cost of product evangelisation.

* Should customers be smarter about demanding free sales effort ?

* Can the WAN / LAN / Campus converge into a single unit of operation ?

* Why SDWAN is taking off ? Permission-less connectivity, Internet is good enough.

* Open Source isn’t free and the cost of software isn’t directly less than hardware.

* The emergence of co-processors for off-load and what that might mean for NFV

* Service Function Chaining or Microsegmentationsomewhat

 

You can find Harry on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/harryquackenboss/

 

On Heavy Networking, Tom Hollingsworth joins us from GestaltIT. Don’t know Tom?

I’ll describe Tom as a long-time network engineer and CCIE turned Scruffy-Looking Nerd Herder who manages many of the community IT events you know as Tech Field Day.

I’ve known Tom for many years, and had this opportunity to get his take on many things I’ve noticed going on in networking.

This episode, we’re going rapid fire reaction. I’ll pitch a statement (which I might or might not agree with) to Tom, and let him react.

Buckle up, everyone. We’re going for a ride.

Provocative statements include:

* Certifications are dead

* Enterprise networking is dying

* If you want an IT career today, it’s cloud or nothing

* BGP is the kitchen sink of routing protocols and that’s bad

* More

Sponsor: ExtraHop

ExtraHop is the enterprise cyber analytics company delivering performance and security from the inside out. ExtraHop offers complete visibility with machine learning to help you make quick, confident decisions about your IT environment. Explore the ExtraHop Performance Platform at extrahop.com/packetpushers.

Show Links:

Tom Hollingsworth on Twitter

Networking Nerd.net – Tom’s blog

Tech Field Day

We’re going warp speed on Packet Pushers Heavy Networking: 400G Ethernet.

If you think 400G is the same thing as 100G, just faster, you’re sort of right…but also kind of wrong.

Joining us to explain the why, what, and when of 400G is Ray Nering, Product Manager; and Lane Wigley, Technical Marketing Engineer; both from Cisco Systems, our sponsor for today’s episode.

We discuss:

* Business and market trends driving 400G

* 400G use cases

* When 400G switches and routers will ship (the end of 2019)

* The role of standards bodies such as the IEEE and industry consortia

* Differences between QSFP-DD and OSFP optics

* The mechanical and electrical engineering challenges of 400G

* What 400G packaging will look like

* Next steps beyond 400G

Show Links:

High Capacity 400G Data Center Networking – Cisco Systems

Cisco Announces 400GbE Switches in Nexus 3400 And 9000 Families – Packet Pushers

Ray Nering – Cisco Interview at OFC Conference 2019 – YouTube

Today on Heavy Networking, we talk about what an ops team looks like when adopting automation.

Network automation seems to be driving many of you towards Python. You’re learning to code, or least trying to. If you could just get that tool written, it would help so much.

It’s hard though, what with projects going on, not enough people to do all the work, a huge network maintenance event on the horizon, and on and on.

And dare I say technical debt? You gotta maintain that tool if you ever get it written.

Maybe writing your own automation tools isn’t your job as a network engineer. Maybe you need someone to come alongside of you…like a software developer.

Our guests today are Brian Gleason and Jeremy Schulman. Brian has recently started a new job where network automation is really important and handled in a forward-thinking way.

Jeremy‘s been in the world of network automation for as long as we’ve been talking about it on Heavy Networking. He’s worked for vendors, his own startup, and now for Major League Baseball.

We discuss:

* Whether an Ops team needs a dedicated developer

* The different types of automation projects and their blast radii

* How to calculate ROI for having a developer dedicated to infrastructure tooling

* The differences between scripting and programming

* How much time you should dedicate to learning to develop, and where to start

* The pros and cons of buying vendor tools vs. building your own

Sponsor: ExtraHop

ExtraHop is the enterprise cyber analytics company delivering performance and security from the inside out. ExtraHop offers complete visibility with machine learning to help you make quick, confident decisions about your IT environment. Explore the ExtraHop Performance Platform at extrahop.com/packetpushers.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Get over 65 hours of free technical training from ITProTV. ITProTV offers online instruction in CompTIA, Cisco, VMWare, Microsoft and more. You can stream courses live and on demand on your favorite device. Sign up for a free membership at itpro.tv/packet-pushers and try it with no obligation.

Show Links:

Interactive Python

Jupyter Notebooks – Jupyter.org

Brian Gleason on Twitter

Bytes of Cloud – Brian’s blog

Jeremy Schulman on Twitter

Intent-based networking is the latest in a long string of dreams and schemes to get meaningful, wide-scale automation into data center networks.

In broad strokes, intent-based networking, or IBN, sounds like magic: take high-level, human comprehensible business goals, run them through some abstraction layers, click your heels three times, and out comes the low-level configurations that are automatically programmed into the requisite devices.

For any network engineer who’s been burned by automation schemes in the past, this might sound too good to be true.

On today’s Heavy Networking, we peer behind the curtain of intent-based networking to find out if we’re actually dealing with a wizard this time, or just another pretender blowing smoke.

Our guest is Phil Gervasi, a network engineer and solutions architect. You may know him at Network Phil on Twitter or his blog networkphil.com.

Phil wrote two in-depth white papers on IBN for the Packet Pushers Ignition site. He did a lot of research and analysis, and today we’re going to pick his brains as we follow the yellow brick road to intent-based networking.

In particular, we dive into three main areas of IBN:

* Network abstraction

* Continuous validation

* Autonomous remediation

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can migrate to the cloud, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

Show Links:

Packet Pushers Ignition

Phil Gervasi on Twitter

Network Phil

Intent-Based Networking – Concepts and Overview – IETF

On today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by InterOptic, we explore how to extend the life of your legacy cabling infrastructure in the data center as you grow to 100G Ethernet, and the options available when you need to upgrade.

As organizations move down the path toward 100G, the higher data rates mean that old cabling might not be good enough.

It’s a fair chance that newer Ethernet speeds are not compatible with your existing cable, and now cabling costs become a factor in the selection of pluggable modules.

InterOptic works with customers on these issues and helps them select the right pluggable modules.

Joining us today are Robert Coenen, Ph.D., VP of Business Development at Interoptic; and Alex Latzko, lead network architect at Server Central Turing Group.

We discuss:

* How cabling affects your choice of pluggable modules

* Considerations for single-mode and multi-mode fiber

* Future-proofing for 25/50/100G

* Whether you need new patch leads

* Whether copper in the data center makes sense

* SFPs vs. GBICs

* Preparing for 400G

* More

Show Links:

InterOptic.com

How To Get Your Data Center Ready For 100G – Network Computing

Heavy Networking 431: Understanding Emerging Trends In Optics With InterOptic (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

Show 360: All About Optics With InterOptic (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

Robert Coenen on LinkedIn

Alex Latzko on LinkedIn