Using open source software on a variety of hardware platforms is old news on the compute side of the IT house. Now, whitebox hardware and open source software are challenging incumbent network vendors and demonstrating new operational models for network engineers.

Web-scale giants have blazed the trail for whitebox/open source networking, and the tools and technologies these giants use are finding their way into the enterprise.

What does all of this mean for enterprise infrastructure going forward? We ponder these questions on the Datanauts podcast.

Our guest is Peyton Maynard-Koran, currently working at a stealthy blockchain startup.

We talk with Peyton about the problems that exist with big networking vendors (feature bloat, tightly coupled software and hardware, and other issues), and how these problems create challenges for network operators.

We also explore how disaggregation, open source, and an emphasis on software offer a different vision for how to build, buy, and operate networks.

Show Links:

Peyton Maynard-Koran – Twitter

Peyton Maynard-Koran – Blog

future:net 2017 – The Impacts of Cloud Computing and Open Source on the Networking Industry – YouTube

Fixing the Internet for Real-Time Applications: Part III – Riot Games Engineering

Today the Datanauts get sorted about the world of database administrators, a.k.a DBAs.

There’s a chasm between infrastructure ops and DBAs, especially when it comes to running data center workflows. This show aims to build some bridges.

We also focus on Microsoft SQL Server, one of the most widely deployed database applications in the enterprise.

Our guide to the DBA life is Mike Fal, a database solutions engineer at Rubrik. Mike blogs at Art Of The DBA. We’ll delve into the intricacies of relational databases and how applications interact with them.

Then Mike walks us through the day in the life of a DBA, and we conclude with a conversation on how infrastructure ops and DBAs can work better together.

Show Links:

Art Of The DBA – mikefal.net

PASS: A Non-profit organization for data professionals

Mike Fal on Twitter

On today’s episode, the Datanauts starship traverses time and space via VXLAN tunnels. VXLAN is an overlay networking technology for the data center that augments and extends traditional VLANs.

VXLAN helps data center operators support multitenancy, enables ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Pathing) to make full use of available paths, and avoids the perils of Spanning Tree. VXLAN works by adding a header to an Ethernet frame that makes it routable across an IP network.

Our guest is Lukas Krattiger, Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems. Lukas and the Datanauts discuss how VXLAN works, explore use cases, and examine the tradeoffs of encapsuation and de-encapsulation in software vs. hardware.

We also delve into how hosts inside a VXLAN network communicate with end points outside that network.

Show Links:

Lukas Krattiger on Twitter

Show 256 – Design & Build 6 – VXLAN Use Cases – Packet Pushers

Show 66 – VXLAN and NVGRE with Ken Duda – Packet Pushers

The Datanauts discuss securing print infrastructure with Michael Howard, Chief Security Advisor, and Jason O’Keeffe, Print Security Advisor, at HP. These guys are the real security deal in touch with how the hacking community leverages printers as jump off points to launch attacks.

HP has both best practice and product recommendations to secure a print infrastructure. If you don’t think much about your printers, you’ll think differently after this episode. Or put another way, replace the word “printer” with “IoT”. Does printer security seem like a big deal now? It should.

Enjoy this look at the lurking horror that is your printer network.

For More Information

* HP Secure Printing Services

* Shodan – searchable database of IoT devices

* Censys – sort of a “Shodan Plus”

* HP SureStart – BIOS protection

* HP JetAdvantage Security Manager

Today the Datanauts embark on a weight loss program for the compute stack by getting into unikernels.

Rather than standing up a full operating system, how about packaging your application to run as a binary that can be created in an immutable fashion and updated in a snap? That’s idea behind unikernels.

In particular, we’re looking at one effort called IncludeOS. Our guest is Per Buer, the CEO of IncludeOS. We’ll talk about how unikernels differ from a traditional OS, their benefits and tradeoffs, use cases for the technology, and more. Per also gives an overview of the IncludeOS software.

Show Links:

IncludeOS.org

Unikernel.org

Unikernel Devel.org

Datanauts 063: Unikernels Vs. Containers – Packet Pushers

If you Google for a definition of high performance computing, you’ll find several entries on several sites that can be condensed down to this: high performance computing describes the use of supercomputers or parallel processing algorithms to solve computationally intensive problems.

Today on the Datanauts podcast, we’re going to pick the brains of a person who has worked in high performance computing environments. We’re especially interested in the distributed computing aspects of HPC and the challenges it presents to the infrastructure engineering community.

Our guest is Nick Buraglio, a network architect and engineer at the Energy Sciences Network, the service provider network for the Department of Energy that connects national labs. Nick blogs at The Forwarding Plane.net.

Sponsor: ITProTV

ITProTV brings you the most current IT training with over 2,000 hours of content and more than 125 hours added weekly. ITProTV is the resource to keep you and your IT team’s skills up to date. Visit itpro.tv/datanauts​ ​and use code DATANAUTS30​ ​to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

High Performance Computing (HPC) – AWS

Best practices for Securing the Science DMZ by Nick Buraglio – YouTube

The Forwarding Plane.net – Nick Buraglio

Let’s get physical, Datanauts. Today we talk about the key elements of building a physical data center: data cabling, racks, HVAC, power, and then managing all of that stuff.

The death of the physical data center is greatly exaggerated, and today we build the perfect data center beast. Our guest architect is John Kerns, Principal Network Engineer for an IT professional services company. John blogs at PackeTsar and co-hosts the InfoTrek podcast. He’s also an active developer on GitHub.

Show Links:

Explain: Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 / Tier 4 Data Center – NixCraft

Data Center Power and Cooling White Paper – Cisco

Back to Basics: Power – John Kerns (via Packet Pushers)

Back to Basics: Cooling – Part 1 – John Kerns (via Packet Pushers)

Back to Basics: Cooling  –Part 2 – John Kerns (via Packet Pushers)

Datacenter Vanity – John Kerns (via Packet Pushers)

Today on the Datanauts, we look at non-volatile memory express, or NVMe.

NVMe SSDs are fast. As these drives go mainstream and make their way into enterprises and clouds at scale, what’s that mean for distributed storage networking?

We play “move the bottleneck” on today’s Datanauts. Our guest is J Metz, a.k.a @drjmetz on Twitter. He’s Research & Development Engineer for Advanced Storage at Cisco Systems.

He’s also been on previous episodes, including Datanauts 093: Erasure Coding And Distributed Storage.

We discuss the basics of NVMe and how it works, look at its performance specs, and explore how this technology will impact the network and the design of distributed storage systems.

Today on the Datanauts podcast, we rocket ahead in time. Put on your favorite time-travel helmet, and join us as we explore commodity hardware, NVMe, distributed architectures, and of course, cloud.

Our destination? The future of storage.

Our Guild Navigator for this glimpse into the future is Tom Lyon. He’s the founder and chief scientist at DriveScale and can be found on Twitter.

In part one of the show, Ethan and Chris relay audience questions to Tom, including the long-term prospects of Fibre Channel, what’s keeping Fibre Channel alive, and the implications of distributed storage.

In parts two and three, the Datanauts delve into commodity storage, NVMe, and storage’s cloudy future.

Sponsor: ITProTV

ITProTV brings you the most current IT training with over 2,000 hours of content and more than 125 hours added weekly. ITProTV is the resource to keep you and your IT team’s skills up to date. Visit itpro.tv/datanauts​ ​and use code DATANAUTS30​ ​to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Today on the Datanauts podcast, our friends at Oracle Ravello fly their sponsorship rocket by our microphones for a discussion of how to stand up a replica of your data center in the cloud.

Why would you want to do that? All sorts of reasons! PoCs, dev/test, user acceptance testing, threat simulation exercises, training, and even to run production workloads in AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud without having to make changes to the application.

Our guests from Ravello are Abhi Gupta, Director of Product Management; and Gil Hoffer, VP of Software Development.

We discuss use cases for Oracle Ravello, examine how the product differentiates itself, and drill into the latest product release: Ravello on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (a.k.a Bare-Metal Cloud).

Show Links:

Oracle Ravello

Sign Up For A Free Trial Of Ravello

Free Ravello Lab For VMware Experts

Follow Ravello on Twitter