Packet Pushers - Priority Queue

Today on the Packet Pushers Priority Queue, we step out of the data center, away from the hot aisle, take out our spectrum analyzers, shoo away the pigeons, and discuss outdoor wireless. Specifically, we’re going to go after point-to-point wireless and wireless backhaul with our sponsor, Cambium Networks.

Cambium Networks specializes in fixed outdoor wireless broadband in the unlicensed 5GHz/2.4Ghz spectrum, handling challenging wireless interference from 2 meters to 245 kilometers.

The company connects backhaul systems, WiFi networks, video cameras and other systems.

Our guests from Cambium are Sakid Ahmed, Senior Director of Engineering; Dmitry Moiseev, Systems Engineer; and Alex Marcham, Systems Engineer.

Greg and Ethan dive in with their guests to talk about Cambium’s product line, including the ePMP product, which is specifically designed for outdoor use. They discuss how Cambium handles outdoor interference, including other radio signals, and uses a deterministic system to adapt modulation levels to ensure a strong signal even in noisy environments.

And because Cambium radios are designed for point-to-point links, deployment is fairly simple and doesn’t require an expert installer. Cambium includes AES 128-bit encryption support to ensure data is encrypted in transit.

Cambium offers cnMaestro, a cloud-based management system that provides visibility to all APs and modules. Operators can configure and manage their entire Cambium network from one place.

Use Cases

The primary use case for Cambium is operators providing Internet and VoIP services to home users. For instance, in a rural location, an operator can put Cambium equipment on a water tower, grain elevator or building and within a 60 degree or 90 degree sector provide broadband for hundreds of houses.

However, the company is also seeing growing adoption for connecting surveillance cameras for warehouses and other large commercial spaces, enterprise connectivity, WiFi hotspot backhaul, and organizations connecting multiple buildings on a campus.

Links

Cambium has a special offer for Packet Pushers listeners. The first 25 people to register at on cambiumnetworks.com/packetpushers will each get a pair of ePMP radios, while supplies last.

Cambium Networks

Cambium Networks Community Forum

Our guest today is Martin Casado, General Manager of the Network and Security Business Unit (NSBU) at VMware. He joins the Packet Pushers to get nerdy about where SDN and VMware’s NSX have been, and where they’re going in 2016.

On the business side, VMware announced this past week it has grown the NSX business to a $600 million run rate and tripled the number of paying customers year over year to 1,200. The number of customers running NSX in production has grown 5X, to more than 250.

In this wide-ranging conversation on the transformation of networking, we hit on four main subjects:

* SDN Evolution: We talk about how SDN discussions have moved from trying to understand the concepts to exploring business cases that drive deployment. And as network virtualization has moved into the mainstream, we dive into the relationship between physical and virtual networking.

* Open Source: We talk about the impact of standards bodies and open source software on networking, including projects such as Open vSwitch and the Congress project, which is an effort to translate business requirements into instructions and configurations that can be implemented automatically.

* NSX And ACI: Martin disputes the portrayal of VMware NSX and Cisco ACI as competing products. He notes both products are seeing great adoption, with many customers buying both. We talk about how NSX provides the virtualization layer, and ACI provides a robust network fabric. As both products advance, Martin anticipates that areas of overlap will shrink.

* Distributed Network Services: When you virtualize the network, you can run functions such as firewalls and load balancers out at the edges, and spread the load of those services across multiple CPUs. This enables fine-grained provisioning and resource accounting, and will enable new capabilities and enhance the operational value of network virtualization.

Links:

The Packet Pushers have had several discussions with VMware around NSX, network virtualization, security, and containers. Check out these other podcasts:

PQ Show 67: VMware NSX Everywhere With Guido Appenzeller (Sponsored)

PQ Show 56 – VMware NSX In Production – Sponsored

Show 161 – VMware NSX – Real World SDN – Sponsored

On today’s Priority Queue, sponsored by Sonus Networks, we examine three use cases for VellOS, Sonus’s product that lets customers program a network to customize it for their environments.

Joining us from Sonus for the discussion are Dan Malek, Software Engineering Fellow; and Karl May, VP, VellOS Business Unit.

We’ll drill into the details of three VellOS use cases, and explore both the technology aspects of the product and the business problems you can solve.

Use Cases

* Enterprise SD-WAN. The first use case revolves around reducing costs for enterprise WAN connectivity while also ensuring high performance for applications and network resilience, using off-the-shelf, OpenFlow-compatible switches in conjunction with the VellOS controller. Customers can mix and match carriers and connectivity types, including MPLS, dark fiber, and broadband, and choose application paths based on criteria including performance and cost.

* Service provider interconnects. The second use case is for international carriers that are building interconnects with other providers across geographic regions. VellOS allows carriers to enforce QoS and other customer policies on a peer’s network.

* Multitenant interconnects for colocation providers. The third use case discusses how a data center/colocation operator can install high-bandwidth interconnects that can be shared with a large number of tenants. VellOS creates a shared infrastructure that lets the operator carve up bandwidth and provide network services and requirements on demand. VellOS flow control provides multitenancy separation.

Links:

If you want to learn more about Sonus and VellOS, you can check out the resource page Real-time Service Quality for Unified Communications.

You can also get more details from the blog posts QoS Done Right and Leveraging SD-WAN For Skype For Business Enterprise Voice.

And be sure to check out other podcasts from Sonus, including Packet Pushers Weekly Show 253 and PQ Show 69: Sonus VellOS And QoE For Unified Communications (Sponsored).

Today’s podcast is sponsored by Kentik, a startup that’s just recently come out of stealth. Kentik offers real-time network visibility for service providers, Web companies, and enterprises.

Kentik’s SaaS offering collects flows, including Netflow, sFlow, and IPFIX, as well as BGP and SNMP, and analyzes all this data to help operators determine if availability or performance problems are network-related.

If they are, Kentik can drill into flow records to show when and where the problem started, whether it’s on an internal or external network, and other essential information to help resolve the issue.

Customers can encrypt and upload flow records to Kentik’s service. Records are stored in a Big Data backend. A portal provides dashboards for immediate analysis of incoming data, and customers can also run SQL queries against the backend. Kentik also offers a premises version for customers uncomfortable with the SaaS option.

Avi Freedman, CEO and co-founder of Kentik, joins the Packet Pushers to talk about how Kentik works, how the service extracts value from flow information, how Kentik compares to other visibility and monitoring products, and shares customer use cases.

It’s a nerdy, detailed discussion on getting insight from flows and other data sources.

I was fortunate to be a guest at the HP Discover conference in December 2015, shortly after HPE announced its acquisition of Aruba. I was able to collar Ozer Dondurmacioglu from Aruba and Chris Young from HPE to talk frankly about what the merger looks like.

Topics Covered:

* Some history about Aruba and how they structure their go-to-market strategy.

* What does the Aruba/HPE merger mean for customers?

* How is the merger going internally?

* What do we know about changes in the product portfolio at this time?

Guests

Ozer Dondurmacioglu @ozwifi

Chris Young @netmanchris

One of the things we like to discuss on Packet Pushers are use cases—why you’d want to use a specific technology in the real world. Today, we’re going to discuss, with our sponsor Sonus, how to enforce QoS end to end across a network to support real-time communications.

If you’ve built a campus QoS scheme, you think in terms of DSCP marks, low-latency queuing, and so on. But the reality is these schemes are static and designed for peak loads in the hope that UC traffic doesn’t exceed those static allocations.

So what if there was a way to build out a QoS prioritized path in real time? What if, when the call was stood up, the path between the end points had traffic prioritization configured automatically?

Sonus’s VellOS allows us to do this and more. VellOS is a network operating system that allows you to fully automate flows through a network, so you can control bandwidth, packet marketing, MPLS values, and more to ensure voice and video calls get the highest quality available.

On today’s show, we’re going to drill into how VellOS works, including its use of OpenFlow, and its integration with Microsoft’s UC SDN API. Joining us for today’s conversation are Kevin Isacks, VP of Engineering at Sonus; and Dan Malek, Software Engineering Fellow at Sonus.

Learn More

If you want to learn more about Sonus and VellOS, you can check out the resource page Real-time Service Quality for Unified Communications from Sonus.

You can also get more details from the blog posts QoS Done Right and Leveraging SD-WAN For Skype For Business Enterprise Voice, and from Packet Pushers Weekly Show 253 with Sonus.

A few years back, the number of data center-oriented overlays the market saw got to be a bit humorous. There was VXLAN, NVGRE, and STT all targeted (mostly) at helping with network virtualization and scale inside the data center.

The funny part was how similar these overlays all seemed to be. Why not get behind one standard as an industry?

Then in February 2014, Geneve was announced. Some of us face-palmed. Another overlay? What could possibly be the point of another one? Well, there was — and is — a point.

Geneve, which is an IETF project, aims to take the best parts of STT, NVGRE, and VXLAN. And while you might assume VXLAN has won the overlay war, Geneve is seeing active development for some good reasons we’ll discuss today.

Several folks who are involved in Geneve were kind enough to give up some of their time for this conversation:

Jon Hudson, Futurist & Principal Engineer, Office of the CTO at Brocade; Dinesh Dutt, Chief Scientist at Cumulus Networks; and Jesse Gross, Senior Staff Engineer at VMware.

Show Notes:

-Why was Geneve conceived in the first place? What was going on at the time?

-In the IETF project hierarchy, Geneve is grouped with NVO3. What is NVO3, and how does Geneve fit into that framework?

-Geneve wants to take the best parts of STT, NVGRE, and VXLAN. What are those parts, and why do they represent significant advantages?

* STT

* NVGRE

* VXLAN

-Geneve is extensible, which gives it a long-term market advantage. What do we mean by extensible here?

-What is the IETF status of Geneve as a standard?

-I thought VXLAN won. If that’s not the case, what market adoption are we seeing for Geneve?

* Hardware (silicon) vendors

* Software/NFV vendors

* Open source community projects

Will Geneve ultimately replace VXLAN, etc.? Or will it be just another overlay option?

Links:

Geneve – Russ White

Geneve, VXLAN, And Network Virtualization Encapsulation – Bruce Davie, VMware

On today’s Priority Queue, we discuss the idea of NSX Everywhere. VMware NSX is not a new topic on Packet Pushers. We’ve been covering NSX since Nicira was a startup, and kept up with its evolution over the years.

The last Priority Queue show we did with VMware was episode 56 on NSX in production. If you want to catch up with where NSX is at, you might want to listen to that show before you listen to this one.

This show is an evolution of the NSX story, bringing up the notion of using NSX Everywhere. Typically we think of NSX as a data center play; a centrally managed network overlay for network virtualization, micro-segmentation, and centrally managed firewall services.

Guido Appenzeller, Chief Technology Strategy Officer in the network and security business unit at VMware, joins Ethan and Greg in this sponsored podcast to talk about NSX’s capabilities for containers, the cloud, mobile devices, and more.

What We Discuss:

* How the conversation is changing from ‘What is SDN?’ to ‘Where will it make a difference in our organization?’

* NSX 6.2 updates, including support for containers and Amazon’s cloud

* Instantiating new features in software rather than hardware

* The impact of containers on networking and infrastructure

* How NSX and microsegmentation apply to container security

* Why hypervisors will still be relevant for containers

* Using NSX to help enforce mobile device policy

* Why separating policy from IP addressing makes sense

Links:

You can follow Guido on Twitter at @appenz. He also blogs at Network Heresy. To find out more about NSX, check out vmware.com/products/nsx/.

IT has been trained to operate equipment, but can they–and should they–learn the fundamentals that underpin the infrastructure? Does the enterprise have the skills,  resources, and competency to handle the transition to the cloud?

These questions caused a passionate debate with Kelsey Hightower @kelseyhightower and Keith Townsend @ctoadvisor on whether enterprises have been able to:

* Retain the right people

* Build skills and knowledge

* Have enough staff

* Have good leadership

Without these human resources, an enterprise might outsource to a vendor or a reseller to get the advice and support they need. Hear what our debaters have to say, and tell us what we got wrong (and right) in the comments section.

With IPv4 address space officially exhausted in ARIN’s region, we’ve moved into a market of IPv4 scarcity. If you want new publicly routable IPv4, you’ll have to get it from your ISP (what normally happens when you order a circuit), or from some other party willing to sell their address space to you.

To facilitate the transaction of IPv4 addresses between parties, many different IPv4 broker services have popped up. Is this a service your organization should take advantage of? Are there risks involved in IPv4 transactions like this?

John Curran, President and CEO of ARIN, joins us to help us understand the issues surrounding IPv4 broker services.

Show Notes:

– Level setting. What does it really means that ARIN is out of IPv4 address space to allocate?

* ARIN did not reserve any blocks, like some RIRs did.

* ARIN allocated the last of the IPv4 space for its region.

* This does not mean that service providers are out. In fact, this is where most end users are going to get IPv4 address space from.

– IPv6 is the future, but adoption remains slow in the United States. From ARIN’s point of view, what major obstacles remain in the way of full IPv6 adoption?

– A sort of gray market for IPv4 addresses has emerged now that all allocations are gone. In general, what is ARIN’s view of this market?

– Getting IPv4 address space from someone ARIN has allocated to isn’t as simple as buying the address block from them. ARIN is still involved. Please describe that involvement.

– Many different IPv4 brokers have sprung up to facilitate IPv4 transactions between buyers and sellers. Does ARIN govern this market or license brokers in any official capacity?

– What is ARIN’s advice to companies that are considering an IPv4 broker service?

* Things to look for in a broker

* Red flags