DNS is a crucial component in modern scale-out application architectures, so when Alex Vayl and Kris Beevers from NSONE contacted me just as I was starting to work on my Active-Active Data Centers presentation, I was more than interested to hear what their solution can do.

The result: Episode 29 of Software Gone Wild in which we discussed a number of topics including:

PF_RING is a great open-source project that enables extremely fast packet processing on x86 servers, so I was more than delighted when Paolo Lucente of the pmacct fame introduced me to Luca Deri, the author of PF_RING.

When we started chatting, we couldn’t resist mentioning ntopng, another open-source project Luca is working on.

VM NIC firewalls have been around for years (they’re also the reason I got my first invitation to the awesome Troopers conference), but it sounds so much better when you call them Microsegmentation (not the one I talked about @ Troopers this year).

Marketing gimmicks aside, VMware NSX includes an interesting in-kernel stateful firewall, and Brad Hedlund was kind enough to explain the intricacies of that feature in Episode 27 of Software Gone Wild

A few days after the Networking Field Day 9 event Nick Buraglio organized a virtual meetup with Brandon Carroll, Brandon Mangold, Bob McCouch and myself, and we discussed the presentations from NEC, Cumulus, Cisco and Brocade. Nick recorded the conversation and so Episode 26 of Software Gone Wild was born.

Achieving 40 Gbps of forwarding performance on an Intel server is no longer a big deal - Juniper got to 160 Gbps with finely tuned architecture - but can you do real-time optimization of a million concurrent TCP sessions on that same box at 20 Gbps?

Juho Snellman from Teclo Networks explained how they got there in Episode 25 of Software Gone Wild… and you’ll learn a ton of things about radio networks on the way.

Enjoy the show!

How many times have you received exact specifications of the traffic the e-commerce platform you have to deploy will generate? How do you buy a load balancer (application delivery controller in marketese) to support that (somewhat unknown) amount of traffic? In most cases, you buy a box that’s several times too big for the traffic the site is receiving most of the time, and still crashes under peak load.

Want to know even more about Tail-F NCS after listening to Episode 22 of Software Gone Wild? Boštjan Šuštar and Marko Tišler from NIL Data Communications continue their deep dive into the secrets of NCS in Software Gone Wild Episode 23.

Tail-F NCS implements one of the most realistic approaches to service abstraction (the cornerstone of SDN – at least in my humble opinion) – an orchestration system that automates service provisioning on existing infrastructure.

Is the product really as good as everyone claims? How hard is it to use? How steep is the learning curve? Boštjan Šuštar and Marko Tišler from NIL Data Communications have months of hands-on experience and were willing to share it in Episode 22 of Software Gone Wild.

When we started planning a VMware NSX-focused podcast episode with Dmitri Kalintsev, I asked my readers what topics they’d like to see covered. Two comments that we really liked were “how do I get started with VMware NSX?” and “how do I troubleshoot this stuff?”

Imagine you need a data center WAN edge router with multiple 10GE uplinks. You’d probably go for an ASR or a MX-series router, right? How about using a 2 Tbps ToR switch and an SDN solution to make it work with full Internet routing table?

If you happen to have iTunes on your computer, please spend 10 seconds rating the podcast before you start listening to it. Thank you!