Tech Bytes

On today’s Tech Bytes, sponsored by Silver Peak, we talk with homeware retailer Dunelm about how they rearchitected their WAN to improve the in-store experience for customers, lower IT costs and boost the bottom line.

A quick look at Solo.io and their service mesh offering

Today we welcome sponsor SnapRoute for a Tech Bytes conversation. SnapRoute makes the CN-NOS, or the Cloud Native Network Operating System, a network OS that runs on whitebox hardware.

We get an introduction to its network OS, find out how SnapRoute differentiates itself from other network OSs, and learn about the operational capabilities it enables.

Our guests are Adam Casella, cofounder and CTO; and Glenn Sullivan, cofounder and Customer Success Officer.

We discuss:

* CN-NOS’s containerized design, which lets you update, test, and replace any component or application independently

* How CN-NOS combines a Linux kernel and Kubernetes to plug into automation pipelines

* The operational and business advantages of this approach

* Its protocol stack

* Hardware support

* Customer use cases

Links:

Networking Field Day: SnapRoute Company Overview with Glenn Sullivan – YouTube

Networking Field Day: SnapRoute CN-NOS Demonstration with Adam Casella – YouTube

The Cube: Dom Wilde CEO…Networking needs to step up its game – Silicon Angle

SnapRoute blog

SnapRoute on Twitter

SnapRoute on LinkedIn

SnapRoute on Facebook

SnapRoute email

Gluware Intent is a live event we’re holding in NYC on May 14, 2019. Come hang out with the Packet Pushers, the Gluware team, and customers to learn about practical network automation.

Register via https://packetpushers.net/gluware to reserve your seat, hear presentations, and see the Packet Pushers record a Heavy Networking episode live.

You’re listening to Briefings in Brief from the Packet Pushers, an audio digest of IT news and information, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Drew Conry-Murray, It’s April 30th 2019 and here’s what’s happening.

Earlier this month Versa Networks announced Versa Titan, an SD-WAN and security offering that can be consumed in two ways: as a service from MSPs, VARs, or system integrators; or as a product to be deployed and operated directly by customers.

Whichever approach customers take, Versa’s goal is to make deployment dead simple through pre-configured branch appliances, a cloud-based controller, and a mobile app for activating appliances and monitoring the system.

Versa operates the controller infrastructure, or a head-end in Versa’s parlance, in its own data centers on behalf of providers and do-it-yourself customers. Service providers can brand the customer interface if they so choose.

Cloud Services Gateway

As part of the solution, Versa is announcing the Cloud Services Gateway, a branded appliance for branch and remote offices or retail locations that runs Versa’s SD-WAN and security software, including a next-gen firewall and UTM.

The appliance, which supports PoE, can also provide Wi-Fi for branch locations. The appliance comes pre-configured with dynamic path selection policies already in place, but customers or providers can access a portal to change those policies as they like.

The SD-WAN component provides table-stakes functionality including support for broadband, MPLS, and LTE links; dynamic path selection based on applications and policies; traffic conditioning using techniques such as forward error correction and packet replication; and analytics.

Aiming To Stand Out

In case you hadn’t noticed, the SD-WAN market is now more crowded than a Florida beach during spring break, so SD-WAN vendors are putting significant effort into differentiating themselves.

By emphasizing ease of use and fast deployment, Versa aims to lure MSPs looking for quick wins, as well as customers who have connectivity needs but may not have a large IT staff to manage a stand-alone SD-WAN deployment.

On the security front, Versa isn’t the only vendor that touts integrated security functions. Cato Networks, for example, offers native security features such as a next-gen firewall as well as a private network backbone. Open Systems, which recently sponsored a Packet Pushers Heavy Networking episode, also offers a service-based SD-WAN solution with security baked in.

Meanwhile, Foritnet, which makes appliances, is essentially putting SD-WAN features into its firewall and UTM boxes. Other SD-WAN vendors will happily regale you with tales of partnerships, integrations, and home-grown security capabilities.

With all that said, if Versa Networks sounds like it’s worth further investigation or might earn a spot on your shortlist, you can go to versa-networks.com to get more details.

That was Briefings in Brief from the Packet Pushers. For more IT podcasts, blogs and news created for engineers, visit packetpushers.net where you can subscribe for free. And for even more great information, become a member at ignition.packetpushers.net.

NetQ Platform

* NetQ platform is the central platform that receives real-time telemetry data, providing visibility, network validation and trouble-shooting. The platform can run in a Virtual Machine or on the Cumulus NetQ hardware appliance.

* Intended for the data centre. Not an end to end automation solution (although possibly that is under development)

* NetQ 1 focussed on configuration and validation for such activities as BGP and EVPN configuration. And tracking IP addresses, VLANs and server status etc other general operational tasks.

* Cumulus claims that NetQ performs 3 primary functions:

* DATA COLLECTION – Real-time and historical telemetry and network state information

* DATA ANALYTICS – Deep processing of the data

* DATA VISUALIZATION – Rich Graphical User Interface (GUI) for actionable insight

* Agent driven – install agent onto Linux hosts including your Cumulus Linux devices.

* Integration with some third parties – Slack, syslog-ng, pagerduty. More to come I suspect

Larger Issues ?

* It’s pretty. Seriously, its visually nice.

* SDN is much more than deployment and configuration of network devices.

* In many ways, its more important to have analytics and monitoring tools to improve your knowledge about what is actually happening on the network and improving the mean time to innocence aka its not the network.

* Smaller companies can easily compete with bigger companies when making software. Mid-sized enterprises with modest networking requirements in the data centre, do not need the more complex products from Cisco which would require Cisco ACI with NAE, or Tetration to have an equivalent solution.

Today’s Tech Bytes episode explores the Link State Vector Routing (LSVR) protocol, an IETF draft standard that lets you use BGP to build a data center fabric.

Our sponsor is Arrcus, and we discuss how LSVR works, including how it reduces resource consumption in routers and speeds convergence, and how it can be used with BGP EVPN.

Our guests explain how LSVR ties to Arrcus’s ArcOS network operating system, what it can do for organizations building CLOS fabrics in their data centers, and common use cases.

Joining us from Arrcus are Keyur Patel, CTO and cofounder; and Murali Gandluru, VP of product management and marketing.

Show Links:

Link State Over Ethernet – IETF

Link State Vector Routing (lsvr) – IETF

Arrcus

Follow Arrcus on Twitter

Follow Arrcus on LinkedIn

PQ 160: Inside ArcOS®: The Internet-Scale, Carrier-Grade Network OS (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

The following is a transcript of the audio file you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s March 28, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Lightbits Labs earlier this month. Why? Because I believe NVMe over TCP is going to make major inroads into enterprise environments over the next months and years, and Lightbits Labs employs many of the folks who wrote the spec. These folks are at the heart of all that is NVMe over TCP, and I wanted to hear about their product and what they’ve been doing with customers, as that might be you in the near future.

Network As Directly Attached Storage

Lightbits Labs has announced a software defined storage with hardware acceleration product. In a nutshell, the product is a global flash translation layer that decouples SSDs and compute. Put your compute wherever, mount a box full of fast storage via Lightbits using the NVMe over TCP protocol, and get storage latency that performs like directly attached storage, but without the waste of space.

Lightbits is aiming this offering at folks who are looking for hardcore storage performance. These folks are operating private clouds and large enterprises. Usually, these companies have their own composable stack. What they want from Lightbits is an API and speed.

Lightbits Is Different

If you’re thinking that this is essentially distributed storage and nothing new, you’re sort of right. Abstracting disk from compute isn’t new. But Lightbits cites four differentiators that we’ll talk through.

First, Lightbits works with the server hardware you bring dedicated to storage, provided it’s x86 with standard NVMe SSDs…nothing fancy. You can load the server with 8, 16, or even 32 SSDs. The NIC can be a standard Ethernet NIC. TCP offload is not required. TCP windowing is optimized by the NVMe over TCP stack to get a consistent latency profile for the storage server traffic.

If you want your rev up your stock x86 hardware a little, Lightbits will sell you an optional acceleration card for SSD management and data services. The LightField Card is a PCIe add-in that offloads data reduction, data protection, NVMe/TCP, and the global flash translation layer functions.

Second, Lightbits claims that the global flash translation layer, something you typically find at the host level, is unique. As I dug around the Internet, I couldn’t find anything to dispute that claim. Lightbits calls their global FTL LightOS. LightOS is the operating system software layer that virtualizes pools of SSDs. Lightbits claims that LightOS can improve the endurance of SSDs up to 4x, especially with compression and thin provisioning. And if that’s true, there’s an ROI calculation you perform, because the physical flash disk is going to last longer with LightOS sitting on top of it. LightOS doesn’t offer de-duplication today, but it’s on the roadmap.

Third, NVMe over TCP is, as the name implies, TCP. You can run this over your existing IP network. You can run it multi-hop, not a given in storage protocols. You don’t have to build a special network to handle special storage protocol magic. NVMe over TCP works with what you’ve got. That said, I will point out that NVMe over TCP might ask a little bit of that network you’ve got, and you should do some homework. Dr. J Metz did a dense, detail-filled presentation on NVMe over fabrics for network engineers, and you can find that presentation on our Ignition.PacketPushers.net website for free. But the point stands that NVMe over TCP doesn’t need a special network, which probably means it’s coming to your network at some point.

Fourth, Lightbits points out that t…

The following is a transcript of the audio file you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s March 26, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with HammerSpace earlier this month. HammerSpace describes themselves as, “a storage and protocol agnostic cloud data control plane, abstracting data from the infrastructure for self-service hybrid cloud data management, driven by machine learning and metadata management to deliver Data-as-a-Service.”

That mouthful does a pretty good job at getting to the heart of HammerSpace, which is to layer policy on top of your existing storage, moving data around to wherever you need it to be automatically. And if that happens to include hybrid cloud, that’s just fine with HammerSpace.

Data-As-A-Microservice

In this briefing, HammerSpace announced the ability to provide a global namespace for persistent storage in Kubernetes environments. As containers were originally conceived to be stateless and ephemeral, that is you should be able to stand them up and tear them down at will with essentially zero application impact, the idea of persistent storage seemed a bit wrong. Why do we need persistent storage for stateless containers?

As container use cases have expanded, stateful containers have become normal, and the need for persistent storage has grown right along side. But presenting that storage to a container in an automated way hasn’t been all that easy.

HammerSpace has tackled this issue with what they are calling data-as-a-microservice. This is not a new type of K8s specific storage, which HammerSpace thinks is about the last thing the Kubernetes world needs. Therefore don’t think of this as being just about getting data to a container. More importantly, HammerSpace is trying to answer the question, “How do we get storage to evolving workloads?”

Data Is Declarative

The answer to this question is to make data declarative. That is, describe what is needed from storage, and it just happens. At least, from a devops perspective, it looks like “it just happens.” In other words, policy drives the automation without admins having to pay too much attention.

Once the policies are in place, snapshots are put where they are needed for access or resilience. You might be accessing storage that’s on prem. You might be accessing storage that was burst to public cloud if policy dictated. You can also turn off HammerSpace in the public cloud when you need to save some dollars in your cloud provider’s bill, although global de-dupe to reduce the amount of data transiting cloud is part of the package.

Of course, nothing here is actual magic. What’s really going on is that K8s is talking to HammerSpace DSX Data Services Nodes as well as the Container Storage Interface as presented by HammerSpace. Kubernetes workloads are getting local file type performance via NVMe-level IOPS even though they are talking to HammerSpace and not storage directly.

Use Cases

HammerSpace cited a couple of key use cases for this technology that will be familiar to folks who have run into stateful containers.

The first use case is databases. For example, noSQL, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Cassandra, mongoDB, and MS SQL Server. HammerSpace described this scenario as helpful to folks who need low latency access for their builds to go fast.

The second was for transparent dev/test to production. For example, you could take a snapshot of data living on your on-premises NetApp, present it into the cloud read-write, a benefit of a Kubernetes global namespace according to HammerSpace.

For More Information

This is a complex product and announcement, and lots more to the…

On today’s Tech Bytes episode we talk with sponsor Nubeva about getting packet visibility in public clouds. Nubeva’s Prisms agent is a cloud-based packet broker that can collect and distribute packets to processing tools in the cloud or on premises.

With Nubeva Prisms you can get packet-level visibility for analysis, performance monitoring, and security.

Our guests from Nubeva are Steve Perkins, CRO and Head of Product; and Erik Freeland, Director, Customer Success.

We talk about the latest capabilities in Prisms, including packet aggregation, filtering, slicing, and distribution/replication.

Nubeva is also integrating with open-source processing tools such as ntop, Moloch, and Zeek so that companies can deploy these tools in their cloud environments.

The company also talks about how it can work with native cloud-based taps such as Azure VTAPs.

Show Links:

Nubeva Blog

Nubeva on Twitter

Nubeva on LinkedIn

Tech Bytes: Packet Visibility In Public Clouds With Nubeva Prisms (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers