The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

The Packet Pushers’ Priority Queue series from IETF 99 continues with a conversation about whitebox switching at LinkedIn.

Shawn Zandi, principal infrastructure architect at LinkedIn; and Russ White, network architect at LinkedIn.

Greg Ferro and his guests discuss the architectural changes going on at LinkedIn, including a move to adopt whitebox switches.

They look at the drivers for whitebox adoption, including wanting to have more control over their infrastructure, the ability to rethink network design, the opportunity to get features they want (and remove ones they don’t), and potential cost savings.

They also explore the challenges that come with whitebox deployment and operations, and talk about the pros and cons of various network designs.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

Today on the Datanauts, our infrastructure rocket navigates the rapidly expanding universe of cryptocurrencies–specifically Bitcoin and Ethereum–and the Blockchain distributed database. We also touch on the Grid+ project.

All of these topics could get their own episode (or more) so this is more of an introductory show than a deep dive.

But we’ve got three smart guests to help us make sense of it all: Mark D’Agostino, Managing Partner at ConsenSys Enterprise and Strategy Lead at Grid+; Karl Kreder, Director of Energy at ConsenSys; and Alex Miller, Software Engineer at ConsenSys and Software Lead at Grid+.

Sponsor: Datadog

This week’s show is sponsored by Datadog. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Sign up for a free trial and get a free T-shirt at datadog.com/datanauts.

Show Links:

ConsenSys

What is Blockchain Technology? A Step-by-Step Guide For Beginners – BlockGeeks

What is Cryptocurrency: Everything You Need To Know – BlockGeeks

SXSW Preview: What’s the Next Generation Internet? Surprise: It’s all about the Blockchain! – Don Tapscott via LinkedIn

Grid+ FAQ – Grid+

Grid+ Blog – Grid+

The Priority Queue returns to the IETF 99 conference to explore projects and standards being worked on within the IETF.

How do you get devices such as light bulbs and sensors join a network securely, make sure they’ve joined the right network, and that the network can be sure the device is what it claims?

That’s the general thrust of today’s episode, which looks at the ANIMA (Autonomic Networking Integrated Model and Approach) Working Group.

This working group aims to “…develop a system of autonomic functions that carry out the intentions of the network operator without the need for detailed low-level management of individual devices.”

Greg’s guest is Michael Richardson, an IETF member and Managing Editor at the Centre for Research and Experimental Development in Informatics Libre (CREDIL) in Canada.

In addition to ANIMA, Greg and Michael also discuss 6tisch and NETCONF.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

Are you still hosting your own e-mail? Is it on Microsoft Exchange? Are you maybe a little sick of that?

What if you could outsource some of those pesky infrastructure problems to the cloud?

Well, of course, you can. Microsoft Office 365 would love to help you with that. Catch a ride on board the mail migration rocket on this episode of the Datanauts podcast.

Our guest is Theresa Miller. She’s founder of 24×7 IT Connection. She’s a consultant and analyst, and she also blogs and hosts the Current Status podcast.

Theresa and the Datanauts examine the business case for, and technology implications of, migrating from on-premises email to a cloud service.

They also look at the migration process and its impact on users, and discuss the operational challenges of co-existence when IT is managing both the premises system and the cloud service.

Sponsor: LiveAction

Join LiveAction and Ethan Banks for a live Webinar on Thursday, October 26th to learn how to reduce the complexity of SD-WAN technology adoption, provide service assurance governance with proactive insights, and deliver the promised performance enhancement for a better application experience.

Register here today and mark your calendar to join us on October 26th at 2:00 pm Eastern.

Can we accelerate the pace of change in enterprise IT?

That’s the topic for today’s Priority Queue. This episode, sponsored by VMware, was recorded live at VMware’s Future:Net conference on August 31, 2017.

Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks assemble a panel of networking experts and practitioners to discuss why technology change can be so difficult in the enterprise (product complexity, long buying cycles, process paralysis, and so on), and how organizations can spur change and innovation in their own environments.

Our guests are:

* Pere Monclus, CTO, VMware

* Jeremy Filliben – Principal Network Architect, Genworth Financial

* Tommy McNicholas – Solutions Architect at Technologent

* Truman Boyes – CTO Office, Head of Networks at Bloomberg

Today on the Datanauts, Chris Wahl undertakes an away mission to the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, FL. (Don’t worry, he’s not wearing a red shirt.)

He’s beamed into Microsoft’s Podcast Center to record a live episode with Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow at Microsoft and Chief Architect for Azure Infrastructure and the creator of Powershell.

Chris and Jeffrey delve into the latest developments in PowerShell and PowerShell Core, explore features and use cases for Azure Stack (which was just released to general availability), and review key announcements from Ignite for Azure, SQL Server 2017, and more. Ethan Banks pipes in remotely to offer his takeaways.

Show Links:

Monad Manifesto – Jeffrey Snover

Datacenter transformation – a roadmap for platforms, processes, and people – Jeffrey Snover (Microsoft Ignite presentation)

Azure Stack – Microsoft

Configuring and Operating Microsoft Azure Stack – Microsoft Course

Packet capture and analysis tools are powerful things. Capturing real data lets you peer into the soul of your network.

That power can be enhanced with machine learning. It’s everywhere these days, but if there’s one area where machine learning can be very useful, surely it’s packet analysis.

That brings us to ExtraHop, the subject of today’s sponsored show. ExtraHop is a protocol decoder, packet analysis engine, threshold management system, alerting tool, flow record collector, and application health dashboard all in one.

We’ve spoken with ExtraHop before, and today we’re returning with news of product updates and ExtraHop’s “Addy” machine learning.

Our guests from ExtraHop are Isaac Roybal, Director of Product Marketing; and Matt Cauthorn, VP of Security.

We discuss the release of ExtraHop 7.0 to understand what’s in the newest version (including Live Activity Maps and SSL/TLS decryption), and then drill into its Addy machine learning technology to see how it can be used to analyze reams of data to produce actionable insights.

 

Show Links:

ExtraHop

ExtraHop on Twitter

ExtraHop Blog

 

In distributed storage systems and hyperconverged environments, storage is scattered across a bunch of hosts all over the network. So does performance suffer if a workload’s data is across the network somewhere?

Should workloads have local data to perform as well as they ought? In other words, does data locality matter?

The Datanauts beam aboard storage expert Howard Marks to dive into the issue of data locality. Howard is a well known writer, speaker, consultant and Chief Scientist at DeepStorage. He’s also co-host of the Greybeards on Storage podcast.

Howard and the Datanauts discuss the basics of data locality and storage networking; explore the myriad bottlenecks and latency sources that can affect an application’s interaction with a storage system; and delve into the issues around hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), data locality, and replication and resiliency.

Sponsor: Datadog

This week’s show is sponsored by Datadog. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Sign up for a free trial and get a free T-shirt at datadog.com/datanauts.

Show Links:

DeepStorage

HCI And Data Locality – DeepStorage

Evaluating Nutanix’ original & unique implementation of Data Locality – Josh Odgers

Looking for the silver bullet that’s not there? My (and Datrium) response to the Data Locality debacle – Andre Leibovici

Today’s Priority Queue returns to the IETF to explore the concept of path-aware networking. Currently, end points on a network have little control over or information about the path over which their traffic is carried.

Efforts are under way, both by vendors and within standards bodies, to develop technologies and protocols to both provide more information about links (i.e. performance, trust, cost, and so on) and enable end points to select the most appropriate path to meet certain criteria.

For example, SD-WAN gateways can connect to multiple links and then direct traffic across one or more of those links based on customer-defined policies.

Greg Ferro and guests from the IETF’s Path Aware Networking Research Group discuss the concepts of path aware networking and examine the work being done by the group.

Our guests are Brian Trammell, co-chair of the Path Aware Networking Research Group and a researcher at ETH Zurich; and Jen Linkova, also a co-chair of the research group and a network engineer at Google.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

Show Links:

Path Aware Networking Research Group – IETF

Standards – XKCD

In this episode the Datanauts bust the ultimate silo: the executive suite.

We delve into the role of the CIO to understand the priorities and job functions of this position. We also want to learn how engineers, operators, and technologists can work with these and other executives to meet goals and align with business needs.

Our guide into the mind of the CIO is Tim Crawford, a principal at strategic consulting firm AVOA. Tim is a former CIO, and he now advises CIOs and other executives on transforming their IT organizations.

We talk with Tim about the role of the CIO and that person’s job function within an organization, and examine the differences between traditional and transformational CIOs. In essence, a CIO’s role, while focused on the business, is to understand how to take advantage of technology to drive the organization.

Tim also shares his insights into what keeps CIOs up at night, and the appeal of the cloud for executives. And for those with an eye for the executive suite, he offers advice on the skillsets and knowledge required to move up the ladder.

Show Links:

The difference between the Traditional CIO and the Transformational CIO – Tim Crawford (AVOA)

On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft – Bits or pieces?