The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

128 Technology takes an interesting approach to WAN routing. In this Brief Briefing Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray skim the surface of 128 Technology's approach, which includes stateful sessions, NAT, and encryption--but no tunneling. We also touch on use cases including SD-WAN and security. We also provide links to Networking Field Day videos that have much more detail.

There’s a flurry of activity around network automation, lots of discussion about its impacts, and a host of open-source and commercial tools available.

But actual adoption? Not so much.

Today’s Datanauts podcast explores NRE Labs, a free site to train network engineers in basic automation concepts and tools. NRE stands for “Network Reliability Engineering”.

As guest Matt Oswalt describes it, the goal of NRE Labs is to help network engineers take that first automation step, get unstuck, and get started. Matt is an “engineer in marketing clothing” at Juniper Networks.

While NRE Labs is a Juniper-sponsored project, you don’t have to be a Juniper customer. You don’t even have to sign up and hand over any information to use it. The site is entirely free.

You just go to the homepage, find a lesson or topic that looks interesting, and get started. The site is designed to work within a browser so there’s no software to download and no complicated virtual environment to configure.

The code that powers NRE Labs is open-source so you can grab it for yourself. The project also welcomes contributions and lessons from the community.

In today’s podcast, Matt walks Chris Wahl through NRE Labs, describes how it works, explains a couple of lessons, and shares how the community can get involved.

Sponsor: Quest Software

Quest Software is your go-to for everything Microsoft. Migrate to a new SharePoint or Office 365 environment, move to OneDrive for Business, consolidate Active Directory and Exchange, secure your AD from insider threats, and much more! Learn more at Quest.com/DatanautsPod, and join Quest at The Experts Conference this August for Active Directory and Office 365 training and earn up to 7 CPEs. Get details here.

Show Links:

NRE Labs

NRE Labs on GitHub

Introduction To Antidote

Antidote Platform Architecture

Network Reliability Engineering Community

Network Reliability Engineering Meetup UK – MeetUp.org

NRE Labs Curriculum – GitHub

Working with Network APIs – GitHub

PQ 158: Introducing NRE Labs For Network Automation Training – Packet Pushers

Matt Oswalt on Twitte...

There’s a flurry of activity around network automation, lots of discussion about its impacts, and a host of open-source and commercial tools available.

But actual adoption? Not so much.

Today’s Datanauts podcast explores NRE Labs, a free site to train network engineers in basic automation concepts and tools. NRE stands for “Network Reliability Engineering”.

As guest Matt Oswalt describes it, the goal of NRE Labs is to help network engineers take that first automation step, get unstuck, and get started. Matt is an “engineer in marketing clothing” at Juniper Networks.

While NRE Labs is a Juniper-sponsored project, you don’t have to be a Juniper customer. You don’t even have to sign up and hand over any information to use it. The site is entirely free.

You just go to the homepage, find a lesson or topic that looks interesting, and get started. The site is designed to work within a browser so there’s no software to download and no complicated virtual environment to configure.

The code that powers NRE Labs is open-source so you can grab it for yourself. The project also welcomes contributions and lessons from the community.

In today’s podcast, Matt walks Chris Wahl through NRE Labs, describes how it works, explains a couple of lessons, and shares how the community can get involved.

Sponsor: Quest Software

Quest Software is your go-to for everything Microsoft. Migrate to a new SharePoint or Office 365 environment, move to OneDrive for Business, consolidate Active Directory and Exchange, secure your AD from insider threats, and much more! Learn more at Quest.com/DatanautsPod, and join Quest at The Experts Conference this August for Active Directory and Office 365 training and earn up to 7 CPEs. Get details here.

Show Links:

NRE Labs

NRE Labs on GitHub

Introduction To Antidote

Antidote Platform Architecture

Network Reliability Engineering Community

Network Reliability Engineering Meetup UK – MeetUp.org

NRE Labs Curriculum – GitHub

Working with Network APIs – GitHub

PQ 158: Introducing NRE Labs For Network Automation Training – Packet Pushers

Matt Oswalt on Twitte...

Tennessee Oncology, a partner of OneOncology, is a healthcare provider that offers cancer care at more than 30 locations in Tennessee.

With multiple sites and critical business apps that include electronic medical records (EMRs) and drug and lab systems, the network is a critical component of the provider’s clinical care.

On today’s Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Silver Peak, we talk with Robert Holloway, Infrastructure Manager at Tennessee Oncology, about how the organization uses Silver Peak’s Unity Edge Connect to securely segment and prioritize EMR traffic and enforce QoS on other essential applications.

We also discuss the organization’s ongoing rollout of SD-WAN, its ability to consolidate firewall and routing functions in most branches into Unity Edge Connect, and how Silver Peak enables the organization to maximize the use of all available bandwidth.

Show Links:

Silver Peak

Silver Peak SD-WAN Edge Overview

On today's Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Silver Peak, we talk with a healthcare provider about how the organization uses Silver Peak's Unity Edge Connect SD-WAN to securely segment and prioritize electronic medical records traffic and enforce QoS on other essential applications.

Take a Network Break! VMware buys Bitfusion for GPU virtualization, Arrcus takes in a $30 million Series B round to grow its network OS business, Kentik announces AIOps to provide more insight for IT operations, the SD-WAN market races toward $5 billion by 2023, and more tech news. Guests Ethan Banks and Phil Gervasi stop by for virtual muffins and commentary.

Take a Network Break! Greg Ferro is on vacation, so Ethan Banks and Phil Gervasi provide guest commentary and analysis.

VMware acquires Bitfusion, a startup that virtualizes GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs; network OS startup Arrcus rakes in $3o million in a Series B and announces support for Jericho2 ASICs; and Kentik announces AIOps.

An IDC report predicts the SD-WAN market will hit $5.25 billion by 2023; Microsoft pours $1 billion into  OpenAI; the Federal Trade Commission levies a $5 billion fine against Facebook and ordered changes to the company’s privacy practices; and Juniper reports quarterly revenues of $1.1 billion.

Get links to all these stories below.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can migrate to the cloud, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

Tech Bytes: Silver Peak

Stay tuned after the news for a sponsored Tech Bytes conversation with Tennessee Oncology, a partner of OneOncology, a healthcare provider that’s using Silver Peak’s SD-WAN to boost performance and security of its WAN while segmenting critical application traffic such as electronic medical records and drug and lab systems.

Follow Up:

Follow Up On Network Break Here – Packet Pushers

7 Hardware & Firmware Hacks Highlighted at Black Hat 2017 – Dark Reading

Hacking iLO — take a moment to secure your servers – Avast Blog

iDRACula Vulnerability Impacts Millions of Legacy Dell EMC Servers – Serve The Home

The Missing Security Primer for Bare Metal Cloud Services – Eclypsium

Show Notes:

VMware acquires AI chip virtualization startup Bitfusion – Silicon Angle

VMware to Acquire Bitfusion – VMware vSphere Blog

Breaking: VMware Announces Intent to Acquire Bitfusion to Boost Support for Artificial Intelligence-based Applications – VMware

Arrcus Raises $30M Series B Funding Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners – Globe Newswire

Today's Heavy Networking looks at the pros and cons of having a dedicated developer on an infrastructure team to create and maintain automation tools. Our guests are Brian Gleason and Jeremy Schulman.

Today on Heavy Networking, we talk about what an ops team looks like when adopting automation.

Network automation seems to be driving many of you towards Python. You’re learning to code, or least trying to. If you could just get that tool written, it would help so much.

It’s hard though, what with projects going on, not enough people to do all the work, a huge network maintenance event on the horizon, and on and on.

And dare I say technical debt? You gotta maintain that tool if you ever get it written.

Maybe writing your own automation tools isn’t your job as a network engineer. Maybe you need someone to come alongside of you…like a software developer.

Our guests today are Brian Gleason and Jeremy Schulman. Brian has recently started a new job where network automation is really important and handled in a forward-thinking way.

Jeremy‘s been in the world of network automation for as long as we’ve been talking about it on Heavy Networking. He’s worked for vendors, his own startup, and now for Major League Baseball.

We discuss:

* Whether an Ops team needs a dedicated developer

* The different types of automation projects and their blast radii

* How to calculate ROI for having a developer dedicated to infrastructure tooling

* The differences between scripting and programming

* How much time you should dedicate to learning to develop, and where to start

* The pros and cons of buying vendor tools vs. building your own

Sponsor: ExtraHop

ExtraHop is the enterprise cyber analytics company delivering performance and security from the inside out. ExtraHop offers complete visibility with machine learning to help you make quick, confident decisions about your IT environment. Explore the ExtraHop Performance Platform at extrahop.com/packetpushers.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Get over 65 hours of free technical training from ITProTV. ITProTV offers online instruction in CompTIA, Cisco, VMWare, Microsoft and more. You can stream courses live and on demand on your favorite device. Sign up for a free membership at itpro.tv/packet-pushers and try it with no obligation.

Show Links:

Interactive Python

Jupyter Notebooks – Jupyter.org

Brian Gleason on Twitter

Bytes of Cloud – Brian’s blog

Jeremy Schulman on Twitter

Learn about how IPv6 works on host OSs on today's IPv6 Buzz podcast. Tom Coffeen and Scott Hogg talk with Ed Horley about the host OS course he's teaching. They discuss how to set up a lab, how v6 differs from v4 at the host level, key differences in support for DHCPv6, and more.