The rise of SASE has eclipsed SD-WAN as organizations develop strategies and analyze products for secure access. But SD-WAN is an essential component of SASE; in fact, sponsor Palo Alto Networks says SD-WAN is the most important component. On today’s Tech Bytes podcast we talk with Palo Alto Networks about why SD-WAN underpins a SASE... Read more »

Greg Ferro bids farewell to Network Break, and Drew Conry-Murray and Johna Till Johnson bid farewell to Greg. Of course, the podcast must go on, so we also cover some tech news. First, Nokia acquires optics maker Infinera, Broadcom brings new features to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and campus switch sales drop. A Microsoft subsidiary... Read more »

Hey, everyone. Ethan here with a behind-the-scenes administrative request. Several thousand of you subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ Fat Pipe. In the Fat Pipe, we’ve been stuffing every single podcast we produce. The problem is that we produce way too many shows–one almost every weekday–for the average podcast client to absorb them all. We can... Read more »

When you think of IETF, you probably just think of defining protocols, but its new NMOP working group is all about helping network operators identify issues and deploy solutions, including those that pop up around automation. Mahesh Jethanandani is an Area Director (AD) for Management in IETF, which oversees the NMOP WG, and joins the... Read more »

Imagine a world with no broadcast storms, basically no DAD issues, not even ARP and reverse ARP. That is the world of IPv6 neighbor discovery. In today’s episode, we teach you the simplicity of IPv6 neighbor discovery: just native Layer 3 addresses, ICMPv6, and multicast. If you’ve ever been annoyed at a guy hopping on... Read more »

This is the final episode of a series of interviews with Scott Robohn (for now). We discuss AI in networking operations and how it’s still too early to tell exactly how much, if any, value will be created. We also dig into Scott’s Total Network Operations framework, what it consists of and how he wants... Read more »

If you care about nutrition, you check the ingredients of your food. If you care about your IT infrastructure, you check the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) of the tech. At least that’s the future that Thomas Pace hopes for. Right now, SBOMs aren’t super common and software transparency is very low. Thomas walks us... Read more »

Wastewater containers, conveyors, chemical reactors… Scott McNeil goes out where the carpet ends to do his wireless work. Today he joins the show to talk us through the basics of designing industrial wireless architecture. With advances in wireless technology, not only is wireless now reliable enough for production environments, but it’s also much cheaper than... Read more »

This is Greg’s last Heavy Strategy episode before he heads off to retirement. He gives us his final pieces of career and life advice, opinions on private equity, and a Cookie Monster quote. We also briefly introduce John Burke, the new Heavy Strategy co-host. Farewell, Greg. Thank you for all the great debates. Episode Transcript... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with a longish round of FUs, and then dive into news. HPE announces HPE Private Cloud, which includes software, switches, and GPUs from Nvidia for building out infrastructure to support AI workloads. HPE also announced KVM virtualization for HPE Private Cloud. We debate whether Britian’s anti-trust inquiry to the... Read more »