It was great to have Ixia return to Networking Field Day at our most recent event. In this post, Amy Arnold, one of the delegates at the event, digs into their newly announced IxProbe. This provides traffic stats, link status, and when used in conjunction with Ixia’s Hawkeye, a battery of QoS and link quality tests, going a long way to solving the last mile visibility gap.
One API to Rule Them All, and in the Ether(net) Bind Them
Amy Arnold heard from Itential at Networking Field Day, where they showed off an interesting solution. They created an API accessible platform that takes modern API and abstraction focused principles, and leverages them toward solving this problem of API overload. Can an orchestrator of orchestrators, or an API for APIs, help solve the problem? Amy digs into the details in this post.
Network Change Validation Meets Supersized Network Emulation
In this piece, Amy Arnold considers the classic problem of having to roll out large scale network changes when many engineers lack a full-scale lab to do comprehensive testing. This impacts organizations of all sizes, and can cause no end of headaches. At Networking Field Day, Tesuto made their debut presentation, showing how they leverage the cloud to perform large scale emulation of networks, while allowing engineers to leverage modern automation tools and testing.
Arrcus: An Application of Modern OEM Principles for Whitebox Switches
Arrcus definitely made an impression on Amy Arnold after Networking Field Day. If nothing else, it spurred some pirate puns. But perhaps more importantly, she was impressed by their approach to whitebox switching. They showed off the latest with ArcOS, which now leverages advanced capabilities of the Jericho-2 chipset. Be sure to check out the rest of the post for all the details.
Cisco Live 2019 – a Whirlwind of Networking Goodness
It was great to have Amy Arnold as a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US 2019. At the event, NetBeez’s presentation really stood out to her. She’s long been impressed by the monitoring company, and with their recently announced integration with Cat9K switches, there’s even more utility in their solution. Overall it was a busy event for her, but one with a lot of networking goodness.
“Thirteen hundred APs, no open support tickets” – achieving quality in wireless networks
Amy Arnold takes a look at what Mist Systems presented at Mobility Field Day last month. Utilizing a cloud-based micro-services architecture along with a smattering of AI, Amy looks at how Mist can provide customer focused reliability, visibility, and proactive troubleshooting for wireless networks.
Intro into Fortinet WLAN configuration
After seeing Fortinet present at Mobility Field Day, Amy Arnold found herself impressed by how in a few simple steps, the company could provide setup for WLAN SSID, applying security policies, and even automation for quarantining an infected machine. In this post, she reviews how to use their GUI to achieve all of these tasks, and what she learned along the way.
Solving 802.11ad challenges
In this post, Amy Arnold look at how the Aruba AP-387 point to point unit overcomes some of the challenges traditionally associated with 802.11ad. At Mobility Field Day earlier this month, Aruba showed how the AP uses both 60Hz and 5GHz radios, and aggregates the throughput in the AP. This combined with self aligning properties on the 60Hz radio combines to bring vastly improved consistency.
Seeing Tetration in action – NFD16
At Networking Field Day last month, Amy Arnold saw a presentation on Cisco’s Tetration. The platform uses machine learning to proactively create security policies based on current flow information. Amy was impressed to see that this not only has the ability to predict security policies based on current flows, but that the system can integration with services like Splunk or Phantom to communicate with devices to isolate traffic.
Preserving and managing intent using Apstra AOS
Apstra’s AOS is a platform to allow network engineers to design a network based around an intended purpose or function, rather than muddling with an existing architecture who’s original intent can only be guessed. Amy Arnold points out that AOS simply isn’t a tool for building an initial configuration, but also a way for making revisions in a controlled manner, while documenting intent. This takes intent out of the realm of a network engineers thoughts, and forces it to be explicitly stated in a single source of truth.
Cisco Live 2017, engineering awesomeness
Amy Arnold reflects on her experience at Tech Field Day and Cisco Live US, reviewing OpenGear’s new API, Paessler’s new monitoring solution, and NetApp’s FlexPod SF.
Forward Networks – go ahead, break it
Amy Arnold laments the plight of the network engineer. The agonize over network design, try to come up with every conceivable failover scenario, and then deal with the consequences. Some have the aid of a lab to help test their configuration, most don’t. That’s why what Forward Networks presented at Networking Field Day was so interesting. It allows for you to model over your network in software, and then break it in every conceivable way. Forward’s model shows every a packet can possibly go, allowing the engineer to see exactly how a scenario will play out. She was justifiably concerned about how their product will be priced going forward, but otherwise it seems like a valuable tool in the engineer’s arsenal.
Shiny new NetPath Services
SolarWinds showed off their latest with NetPath at Networking Field Day. Amy Arnold seemed impressed by their solution. NetPath isn’t just a traceroute visualization tool, it uses “real” network traffic from Windows-based pollers on the network. This allows an engineer to get a better sense of how traffic flows, without worrying about packets being dropped (as much) by devices on the network. Amy says it best, “any tool that expands insight into what packets are doing is a beautiful thing.”
Server, meet switch: a brief introduction to Pluribus Networks
Server, meet switch: a brief introduction to Pluribus Networks
Runt Post: Big Tap Monitoring and its Wireshark goodness
Runt Post: Big Tap Monitoring and its Wireshark goodness
Runt Post: Quality troubleshooting, what it looks like
Runt Post: Quality troubleshooting, what it looks like
