Tim Miller wrote up his thoughts on what he saw from Forward Networks at Networking Field Day last year. Their solution is billed for providing network assurance, which they break down into correctness and performance. Their presentation focused on correctness, which they use sophisticated modeling to formally verify. Tim reviews the implications of their Forward Platform in terms of business intent, highlights their strong search functionality, and predication engine.
Generating Maps of Your Traffic
For a network engineer, it sometimes feels impossible to avoid traceroute. Tim Miller thinks it can be a valuable tool to see where traffic is getting dropped, but it’s not without its issues. He’s highlighted some other solutions in previous posts, but the one he’s looking at today is SolarWinds. Their NetPath tool has gone from a lab toy to an official feature of their Network Performance Monitor solution in a little under a year. Tim finds it a really impressive tool. Even though it requires Windows-based polling appliances in a network, a Linux guy like Tim can still be tempted. It gives historical information layer on top of what you would find with a traceroute, and adds multipathing. Overall, Tim sees this as a very practical tool to help disentangle issues in increasingly complex networks.
Efficient Resource Use Takes Interesting Turn at Scale
Tim Miller has some thoughts about DriveScale, which he saw at Tech Field Day last month. But to fully understand their solution, he delves back into a little bit of IT history. The brief but informative look back shows how IT has moved to the Big Data mindset of building clusters for each application. In the foreseeable future, we know that compute will surpass these Big Data setups, resulting in inefficiency. Tim thinks DriveScales disaggregated storage solution is setup for this reality. On a practical level, he really liked that DriveScale’s solution doesn’t insert themselves into your storage supply chain, relying instead on a simple rack adapter and software. Overall it gives a great perspective on where DriveScale is going in the future.
Container-based ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent…
Tim Miller tried out a Docker container install of a ThousandEyes image. While there were some issues with the actual Docker configuration, Tim was impressed with the service and support by Thousand Eyes, he had a customer service representative install Fedora over the phone just to try to replicate the issue. Tim got the ThousandEyes container up and running and is looking forward to trying it out in a longer trial.
