Rich Stroffolino takes a look at IP Infusion. The company has been around since 1999, commercializing the founders’ previous work on GNU Zebra in the form of ZebOS. Rich reviews how the company has pivoted to now provide a network operating systems for white box vendors and virtualized environments.
Unmasking Bad Actors with Gigamon
After seeing their presentation from Networking Field Day earlier this year, Tom Hollingsworth reviews Gigamon’s solutions for giving visibility back to your network. They do this via SSL Decryption, which can detect anomalies from a variety of sources. Tom also addresses potential privacy concerns of this approach in the piece.
VMworld 2017 preview: Current state of VMware
In this VMworld US preview, Keith Townsend reviews the current state of VMware. This includes a look at where the company has stumbled or needs keep on eye on, like Cloud and containers, and areas where they are prominent or leading the category, like networking and security. It’s a thorough rundown to set the stage for the major announcements at VMworld.
IP Infusion powering the world from behind the scenes
After Networking Field Day, Tony Mattke says that IP Infusion powers the world from behind the scenes. Their ZebOS powers everything from F5 LTM’s and Citrix Netscaler’s to Plexxi, SK Telecom, and Huawei networking products. Today IP Infusion is selling two variants of ZebOS to OEMs, OcNOS and VirNOS, both for unique purposes. Tony was interested to learn more about IP Infusion and what they have been doing behind the scenes.
Step by Step – VMware Virtual Network Assessment NSX Free
Writing in Czech, Karel Novak gives a step by step guide to using NSX Assessment to audit virtual network environments. This was prompted by VMware NSX’s presentation at Networking Field Day. Karel very clearly explains the process of setting up and using NSX with accompanying images for each step.
VMware NSX is something something awesome
Returning from Networking Field Day, Tony Mattke talks VMware NSX, focusing on the very interesting concept of Micro-Segmentation that NSX enables. He also highlights NSX’s ability to fully virtualize the network inside of VMware’s virtual compute infrastructure. Tony is very excited about the NSX, but he has his concerns and concludes by asking for a deeper dive into what happens when the firewall is flooded with traffic.
Is it time for virtual switch abstraction to fade?
From VMware’s presentation on NSX at Networking Field Day, Keith Townsend started looking seriously at the concept of a virtual switch. After working with designing cloud-based infrastructure projects, where the concept doesn’t exist, Keith was seeing the idea as outmoded in a modern data center. This caused a fascinating discussion in the VMware presentation. Keith links to it, and it definitely gets you thinking.
NSX – The Network Redefined
Justin Cohen takes a look at VMware NSX, which he saw a lot of at Networking Field Day in April. This is a comprehensive review of the network virtualization solution, best summed up by Justin: VMWare does for the network what it did for servers. It’s not quite as simple as that, and Justin does a good job of showing what VMware is doing different to account for the realities of networking. It’s a good read, and gives a thorough overview of the solution.
My Experience at InteropITX 2017 / Where was the Wi-Fi?
Drew Lentz went to Interop ITX earlier this month. He found out two things. One: the ITX stands for ” the X factor – what’s needed to thrive in this rapidly changing environment.” Two: The wireless industry didn’t show up! Drew still had a good time at the show, and thought the show’s change in venue and focus was nicely done. But in this piece, he gets into who wasn’t there and, more importantly, why it’s vital for the wireless industry to have a presence at these kind of events.
VMware NSX: Going Big with Micro-Segmentation
At Networking Field Day in April, VMware gave a four hour presentation, going into a deep dive on NSX. In this piece, Rich Stroffolino focuses specifically on how the platform can be used for network security applications, and increase overall visibility.
Why the Heck Would You Use NSX?
John Welsh got to drink from the firehose of a four hour VMware NSX presentation at Networking Field Day in April. He thinks the value the platform gives is in its ability to provide additional security layers through micro-segmentation. This isn’t meant to replace a hardware perimeter firewall, but can provide additional firewalls down to vNIC level. Effectively setting a stateful firewall policy per VM.
Network as a Service provider TeloIP
TELoIP presented at Networking Field Day last month. Keith Townsend heard a lot to think about during the presentation. Although they position themselves as offering a SD-WAN offering, Keith sees them as a Network as a Service, targeted at MSPs, allowing them to drop a high-speed circuit at the last mile. While this wasn’t targeted at Keith’s enterprise focus, he nevertheless found them to be “an intriguing 13-year old company”.
SD-WAN as a Service: Just Give Me an Ethernet Handoff
Phil Gervasi looks at what he saw from TELoIP at Networking Field Day. The company is offering SD-WAN as a service (SDWaaS?). Phil sees the core business benefit of this approach as ease of use and cost savings. The fundamental idea of a managed WAN isn’t all that new to Phil. He sees TELoIP potentially allowing organizations to cancel more expensive MPLS circuits, and instead utilize cheap broadband prices. Since TELoIP utilizes a variety of public internet providers for their service, they are able to achieve collective reliability, with a wrapped in SLA, for much cheaper price. Phil wants to look into some more of the details of transport before making any final judgement. The underlying idea might not be brand new, but TELoIP has an interesting technical approach to the solution.
TELoIP and the SD-WAN Cook-off
Rich Stroffolino wrote up his thoughts from TELoIP’s presentation at Networking Field Day earlier this month. You may not have heard of the company, but they’ve been around since 2002, and have a lot of interesting, and patented, technology. Rich focuses on the capabilities of their VINO SD-WAN solution, which aggregates all available links to offer the best high utilization, performance, and reliability.
VMWare NSX Distributed Firewall
At Networking Field Day earlier this month, Kevin Blackburn was introduced to the idea of a VMware distributed firewall. He thinks it’s a perfect example of how their NSX platform can bring additional value to your network by eliminating a lot of the need to physically segment it. Kevin sees NSX as making the network easier to manage, without ceding any control over its operation.
VMware NSX Unplugged: Networking Field Day
Networking Field Day compared to MTV’s “Unplugged” series? Hey, we’ll take it! Roger Fortier with VMware shared the videos from the event, and found the focused discussions and more relaxed atmosphere led to some truly unique moments. Make sure to check out all of VMware’s presentation, they were able to go really in-depth on their NSX Network Virtualization and Security platform.
SD-WAN: Redundancy and Optimization
Kevin Blackburn saw a presentation from TELoIP at Networking Field Day earlier this month, and used the presentation as a jumping off point for talking about SD-WAN. TELoIP presented their VINO SD-WAN and SD-Internet solutions during the event. In a lot of ways, the end result of a lot of SD-WAN solutions remains the same, but each company goes about doing it in substantively different ways, which may have different appeal among organizations. For TELoIP, they emphasized using all available internet circuits into a logical bundle of network connections.
Do We Really Need SSL Decryption?
Brandon Carroll doesn’t mince words. He thinks passing SSL traffic through the firewall without decrypting is akin to walking into “a war with a gun thats half loaded”. To that end, he was impressed with what he saw from Gigamon at Networking Field Day earlier this month. Their GigaSECURE Network Visibility Platform serves as a trusted man-in-the-middle to handle decryption, and to flag traffic that can’t be verified as secure.
PNDA provides scalable and reactive network analytics
Tony Mattke looks at what he saw from PNDA. This is a project from the Linux Foundation, recently open sourced by Cisco. It serves as a platform for network analytics across data centers. PNDA sees this as vital for organizations with large volume high velocity data, something they see as vital for areas like the Internet of Things. Tony was really impressed by PNDA’s data assurance as well, which allows you to make sure everything is received and processed on every step of the data’s path across the network. Overall, Tony found PNDA further evidence that open source networking is alive and well!
