On an episode of the Briefings in Brief podcast, Ethan Banks discusses what he saw from Pluribus Networks at Networking Field Day last month. This includes not only their switching portfolio, but their Insight Analytics platform.
The Aruba 8400 Integrated Network Analytics & Automated Root Cause Analysis
Ethan Banks has a colorful way to describe the process of root cause analysis. “When goat sacrifices fail, deep human knowledge of a snowflake system’s specifics is required to sort through data, decide what is symptomatic as opposed to causal, and filter the information down to the root cause.” Luckily Aruba Networks’ 8400 chassis switch comes with a built in analytics engine as part of their base license. Ethan takes a look at how this specifically works on the switch and how it can be used to automate remediation as well.
The Aruba 8400 ArubaOS-CX Network Operating System
In this next installment looking at the Aruba Networks 8400 chassis switch, Ethan Banks looks how the switch interacts with ArubaOS-CX. The OS is highly programmable, supporting a well documented API in addition to a modular web GUI. Ethan takes a look at the extensibility offered by the system, the importance of the Linux kernal to the OS, and its design for resiliency.
The Aruba 8400 Hardware Highlights
In part two of his look at the Aruba 8400 chassis switch, Ethan Banks digs into the hardware of the device. The 8400 is built with redundancy in mind, which fits in with its campus core market. Aruba has designed it to offer a vaunted “carrier class” availability, with a service life to match. Ethan breaks down the unique ASIC used in the switch and digs into some speeds and feeds.
The Aruba 8400 Chassis Switch. Yes, But Why?
For those that have been around networking for more than a little bit, switches are often hard to get excited about. When Ethan Banks found out that Aruba Networks would be announcing a new chassis switch, he was initially demurred by the seemingly innocuous product . But after attending their announcement, his mind was racing with the possibilities for this new piece of hardware. So much so that this is part one in an article series going into a deep dive of all its capabilities.
Startup Veriflow Adds New Intent-Based Capabilities To Its Network Verification Software
At Networking Field Day, Veriflow demonstrated bringing intent-based network verification to the enterprise. Drew Conry-Murray looks at these features, which include using formal verification to build software models to see if your on-site and cloud networks are performing as you intended. Drew likes the fact that its designed for networks as they exist, not positing hypothetical networks an engineer has no way of building within an organization. Ultimately, using these software models puts the onus on organizations to use them effectively for managing networks.
Network Break 148: HPE, Big Switch Partner; Brocade Spins Out SDN Startup
In this episode of the Network Break podcast, the Packet Pushers talk about much of this week’s IT news including HPE and Big Switch teaming up in the data center, Google’s routing initiative Espresso, Brocade spining out its OpenDaylight SDN controller to a startup, Aruba revealing more details of its brand new core switch, and more. Ethan Banks expands specifically on Aruba, as he just saw them present at a Networking Field Day Extra event.
Accelerite’s Rovius Readies Your Hybrid Cloud
Writing about Accelerite’s Cloud Field Day presentation on their product, Rovius, Ethan Banks has very mixed feelings. He is a huge fan of how easy to use Rovius is and how easy Rovius makes it to consume a variety of clouds, but he is worried how it will function in complex failure scenarios. Ethan knows these issues are on Accelerite’s minds and hopes that they will prove themselves in the near future.
Nirmata’s Cloudy Control-Plane Is The Catalyst For Container Calm
Ethan Banks saw a presentation from Nirmata recently at Cloud Field Day. Here, he recaps Nirmata’s product, customer base, and everything else you would like to know about the company. Ethan also says that Nirmata “is in the right place at the right time” with their orchestrator of orchestrator product, especially as ease of use and speed of application deployment become critical to businesses.
Personal Transformation
Inspired by his time at Cloud Field Day, Ethan Banks compares the journey of companies like Gigamon re-tooling themselves and their products for the cloud to the transition that individuals will have to make as well as cloud becomes more pervasive. He says that people need to learn the public cloud environment and start to swap out their hardware revenue for revenue made with the cloud instead.
Understanding HPE Nimble Storage’s Cloud Volumes
Ethan Banks writes about HPE Nimble Storage’s Cloud Volumes, which they presented about at Cloud Field Day. Cloud Volumes are a cloud storage product focused on helping enterprises move their business applications to the cloud. Ethan sees the idea behind Cloud Volumes, but worries that it is a short-term product filling a gap that enterprises will eventually be able to bridge themselves, and therefore will not be particularly profitable for HPE.
Cisco’s SD-Access: All The Pieces
Drew Conry-Murray gives his thoughts on Cisco’s SD-Access. SD-Access is designed to automate common networking tasks in a campus network and is an ambitious project, but Drew is optimistic. Here, he discusses the supported hardware, the new dashboard DNA Center, as well as three additional pieces: APIC-EM, the Identity Services Engine (ISE), and the Network Data Platform.
Anuta NCX: An Orchestration Platform For Networks
Drew Conry-Murray shares his thoughts on Anuta’s NCX solution, which he saw first hand at Networking Field Day in January. NCX is an orchestration platform designed to simplify a lot of networking drudgery. To do this, high-level models are constructed with Yang, which are then translated into specific device instructions when called upon. It even does device discovery to automatically understand which versioning and configuration on network devices. Key to this, Anuta has a wide list of hardware and software partners NCX supports.
DPDK Project Moves To The Linux Foundation
Drew Conry-Murray the Data Plane Development Kit being brought into the Linux Foundation as an official project. DPDK was originally developed by Intel before being open sourced as a way to accelerate packet processing in CPUs. Drew highlights that DPDK supports not just x86, but a variety of CPU architectures, as well as being able to run on NICs from Broadcom, Cisco, and Mellanox.
Datanauts 077: Transitioning To A Less Technical Role
On the latest episode of Datanauts, Tom Hollingsworth joins hosts Drew Conry-Murray and Ethan Banks to discuss the topic of transitioning to less technical roles as you advance in your IT career.
Nyansa Measures Network Performance Using Mobile Devices As Sensors
Drew Conry-Murray shares his thoughts on Nyansa, who presented at Networking Field Day last month. The company has an interesting approach to analytics, they use measure user experience by using mobile device endpoints as sensors, effectively turning any phone, laptop or tablet into a sensor. These on-prem metrics are then sent to Nyansa’s cloud for further analytics and to establish baseline network performance. This can be used to easily assess problems when they deviate from these baselines, and also let you see how performance of your network stacks up to others in your vertical.
Cisco’s Wireless Partnership With Apple
Ethan Banks got an update from Cisco on their partnership with Apple, previously announced at Cisco Live US 2016. Cisco went into detail about their framework to allow for application prioritization from Apple devices across the network. This is done by a white list, and developers providing QoS marks on specific packets. They also revealed improved roaming support between access points, reducing the time of switching between to from 0.5-0.7 seconds to sub-50ms. Overall, Ethan found these both to be laudable efforts from Cisco.
ZeroStack Adds Learning To Their Automated Infrastructure
ZeroStack demoed their “self-driving” cloud at Tech Field Day last week. Ethan Banks gave it a look and came away impressed. He doesn’t see this as a VMware replacement right now, but the current tools and roadmap the company outlined certainly could make it tempting in a refresh cycle or two. Despite using the buzzwords of “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence” to describe their automation, Ethan saw it as a good way to automate a lot of the typical production tedium.
Riverbed SD-WAN – The Simplicity of Automation in SDN
Do network engineers need to be programmers too? Greg Ferro thinks this doesn’t always need to be the case, especially with SD-WAN solutions like he saw from Riverbed at Networking Field Day. They demoed the ability to push security rule across the entire WAN with a few simple steps, making it far easier for engineers to actually manage their networks. It’s a really great insight into the exciting implications SD-WAN and Riverbed can have on the entire IT networking space.
