Every mid-sized company usually has legal counsel on staff (we have two lawyers for ~100 employees, but we might be a bit specific), that will escalate to an external law firm as necessary. Usually this would be when dealing with extraordinary events such as lawsuits or negotiation of a complex agreement.

Plexxi has an interesting problem. They have a shiny new solution that requires unorthodox approaches to network forwarding and allows them to implement potentially cool concepts like affinities (traffic engineering in disguise). They also need to sell these new concepts to the customers, and the first question I would ask after recovering from a hefty dose of cool-aid is "and how do I configure these affinities?"

I'll be talking about overlay virtual networks and clouds @ PLNOG 11 (September 30th - October 1st in Krakow) - if you're there and would like to chat with me, send me an email or a tweet.

Also, the organizers sent me this great promotional picture - I simply have to publish it ;)

The primary benefit of SDN (as claimed by its promoters) is a geek’s dream: the ability to program the network (or, more precisely, control network’s behavior through programmable tools).

Sounds great – we’ll finally be able to fix that pesky detail the vendor never wanted to implement (probably for a good reason). But should we REALLY do that?

Remember Tore Anderson’s IPv6-only data center design he described in last June’s webinar? Wondered how he got it done? The secret sauce he used is SIIT – the stateless IPv6-to-IPv4 translation technology. His trick: turning it around.

I was listening to the fantastic OTV Deep Dive PQ Packet Pushers podcast while biking around the wonderful Slovenian forests. They started the podcast by discussing OTV use cases, Ethan throwing in long-distance vMotion (the usual long-distance L2 extension selling point), but refreshingly some of the engineers said “well, that’s not really the use case we see in real life.”

So what were the use cases they were mentioning?

Regardless of the advantages of photonic switching (David Husak claims it’s 20.000 times more effective than electronic switching), the programmable optical components remain ludicrously expensive, prompting Plexxi to launch a cost-optimized fixed-topology version of their data center products.

If you’ve ever tried to troubleshoot web application performance issues, you’ve probably seen it all – browser waterfall diagrams, visual traceroute tools, network topologies produced by network management systems … but I haven’t seen them packaged in a comprehensive, easy-to-use and visually compelling package before. Welcome to ThousandEyes.

During the Networking Tech Field Day 6 Spirent showed us Avalanche NEXT – another great testing tool that generates up to 10Gbps of perfectly valid application-level traffic that you can push through your network devices to test their performance, stability or impact of feature mix on maximum throughput.

Not surprisingly, as soon as they told us that you could use Avalanche NEXT to replay captured traffic we started getting creative ideas.

I spent most of the last week in day-long geek parties better known as Networking Tech Field Day. Talking with startups doing cool things or vendors launching cool products, and bouncing barely-feasible ideas off fellow geeks is intoxicating. No wonder I was so excited after the previous events.