I stumbled upon a great ACM article comparing challenges of distributed systems with well-known milestones of modern physics.

The modern networks are probably the ultimate distributed systems. Now take the ideas from that article and apply them to the Centralized Control Plane concept (the last time I checked the marketers were still promoting that academic marvel).

Tore Anderson has been talking about IPv6-only data centers (and running a production one) for years. We know Facebook decided to go down that same path… but how hard would it be to start from scratch?

Not too hard if you want to do it, know what you're doing, and are willing to do more than buy boxes from established vendors. Donatas Abraitis documented one such approach, and he's not working for a startup but a 12-year-old company. So, don't claim it's impossible ;)

Summer is a great time to do odd jobs that you always wanted to do but never found time for. One of mine: document the crazy stuff I’ve been doing decades ago. Starting point: how I got into networking in 1980s.

One of my readers sent me a lengthy email asking my opinion about his ideas for new data center design (yep, I pointed out there’s a service for that while replying to his email ;). He started with:

I have to design a DR solution for a large enterprise. They have two data centers connected via Fabric Path.

There’s a red flag right there…

While some people spread misinformation others work hard to figure out how to make TCP work on exotic links with low bandwidth and one second RTT.

Ulrich Speidel published a highly interesting article on APNIC blog describing the challenges of satellite Internet access and the approach (network coded TCP) they took to avoid them.

One of my readers sent me a link to SoftEther, a VPN solution that

[…] penetrates your network admin's troublesome firewall for overprotection. […] Any deep-packet inspection firewalls cannot detect SoftEther VPN's transport packets as a VPN tunnel, because SoftEther VPN uses Ethernet over HTTPS for camouflage.

What could possibly go wrong with such a great solution?

In one of my ExpertExpress engagements the customer expressed the desire to manage their firewall with OpenFlow (using OpenDaylight) and I said, “That doesn’t make much sense”. Here’s why:

Obviously if you can't imagine your life without OpenDaylight, or if your yearly objectives include "deploying OpenDaylight-based SDN solution", you can use it as a REST-to-NETCONF translator assuming your firewall supports NETCONF.

Every time I have a network automation presentation (be it a 2-day workshop or a 45 minute keynote) I get the same question afterwards: “How do we deal with exceptions?”

The correct answer is obvious: “there should be no exceptions, because one-offs usually cost you more than you earn with them,” but as always the reality tends to intervene.

Let’s continue our journey toward two-switch data center. What can we do after virtualizing the workload, getting rid of legacy technologies, and reducing the number of server uplinks to two?

How about replacing dedicated storage boxes with distributed file system?

In late September, Howard Marks will talk about software-defined storage in my Building Next Generation Data Center course. The course is sold out, but if you register for the spring 2017 session, you’ll get access to recording of Howard’s talk.

My friend Jeremy Stretch wrote an IPAM+DCIM tool for Digital Ocean and open-sourced it. As the tool was designed by networking engineers to manage data center networks (more in Jeremy’s blog post), it might be a better fit than other tools out there. In any case, check it out and let me know how it works.