A reader left the following comment on my Does Multipath TCP Matter blog post: “Why would I use MP-TCP in a data center? Couldn’t you use packet spraying at each hop and take care of re-ordering at the destination?”

Short answer: You could, but you might not want to.

I was listening to excellent opening presentation Enno Rey had at Troopers 2014 IPv6 security summit (he claimed he was ranting, but it sounded more like some of my polite blog posts) and when I’ve seen this slide I could literally hear a blog post clicking together in my head.

In short: IPv6 has many shortcomings, but this might not be one of them.

Cristiano sent me an interesting question:

I saw that to configure BGP as the routing protocol running over DMVPN I have to configure BGP neighbors on the hub site router. Do I really have to configure all the neighbors on the hub site? How many neighbors could I configure? How can I scale that?

According to Cisco Live presentations, BGP-over-DMVPN scales to several thousand spoke sites (per hub router), so you shouldn’t be too worried about the protocol scalability. Configuring all those neighbors is a different issue.

The best description of fundamental problems of IT industry I found recently comes from @cloud_borat. Evidently SDN is no different.

When OpenFlow was still fresh and exciting, someone made quite a name for himself by proposing a global load-balancing solution that would install per-session OpenFlow entries in every core switch around the world. Clearly a great idea, mimicking the best experiences we had with ATM SVCs.

Meanwhile some people started using OpenFlow in real-life networks for coarse-grained load balancing that improves the scalability of stateful network services. For more details, watch the video recorded during the Real Life OpenFlow-based SDN Use Cases webinar.

I heard the following pretty bold statement while listening to an episode of my favorite podcast: “Bringing MPLS into the data center is impractical because MPLS requires custom silicon.” Really? How about checking the Intel FM 6000 product brief first?

Broadcom Trident chipset supposedly also supports MPLS. I couldn’t verify that because Broadcom considers the capabilities of their hardware highly confidential (but if you know more, do write a comment). Absolutely refreshing for a chipset that you get in almost every ToR switch you buy.

Ed Horley opened another juicy can of worms in a comment to my First-Hop Load Balancing in IPv6 post: can we use IPv6 RA for fast failover (and high availability)?

TL&DR summary: it depends.

DMVPN networks still confuse some engineers, particularly the true differences between Phase 2 and Phase 3 DMVPN. Here’s the explanation that worked for an engineer that sent me a question along these lines.

A while ago, D.L. Owens published a very nice review of my TCP, HTTP & SPDY Deep Dive course, one of my most successful projects with more than 45000 enrolled students. Thank you!

New to the OpenFlow/SDN discussions? Interested in the reality behind the ever-growing hype? Check out the OpenFlow 101 video recorded during the SDN, NFV and OpenFlow for Skeptics webinar.