Category: SDN

Listening to some SDN pundits one gets an impression that SDN brings peace to Earth, solves all networking problems and makes networking engineers obsolete.

Cynical jokes aside, and ignoring inevitable bugs, is controller-based networking really more reliable than what we do today?

In the last video from the Network Programmability webinar Matt Oswalt answered numerous questions from the audience.

For whatever reason (subliminal messages from vendor marketing departments?), I’m constantly brooding about the vendor lock-in, its inevitability, and the way supposedly disruptive companies try to use the fear of lock-in to persuade naive customers to buy their products.

Imagine you need a data center WAN edge router with multiple 10GE uplinks. You’d probably go for an ASR or a MX-series router, right? How about using a 2 Tbps ToR switch and an SDN solution to make it work with full Internet routing table?

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I got a lengthy email from one of my readers a while ago, essentially asking a simple question: assuming I want to go return to my studies and move further than CCIE I currently hold, should I go for CCDE or the new VMware’s VCIX-NV?

Well, it’s almost like “do you believe in scale-up or scale-out?” ;) Both approaches have their merits.

What’s the difference between network programmability and SDN? Matt Oswalt explained his view on the topic in the Network Programmability 101 webinar.

Highly customizable high-speed virtual switch written in Lua sounds great, but is it really that easy to use? Simon Leinen was kind enough to get me in touch with Alex Gall, his colleague at Switch, who's working on an interesting project: implementing L2VPN over IPv6 with Snabb Switch.

If you want to get a free copy of my Overlay Virtual Networks in Software-Defined Data Centers book, download it now. The offer will expire by December 15th.

In my presentation @ SDN Meetup in Stockholm, I tried to answer a simple question: “Should I really program my network?” and obviously had to start with an even simpler one: “What is SDN?”

The video of the presentation is already available on YouTube, and you can watch the slides on my content web site.

Also, make sure you watch other presentations from that event, particularly David Barroso’s SDN Internet Router.

It was a dark stormy autumn night and three networking engineers had nothing better to do than ponder the heavy topics of transactional consistency in a distributed SDN environment in Episode 16 of Software Gone Wild podcast.

Here are a few of the topics that crossed our minds:

While the industry press deliberates the disaggregation of Arista and Cisco, and Juniper’s new CEO, Juniper launched a virtual version of its vMX router, which is supposed to have up to 160 Gbps of throughput (as compared to 10 Gbps offered by Vyatta 5600 and Cisco CSR). Can Juniper really deliver on that promise?

After describing the current state of affairs in his Network Programmability 101 webinar, Matt Oswald moved to the low-hanging fruits: automating repetitive tasks in baby steps, from VLAN provisioning to consistent device configurations.

The last day of Interop New York found me sitting in the Speaker Center with a few friends pondering the hype and reality of SDN and brokenness of traditional network products. One of the remarks during that conversation was very familiar: “we have too many knobs to configure”, and I replied “and how many knobs do you think there are in Windows registry?" (or Linux kernel and configuration files).

Overlay virtual networks are one of my favorite topics – it seems I wrote over a hundred blog posts describing various aspects of this emerging (or is it reinvented) technology since Cisco launched VXLAN in 2011.

During the summer of 2014 I organized my blog posts on overlay networks and SDDC into a digital book. I want to make this information as useful and as widely distributed as possible – for a limited time you can download the PDF free of charge.

Learn more about the book

Like many of us Khalid Raza wasted countless hours sitting in meetings discussing hybrid WAN connectivity designs using a random combination of DMVPN, IPsec, PfR, and one or more routing protocols… and decided to try to create a better solution to the problem.