SDN Dominates NFD#5
SDN was the soup dajoure at Networking Field Day #5 and rightfully so. My friends are not only talented bloggers, but also some of the best architects, engineers and operators in the networking field. The networking industry has gone without significant innovation since at least MPLS and arguably Ethernet. Our network architectures are snapshots of the cold war. Every device …
Big Switch Introduces Switch Light
Big Switch took a step towards rounding out their portfolio with introducing plans to release a software switching software to integrate into ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) and vendor hardware switches. The “thin switching” software is made up using the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Indigo project from Stanford University and Project Floodlight. Just as various vendors have used Open …
Be The Steamroller Not The Road
I always chuckle when I hear SDN or OpenFlow “bigots”. I find that it is normally vendors being flippant towards SDN in general are from a handful of camps: When people spend time to understand that OpenFlow is merely an open messaging protocol to instantiate flow based forwarding. Flow based forwarding integrates L4 into forwarding decisions. L4 adds rudimentary application …
Configure an HP OpenFlow Switch for Floodlight
This is a revised tutorial to configure an HP OpenFlow switch for Floodlight or any other OpenFlow controller. HP revised its firmware a few months back which is great. HP has been supporting OpenFlow on its switches with generally available code longer then any other networking vendor. Other vendors with GA OpenFlow firmware are Brocade and Pica8. Maturity of OpenFlow …
Open vSwitch on VirtualBox
Here is a quick tutorial for installing Open vSwitch on VirtualBox. VirtualBox is an open source virtualization project from Oracle. It is supported on Windows, Mac, BSD and Linux to name a few. It has a nice GUI for VM management out of the box. Open vSwitch is an open source vSwitch from Martin Casado, Ben Pfaff and a whole …
The Good and Bad of Wireless
The Good and Bad of Wireless :A while back, I posted some numbers on campus 802.11 growth. Wether cellular or 802.11, the numbers are big. The numbers show in the 802.11 campus which reflects smart phones, tablets, laptops and soon to be glasses and watches painted all over people. In networking, customer growth typically linearly correlates into the need for …
Networking Field Day #5 – A Community Event
Networking Field Day is upon us again. The days of March 6-8 some of the best in the business are going to be together again to have participating vendors pitch their product strategies to the NFD delegates and more importantly, to everyone else watching the live stream. I was invited to attend Network Field #5 and I humbly accepted. Network …
Putting Together Provider Bridging, Provider Backbone Bridging, S-Tags and C-Tags
Putting Together Provider Bridging, Provider Backbone Bridging, S-Tags and C-Tags: Understanding carrier bridging techniques is important, not just for provider operators, but also for engineers on the customer edge. When turning up or troubleshooting a circuit, carrier operators will ramble off C-tag and S-tag when many in the enterprise, are used to hearing Vlan ID in single tenancy deployments. More …
