AI, LLMs and Networking
Bill Gates recently described the development of AI as a creation as fundamental as the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. He is most likely right. OpenAI found that around 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of large language models (LLMs). For those in …
Time to Ditch the Definition of SDN
While at a stoplight looking at the random news feeds on Linkedin I ran across a post of a recent blog post by the ONF and the subsequent conversation where my friend Ivan Pepenlnjak commented. So I threw in my two cents and quickly regretted it because Linkedin has an amazing ability to frustrate me as it updated the comment …
The Network Iceberg
The impact of compute virtualization on the data center network has been profound. There are more virtual ports then physical ports. That simple measurement overshadows any other disruption in networking. We arrived at this transformation as a result of significant adoption of OS virtualization. The next revision of compute virtualization is the application. The last significant bastion of efficiency is to …
New Opportunity at Red Hat
Exciting times are upon us. I have humbly accepted a job at Red Hat on the Open Daylight dev team working with some incredible people at Red Hat and just as special folks in the community. I just wanted to pop up a brief post letting my friends in the community know where I am heading. I will miss my …
Install Open vSwitch v2.0 from RPM on RedHat Fedora
This post is for installing OVS from RedHat RPM binaries. If you want to build Open vSwitch from source please see this post. Open vSwitch v2.0 introduces some really important features, at the top of the list is multi-threaded support in vswitchd. This will increase flow instantiation rates significantly into the upstream kernel module. A rough guess would be from …
Installing Mininet, OpenDaylight and Open vSwitch
The easiest way to get started with a quick SDN lab image is using the Mininet image that is now managed by the ONLAB which is part of the ONRC. They do a nice job keeping the images maintained. Ideally the will incorporate ODL into the image soon since the ODL GUI is great for folks to get started with …
Eliminating VLANs and Fragility in the Underlay with Network Virtualization
This post is not intended to participate in the vendor Overlay vs. Underlay vs. Open OS vs. closed NOS but rather a network centric look at some things I am considering. The simple answer is routing scales and bridging doesn’t in my experience. As I look back at the first decade in my career I spent operating and designing Ethernet …
SDN Product Rundown from September
What an exciting time to be in networking. This past month of September has been a blur of SDN product announcements and emerging strategies. At the top of the heap was the NSX announcement from a software company in Vmware that encapsulated Nicira’s SDN push. I am an unabashed Casado fan boy so whatevers. Humility and genius is lightning striking …