Gian Paolo Boarina and Nicola Arnoldi have an interesting exchange going on the role of white box networking in the enterprise and the exodus of intelligence from organizations to vendors.
Flatland 2: Railroad Boogaloo
Water planes, trains, and automobiles, that’s the fantasy allegorical landscape consuming this post by Ivan Pepelnjak. He paints a landscape where trains have consumed all transportation, to the point that there are no roads, only rails, and on it run electric trains. Cars do exist in this realm, but run on the rails, and are beholden to the train vendors for their efficient electric engines. But now the landscape is changing. New cheap gravel roads allows for inefficient gas cars to run at dirt cheap, and travel places the trains can’t. Ivan wants to know how the train manufacturers will do?
Yeah, Blame It on Cisco
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: A Technology Market Builder (in his own words) from a major networking vendor decided to publish a thought leadership article (in my sarcastic words) describing how Cisco’s embrace of complexity harmed the whole networking industry. Let’s see how black this kettle-blaming pot really is ;), and make sure to have […]
What Are The Problems with Broadcom Tomahawk? We Don’t Know
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: One of my readers has customers that already experienced performance challenges with Tomahawk-based data center switches. He sent me an email along these lines: My customers are concerned about buffer performance for packets that are 200 bytes and under. MORE IMPORTANTLY, a customer informed me that there were performance issues […]
What Is Layer-2 and Why Do We Need It?
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: I’m constantly ranting against large layer-2 domains; recently going as far as saying “we don’t really need all that stuff.” Unfortunately, the IP+Ethernet mentality is so deeply ingrained in every networking engineer’s mind that we rarely ever stop to question its validity. Let’s fix that and start with the fundamental […]
Arista EOS Available on Whitebox Switches
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net writes: So far, Arista is the only other networking vendor that figured out it doesn’t make sense to resist the tide – Arista EOS is now available on Open Compute Networking whitebox switches. Arista always used merchant silicon in their switches to keep their hardware development costs under control, and developed a network […]
BGP Configuration Made Simple with Cumulus Linux
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: BGP is without doubt the most scalable routing protocol, which made it a popular choice for large-scale deployments from service provider networks to enterprise WAN/VPN networks and even data centers. Its only significant drawback is the tedious configuration process (which almost reminds me of writing COBOL programs decades ago). Anything that makes BGP […]
Do you really need to see all 512K Internet routes?
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: Last week the global routing table (as seen from some perspectives) supposedly exceeded 512K routes, and weird things started to happen to some people that are using old platforms that by default support 512K IPv4 routes in the switching hardware. I’m still wondering whether the BGP table size was the […]
Is STP Really Evil?
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: Maxim Gelin sent me an interesting question: Can you please explain to me, why is STP supposed to be evil? What’s wrong with STP? STP’s fundamental problem is that it’s a fail-close, not a fail-open protocol. This is a wonderful analysis from Ivan about the problems with spanning tree and […]
Why is IPsec so Complex?
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: Jason Edelman wrote a great blog post after watching Ethan Banks struggle with yet another multi-vendor IPsec deployment. Some of his ideas make perfect sense (wiki-like web site documenting working configurations between vendor X and Y for every possible X and Y), others less so (tunnel broker — particularly in […]