We have all drunk the Kool-Aid. Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), or both will save the world. They decouple us from the shackles of legacy networks to allow a utopia of business-driven requirements to freely flow, delivering value and freeing the network, application, storage, and infrastructure teams to have weekends off and time …
Continue reading “Managing and Monitoring Performance in SDN / NFV”
In virtual and cloud environments, network traffic often flows into a virtualization, then back out, forwarded to another device, usually security, before it re-enters the virtual environment. I call this a “sadly defined network,” not software-defined. Many of my colleagues claim that this is not true. They say that an SDN keeps east-west traffic within …
Software-defined networking (SDN) is clearly one of the hot items of the tech field at the moment. VMware’s purchase of Nicira precipitated a sea change, leading to today’s plethora of SDN vendors and array of competing technologies. It reminds me the early noughties—the introduction of virtualization, competing hypervisor technology stacks and Unix/Linux Zones*—followed by the …
Continue reading “What Is SDN? The History of All Things SDN”
It’s that time again. VMworld 2014 opens in San Francisco on Monday, August 25. With fifty sessions covering network virtualization and security this year, it is clear that VMware is once again pushing software defined networking (SDN) and NSX, and that is as serious about the software defined network as it is about the rest of the …
Continue reading “VMworld 2014: Essential Networking Sessions”
On April second, Cisco introduced something that seems to make a lot of sense in its new declarative-based, ACI-led world of software-defined networking: a policy mechanism. The blog post about it was pretty straightforward: it included the obligatory nods toward the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and open-source communities, defined the differences between the traditional …
Continue reading “OpFlex, Standards-Based Protocols, and Cisco’s Messaging Problem”
Despite all of the rapid innovation and the incredible rate of change in technology, there are some things that you can count on. One of those things is that the transition from hardware to software is a cyclical one, and if you look at any one segment of the market long enough, that becomes apparent. …
