Aruba WLANs 101 and design fundamentals Integration Partners' Wireless Lead Architect, Tim Cappalli gives a Presentation at Aruba Networks EMEA conference.
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Aruba WLANs 101 and design fundamentals Integration Partners' Wireless Lead Architect, Tim Cappalli gives a Presentation at Aruba Networks EMEA conference.
The Impact of Digital Natives
Digital native From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“The term digital native can be used to describe people born after 1980, when social digital technologies, such as Usenet and bulletin board systems, came online. Digital natives are characterized as having access to networked digital technologies and the skills to use those technologies. Major parts of their lives and daily activities are mediated by digital technologies: social interaction, friendships, civic activities, hobbies. And they’ve never known any other way of life”
By way of the above definition I am a digital non-native, I might be considered an adopted child of the natives. Although I was hacking code and designing digital systems prior to the 1980s, I do not have the mindset that differentiates the digital natives from the non-natives. My experts on the topic of digital natives are a pair of true digital natives, my daughters, they are 18 and 20 and to them I am a total digital Luddite. I asked them about their views on the use of digital technology and their expectations of the networks that supported these technologies. I suspect their answers are typical of digital natives the world over. These views and expectations are changing all aspects of networks to include: storage, security, connectivity, services, pricing and advertising. Some of the digital native’s views and expectation:
• No concept of “where” the content resides (on-net, off-net, local, cached, it does not matter) • No concept of busy hour or congestion periods so that the term 24/7 is meaningless as there is no other option and down-time is incomprehensible as the only time that you cannot access content is when your battery is dead. • Power is free and available • Mobility trumps size and comfort • Cellular service is a staple part of the household budget (not a business expense) • No off button, apps that always run • Social networking is a given (others care what they are doing) • Social sites are safe (Whether or not, they are a tremendous source for identity theft or a sociopaths playground) • Applications are secure (their information will not be lost or stolen) • Where an application runs is of no concern (locally or not) only connectivity options • Touch, links, resizing, tabs, multitasking (on the machine) are all natural operations •Given these expectations for service, how does your network design meet these new user’s requirements? • Was your network designed around traffic engineering standards of the 1990s? • Does your network have single points of failure? Transport, management, billing? • What is your upgrade plan, are you watching the bandwidth growth, or just the bandwidth? • Do you have a means to notify users of security breaches or do you just watch them happen? • Can your systems withstand another Hurricane Sandy and survive? • Are you transporting all your traffic all the time? Is caching viable?
If you cannot answer these questions, then it is time to take a close look at your network. If you answered these questions and most are to the negative, it is time to rethink the implementation of your network.
If you are wondering who these natives are, you are not one of them, but look around, they are pasted to their smart phones, taking selfies, and poking fun at you. If your network or systems fail, they won’t care, there are other providers or app that will work just fine for them. What’s your #?
---Peter Southwick
SIMPLICITY Infographic with Juniper Networks
TOP 6 REASONS TO DEPLOY WITH JUNIPER AND ARUBA
Net Neutrality & Internet Capabilities
From my point of view I see is the loss of net neutrality as a boon for the technology of the Internet as a whole. If service providers can charge more for ‘premium’ content it stands to reason that the provider has to offer a ‘premium’ class of service for that content. This concept is totally lacking across the Internet. Today there is no class of service or quality of service distinction provided by ISPs. Verizon might have a scheme that is used in its network (most likely not to classify user Internet traffic), as does AT&T and all the others. The point is that none of them have a single agreed upon scheme.
Definitions abound in the RFCs as to what the classifications should be and what quality guarantees should be applied, but no one has ever implemented these across the broad Internet. They have been successfully implemented in Enterprise networks for years, voice, video and data routinely are passed between locations on the same pipes and routers. Each traffic type offered its own distinction and quality treatment.
What is Your Hobby?
Mine tend to be outdoors, skiing and sailing are my principals, but I tend to buck the trend. It seems that a large number of people find their hobbies on-line, gaming being one of the principals. A recent survey shows that the U.S. supports about 145 Million gamers and that they spend on the average of about 215 million game hours per day. It is no wonder that the game hosting companies are doing so well. Another survey showed that on-line gamers are split between games that play for points and those that play for money.
I worked with a gaming company a while ago and found it interesting that the biggest concerns for this company were bandwidth and denial of service attacks. The bandwidth concerns I understood, the more bandwidth the more feature rich and life like the game can be. The second concern was a surprise. Apparently when a gamer is disenchanted with a game, in addition to going to another game, he or she finds is necessary to disrupt the game so that other gamers and the gaming company cannot continue that game. Seems childish, but then again I have seen folks drive pickup trucks over ski trails quite possibly for the same reason. In any case, back to this game company and their concerns.
What's On Your T-Shirt
I know it is a worn out marketing line, but the recent advances in technology have sparked an interest in this technophile. Wearable technology made techie headlines with the announcement of an electronic fabric. Today we have glasses and watches that are connected, and I am sure that I can find a ring that can be a phone or whatever, but a tee shirt that is electronically connected… the possibilities are endless.
I am not talking about the sport apparel that is wired to accept an i-whatever for my listening pleasure, although I did see a dude pushing a hoodie strings into his ear and wondered what new fad this was until I saw the headset wire in the cord. Who needs Q-Tips sticking out of your ears to make a statement?
Although another avenue to explore, this is not about the health monitoring devices either. Those strapped on things that tell me how many steps I have taken today or how often my heart rate has exceeded (or not in my case) the limit for a workout. My heart rate monitor died of boredom, I think the batteries gave up the ghost trying to find my pulse.
Layered Security on a Network Device
I recently co-authored a whitepaper discussing the layered network security approach typically implemented with PCI Compliance. This got me thinking about layered security in general.
Data center security, network security, application security, physical security, and national security… One thing these entirely different security architectures have in common is the layered approach to securing critical assets.
Each approach has a first line of defense, an in-depth inspection of incoming traffic, the “trusted” core, and the transit traffic from one side to another. The perimeter will usually catch most “bad guys” and the core will typically be the most expensive to secure. Each architecture can be layered, secured, and segmented time after time after time.
What Gauges Are You Watching?
As a sales engineer for Integration Partners I have the opportunity to spend long periods of time behind the wheel of my car. I am in tune with the rhythms of my car, the sound of its engine, the vibration of the tires on the road surface and any number of other observations that my senses can pick up. I do not rely on the alarms to tell me when something should be looked into, I am typically aware of these things well in advance of the warnings generated by the manufacturer. The more information I can receive from the car the happier I am. Hopefully with this information I can stay one step ahead of having to call a tow truck from the side of the road. My dream car would contain an instrument cluster that would house gauges for every operational part of the drive train.
I realize that not all drivers operate the same and that I might be an exception to the rule (I have been told this for many other aspects of my life). Some drivers go on the theory that no news is good news. All they want to know is how fast they are driving and when to fill up the tank. Their idea of a gauge cluster includes a speed odometer and a fuel gauge. They feel that since they are not auto mechanics, the added information does nothing for them. The car should continue to work as designed.
An interesting sign to be found on the highways of Vermont, I looked for it in Connecticut and Massachusetts, but they do not seem to care, left, right center, drive where ever you please. But in Vermont it seems that the department of transportation wants to preserve the road surface of the left lane, only use it when you are passing another vehicle.
I guess the proper way to view the sign is to stay in the right lane, allowing the impatient drivers to pass on the left.
Another way to look at it is that the right lane is for the cautious and those that are following the status quo and the left lane is for passing those folks.
This is the approach that I have taken when looking at the recent advances in Ethernet switching. There are companies that are cautiously advancing in the right lane and those that are out in the passing lane covering new ground and pressing new capabilities. This post takes a look at a few of the switch options and aligns then in my opinion of a proper lane.
10 Gbps performance capabilities – The introduction of a new generation of 10Gbps chips from Broadcom(1) has been used by Juniper, Arista, Cisco, Brocade and Extreme in their top of rack switches. These high density 10Gbps devices offer from 40 to 70 odd ports in extremely low power 1 RU devices. RIGHT LANE!
Amazon in Line to Break the Wireless Speed Record
Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos unveiled the plan on CBS’s “60 Minutes” news program in the U.S., showing interviewer Charlie Rose the flying machines that can serve as delivery vehicles. Bezos said the gadgets, called octocopters, can carry as much as 5 pounds within a 10-mile radius of an Amazon fulfillment center. Amazon may start using the drones, which can make a delivery within 30 minutes, within five years pending Federal Aviation Administration approval, Bezos said
Interesting concept, but what if you use it for data backup. Back in the 90s Marshal T. Rose wrote a number of technology books, in one of these he calculated the throughput of a station wagon hurling down the highway at 65 miles per hour and compared that to the current transport technologies. Twenty year later it looks like we have another transport system that could rival the throughput of that Caprice Classic.
The news story claimed a five pound payload, a 30 minute delivery over a 10 mile radius. So a typical metropolitan area, the Caprice will not make it in that time, let alone get it loaded and gassed up for the trip.
Maple Syrup the Ethernet of the Kitchen
For the holidays I tried a new twist on the festive fowl. I found a receipt for apple maple roasted turkey (http://allrecipes.com/recipe/maple-roast-turkey/). It was a hit. Maple syrup is a staple around our household, it sweetens everything possible in the kitchen (from apples to zucchini).
I liken it to the way that Ethernet has transformed networking, a standardized normalized platform that supports all other communications. Today we can have Ethernet transport from the desktop to desktop regardless of how far those desktops are separated (room, building, campus, metro, nationally or internationally.) The same frame is used to transport those upper layers from edge to edge.
Like my turkey recipe, I take notice when a new Ethernet based technology is introduced. The week prior to our holiday Avaya presented a relatively new Ethernet based transport technology to the engineering team based on Shortest Path Bridging (802.1aq). The technology is explained quite well in a virtualization white paper from Avaya (http://www.avaya.com/usa/resource/assets/whitepapers/dn4469%20-%20network%20virtual%20using%20spb%20white%20paper.pdf) so there is no need to repeat the techno-babble here. The technology is intended to replace Ethernet transport over MPLS in the wide area and the use of spanning tree in the local areas. The technological equivalent of replacing sugar with maple syrup on our breakfast table.
Over the past decade I have taught about, designed and installed local area, metro area and wide area Ethernet deployments. None have been straight forward, none plug and play. As the size of the deployment has grown, so has the complexity of the technology. Adding multicast only made the deployment more difficult, another set of addressing, protocols and designs.
So when I read, no I have not had the opportunity to deploy it yet, about shortest path bridging I was intrigued about this system. Loop free local topologies, resilient, and multiservice with as the name implies shortest path transit.
But I have seen this all before. In the early 90s a new exciting all-in-one technology was going to revolutionize communications from the desktop to the wide area. It contained the control, data and management planes in one unified architecture. You more experienced engineers might recognize this diagram:
Yes, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) offered the same feature set that I am seeing for SPB. But ATM lacked industry support and provided a small blip on the technology landscape for all its hype. Mostly because ATM needed chip sets that were ultra-expensive and specialized hardware. SPB on the other hand is Ethernet with a reuse of the technologies that have been time proven and readily available as far as hardware and chip sets are concerned.
The 2014 Olympic Torch arrives at Integration Partners!
Hands on Wheel – Mind on Road
In my capacity as solution architect for New England I have the opportunity to travel the roads from my home in Vermont. Last week while traveling to a customer visit the DOT informational signs, had the following message in four foot high letters:
Hands on Wheel
Mind on Road
Considering that the commute is about four hours, this sign gave me food for thought. If drivers heeded this sign there would be fewer crashes on the roads, leading to fewer backups, leading to fewer distracted drivers, leading to fewer crashes, etc. etc. etc.
In the past decades technology has created many solutions for the Hands on Wheel portion of this equation, there are hands free phones, head up displays, voice command controls for entertainment and environment. There are programs that convert text to voice and voice to text. There are even glasses that can be worn that have a fully interactive display in them. There are so many gadgets that there really is no reason to have your hands off the wheel while operating your automobile.
The issue is that none of these gadgets address the greater concern of Mind on Road it seems that in our need to stay connected 24 x 7 keeping our mind on the road of a secondary concern to technologists.
While a blog post on highway safety would be self-conversant, that is not what initially came to mind when I saw the road sign. What I saw was an underlying message to many network administrators today.
The Two Years have finally arrived
Approximately fifteen years ago the demise of the IPv4 address pool and the popular use of IPv6 has been two years away. In 2000 we were going to run out of IPv4 address by 2002, in 2003 it was 2005 etc. etc. etc.
Well we have finally made it those two years, IPv4 is still not exhausted, but it is quite winded and some say on its last gasp. But we are seeing the use and deployment of IPv6.
The topic today is a case of the “forgot to ask the right questions” when deploying a new core for a data center. The engineer asked about price, ports, throughput and power, but forgot about IPv6 capacity. The core, while sized correctly for IPv4 traffic could not handle the table sizes for IPv6 neighbors (analogous to the IPv4 ARP table).
The existing design is as shown below, showing a collapsed core surrounded by edge switches. All routing is performed in the core and all the edges pass layer 2 traffic (VLANs in this case).
To the Cloud? The 8lb. Rule
The cloud has had many definitions. In the early 90s when most enterprises maintained private line networks, moving to a frame relay or ATM service from the carriers was referred to as transferring their data over the cloud. In those days I was teaching service provider sales teams and I would insist on a definition of what was in the cloud. How many times did I hear that it did not matter, that it was in the cloud and that as long as what went in came out again, all was good in the cloud.
The cloud has grown since those early days, today the decision to use a cloud service makes economic and technological sense. Why build it local when an enterprise can save money, reduce headaches and offer a better product from the cloud.
Amazon, one of the leaders in cloud services, has a total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator (http://aws.amazon.com/tco-calculator/) that allows the definition of the current or proposed data center and provides a TCO for that data center compared to the cost of offering the same services from the Amazon cloud service. For the trials that I ran, the savings were all over 70% of the cost of hosting the services locally.
Integration Partners 1st Annual Pinewood Derby