So why do we build networks? In my mind from the very earliest networks there was an application that the network was designed to support. That brings me to what is an application: According to Wikipedia "Application software applies the power of a particular computing platform or system software to a particular purpose." With that established lets talk about a few networks and what their core application or applications were/are.
Ok I know this will pull a significant amount of hate from all of the NAT haters. 99.9% of the time I would agree. However our business is unique. That is the first thing I am going to layout for sake of the discussion that will happen.
What we do: We do real time video communication.
Who we do it for: Medical Institutions.
How we deliver it: Via Private MPLS from the client site to our call centers. At the client side we ride their infrastructure.
Hopefully the issue becomes immediately clear. If it does not let me help out. I own my network and the MPLS links and CPE router. I do not own, control, influence or have any visibility into the client infrastructure. In most cases the answer would be who cares push it to the gateway NAT it and be done with it. However real time communications using SIP first don’t natively like NAT (but I have that issue fixed…..I think.) and these systems are not simple point to point communications. Instead they are CientX to server, server to ClientY, ClientY to ClientX communications. The solutions should be pretty obvious; Read more
So no one who is reading this should be in the dark about some of the interesting things I have been doing as of late. But if you are here is a quick re-cap.
Language Access Network my employer is undergoing an installation of a first of its kind Video Call Center. I will more on that to write soon. As part of this process we had a WHOLE LOT of infrastructure put into place. For starters we needed a “SAN”, we needed Servers, we needed DC Switching and we needed lots and lots of licensing and that all before the developers and engineers jump in to make the whole thing work. The cool bits of this first part are what we did for “SAN”, Server and Network. As you all know I am a past Cisco UCS zealot and I have a NetApp in my basement so you would think that it would be simple math as to what I would have installed. You would be right. UCS and NetApp were about $100,000 more than I could scrape out of my budget and still have anything left for other major components. Before people get bent out of shape about me saying Cisco UCS and NetApp are to expensive, I did not say that. Honestly I think within existing DC platforms they are both very well priced if you don’t bring next gen platforms into the mix. In my case the next gen platform is Nutanix. If you don’t know anything about these guys click the link and check them out.
In a nutshell Nutanix is 4 Blades of Compute and 20TB of Storage in a 2RU chassis with FusionIO, SSD and SAS Drives and no common backplane between the 4 nodes. Along with my four pod node we added Arista 7124SX as our DC Switching/Fabric. There are lots of details around this combination like currently Nutanix does not support using the Node for a bare metal server like you can do with UCS or other Blade Enclosures and the storage has limited access to the outside world (it is setup to presented to ESXi Hosts as iSCSI targets and VMs as ViSCSI targets) but so far I love the platform. It gave me what I needed in the price point I needed and offers huge scale out options considering it is based of the GFS files system that Google uses across their DC’s. Read more
So tonight as I was getting into bed I did my normal scan twitter to see who I have pissed off or what might be going on that should rob me of sleep. Well tonight @david_Strebel asked the following questions;
“Who thinks FCoE will win over iSCSI?” and I responded “Not I” and then David asked the next logical question which was why not and here is what I had to say in the incredible detail that Twitter allows; “l2 boundaries, specialized hardware other than nics, hate relationship from most network people.”
The problem with this answer is pretty clear though. It does not really answer the question just gives a few power point bullets to appease the crowd. I don’t feel like this is enough though. So I am going to attempt to lay out my overall view on this issue of who will win iSCSI or FCoE and why. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole article which might get a a tad windy I don’t think either will win. But I don’t think FCoE will emerge as the leader until something better come along. For those masochists who like this kind of crap read on.
So here I am at 2:15 AM. Storming outside and me all hopped up on caffeine. I just took a break from righting my last post:
During that little breather I though you know what people must think I am a Cisco Zealot. Well that could not be further from the truth. I am a self confessed Technology Zealot. It it is new, shiny, blinks, chirps or at some point in its lifecycle lived in a Data Center I want it. But alas at least at this point in my life I have to make money. I do that by working for a Cisco VAR. We sell 90% plus Cisco. Unlike past jobs I do not rep Juniper, HP, F5, Foundry oops I mean Brocade, Arista, 3com, Shoretel, Avaya or anyone else that directly competes with Cisco Networking, Compute or Unified Communications.
That being said I do not think Cisco has the best product in every segment. But I wont flesh that out on my blog. If you want that info there is a price. You are either a customer with a requirement I cant meet at which point I will be honest with you or you are a professional friend who I feel comfortable discussion the finer and rougher points of our industry with. What I will say though is I have some Rules for what I will sell and I wont sell. I am going to lay those out to you and in a few cases why I feel how I feel. I hope this will provide insight to others who design, sell and deploy solutions in our industry for clients. At the end of the day our integrity is all we really have, Vendors crash, employers go under and clients come and go.
1. If I wont run it in my basement I wont install it at a client!
So last night while working on a Scalable Compute and storage design for a client, this post popped up in my twitter stream from @ErinatHP;
New HP blog post “In the light of day the Cisco UCS hype doesnt match the promise” ; UCS not all its marketed to be http://bit.ly/dKj88W
So in my normal do not let a stupid dig by a lame duck player go unmatched I responded Oh I can’t wait to read this FUD (you can check me out on twitter @joshobrien77)
All the twitter marketing and pissing matches aside I meant what I said and I did look forward to reading the HP Spin on where their market is vanishing to. And here are my responses, while they might not be the most technical they are not un-informed from the basis of the Cisco UCS platform or the HP C7000 with FLEX-10 Platform. And remember at the end of the day I represent me not Cisco not my employer, just little old me.
Also just so if this gets nasty I want to make sure that I am crediting this correctly:
All of the HP Writes: Are direct Quotes from Duncan Campbel with HP on his blog which you can find here: http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Converged-Infrastructure/In-the-light-of-day-the-Cisco-UCS-hype-doesn-t-match-the-promise/ba-p/83537
PLEASE READ ALL of Duncans Post BEFORE you READ Mine. I DO NOT PRETEND to REPRESENT HIS SIDE WELL AT ALL!
It is funny how things cycle. We have been doing a bunch of Cisco 4500 installs ranging from 4506’s through the 4510 and even a few 6500s in the mix. And no matter how hard we try we have power issues with them every single time. We either are in a hurry and spec the wrong cables, the client requests the wrong cable, we don’t have the correct power to stage the equipment in our office or the client doesn’t have the right power for the unit. In many cases we temporarily fall back to using 110 power with NEMA 5-15/20T cables and then force the power supplies to combined mode in order to get enough power to bring up the entire chassis. I should point out that this is usually only good for temp fix and that you should fix your power issue (usually installing bigger circuits) and move back to redundant mode. But for that quick fix here is the command on a 4500 or 6500 chassis to combine the power supplies:
power redundancy-mode combined
This command should be ran from config mode and once your config is saved it will return to this state after reboot.
And for a bit of extra fun scream out BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL as you type this in.
Well the picture to the right shows exactly where they are. In the past we have dealt with 1Gbps interfaces on supervisors that had both RJ-45 and SFP slots and it was an either/or decision if you wanted to use them. In those cases you had a config entry that required you to state SFP or RJ-45 in the interface configuration. No matter what you chose it was always shown Interface GigabitEthernet Mod#/Port#. So when I dove into the Sup720 I was configuring I decided it was supposed to be the same way because why would Cisco ever let me use all the ports on the front of my hardware? Being the all knowing geek that I am I also ignored the config file that I have seen at least 30 times in the last hour and I just started typing Interface TenGigabitEthernet 5/1, and I kept getting this; Read more
One of my clients has had their web server exposed to the wild world of the internet now for several years. Up till about a year and a half ago many systems on their network actually had IP ANY ANY statements cut through from the Outside of their Firewall to the Inside. However it has been one of my many jobs since I started with them to eradicate these problems and start securing their infrastructure. The firewall changes have been easy for the most part and any problems that remain are policy issues that we are working to eliminate. However their web server sitting outside of the firewall has been an ongoing issue and due to some anomaly’s on the server they are deploying the recommended DMZ and migrating their web server there. Read more
Led Zeppelin said it best I guess. This past week Ohio along with lots of other states got hit with the remains of hurricane Dean. So far it has been the most damaging storm for my clients in my short consulting career. The first call came on Tuesday morning August 21st. That call was from one of our account managers who indicated a client had sustained catastrophic damage to their 6509 when water rushed into their core network closet. My first two thoughts were how quickly can we get replacement hardware and how long should it take for me to get them back up and going? Read more
I am sure that at this point most of you have had some sort of experience with VOIP. My personal experiences are very mixed. On the Enterprise side I have worked on a multi-million dollar install of Cisco VOIP on a new all Cisco Network and it was less than spectacular. As a consultant I have worked with Cisco’s Call Manager Express in it’s home waters of the small/mid sized business and again I felt that it was lacking. However on the personal side I have been an off and on user of Skype for quite awhile as well as other come and go lightweight VOIP apps over the past seven or eight years. Read more
Ok so I have been beating my head on ASA to LDAP auth (temporary fix till my client spins up RADIUS) but thanks to the great LDAP group at Cisco TAC I”m up and working. The piont of this post is to take what we tend to know about LDAP client configs and adjust it for what Cisco has setup in PIX IOS 8. Read more
From a Network Engineer’s point of view this is exactly what is wrong with todays home networking methodology. Every night when I get home from work I follow the same rough routine. I plop down on the couch power on my laptop and connect to my home network via wireless. After doing so I check my connection logs for the day to my AP, my overall bandwidth usage via PRTG and my syslog server messages from my firewall. I do this to ensure that all is well on my little spoke of the internet. But I know for a fact that those of us who perform this little daily dance are in the minority. Instead what you get is scores of people purchasing wireless routers and just throwing them on their cable or DSL modem and going on with life, like they didn’t just leave their front door open with a big neon WELCOME HACKERS sign over it. Read more