Earlier this year I came across Scalyr, a newer player in the cloud-based log management scene. They’re taking a slightly different approach to products like Loggly and Splunk. I’ve been testing it in my lab - here’s my impressions.
(Read more...)A recent Gigaom article asks: “Will transparent caching reshape the future of video on the internet?”
(Read more...)HP has announced that HP Master ASE holders can now get VIP support. This is supposed to give me:
(Read more...)SNMP may be outdated, and is definitely unloved, but it still serves a purpose. We’re moving to a new world, with new methods and data structures for interrogating and configuring our network devices. This is a Good Thing, but we’re not there yet, and this leaves us stuck in limbo for trying to solve Real World problems today. Here’s what I found recently when trying to do some network monitoring with IOS-XR devices.
(Read more...)SDN is the buzzword du jour in the networking industry, but it’s hard to make sense of what it might mean for “normal” people. Here’s my take on what SDN solutions & architectures might look like in the Enterprise space, and the problems that it could solve.
(Read more...)In New Zealand, one company controls the copper cabling delivered to houses. They sell access to Retail ISPs, at a fixed price. Individual customer connections are mapped through to the ISP, who handles all customer management, upstream access, enhanced services, etc. This means that most people have many options for their ISP, with everyone competing on a common platform. Switching ISP is trivial, and so churn rates are high.
(Read more...)Technical people often have problems with Project Managers. It doesn’t have to be this way though - if you can each recognise the other’s strengths and weaknesses, you can work well together. Here’s some advice on working with PMs.
(Read more...)The “Best of Interop 2014 Finalists” have been announced. Pretty much all the products and technologies that you would expect, but I found the categorisation interesting. As you’d expect, there’s an “SDN” category. This year’s finalists are:
(Read more...)SDN career certifications are starting to emerge. Network engineers are well-used to certifications, and use them as a badge of marking progress. But developers prefer to focus on code, not passing tests. This will be just another way that the different cultures rub up against each other as we change the way our networks work.
(Read more...)Network Field Day 7 had many interesting presentations and discussions. I’m still working through them all, but one from Dell caught my eye, where they declared that CCIEs were no longer required. They were slightly exaggerating their case for impact, but there is some substance to it - we shouldn’t need CCIEs to generate basic network configurations for standard networks.
(Read more...)