by Sunay Tripathi If you are building, operating, or enhancing a network in 2015, you are in a good position. The reason is: several industry trends are coalescing to provide the network buyer an opportunity to do more for less. Several factors, including the rise of merchant silicon, hardware commoditization, disaggregation of hardware and software in the network, and emerging software-defined network (SDN) solutions enable a hyper scale datacenter to transform into a forward-looking enterprise to get more out of their IT and network investment.
by Bob Natale Network Services Virtualization (NSV) is an emergent capability, a transformation in network service delivery and consumption capabilities rising from the optimal integration of enabling technologies that collectively underpin the revolution in network virtualization. The set of NSV-enabling technologies – summarized in the listing in Figure 1 (red font) – centers on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and includes other technologies necessary for a fully functional NSV solution.
This featured interview with Big Switch Networks CEO, Doug Murray, is a part of the ongoing ONUG CEO Corner Series.
by Chris Swan At the last ONUG meeting I presented on the topic of container networks and network containment. This time around there’s going to be a chance during the ONUG Academy to get hands on and take a deeper dive into Container Networks. If you’re a networks person and you’ve heard of Docker but not yet taken a good look at it, then this is your chance. Similarly if you’re an ops person or architect who’s interested in Docker, but hasn’t yet figured out…
by Kyle Mestery With a theme of “Operationalizing Open Networking,” the ONUG Spring 2015 conference is giving voice not only to the technologies enabling open networking, but also to the operational aspects of running these networks. This is encouraging because it means we’ve reached the point where open networking is being used in production. If you look at the Open Source networking stack, you can see the pieces are all there to run a full-fledged open networking stack for production systems:
by Rob Sherwood If there’s only one message you take from my ONUG white box tutorial, it’s this: reducing capital expenditures (CapEx) is not the only reason to move to white box, branded white box (“brite box”) or disaggregated open networking switches and routers. All of these terms translate into one thing: switches that enable you to buy the hardware separately from the software.
by Srini Seetharaman The prevalent migration of application delivery from legacy compute clusters to cloud generates relentless pressure on networking staff for new application needs and push for agility, without a corresponding growth in budget. There is also a stigma of the networking team as being part of the cost-center of the organization. On the other hand, the compute and application IT teams rejoice in being part of the revenue-center of the organization. They talk about “Docker”, “Chef”, “Puppet”, “Salt”, “Ansible”, “Nginx”, “Kubernetes”, “Hadoop”, “Storm”…
by Nick Lippis In Global 2000 companies, IT has organized primarily around silos of technologies. There are different silos: the network, storage, application, server/host, virtualization, security groups and more. This model became popular in the mid 1980s when mainframe computing gave way to mini- and personal computers. Remember Apple’s 1984 Superbowl commercial? Big brother wasn’t just IBM; it was the IT organizational model that created huge barriers of entry for new IT products and ideas from enterprise corporations. But as the mainframe market disaggregated and the IT…
by Toby Redshaw At the end of 2015 some CEOs are going to be happy about their results. Others not so much. Underlying both the good and the bad will be a clear bifurcation between those that get and execute modern IT and those that don’t. The outcomes will be stark and the penalties brutal. This bifurcation will just be beginning and the gap between the have’s and have not’s will continue to grow. Here’s what the bifurcation is, how it came about and how…
by Mike Cohen As demands increase for speed, scale, security, agility, and flexibility in cloud environments, a policy driven approach is quickly becoming an important area of development in the open source community. Today’s cloud infrastructure is often overwhelmed by inputs from different teams with differing objectives: developers who want to quickly and easily deploy their applications, infrastructure teams who need to deliver on operational requirements, and business teams looking to impose governance, cost, or compliance constraints. The end result is a system that muddles…
