Rant on Network Janitor

Software Defined Data Centres and the blending of cultures

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:50:29 +0000

As some of you may know, I have spent a fair amount of my time in the last few years designing and improving multi-tennant hosting environments. Each revision attempts to learn from the mistakes of the previous iterations, as well as bundle in new features and “advancements” from each of the different vendors in the stack.

New offerings on the storage fronts, developments in the server space in the form of the boom of virtualisation, and the simple existence of the network amongst the fact that none of these technologies changed the existing/fundamental laws of networking.

Vendor mandated certs only degrade integrity

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:54:40 +0000

I dont doubt that vendors have a tight line to walk when it comes maintaining their brand integrity. To build up a skill set in the market the certification teams put in many weeks developing a program that is relevant, useful and achieves the goals required. Followed by countless hours reviewing each of the certifications regularly to ensure integrity. There is the added benefit that these certifications build of community of loyal followers - The Cisco and VMWare certification programs are evidence to this.

The Smartest Guy in the Room

Mon, 08 Jul 2013 11:51:06 +0000

There is one thing that anybody who has been in a room with me longer than 5 minutes can tell you - I am not a smart guy! I have lots of smart friends. I am not one of them. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done more stupid things, more often than I would like to admit, and its only that I have been stupid enough often enough that I have eventually learned “dont do that!”.

On accents, colloquialisms and proprietary extensions

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:28:11 +0000

I may not be the most “travelled” person in the world, but over the past couple of years I have managed to find myself in several places across Asia, the Pacific Islands and also the US. One thing has always stood out - Speaking the same language is the hardest part of travelling! Now when I travel to parts of Asia and Im dealing either in hand gestures or with somebody trying their very best speak English (Their English is 1000x better than my Cantonese or my Khmer), and we both make allowances for the difficulty of not speaking the same language.

The VAR-y good upsides to being a consultant!

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:04:39 +0000

Earlier today Ethan Banks wrote a really good blog posts about “Thoughts on Working as a Consultant for a VAR”. I found his point of view quite interesting and I will say I can understand his points. I can also say that I would rather be a consultant than a full time engineer at a customer site. As a little bit of background I have spent most of my career working as a consultant. I did do a two year stint as network operations manager for a wireless ISP which itself was quite fast paced, but other than that Ive work as a consultant in one form or another.

Midnight in Silicon Valley

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 07:19:49 +0000

The Setup

So there I was, setting up my “command centre” for the 15 hour flight from Sydney to San Jose via San Francisco. I had my Macbook and my iPad fully charged, as well as ye olde print book ready just in case. I idly flipped through the inflight entertainment guide to see what movie would be playing on the main cabin display.

“Midnight in Paris” ? What’s this rubbish? Oh… Woody Allen… right… yeah… that’s just what I need :(

On the Premature Death of Spanning Tree and the Indiscriminate Killing of Canaries

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:29:36 +0000

I have a bee in my bonnet. After my last post full of love and bromance, this one is full of hate and vitriol - and I don’t apologise! We have all seen many presentations on each vendors latest and greatest “fabric” technologies over the past 18 months. It doesn’t matter which vendor, whether the presenter is sales or tech, or even enterprise or service provider focused - at some point almost every one declares that their solution is “the end of spanning tree”. It gets worse when they actively advise that you do not run spanning tree in your environment.

Pessimistic Engineering

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 07:43:55 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I am regularly told “You worry too much” or “You don’t need to worry about that”. Sometimes its “What are the chances of that ever happening?”. These are things that Ive heard from many people over the years and the best I can come up with is:

"That's what you pay me for! Im here to think of the worst case scenario and then mitigate against that.".

This is usually followed by confused looks from those around me who do not seem to grasp what I am getting at here.

SlackArse of the Year - 2011

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:11:13 +0000

Hey All,

I know I have kind of been MIA for the past 3 months. Ivan reminded me recently that I haven’t actually published a single post since September, so I wanted to give a brief “status update”.

The last couple of months have included the following:

Network Field Day
Meeting some of my “Industry Heros” (Read ‘Rockstars’)
My wife spent 3 months living 12 hours away, teaching at a remote Aboriginal Community.

Finally - I am a swimming pool!

Tue, 17 May 2011 15:01:40 +0000

Ok all, Im going to let out a secret. Long ago when I was a small child (long before I dreamed of being a janitor), when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would answer:

"I want to be a swimming pool".

Cute, no? I guess not, but that never stopped my folks from telling it to everyone of my friends. In fact my Dad put that in his speech he made at my wedding. Usually I would go all red in the face, but denying it was pointless.

You can't buy Innovation

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:35:14 +0000

Last weekend I was interviewing a potential new staff member for a job we have going, and we started discussing various vendors strengths and weaknesses. I put forward that I would question buying hardware from a vendor who just copies everyone else and doesn’t innovate on their own undertaking.

The response from one of the people present was that you can buy innovation (eg Cisco buying back Nuova, HP buying 3Com and thus H3C). I didn’t respond at first to this statement because I wasn’t really sure how I felt. After some thought I have decided how I feel.

Multi-Vendor Networking - The Two Edged Sword

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:30:45 +0000

A couple of weeks back, when we recorded Episode 33 of Packet Pushers Podcast, one of the items we had on the list of topics to discuss was that of multi-vendor networks and the recent Gartner report on the topic.

Due to various reasons this topic was taken off the list, but I still had a few thoughts on the topic so I decided to write this blog post to discuss some of them.

Proprietary Cometh before the Standard

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 06:09:52 +0000

Driving home the other night I was listening to the latest episode of the podcast “Coffee with Thomas”. This episode had our host, Thomas Jones, interviewing Steve Chambers of ViewYonder (and also a history of great vendors!). During the interview, Steve made the following comment:

It amazes me that people criticise Cisco for not be standardised on things that are brand new, as if the standards bodies are innovators. That is not their job. They follow up after things have been invented.

This statement took me back at first, and I was about to write it off as protecting your own team, but the further I drove (I have a very long commute - about 100km each way) the more I thought about this statement and the evidence - both historical and current.

DCB: How to Engineer your way out of a poor architecture decision!

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 02:29:12 +0000

I recently gave a presentation to the New Zealand Network Operators Group (NZNOG) 2011 conference on “Data Centre 3.0”. During my research over the last 8 months coupled with the fact checking I had been following up during the creation of the slides, I kept asking myself:

"Would we need all these protocols if we, as an industry, had made better technology implementation decisions?"

I understand the background and requirements for some of the different technology proposals, particularly Layer 2 Multi-path and the various Data Centre Bridging (DCB) QoS standards, but I cant help but feel that we are trying to bring features of the higher layer protocols down into Layer 2.