In the new world of networking, you can program your network.  You can make it do whatever you want.  Even your business applications can program your network.   Have you heard this before?  If so, you aren’t alone.  Well, before you let business applications program the network, how about starting somewhere a little less frightening?  Here is a good use case for network programmability that I thought about during the ThousandEyes presentation while at Network Field Day 6.  It combines ThousandEyes Private Agents and Cisco’s onePK.

In Part 1, I talked about how OpenFlow could commoditize hardware in the network visibility fabric market.  In this post, I’ll focus on intelligent network load balancing.

Long overdue, but here are some slides from the Open Networking Summit that happened back in April 2013.  These were presented by an architect on the Azure team.  Fully relevant given some discussion happening at the SDDC today.

Absolutely, but I’m not going to say what you think.  I’m going to shift from talking about the traditional network or network virtualization solutions that have been getting all of the attention lately.  There are still companies out there building new products that leverage black box vertically integrated hardware and software.  The two markets that could lose out to commodity hardware are network visibility fabrics and intelligent network load balancing.  In this post, I’ll focus on visibility fabrics and save the latter for my next post.

VMware’s NSX officially launched just two weeks ago.  Since the launch, the media has focused on the VMware and Cisco relationship and where that may end up in the future.  That also includes me.  I wrote my own take that was recently published by TechTarget on the impact NSX will have on the Cisco/VMware relationship, but when you look at the industry as a whole, it’s more than that.  If we take a step back, it’s not about just VMware and Cisco.  If we use stereotypes (good or bad) in the networking space, Cisco falls into the traditional physical network or incumbent category and VMware falls into the emerging network virtualization category.

Harry Quakenboss made an interesting comment on a previous post of mine a few days ago.  He noted that Big Switch has been pretty quiet in terms of their outbound marketing.  He is absolutely right and I also commented back to him, I actually remember thinking a few times over the past 18 months when startups would launch or get acquired, they usually went through a quiet period when it came to social media and outbound marketing.  That makes perfect sense --- so what is going on with Big Switch?

Many focus on the lack of visibility in network virtualization environments. It's time for more concrete conversations in this area.   The statements around visibility are usually too broad After a quick search, I found that Riverbed’s Cascade network performance management (NPM) solution already supports VXLAN and I’m sure what they offer will only get better.  That means they can let you know what applications are being used within the overlay tunnels.  A demo of the solution is below.