OpenFlow is, of course, a hot buzzword. It’s the newest, and in my opinion, the most innovative thing to hit data networking since dynamic routing. The ability to programmatically, systematically and potentially dynamically control traffic at the flow level through a network is innovative, exciting and terrifying [to many network engineers and architects] at the same time. Allowing applications to touch the network change behavior is something that many engineers are not terribly comfortable with.

Nancee Waddick - May 5, 2013 One frequent perceived technical problem with FeedBurner is the reduced number of subscribers being reported for the blogs using the service. This is not actually a technical problem with FeedBurner, but by the feed readers and aggregators that report to FeedBurner, as FeedBurner collects and tallies from those partners. Usually this problem is connected with one specific RSS reader or client. -^ Make sure you visit our own website as well Nick Buraglio - Apr 1, 2013

The SDN world is abuzz with the announcement that the OpenDaylight controller came from stealth mode today. Why is this important? Well, SDN and OpenFlow are fractured. It is Mac vs. PC, Beta vs VHS, Coke vs. Pepsi all over again……multiplied by 100x and with a handful of players. Vendor zealots and brand loyalists will nearly always side with their camp. Heck, even I have some biases of personal preference.

Nick Buraglio - Mar 6, 2013 The qfabric stuff seems even more green than the EX series. Perhaps i should give it another look, but I didn’t have the best experience with it in testing. My guess is the mpls support will be about the same as the EX series, but it’s certainly one I did not consider. Thanks, I will give it another once over. EtherealMind - Apr 1, 2013

Lately I’ve been lamenting the fact that there seems to be a lack of options in a very specific product level. Lets say you have a network that looks like this: Right Away you’re limited since you need MPLS and more than 2 10G interfaces. Even more so if you require full support for IPv6 and ISIS. If budget is of any concern, you’re in real trouble. For many, Cisco pricing and smartnet is potentially going to exclude anything reasonable from them.

Nick Buraglio - Mar 6, 2013 Totally agree. Work smarter not harder, it’s a good idea and it makes sense. Is it different? Yup. Is it better? Maybe not now, but eventually it will be. Look at the state of routing hardware in 1995. Now look at it. It was a totally different experience and it was not even a real shift in thinking. 10 years from now we will be saying “remember when we had to touch every device” just like we did with wireless APs not 7-8 years ago.

This week there was a lot of buzz about SDN (as usual). There was alightreading thread that I commented on and a fantastic read by Brent Salisbury about being the steamroller and not the road that got me thinking about OpenFlow and SDN in a way I had not before. All that is old is new again. I remember when internal networks were small and routing protocols were taboo in many internal environments.

[cryptochrome (@cryptochrome)]( “sascha@picchiantano.de”) - Mar 4, 2013 What everybody seems to forget is that actually simple stateful inspection firewalls are the walking dead. Modern firewalls do a lot of inspection at layer 7 (think Palo Alto Networks). I want to see one of those white box Intel boxes push 20 gigabit of application level firewalled traffic. I highly doubt it. And I am also curious how you want to put OpenFlow to use here, when basically every flow would need to be forwarded to the Controller and passed on to the “OpenFlow Firewall” for inspection.

OK, maybe they’re not totally dead, but they’re being demoted. To the mail room. During the course of my career I’ve always had at least some responsibility for firewall and security devices. In those ~15 years, how these boxes are built and function has shifted. From the perspective of my career, there were IOS ACLs (yes, I know, not a firewall), there was the IOS firewall versions and there were software packages such as gauntlet, checkpoint.

Nick Buraglio - Mar 3, 2013 Yes. Yes indeed. [Ryan]( “convention@gmail.com”) - Mar 2, 2013 You just wanted to mention the 100G interface.