networking
There are 20 entries for the tag networking
An architectural solution to the challenge of IP-address dependency. A rarely mentioned obstacle when attempting to duplicate or migrate enterprise-class applications is IP-dependency. Not just topological dependencies that are easily addressed with dynamic routing and switching protocols in conjunction with a boot script, but internal dependencies – the ones so deeply embedded in the application’s “identity” that to change the IP address is to break the installation and render it useless. These are the applications that, upon asking for an exported image for testing purposes, virtualization experts will tell you is far more efficient...
The quest for truly stateful failover continues… Lightning was the latest cause of an outage at Amazon, this time in its European zones. Lightning, like tornadoes, volcanoes, and hurricanes are often categorized as “Acts of God” and therefore beyond the sphere of control of, well, anyone other than God. Outages or damages caused by such are rarely reimbursable and it’s very hard to blame an organization for not having a “plan” to react to the loss of both primary and secondary power supplies due to intense lightning strikes. The odds of a lightning strike are pretty high in the...
Making the case for a stateless infrastructure model. cloud computing appears to have hit a plateau with respect to infrastructure services. We simply aren’t seeing even a slow and steady offering by providers of the infrastructure services needed to deploy mature enterprise-class applications. An easy answer as to why this is the case can be found in the fact that many infrastructure services while themselves commoditized are not standardized. That is, while the services are common to just about every data center infrastructure the configuration, policies and APIs are not. But this is somewhat analogous to applications,...
We focus a lot on encouraging developers to get more “ops” oriented, but seem to have forgotten networking pros also need to get more “apps” oriented. Most networking professionals know their relevant protocols, the ones they work with day in and day out, that many of them are able to read a live packet capture without requiring a protocol translation to “plain English”. These folks can narrow down a packet as having come from a specific component from its ARP address because they’ve spent a lot of time analyzing and troubleshooting network issues. And...
World IPv6 Day is June 8. We’re ready, how about you?
World IPv6 day, scheduled for 8 June 2011, is a global-scale test flight of IPv6 sponsored by the Internet Society. On World IPv6 Day, major web companies and other industry players will come together to enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. The goal is to motivate organizations across the industry — Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies — to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 address space runs out.
This is more than a marketing...
Turns out that ‘unassailable’ economic argument for public cloud computing is very assailable The economic arguments are unassailable. Economies of scale make cloud computing more cost effective than running their own servers for all but the largest organisations. Cloud computing is also a perfect fit for the smart mobile devices that are eating into PC and laptop market. -- Tim Anderson, “Let the Cloud Developer Wars Begin” Ah, Tim. The arguments are not unassailable and, in fact, it appears you might be guilty of having tunnel vision – seeing only the list price and forgetting...
Variable latency is a Very Bad Thing™ – that’s why we build core networks based on hardware, not software. One of the key components to a successful scaling strategy is recognizing when more (or less) capacity is required and then acting upon that information. We call cloud and auto-scaling “on-demand” but in reality it’s more the case that we’re taking action based on historical data; on the past five or ten minutes of performance and load on a given resource. Ultimately this requires some predictive capabilities, either of systems or people. Based on data regarding the...
Migration is not going to happen overnight and it’s going to require simultaneous support for both IPv4 and IPv6 until both sides of the equation are ready.
Making the switch from IPv4 to IPv6 is not a task anyone with any significant investment in infrastructure wants to undertake. The reliance on IP addresses of infrastructure to control, secure, route, and track everything from simple network housekeeping to complying with complex governmental regulations makes it difficult to simply “flick a switch” and move from the old form of addressing (IPv4) to the new (IPv6). This reliance is spread up and...
The importance of context in solving the problems created by tying web applications to deeply rooted local metaphors (IP addresses). The relationship between IP addresses and web applications to most end-users is much like the metaphorical language of the Tamarians in Star Trek: The Next Generation “Darmok”. It is incomprehensible without the proper foundational concepts; to anyone who lacks the proper context. In the case of IP addresses and web applications that foundation is technological rather than the historical basis of the Tamarian’s metaphorical language. The diseconomy of scale inherent in our reliance on IP addresses...
If your entire data center infrastructure is on one virtualized PC, you're doing it wrong. Where's F5 The comparison between the power of a modern PC and a 1960's mainframe is often made in conjunction with a smug "look how far we've come" look. ...
Back in the day when I was a technical architect and actually wrote code (yes, they did let me do that once) I got into a discussion with the rest of my team about the impact of our code on performance. I was saying white-space was evil because it can unnecessarily increase the number of packets necessary to transfer data. I wanted to go through the code (mostly JavaScript and HTML output) and reduce the white-space to make application...
I'm going to give you an engine low to the ground. An extra-big oil pan that'll cut the wind underneath you. That'll give you more horsepower. I'll give you a fuel line that'll hold an extra gallon of gas. I'll shave half an inch off you and shape you like a bullet. When I get you primed, painted and weighed... ...
IPv6 was supposed to eliminate NAT (Network Address Translation). But in order to make the transition from IPv4 reasonable and less painful, it's being added to IPv6. It's intended use in being included in IPv6 is to create gateways that bridge between IPv6 and IPv4 while the transition occurs. The IETF is not thrilled however. It's description of how it feels about NAT and the necessity to include it make it sound like school-children forced to allow that kid to play in their game of kickball. And then they put him in far right field. And I mean...
Been wondering what the impact of Web 2.0 on the network might be? Click on over to this Articulate presentation and find out! You'll discover how Web 2.0 applications and its associated technologies affect the network, and what you can do about it.
Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,Web 2.0,networking,application delivery,challenges,presentation
I recently made a passing remark about the value of being able to write the code for a linked list. The night before Don and I had been arguing with our oldest son about whether he should be using a stack or a linked list to implement a Java version of Freecell, hence data structures had been on my mind. Because he, like many college students (and graduates) today, hasn't had the proper instruction in the basics of these data structures he's somewhat at a loss to understand why a linked list is, in fact, a better solution...
The role of "application delivery expert" is really coming into its own of late, along with the understanding that the traditional siloed approach to management of applications in IT no longer makes sense. TechTarget :: How networking professionals can prove their worth Jim Metzler [vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates] recently worked with NetQoS to survey more than 175 NOC and non-NOC IT professionals about how the evolving role of the NOC affects both network and IT professionals. Metzler moderated several sessions at Interop that had...
Tony Bourke has a fun little post on "Gotchas of Load Balancing" that really end up being your fault. Sorta. All very true and common mistakes that many people have made when configuring load balancers. But that got me thinking - and laughing - about a couple of "gotchas" that were my own fault back in the Network Computing lab. When Bits Don't Match You cannot plug a 10/100 port into a GigE only port and expect things to work. Really. One of the core routers in our lab had a GigE only blade and for some reason...
Like many people, I scour the Internet using Google Alerts that focus on keywords pertinent to my employer's business. Just this morning a digest from Google searching for the term "application delivery" landed in my inbox with an interesting job title: Application Delivery Support Analyst. My first thought was "Hey, that's cool!" I haven't seen such a title before and I got a little excited thinking that perhaps application delivery was finally coming into its own. Then I read the requirements and job description. Technical Skill sets Experience using SQL/ PL-SQL, SQLServer and Oracle to identify and...
It's been a month of imagining a lot of changes in the way we think about application delivery networks. Imagining unmatched performance, manageability of a system that's both green as in cash as well as in grass, and intelligence beyond what is currently available in most of today's application delivery controllers.
It's been a long road to get here, but it's finally arrived: a bladed, chassis-based application delivery controller from F5.
That's right - bladed and modular and with all the flexibility and intelligence you've come to expect from F5 combined with performance that's counted in the millions of transactions per...
The importance of an application ready network I've been talking a lot about how AJAX and SOA impact the network of late, specificially focusing on the increase in traffic - both the amount of data and frequency of requests. Saturday night I was reminded of how important a properly tuned network can be to applications, especially those based on AJAX. TimeWarner Cable, our only choice in broadband providers, has thoughtfully reconfigured its network as part of a consolidation in the midwest. That shouldn't affect me, it's mostly about routing and such, right? That's what I thought, but it's...
