I was at FutureNet Expo in Boston last week where I saw a very jarring and interesting presentation made by John Day, a professor at Boston University. If you’d like to take a look at the presentation, you can find it here. John has been involved with some fairly significant projects that were responsible for the Internet we have today. He is also founding member of the Pouzin Society, an organization named for Louis Pouzin, the father of the datagram and designer of the first packet communications network. John and the Pouzin Society’s assertion is that it has been known for some time the Internet as it exists today is not properly built to scale and the backup plan is not going to be much better. Let’s examine why he and a few other folks in the know think this is true. Read more…
jason Featured, Network News bgp, internet, lisp
So you’d have to be living under a rock (or else have a real life) not to see the coverage today on the Unified Computing System (UCS). I’m not going to go over specifications nor any of the technical aspects of what it does or does not do, I just want to ask… What the hell, Cisco? Why do we need another server platform? I have some ideas on what this is all about. Read more…
jason Featured, Network News cisco systems, ucs
There’s been a lot of brouhaha lately about the fragility of the Internet. IP addresses are running out, silly folks are breaking BGP, routers are running out of resources… for how important this little thing we call the Internet is, it’s kinda freaky. You may or may not be aware, but these three problems I detailed could be addressed by a protocol that is making it’s way into the world called Location/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). Aside from the unfortunate acronym that it shares with the ancient programming language also called LISP, this is a pretty promising idea. Basically what it boils down to (and I’m over simplifying) is that it’s kind of like the layer 2 Ethernet methodology of tag stacking or Q-in-Q but for layer 3 IP traffic between autonomous networks. Read more…
jason Featured, Service Provider bgp, internet, lisp
Sometimes I’m freaked out and sometimes I’m not. We’ve been through this before, right? It’s just the classic IPv4 exhaustion scare. I’m talking back when the IANA and the RIRs used to give away classful network allocations like they were Tootsie Rolls at an Independence Day parade. Back before NAT and before IPv6 was even ratified, the fear was here. So what’s different this time? Is it real? I think there are different factors that make it more of a threat of being legit this time.
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jason Featured, Service Provider iana, internet, ipv4 exhuastion, rir
I don’t know if any of you are getting the same vibe lately but I’m hearing more and more from my colleagues about the service providers they work for transitioning from Cisco to Juniper routers. With reports like Cisco service provider sales slipping 20%, I’ve been thinking about some of the reasons why I see Cisco having a little bit less of a foothold and possibly even losing ground with some service providers. I’ve witnessed this as it has gone down over the years and I think there are a lot of reasons why Juniper is poised and ready in the right place, at the right time. Here’s what it looks like from an engineer’s perspective.
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jason Featured, Service Provider cisco systems, juniper networks, Service Provider
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