Monday, August 3, 2020
VPLS.US 06/24/2011 Relational Investors push to breakup L3
http://vpls.us/?p=752My jaw dropped and I paged through to B2 to see the article about the breakup of L3.
Apparently there is a defense firm called L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. which has a bunch of defense contracts and with the slow down of the wars and the pressure from the democrats to get out of the wars, and the republicans seeking to reduce the deficit and spending on defense projects.... They were planning to break themselves up anyway.
Relational's last effort was to break up a company centered on ITT, breaking up into three different companies.
I don't know a lot about defense contracting firms but, I'm glad it's this L3 rather than the L3 that is buying Global Crossing!!!]]>
VPLS.US 06/23/2011 Teraflops
http://vpls.us/?p=741Cores : 1,536 or 2,304 processor cores per system cabinet
Peak Performance : 12.2 to 20.2 teraflops per system cabinet
Yes, it uses 10Gigabit Ethernet for IO and uses 100Mbit Ethernet between nodes. Had to get Ethernet in there somehow. :)
Wow, 20.2 teraflops.
My dual processor Pentium 4 3.2GHz approx 12 Gigaflops. So the Cray XE6m cabinet is roughly 1,666 times more powerful than the desktop machine that I use today. I think it’s time that I asked for an upgrade. And don’t even think about the laptop, I’m sure the T60 that I use is way less powerful than a desktop.
Here in corporate America, what they haven’t told everybody about the recession is that spending on non essential things have slowly ground to a halt. I’ve bought my own business cards and my own paper / pencils / notebooks, staples and misc stuff for the last 8 years or so. It’s all tax deductible….
But new computers? Well they did a refresh a couple years ago where the bought new computers for the sales force and gave the old ones down to engineering. I never really understood that. A sales person doing e-mail and power points get the newer computers, instead of the people who are REALLY using a computer. At one point I offered to buy my own computer and bring it into the office. They wouldn’t even let me do that… They were afraid when I left I’d steal the company secrets? I don’t know why they think that. I have it all in my head regardless.
Oh, they have started (this last year to buy supplies). AND they restarted our 401k Contributions so I guess it’s getting better. But I hope that Level 3’s computers are better than Global Crossings. :) My tests and scrips on a Cray XE6m would really fly!!!]]>
VPLS.US 06/08/2011 Cisco Startup mentality
http://vpls.us/?p=732So I’m reading a business book. “In search o Excellenceâ€, Lessons from America’s best-run companies. By Thomas J. Peters & Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
They list 8 characteristics of a corporation that’s highly successful
- a bias for action
- close to the customer
- autonomy and entrepreneurship
- productivity through people
- Hands-on value driven.
- Stick to the knitting
- Simple form, lean staff
- Simultaneous loose-tight properties
It really is an interesting book. I’m only like 1/2 of the way through it, but it’s enlightening. I’m looking at my company and wondering what it would take for us to change. With the acquisition coming up I’m sure we are going to be going through lots of changes. That is probably for the better I know many of the groups have stagnated. We’ve become “used to doing it a certain way” Whenever you get “used” to do it one way, it can be awful tough to change to a different way.
How many of these is Cisco doing wrong? As an outsider looking into the company it can be hard for me to see some of these traits, and perhaps the groups I don’t deal with are exhibiting these traits, but I count at lest 4 of the traits they could improve upon.
If john needs my copy have him send me a quick note, I should be done with it in the next week or so. ]]>
VPLS.US 06/06/2011 MEF Eaas?
http://vpls.us/?p=718........
Wheeeezeeeee
.......
WaHahahahahaha
Wahahahahahaha
Dynamic Responsive Ethernet
Description
- What is the problem or service we are trying to solve or provide?
- How large a market?
- What is the value?
- What does MEF need to do?
- Technical spec
- Marketing message
hehehe
- Is it within the scope of MEF or does MEF scope need to change
- Intra-Data Center expands the scope of MEF
The MEF has figured out another way to expand their longevity. Take a convoluted ambiguous technology and add their own little twists on it to make it more confusing and in the long run give them selves the appearance of propriety.
But like all good “for profit” organizations they are trying to increase their product range. Trying to expand their customer base. Trying to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Trying to increase their profit margin.
Wait, did I really say that out loud? Increase their profit margin? Ops… Did it again. Dang.
Perhaps they are reading my blog? I’ve mentioned in the past how bereft of content I felt the MEF was, and I’ve also mentioned how bereft of content the Cloud Computing movement is today. Perhaps, it’s a match made in heaven?
Or, perhaps I’m jealous again that they’ve figured out how to make money from nothing and if I would have seen this sooner, I would have jumped on it myself?
Can two empty movements create something out of nothing? I’m holding my breath in anticipation.
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VPLS.US 05/23/2011 GLBX to add 40 sites
http://vpls.us/?p=682That’s a huge expansion roughly 50% increase in locations covered by their existing EtherSphere product.]]>
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That's a huge ...]]>
On the way, we got to drive “OVER the damn”. That’s the First time I had been on that road since they opened up the bridge. So I knew I was WAY high, but the way they designed the bridge??? I couldn’t see anything. :( The barricades were so high that all I saw was concrete.
Light Reading had sent me many messages, and told me about this new event that they were going to be hosting. Well Heavy Reading was going to sponsor this event concurrent with Interop. So I thought it’d be a good opportunity to hear what heavy reading had to say about cloud computing, get in a couple of vendor sponsored drinks, as well as see all the chaos on the Interop floor. You see I used to be a volunteer for the Interop, way back in 1998, when I worked for Kellogs, I helped the guys build the Interop network and the Noc. I also did customer demonstrations of this NEW pic that Cisco had come out with that allowed us to do VoIP over a 2600 series router, but that’s a whole other story, (One that includes how I met my wife)…
So, I expected this conference to have some heavy hitters, and it did kind of look like it was going to be a technical conference. You know, digging into some of the nuts and bolts of what the different vendors considered to be their cloud offering, and the different protocols and technology that they were using to accomplish this “Cloud thing”. That’s Heavy Readings Gig. Heavy Reading generally puts out very technical papers, that are researched in the industry, and then they charge companies money to read the papers.
Cisco, Juniper, Foundry where all presenting, and I think based upon the people presenting and manning the discussions, they could have gotten technical. HOWEVER, I think Light reading must have had too much influence over the discussions and the questions. This conference had to have been one of the most boiled down “soft” conventions that I’ve ever attended. Now I’ve attended IETF several times and MEF once or twice. I wasn’t even expecting it to be at the MEF level. Good thing I didn’t have my expectations set very high. They weren’t even met. Believe me I don’t consider the MEF to be technical either.
But I did get this cool book.
So I guess one of the things that most confused me was even the lack of a definition of what some of the companies consider to be “cloud”. IMHO Cloud is kind of like Managed Services. Where a company can outsource EVERYTHING to the “cloud” or in other words outsource their “whatever’s” to the cloud. Infrastructure, communications, servers, applications, whatnot. It’s like a big Ethernet switch ;) You know I had to bring it back to the blog somehow.
I expected somebody to stand up and say what a cloud was, nobody really did. I guess it was Ken from foundry, who said it best. Years ago, when he went to talk with Network engineers about designs, they would always draw a big cloud on the whiteboard and then start hooking things to it. He said that’s when they started Cloud computing.
I kept waiting for the conversations to turn technical and it never did. I eventually got bored and left to explore the larger Interop show. Perhaps next time they’ll get more involved in the nuts and bolts? Or if it’s going to be the same old soft shoe I’ll probably skip these from now on.
Interop was good and I did have some drinks on the vendors. I also got to meet Dan Lynch who happened to be at one of the gatherings. Jeannie and I were about to leave and he came over trying to pick up my wife. :) Super nice guy. It was interesting to see him talk with Vincent Cerf at the Interop opening on Tuesday. Guess he’s got some history.
So, draw a VPLS network! I bet money you start by drawing a cloud.
Packet loss can occur when the IGP and LDP aren’t synchronized. If the ISIS adjacency is established before the LDP then it will forward packets down a link that’s essentially a black hone. Or in the other case if the LDP session closes the PE could continue to forward packets at a black hole.
Of course Juniper says
This issue is especially significant for applications such as a core network that does not employ BGP.
- Juniper
ldp-synchronization {
disable;
hold-time seconds;
} - Cisco
Router(config)# router isis
Router(config-router)# mpls ldp sync
Another useful tool in the pursuit of losses or “Carrier Grade” networks.
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And then I explained to him what I was thinking.
Where all of OTV is a single location logically. If OTV site a sends a Ethernet Multicast Frame to the PE. If the PE is part of a VPLS network It’ll see the multicast MAC address and where it would normally do mac learning if it was MAC unicast packet, it won’t because it’s a well known multicast mac address.
So it would Broadcast the frame. Essentially negating any benefit that the OTV was providing. The VPLS would send the frame to both OTV(b) and OTV(c).
The mechanisms in place for VPLS to stop doing this are placed into snooping of the Multicast routing protocol. IGMP snooping and PIM snooping. However, OTV is using ISIS for signaling of traffic over the WAN, and isn’t using IGMP or PIM in the negotiation at all. This means the customer wouldn’t get any benefit from snooping. And he just lost his OTV benefit.
Cisco says in the future they will be able to support OTV without using Multicast. That would fix this problem, but until they support Unicast packets, I’m afraid OTV won’t be able to use L2VPNs for transport of the traffic.
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http://blog.ioshints.info/2011/04/vpls-versus-otv-for-l2-data-center.html]]>
Anyway, with networks becoming more and more heterogeneous, it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibilities to find someone wanting OTV not thinking about a VPLS portion of their network.]]>