AUTOMATION Stories
5G Transforms Vertical Industries
Published on: 2019-09-25
With more and more 5G networks up and running every month, and commercial 5G services now available in multiple markets, mobile operators are turning their attention to seeking out new business opportunities that can help deliver the best return on their investments and make the most of their ...
Rubrik, NetApp Catapult Data Management to the Cloud
Published on: 2019-09-24
Rubrik and NetApp have teamed up to integrate Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform with NetApp’s enterprise-grade storage platform, StorageGRID, bundling backup software and storage that is purpose-built for cloud. The partnership will offer NetApp customers protection of their ...
Samsung Networks explores new 5G enterprise use cases
Published on: 2019-09-24
Samsung Networks may not be the most well-known business within the South Korean conglomerate’s entire organization, but it has been going strong for about 40 years, beginning in the Korean market before expanding. RCR Wireless News spoke to Samsung Networks’ VP of Networks Strategy & Marketing ...
5G to power Los Angeles smart building
Published on: 2019-09-24
With help from Connectivity Wireless Solutions, Coretrust Capital Partners is employing 5G to transform its downtown Los Angeles tower into a smart building. The transformation, which includes a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) comprised of 317 multi-band antennas and 20 software defined remotes ...
Dissecting Microsoft’s ‘Discovery’ of Firstline Workers
Published on: 2019-09-19
By Michael FinneranThe mobile field is rife with meaningful examples of business process automation. Can Microsoft be a factor?
Cisco spreads ACI to Microsoft Azure, multicloud and SD-WAN environments
Published on: 2019-09-18
Cisco is significantly spreading its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology to help customers grow and control hybrid, multicloud and SD-WAN environments. ACI is Cisco’s flagship software-defined networking (SDN) data-center package, but it also delivers the company’s Intent-Based ...
HPE's vision for the intelligent edge
Published on: 2019-09-06
It’s not just speeds and feeds anymore, it's intelligent software, integrated security and automation that will drive the networks of the future. That about sums up the networking areas that Keerti Melkote, HPE's president, Intelligent Edge, thinks are ripe for innovation in the next few years. ...
Nornir offers Python-based network-management automation
Published on: 2019-04-26
Nornir, an automation framework that uses Python directly, provides an alternative to other automation frameworks that use their own domain-specific language (DSL). The framework can dispatch tasks to devices and nodes, deal with inventory when the user has host information, and support the ...
What is infrastructure as code? A big step up from server scripting
Published on: 2019-03-07
If you have ever had to provision and configure a server, you know the pain it can bring. Take the process of configuring hardware connections, the software stack, and their interdependencies, and then multiply that across however many servers you are deploying—you are talking days and days of ...
Network Break 253: Arista CloudVision Ingests Configs From Third-Party Gear; Cisco Adds Azure To Cloud ACI
Published on: 2019-09-23
Take a Network Break! Arista Networks upgrades its CloudVision management software to accept configuration information from third-party devices, Cisco adds Azure support for its Cloud ACI and APIC controller, and Marvell completes its acquisition of transceiver manufacturer Aquantia. Datadog ...
Juniper NXTWORK Hack-a-Thon
Published on: 2019-09-23
Over the past couple of years, Juniper has hosted a Hackathon at start of NXTWORK. This event is a great way to meet new people, start to get in the groove of challenging technology and just have some fun. When you register for NXTWORK, there is an option to sign up for the Hackathon. In 2017 we ...
Opinionated Automation: Packaged, Extensible & Closed Systems
Published on: 2019-09-20
Network engineers for the last twenty years have created networks from composable logical constructs, which result in a network of some structure. We call these constructs “OSPF” and “MPLS”, but they all inter-work to some degree to give us a desired outcome. Network vendors have contributed to ...
Palo Alto Networks an Eight-Time Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader
Published on: 2019-09-19
In any high tech industry, it’s not often that a company gets to define a new market, and then continue to expand and reshape it for more than a decade. It’s even less common in our highly competitive cybersecurity space. Maybe that’s why this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls ...
Formalisation of Automation: WIP
Published on: 2019-09-17
For the last five or six years, I’ve not really done any networking and have focussed on software, automation and the mechanisation of processes so that they may be manifested as network driving workflows. I try to keep up with networking technology and working for Juniper has really made me ...
Replacing a Network Element Config System with Git
Published on: 2019-09-09
In this post I’ll explore replacing the heart of a network operating system’s configuration mechanism with the software developers take on version control. It can be argued that network operating systems, or at least good ones, already have a version control system. It’s that very system that ...
Real World APIs: Snagging a Global Entry Interview
Published on: 2019-08-07
As my new job will have me traveling a bit more often, I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Global Entry (which is similar to TSA PreCheck but works for international travel as well). A few days after submitting my application and payment, I was conditionally approved. The next step was to ...
Connection Restored
Published on: 2019-08-02
I was embarrassed to realize recently that it’s been well over two years since my last blog post. Life has a way of getting away from you, I suppose. But I’ve decided to try and reboot the blog, and hopefully get back to writing regularly. Let me kick things off my sharing what I’ve been up to ...
3 Tools for Getting VMs From Your Datacenter to the AWS Cloud
Published on: 2019-07-23
Here’s a simple scenario: you have some Virtual Machines (VMs) in your on-premises environment, likely in VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. You want to either fully migrate some or all of those VMs to the AWS Cloud or you want to copy a gold image to the AWS Cloud so you can launch compute ...
The Achilles Heel of the API
Published on: 2019-06-18
I’ve been developing yet more automation recently, and I’ve been hitting two major stumbling blocks that have had a negative impact on my ability to complete the tooling. When APIs were first made available, the documentation from many vendors was simply incomplete; it seemed that the ...
Cisco takes learning to the Next Level
Published on: 2019-06-10
Many of us in the industry have gone through many of the various certification programs out there and many of us started with the Cisco CCNA. I remember back to 2008 when I first got my CCNA, it took me 2 attempts to pass and I was impressed with the knowledge and confidence that I gained from ...
Automation Workflow Patterns
Published on: 2019-06-07
Workflows vary from seriously simple to notoriously complex and as humans, we might not even consciously observe the subtleties of what a workflow comprises of. Workflows are the source of control semantics and comprise of many elements, some obvious some not so. This post is a primer to help ...
CLI Still Sucks for Automation
Published on: 2019-05-09
Using network CLI for automation has always been fragile. But it keeps surprising me with the way it breaks. This time, it was a combination of Ansible, Arista, and used as a config command. I work for Extreme Networks. I would like to be clear that I am not in any way picking on Arista here. ...
Migration Strategy: Moving From MPLS/LDP to Segment Routing
Published on: 2019-03-21
MPLS core networks that use Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) are common in SP core networks and have served us well. So, the thought of pulling the guts out of the core is pretty daunting and invites the question why you would want to perform open-heart surgery on such critical infrastructure. ...
Cisco Live – Network Building Blocks for IoT
Published on: 2019-03-07
Cisco Live happened in Barcelona end of January, and as usual I am a little late with my blog posts about it. Like the last two years I was invited to join the group of technology experts for Tech Field Day Extra, with various presentations covering a number of new and improved Cisco ...
SnapRoute - Is there something new happening in networking?
Published on: 2019-03-04
The launch (or relaunch depending on your opinion of when they started and on what they were building verse what they are doing now) of SnapRoute was an interesting event to be able to participate in. SnapRoute presented at Network Field Day 20 as part of the launch of their Cloud Native Network ...
Multi-Cloud Network Environments
Published on: 2018-10-03
In a previous article, we went through an introduction to Cloud Computing and defined what a “cloud” is, its characteristics, and also deployment models. In that article, we mentioned that the initial reaction of enterprises to the concept of the cloud was that of fear; however, what we see now ...
Intro into Fortinet WLAN configuration
Published on: 2018-09-30
Simple, secure, sensible – Koroush Saraf, Fortiner VP of Product Management, emphasized these words in his recent MFD3 presentations. While any vendor can claim their products share these attributes, it’s usually the complexity of workflow that reveals the betrayal of one or all of these ...
Automated Testing & Intent Verification for Network Operations
Published on: 2017-10-23
The most important part of writing quality software is testing. Writing unit tests provide assurance the changes you’re making aren’t going to break anything in your software application. Sounds pretty great, right? Why is it that in networking operations we’re still mainly using ping, ...
Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible
Published on: 2017-09-06
The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in ...
Using the Ansible ios_config Module
Published on: 2017-05-03
I get asked often on how to perform specific network automation tasks with Ansible. There were a few questions recently pertaining to the module within Ansible core, so I decided to record a video to show different options you have when using it to deploy global configuration commands on IOS ...
Self Driving Cars and Network Automation
Published on: 2017-04-22
Last year at Interop, there was a great mini-conference dedicated to the DevOps for Networking community. In that session, I kicked off the day with a general view of where the industry was with respect to the intersection of DevOps and networking with a focus on network automation. One of the ...
SDN Lesson #2 – Introducing Faucet as an OpenFlow Controller
Published on: 2017-03-07
Welcome back to a new article about SDN - this time introducing an OpenFlow controller called Faucet, developed as a RYU application by New Zeeland Research and Education (REANNZ), Waikato University and Victoria University. In this article, I am not going to write about Faucet's architecture ...