Om mani padme hum (posted by gins, 9 Dec 2013)

Decades ago, when I traveled through Tibet, I was told that spinning the prayer wheel would add to the overall happiness in the world.  Needless to say, we spent a lot of time on the trails through the mountains spinning wheels.  

Fast-forward to 2013, and an analyst I know recently sent over a great diagram he picked up from Linkedin.  It is probably the best characterization of the sometimes conflicting directions that those of us in technology face.   

Do we focus on what we love to do, what we are good at, or what pays well?  Are we penniless poets or Netserfs?   Here is the problem.... Very few of us have a job where we experience all three at once, and when we do, it is sometimes fleeting, subject to budgets, changes in the market, or changes in management.   Boredom, dreaming, and second-guessing the past and the future fill the time.  

The solution?  When looking back decades from now, focusing on what you love will make all the difference in the world and to those around you.   We probably need more of this in the valley, and a few more prayer wheels may not be a bad idea.

The Ties That Bind - Redux (posted by gins, 23 Oct 13)

Last September I wrote about the importance of the Donner Pass in connecting the nation, first as a Native American trail, later the route of the Transcontinental Railroad, followed by the auto, the phone, and finally the Internet.  I've always been fascinated by the role the railroad has played building this nation, and last month I visited the final stop of the Station to Station tour, an art and music train that I equate to a 'Burning Man on Rails.'  The Oakland stop was interesting for a number of reasons, one of which was use of the old 16th Street Station.   Think of the station as node on the Iron Internet.  The decaying neoclassical interior was a great juxtaposition to the modern visuals and vibe, and hopefully, at some point the building will be put to good use. 

But not for transportation, as the platform at the station is a stub, a victim of the Interstate Highway System which bypassed the building less than 100 feet to the north.  Few at the event were probably aware of the role the rail played in the growth of the Bay Area, including the recently celebrated 150th anniversary of what is now known as Caltrain, the first regular passenger service west of the Mississippi.  And it was sad that the actual train had to park a few miles distant at the nearest siding.  

An even more important milestone was celebrated during the same week - the 'first shovel' on the proposed high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  When complete sometime after 2027, other than the Internet, the line will be the quickest way of enabling face-to-face interaction between the two cities.  Impressive that a century-and-a-half technology can still hold its own against highway and air travel wrt time and efficiency.  For those in Europe, Japan, and more recently China, this comes as no surprise.  But here in America, it is one small step forward.

 

Broadband: Lifeblood, not Luxury (from Extreme Talk, September 26, 2012)

I don’t consider myself a railroad buff, but I still have fascination in watching a train of a hundred double-high Conex containers making its way through the desert, stumbling upon an old switching yard, or following an old mountain grade. Maybe because boxcars, switchyards, and rails remind me of a life-size packet switched network. A few months ago, I was hiking at Donner Pass, near Lake Tahoe in California. For those who only remember the name from the infamous Donner Party, the pass has played a critical role throughout much of California’s history.

Old Lincoln Highway under railroad; US 40 in background

The pass was the only viable way through the Sierra Nevada range for hundreds of miles. First the Indians, and then decades of emigrants heading west braved its slopes and weather. This followed by the Transcontinental Railroad and the old Lincoln Highway. Later still, Federal 40, the Donner Pass Road, was constructed. This road still offers a more peaceful alternative to most people’s experience with the pass today, Interstate 80. Less visible than any of these engineering works are the cable markers scattered up the hillside, the sign of buried copper and fiber.

What the railroad meant to people a century ago, commerce and connectivity, is reflected in the buried fiber of today. And when the railroad, or the interstate highway bypassed a town, commerce dried up and the inhabitants left for greener pastures. Remember Radiator Springs in the Pixar film ‘Cars’? It is still happening. Garden City, a town in Kansas, is in danger of losing their daily passenger service after over a century. Yes, there are economics at play, and yes, there are roads and I’m sure they’ll keep their local McDonald’s, but this story is being played out hundreds of times in hundreds of small towns, not only in the United States but throughout the world.

So how does this relate to buried fiber? Cost-effective, broadband connectivity is no longer a nice-to-have for both competitive and social reasons, it’s a must-have, just like the railroads or highways. Get connected and the community flourishes, often in unexpected ways. Get bypassed and wither up and blow away.

And it is not 300 Kbps either, a speed that some government studies over the last decade attempted to characterize as “broadband”. Just as a locomotive is of little use without tracks, one laptop per child is of little use unless there is bandwidth. Indeed, educators are suggesting that the typical elementary school will require upwards of 1 Gbps to the outside world. At Extreme we’re in the thick of dozens of these deployments, but sadly they end at the school office. To use highway analogy, a six-lane freeway connects the classrooms, but it is a rutted old dirt road that connects the school to the rest of the world.

I applaud the recent Obama administration initiative that takes a new look at solving this disconnect. Although the executive order only established a working group, it tackles the problem not in terms of technology, or what to expect from Comcast or AT&T, but with regard to rights-of-way. Remember – this was the same kickstart the government provided to the railroad companies in the 1800s through land grants, and the government still controls nearly 30% of the land in the United States. A second initiative created U.S. Ignite, which focuses on developing broadband and software-defined networking applications through a public-private partnership.  Today, we announced our membership in U.S. Ignite, and in November we will host a major event in North Carolina that speaks to the impact that these types of initiatives can have on local economies.  Stay tuned! 

At Extreme, our watchword is ‘Software Defines the Network,’ with the first part of our strategy announced over the last few months. Going forward, we expect to be able to play a key role in driving innovation in this space. With a little luck, we might even help pave some of those dirt roads.

SC12 - A Big Switch for Big Data in a Big Truck (from Extreme Talk, November 19, 2012)

A year ago, we introduced the BlackDiamond X8 to the HPC community at SC11 in Seattle… a Big Switch for Big Data.  This was before our switch was generally available, but its scalability, low latency, and green credentials resonated with attendees spanning education, government, and Fortune 500.  How times have changed.

Darius Goodall, mastermind behind the Extreme Networks Truck, shows the Big Rack to some visitors.

In eight short months, we’ve deployed at NCSA’s Blue Waters, Petro China,  Sinopec, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK for genomic research, and the London Internet Exchange, just to name a few.  Our BlackDiamond X8 has been recognized by the Lippis Report as the fastest, lowest latency, and lowest power modular data center switch in the world, and it has become the core of our comprehensive TOR and chassis portfolio.  A portfolio powered end-to-end by our Extreme XOS that reduces TCO and maximizes service availability and predictability.

Building upon our SDN architecture launch last spring, we announced our first set of supported SDN applications in conjunction with our partner Big Switch Networks, while proving our promise of BlackDiamond X8 futureproofing by announcing our 40G and 100G ‘cloud-scale’ interface modules.  These 12 port 40G and 4 port 100G boards offer the ultimate in flexibility for deployment in L2, L3, and flow-heavy SDN environments.

As impressive as our launches and products have been, what really created buzz this time around was our truck… a Big Switch for Big Data in a Big Truck, to be exact.  About a month ago we launched a mobile EBC on a one-year tour across the USA with support from our partners.  We packed it with our data center and campus demos, all delivered from live equipment in the Big Rack. Also a training/seating area, and even a ‘social’ area.  At SC12, we hosted over 2000 attendees, and had in-depth discussions with 200 or so spanning every type of user and every geography.

The Network Liberation Tour continues!

While you may not have made it to SC12, that doesn’t mean that you will not have the opportunity to see the truck. The Liberator, as we call the truck, is in the middle of a year-long tour. We will be visiting most of the larger metropolitan areas in the continental United States and a number of not so major ones too. For more on the tour, including the latest schedule, click here. You are invited!

SDN - Lightweight Switches: Why Now? (from Extreme Talk, March, 26, 2013)

SDN is engendering debate within IT, the likes of which we’ve not seen in a decade or more.  Every week some industry and financial analyst weighs in on the expected winners and losers, their pen shifting valuations a billion dollars at a time.  Most recently, Scott Thompson at FBR Capital stated that the market for routers and switches is at a ‘dead end,’ the ‘end of an era,’ and requires a shift to a ‘software and service-centric business model.’  He then goes on to say that ‘customers will increasingly use more lower-margin white box products.’   Can a switch vendor benefit from this transition and embrace change?

We believe the answer is an emphatic yes. Working with partner Big Switch Networks, we will be offering a lightweight switch with Switch Light, a thin switching platform based on Indigo, part of the open source SDN Floodlight effort.

With Slalom, fast, cost effective SDN just became a downhill run.

Our new product, aligned in theme with our extreme sports skiing culture, is called the Slalom™. The very name fits this type of switch perfectly, as its fast, focused and its purpose is very clear – to take users where they want to go very quickly and cost effectively, with the lightest burden. It is part of our Open Fabric solution.   

The Slalom complements our ExtremeXOS-based stackable and chassis-based switches, now offering customers, enterprise and service provider alike, a combination of ‘hybrid’ mode switches supporting Layer 2, Layer 3, and SDN deployments, as well as lightweight SDN-only leaf switches.  They now have maximum choice by deploying the architecture that best suits their business needs.   In fact, our customers today are beginning to deploy our SDN-capable switches, given that in February of this year we were one of the first switch vendors to productize both OpenFlow and OpenStack in a generally available and supported release.

Now some may call this a “white-box solution” – as much of the speculation about SDN is that it will obsolete hardware investments and even create a market where performance doesn’t matter. However, with today’s news and Extreme Networks SDN network vision, we choose to take an approach that is more likely to happen because it is more pragmatic and deployable. And in the future, the open source Switch Light will lend itself to OS and even application layer enhancements.

Our ultimate goal is to provide our customers with a comprehensive portfolio of data center, campus core, aggregation and access switches, leveraging a rich software foundation, optimized for their business needs, and backed by our global service and support capabilities.

The future is bright and more innovation is to come. Please stay tuned! In the meantime, here is our press release on Slalom.

AVB Thrilled the Radio Star (from Extreme Talk, May 28, 2013)

We’ve recently written about Audio-Video Bridging, or AVB, an evolving set of protocols to converge professional audio and video across Ethernet.  Extreme Networks, with its 1588v2 timing expertise, is a leader in this space, and we’ll be exhibiting as part of the AVnu booth (come see us at Booth 459e) at the upcoming InfoComm show in Orlando June 12-14, 2013.  For those not following the technology, besides seeing use in concert halls, stadiums, theme parks, studios, state-of-the-art multimedia conference rooms, and even high-end home installations, AVB will also support navigation and entertainment over Ethernet in your next car.  Closer to home, I’ve spoken with customers that are looking to AVB to support high-bandwidth engineering workstations.   But it sometimes is worthwhile taking a step back and looking at how we got here, and just how different ProAV was a few short decades ago.

The documentary ‘Sound City’ follows what was probably the best-known analog recording studioover an almost forty year span, from 1969 until it closed in 2011.  Many of the greats – Fleetwood Mac, Pat Benatar, Tom Petty, Foreigner, and even Nirvana all recorded at what looked like nothing more than a warehouse in Van Nuys, California, not far from Hollywood.   Its appeal was the sound quality of the studio itself, as well as a legendary mixing console from Neve.  Bands went in there and played their hearts out, the result mixed onto two-inch magnetic tape.  Sound City’s ‘platinum’ age spanned a ten-year period from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.  But then the world changed.

The advent of digital recording and CDs added a non-linearity to recording.   Tracks could be recorded onto “digital tape,” loaded into a computer, and then mixed and altered using Pro-Tools (called ‘Slow-Tools’ by producers at the time due to the speed of Macs) and other early applications.  You no longer needed to be in the same room at the same time, or even in the same city.  Mouse clicks replaced razor cuts to splice tape and manual punch-ins.  Admittedly, Sound City didn’t see some of this coming, and was late to re-equip.  After Nirvana recorded there in 1991, other grunge bands gravitated to the place, but the end was in sight.  But not all was lost.   The mixing panel was disassembled, moved, and found a new home in Studio 606 courtesy of Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters (and previously with Nirvana).  It is one of the few places where bands can still get together and be bands, even onto magnetic tape.  So where does Ethernet play into this?

The technology has just celebrated its 40^th anniversary - just a bit younger than Sound City.  We’re working with partners who include some of the most influential in the industry – Riedel, Sennheiser, Biamp, Axon, Avid, Harman, andBarco, to name a few.  They are building AVB-equipped mixing boards, microphones, speakers, video processors and pretty much everything else for the audio-visual recording industry.  A decade from now, AVB will be all but universal.  However, I have a new appreciation for how we’ve gotten to this point and the need to preserve a small part of the past.  Long-live Studio 606!

SDN Applications - Where's the Beef? (from Extreme Talk on June, 21, 2013)

Flying off fromCommunicAsia in Singapore and as you’d expect, SDNwas peppered across vendor booths spanning the campus, data center, and service provider spaces.  What was most interesting is that visitors to our booth – government, industrial, educational, and press – were very open in stating that this was the first time they saw in action a practical SDN-delivered application, as opposed to an elevator switch on protocols and the handful of consortia.  Here’s how we did it….

We have partnerships with two OpenFlow controller and application vendors –Big Switch and NEC. As a company, we build the best Ethernet switches in the world, top it off with an open next generation network operating system –ExtremeXOS – and build in hooks to talk with controllers via standard protocols.   Our real focus in the SDN space is on the application, either demonstrating interoperability and deployability with 3^rd parties, or building our own.

Here, we took both approaches.  In the case of NEC, we demonstrated their network virtualization application, a way to simply manipulate via a GUI groups of VMs belonging to a single group within the enterprise, managed at the logical level.   If the underlying topology changes, the controller ensures that existing groups remain intact, freeing the administrator from having to worry about physical connections.   This network virtualization is of course one of the most fundamental SDN-delivered services, but to many in the hall it was new.

Taking it up a notch, we’ve built in QoS APIs into our switches that the Big Switch controller can leverage.  Using an Android tablet, the end user can toggle ‘low’ or ‘high’ quality for video.  The tablet speaks to the controller, and the controller adapts the flows on the Extreme switches in real-time.  The user experience is impressive, and one can imagine this type of control deployed within education, corporations, or as a service provider offering.  Separate from SDN, we demonstrated our physec capabilities and our visitors were doing the math and speculating how a camera could command additional QoS from the network when detecting motion.   We use Hyperglance to visualize the shift in the flows from the ‘low’ to the ‘high’ quality path, and vice-versa, adding additional reality to how the network actually adapts to the user command.

Time and time again we were told that Extreme Networks is at the forefront of shifting SDN as an academic discussion or technical debate to a framework that has practical applications within the network. The science fairs are over, it’s time to get to work with SDN.

Where’s the beef? We’ve got that for you right here!