Network-Design

The complexity required for robustness, often goes against robustness

The complexity required for robustness, often goes against robustness

In the past few months we have seen major outages from United Airlines, the NYSE, and the Wall Street Journal. With almost 5,000 flights grounded, and NYSE halting trading the cost …

Network Design — Keeping it simple

Network Design — Keeping it simple

Since the dawn of time people have skirted best practice and banged together networks, putting the proverbial square peg in the esoteric round hole. For example, new vendor XYZ’s …

Cisco Nexus 2000: A Love/Hate Relationship

Cisco Nexus 2000: A Love/Hate Relationship

My feelings towards the Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX) are hardly a secret. The myriad of design choices and platform limitations present engineers with some rather difficult …

BGP Essentials – The Art of Path Manipulation

BGP Essentials – The Art of Path Manipulation

Most enterprise networks use BGP to peer with their Internet Service Providers if they want to be multi-homed. Many factors come into play when determining how traffic should flow, …

Using /31 subnets for point-to-point interfaces

Using /31 subnets for point-to-point interfaces

Recently a “colleague”, I use that term very loosely here, was reviewing my recommendations for changes on his network. Since they’re rather tight on public IP space, and require …