Network-Design

Halfway through Tom Emmons’ scale-out segment at NFD40, a fellow delegate looked at Arista’s load-balancing slide and said what most of us were thinking… this could have any vendor’s logo on it.

Cisco showed up to NFD40 selling two different pitches in the same session, and nobody on stage reconciled them.

I’ve been building networks for nearly thirty years. I understand leaf-spine fabrics, BGP design, VRF isolation, ECMP, and congestion management.

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 of failure is high.

Since the dawn of time people have skirted best practice and banged together networks, putting the proverbial square peg in the esoteric round hole.

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 decisions.

Most enterprise networks use BGP to peer with their Internet Service Providers if they want to be multi-homed.

Recently a “colleague”, I use that term very loosely here, was reviewing my recommendations for changes on his network.