“Finally, I do not think the economic case is settled. The thing to bear in mind is that service providers operate their DCs as profit centers (its what they do), which is different from most enterprises, which operate their data centers as costs centers (support what they do). This is an important distinction, because the it guides how organizations fund and invest in their IT infrastructure—for the former you optimize you data center to maximize revenue generation capability, for the latter, you optimize to minimize expense. If you are looking to drive revenue, the only hurdle is to show you can effectively monetize the investment—give me $1.00 and I will give you a $1.50 back in a meaningful period of time. If you are looking to optimize for expenses, its a bit more challenging—while there is no inherent limit to how much revenue you can generate, this is a natural limit to how much money you can save (you cannot drive costs below 0). Often, if you have sunk cost in infrastructure that is otherwise up and running well, the best course of action is to do nothing—I find that if you are going to make an “invest-to-save” argument to a customer, you better have some solid, empirical data to back it up. The reality is that all this SDN stuff might end up being amazingly cool and useful but not really do anything meaningful for TCO. In recent history, both cloud and server virtualization were introduced with much heralded costs savings. As we have gained experience with these technologies, we have found them quite useful, but the economic angle has not always played out as expected.”
—Cisco Blog » Blog Archive » Final Thoughts on the Open Networking Summit
April 2012
“A web company might do really well with thirty people and a few million dollars in revenue. To get to a thousand people (big enough for an IPO, say), it will need to transform both the product and the way it’s sold. And in between the size it is now (which is working) and the size necessary for the public offering, there’s a dead zone. This is a leap, not a stroll.”
—Seth’s Blog: What’s the right size? The quantum mechanics of growth…
“Piston Cloud Computing Inc., an OpenStack based enterprise cloud infrastructure vendor, announced a new open source project that will let CloudFoundry run on top of OpenStack. Essentially, Piston Cloud will develop, distribute and support a BOSH CPI for OpenStack. First it will bring this capability to be part of Piston Enterprise OS and submit for consideration as OpenStack incubation project.”
—CloudFoundry On OpenStack: PistonCloud Makes It A Reality
“The following conclusion to me is incorrect: Google built internal servers and switches and they are using OpenFlow and therefore the companies that build servers and switches will be under enormous pressure from the network DIY movement and most likely will go out of business.
I think the following conclusion is correct: Google built a network that is adaptable to the compute requirements of their business.” —
I think the following conclusion is correct: Google built a network that is adaptable to the compute requirements of their business.” —
Compute Conundrum for Vendors « SIWDT
Bingo. It’s not about the network. It’s about getting the damn thing out of the way.
(via abnerg)
“Akaros is an open source, GPL-licensed operating system for manycore architectures. Our goal is to provide support for parallel and high-performance applications and to scale to a large number of cores.”
—Akaros Home Page
“- Google’s biggest risk isn’t a direct competitor. Startups and incumbents who’ve tried to create better search engines have barely cut into Google’s market share. Google’s primary risk – and they seem to know this – is that they are no longer relevant when people find content through social sites, and where an ever increasing portion of the web is uncrawlable.”
—Incumbents die due to irrelevance or ineptitude - Chris Dixon
“All of these media are conduits, they are tools that human beings use to waste time or communicate or calculate or engage or learn. Behind each of the tools is a person. Do you have a story to tell that person? An engagement or a benefit to offer them?”
—Seth’s Blog: Do you have a people strategy?
“Imagine you have this Packet-Tracer functionality NETWORK WIDE – that’s right, network wide. Imagine wanting to test how a change may affect the network campus wide or enterprise or debugging an issue where a packet doesn’t reach its destination. Within a SDN, this becomes possible. This was actually eye opening for me in terms of looking at the product development and testing of software based solutions. His team at Stanford is already well underway on developing these types of tools for the Stanford campus network. Imagine specifying a flow in a simple UI, clicking submit, and the output quickly showing where the dropped packet is in a muilt-node network. The output may show the error is with the ACL on Router 5 port 3. Well, you really don’t have to imagine this because you can go to Stanford and see these types of developments.”
—The Future of Networking and the Network Engineer - by Jason Edelman (@jedelman8)
“This is an area where I think the advent of the programmable server-based controller is a big deal. It changes the customer power dynamic, putting the cloud architects and the programmers in the driver’s seat, effectively placing the network under their control. (Jason Edelman has begun thinking about what the rise of SDN means for the network engineer.) In this model, the network eventually gets subsumed under the broader rubric of computing and becomes just another flexible piece of cloud infrastructure.”
—Cisco Not Going Anywhere, but Changes Coming to Networking | Twilight in the Valley of the Nerds
“
The real lesson: Google as a medium for launching an attack against others
Then I realized: This is a technique that can be used to launch a denial of service attack against a website hosted on Amazon (or even elsewhere). The steps:
1. Gather a large number of URLs from the targeted website. Preferably big media files (jpg, pdf, etc)
2. Put these URLs in a Google feed, or just put them in a Google Spreadsheet
3. Put the feed into a Google service, or use the image(url) command in Google spreadsheet
4. Sit back and enjoy seeing Google launching a Slashdot-style denial of service attack against your target.
What I find fascinating in this setting is that Google becomes such a powerful weapon due to a series of perfectly legitimate design decisions. First, they separate completely their index from the URLs that they fetch for private purposes. Very clean and nice design. The problem? No caching. Second, Google is not doing lazy evaluation in the feeds but tries to pre-fetch them to be ready and fresh for the user. The problem? Google is launching its Feedfetcher crawlers again and again. Combine the two, and you have a very, very powerful tool that can generate untraceable denials of service attacks.
” —The Google attack: How I attacked myself using Google Spreadsheets and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill | A Computer Scientist in a Business School
NYC OpenData: Help develop the plan for NYC government to unlock its data →
nycopendata.tumblr.com
NYC Open Data Policy Hack Day Saturday, May 19, 2012 at 11:00 AM (ET) REGISTER HERE
NYC recently enacted Local Law 11 of 2012, which mandates citywide open data in machine-readable formats through a centralized, publicly accessible web site. The NYC Open Data portal was launched in…
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Smart.
It’s with some excitement I see that the ONF has publicly released the OF-CONFIG specification to precious little fanfare. The head-spinner (in a positive sense) for me is that it includes a nice little RFC 2119-style MUST statement making NETCONF mandatory:
[…] OF-CONFIG1.0 requires that devices supporting OF-CONFIG 1.0 MUST implement NETCONF protocol as the transport. This in turn implies as specified by NETCONF specification that OpenFlow Capable Switches supporting OF-CONFIG1.0 must implement SSH as a transport protocol
” —Capital Letters Galore as The ONF Extends their SDN to Embrace NETCONF and YANG « On Network Management—
Smart.
“After all, value (as in “money that your vendors extract from you”) almost never “magically” disappears from the stack. It simply moves somewhere else, in some cases making you pay more dearly than before.”
—Removing intelligence from the network kills value « Telecom Occasionally
“
At Interop Las Vegas 2012, Dell will demonstrate new SDN-based solutions showcasing the ease with which customers can virtualize their infrastructures and enable multi-platform orchestration and multi-tenancy.
As part of this, Dell also announced interoperability with Big Switch Networks Open SDN ™ architecture. Big Switch Networks delivers cloud networking solutions based on open standards such as OpenFlow, providing customers more networking choices within the SDN ecosystem.
” —Dell Strengthens Virtual Network Architecture Portfolio to Help Customers Deliver Results Faster | Dell
“When you sell a want, you have to work harder, you must seduce the market, because wants are fickle, picky and not easily bullied.”
—Seth’s Blog: Needs and wants are often confused
