Taking control of the last-mile delivery

Managed network service providers (MNSPs) and their particular issues don’t generally keep me awake at night. But in a world of SD WAN disruption and its tendency towards less and less visibility for MNSPs due to more and more closed boxes littering the last mile landscape, those MNSP engineers aren’t getting a whole lot of sleep when it comes to dealing with last mile delivery issues.

Network insight has been all the rage over the last couple of years, but that telemetry is generally exclusive to the equipment owners – leaving MNSPs, who have no access to the hardware, in the dark. As this problem becomes increasing prevalent, many of the tools designed to shine light on this issue require expensive tooling and complex integrations.

Ixia’s newly announced IxProbe offers itself as an operationally simplistic approach to this visibility gap. In a small form factor that takes minutes to install inline, IxProbe provides traffic stats, link status, and when used in conjunction with Ixia’s Hawkeye, a battery of QoS and link quality tests.

Below are just a few features this test probe brings to the table.

- Can be installed by non technical resources in the field
- Both active and synthetic test capable
- Adopts the IP address of the router (watch this video at the 7 min mark for a good discussion on how this works)
- Fail-to-wire (if the device fails, your link doesn’t)
- Only answers to your configured whitelist of management IP
- APIs for network management system integration

IxProbe isn’t just for MNSPs, and it’s not just for inline testing. While you probably have a myriad of other monitoring solutions, networking probes, and QoS testing devices inside your own network, it’s worth noting that the IxProbe performs tests out of band and can easily be deployed throughout branch networks and other edge locations, perhaps as an option for unifying your test probe solution.

There is a 1 gig limitation on the device, though, so beware you won’t be using this to analyze performance on those big ole backbone links.

If you’re interested in more information on the IxProbe and how it fits into the rest of the Ixia testing and monitoring portfolio, be sure to check out both of these short TFD21 videos here.

You can also find the data sheet here: https://www.ixiacom.com/resources/ixprobe-active-sla-monitoring-service-providers-and-enterprises

Disclaimer: While Networking Field Day, which is sponsored by the companies that present, was very generous to invite me to the fantastic NFD21 event and I am very grateful for it, my opinions are totally my own, as all redheads are far too stubborn to have it any other way.

Published 10/26/2019

One API to rule them all, and in the ether(net) bind them

While some APIs are more open than others, and some APIs are better documented than others (god bless ’em), APIs prevail. From basic network infrastructure elements to all the complex applications flowing across them, just about everything we deal with today in IT has an API. Pretty sure even that new fridge @netmanchris bought has an API. 😉

The sheer quantity and diversity among these APIs presents network engineers, who are just starting to get a handle on automation, with the additional challenge of wrangling umpteen different versions of APIs into cohesive, scalable, and maintainable processes that don’t make them hate their lives on a daily basis.

So what better to way to corral your herd of APIs than with another API? To quote @scottm32768 in this grand networking quest, “One API to rule them all, and in the ether(net) bind them.”

Or to put it another way:

As an orchestrator of orchestrators, that’s where Itential comes in. Their architecture takes modern API and abstraction focused principles, and leverages them toward solving this problem of API overload. All while providing a platform which itself is API accessible and automation ready.

Using adapters that consume and abstract the various input APIs of your multi vendor network, Itential provides a platform that allows you to build for various systems all in one place. Sounds suspiciously like that single pain, err pane, of glass we’ve all been promised for years. So what’s going on under the hood?

Itential’s adapters are reaching into disparate systems, consolidating the data, and then normalizing it into a JSON schema. The broker layer above the adapter layer performs the real magic by transforming the desired state configuration changes you want into the what each system needs to be told to do to make it happen.

Need to change a VLAN across a multi vendor environment? No problem. Need to validate similar configuration elements across multiple systems, each with the data accessible in a different format? No problem. Use Itential’s Automation Studio and Configuration Manager to design your workflows and manage your configuration changes. Then let Itential’s broker layer translate, while its adapter layer makes it happen.

What if you’re further along than most in the automation game and are sitting on a repository of your own network automation scripts? One, you get a cookie. Two, Itential allows you to bring those into the platform as well using their Automation Gateway.

The Automation Gateway also serves in cases where the vendor of your choice isn’t on the adapter list yet, but you still want some level of centralized automation.

If this commander of API armies, this chieftain of your automation islands, peaks your interest, I recommend checking out Itential’s fantastic Networking Field Day 21 video here that details the platform architecture along with an excellent demo (demo starts at 14 min mark). Also, be sure to check out their developer tool website, which has lots of great links and FAQs, and their additional NFD21 videos as well.

Published 10/20/2019

Arrcus: An Application of Modern OEM Principles for Whitebox Switches

What’s a pirate’s favorite switching platform?

Arr-cus. 😂

And before I make a joke about networking ship-sets (too late), I’ll move onto what Arrcus is and why you should be checking them out!

Arrcus manufactures white box switches running ArcOS, their latest generation of switches leveraging the Jericho-2 chipset.

Touting a microservices architecture, multi-tenancy at scale, and open integration across multiple ODM vendors, ArcOS offers up a hardware agnostic platform that finds it home in data center fabrics, large scale peering/edge deployments, and cloud deployments.

With support for OpenConfig and YANG, Arrcus intends for users to leverage APIs for operations and management in modern fashion, no slumming it with old school CLI (although there is one should you choose to use it).

With claims of up to 100 million (that’s 100 meeeeellion) BGP paths and carrier grade class hardware, the OS also provides streamed telemetry data for multiple purposes, including monitoring device health and workload mobility. Arrcus also takes advantage of streaming telemetry in BGP route validation, comparing real time data with RPKI lookups and sending notifications to operators of potentially hijacked routes.

Support for BGP-LSVR is also part of the ArcOS platform. Which if you don’t live in carrier land, you might have just said “huh?” (because that’s what I said as well). BGP-LSVR is a IETF draft standard for augmenting BGP with Shortest Path Dijkstra algorithm behavior in an attempt to handle massively scaled out data centers and sneak around IGP flooding scale limitations. I know what you’re thinking:

But BGP-LSVR has the advantage of the underlay and overlay both being BGP, as well as improved convergence times. And possibly dinosaurs wreaking havoc on humanity, but we’ll save that for the sequel.

For more Arrcus goodness, I recommend watching the Network Field Day 21 Arrcus videos, especially the demo presentation below. I’ve also included some handy dandy research links for both Arrcus and BGP-LSVR if you’d like to learn more about either or both!