loopback0 – Douglas Gourlay's Blog Data Centers, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing

Networking and Operations Focus

Again, suitably sub-titled, "things I'd like to change 3/N."

the day Altiris was installed... (client retrospective)

When networking was in its hey-day growth phase in the mid-late 1990's through the dot-com crash of 2001 we were a nerdy group of people. We didn't have to worry about change control when the systems were not mission critical, we could use the classic "I tripped over the power cord" emergency change-control procedure. The advanced and automated ticketing systems were not in place, there was only one enable password, and we router jocks loved the fact that we were our own masters of the universe.

The features developed, delivered, and sold by the networking vendors catered to us, the operators, admin, engineers, etc. Think about them- the features we all remember and still tend to use were designed to make our jobs easier, not harder. Features like EtherChannel, speed/duplex auto-negotiation (although for many vendors that was a big #fail), IGRP/EIGRP (turn it on, it just works, for three desktop protocols, on one process!), VTP - okay, we all remember the VTP Bomb, but the concept of auto-propagation of VLAN ID and auto-pruning of unnecessary VLANs was nice although the initial implementation was rather like a liquid-center flourless chocolate cake.

What happened?

Why, since 2001 and the dot-com bust have networking vendors stepped away from supporting and embracing the loyal network operators and delivering features and capabilities that make their jobs easier and simpler and instead seem to focus on things that in many cases make the job harder. I mean, how many encapsulation types do I need? How many differing non-interoperable segmentation mechanisms? How many security tags/constructs/products with little integration? How many differing UIs and code-trains?

I like building things that make peoples jobs easier. It's a personal passion of mine, because they tend to get used and deployed, and heck- they make people happy! (as I write this 'Sweet Child o' Mine' comes on the overhead speakers and I have to pause a minute during one of the most memorable guitar solos ever...) ok, back on track... umm, where was I?

Oh yeah- features that make network operators lives easier?

One I always wanted to do was a global port profile. Basically an object oriented port based configuration that is synced across a reasonably sized autonomous system of network devices. Then I can make changes to the port object and have it sweep across the switches and be swiftly implemented. All the ports map to the object, the object is the point of change. This gets very interesting when it is integrated between physical and virtual devices so that I can have a policy that moves as I execute a P2V operation and maintains consistency regardless of where the workload runs.

Just a thought. I am sure there are more... any other things you wish your network did? (I also wish there were native Opsware agents on my network devices... for more food for thought...)

dg