NEC demonstrated multi-vendor OpenFlow network @ Interop Las Vegas, linking physical switches from Arista, Brocade, Centec, Dell, Extreme, Intel and NEC, and virtual switches in Linux (OVS) and Hyper-V (PF1000) environments in a leaf-and-spine fabric controlled by ProgrammableFlow controller (watch the video of Samrat Ganguly demonstrating the network).

Does that mean we’ve entered the era of multi-vendor OpenFlow networking? Not so fast.

If you live in Europe and happen to be interested in security, make sure you put Troopers on the list of must-attend events. Like many things coming from Europe it’s a boutique event (limited to 200 attendees even if it means it’s sold out – that would never happen in some other parts of the world) with some great content.

Erik Dietrich obviously hates the self-proclaimed (usually clueless) “experts” – he devoted a whole series of blog posts to them:

• Rise of the Expert Beginner
• Legacy of the Expert Beginner
• Language of the Expert Beginner
• Ambitions of the Expert Beginner

I’m positive you know at least a few people that would match his descriptions. Enjoy!

Stu Miniman kindly invited me to do an interview for the SiliconANGLE during the Interop/EMC World week. Here are the results:

One of the most pleasant surprises of the recent Interop show was the Tail-f's Network Control System (NCS). I “knew” Carl Moberg (of the NETCONF and YANG fame) for a long time and had the privilege to meet him in person just before the SDN Buyer's Guide panel that I co-hosted with Kurt Marko (who did an excellent job putting the buyer's guide together). Anyhow, what Carl presented during the panel totally blew me away.

A while ago, while listening to an interesting CloudCast podcast (my second favorite podcast - the best one out there is still the Packet Pushers), I stumbled upon an interesting idea “Data has gravity”. The podcast guest used that idea to explain how data agglomerates in larger and larger chunks and how it makes sense to move the data processing (application) closer to the data.

In one of his Open Networking Summit blog posts Jason Edelman summarized the presentation in which Goldman Sachs described its plans to replace stateful firewalls with packet filters (see also a similar post by Nick Buraglio).

These ideas are obviously not new – as Merike Kaeo succinctly said in her NANOG presentation over three years ago “stateful firewalls make absolutely no sense in front of servers, given that by definition every packet coming into the server is unsolicited.” Real life is usually a bit more complex than that.

A few days after I published the Interop Product Launch Craze post, Jason Edelman told me HP claims they have running TRILL implementation. Time to read their release notes.

Results: No mention of TRILL in latest release notes for 12500, 9500 or 58xx. 5900 switches support TRILL, EVB and FCoE since release 2207 (January 2013).

More about changes in the data center switching market in the Data Center Fabrics Update webinar. Now I have to catch the next plane on the way home.

Just received an email from Trevor Warwick (Director, Cisco NOSTG Software Engineering, UK) on ipv6-ops mailing list (which you really should join if you plan to deploy IPv6) explaining the changes they made to IPv6 TCP MSS handling.

In the last part of Clos Fabrics Explained webinar Brad Hedlund described how you can use Dell Fabric Manager to plan, design, configure and operate leaf-and-spine Clos fabric built with Dell Force10 switches. Should we call Dell Fabric Manager an SDN solution? Who cares, it sure is useful ;)