The New Enterprise Requirement: Full Lifecycle Network Automation
Posted on
April
23,
2019
by
Jeff Paine
Enterprise campus and access networks are growing increasingly complex at a pace far faster than companies can grow their available technical networking engineering support staff, who by the same token are becoming increasingly unaffordable. In this environment, automation is no longer an option:...
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Like Watching the Caveman Invent the Rock – Cisco “Discovers” Software
Posted on
July
09,
2018
by
Jeff Paine
In truth, today’s legacy enterprise networks -- many now decades overdue for replacement -- were built to fight Cold Wars among the vendor powers. Cisco “big iron” battled Wellfleet “big iron” and, later, Juniper “big iron,” and the throughput/density contests are now the stuff of NetOps legend....
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Wow. Just, wow. Here we were at Pica8, ten days away from announcing a screamingly simplified white box switching architecture for enterprise campus networks – one that makes legacy switch stack and chassis switch replacement with disaggregated white box switches ridiculously easy -- when Arista...
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From the very beginning, Cisco Systems tightly embraced the use of complexity as a market differentiator. Creating a complicated CLI to configure networking gear instead of a relatively simple GUI – Wellfleet’s choice -- was an early move down this path. The next cab off this particular rank was...
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AT&T's dNOS Initiative Spotlights Fake News from Cisco (et al.)
Posted on
February
08,
2018
by
Jeff Paine
One thing that's clear from recent events is that the "alternative" path for network infrastructure refresh and build-outs - disaggregation - has just become exciting again due, in part, to AT&T's recent announcement of the company's dNOS (disaggregated Networking Operating System) initiative....
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