A while back I started thinking about why it took so long before we started using anycast gateways. I started thinking about what would be the reason(s) for not doing it earlier. I came up with some good reasons and
Vendor Lock-in – Is It Really That Bad?!
In today’s IT infrastructure, open source software is a common component. Many organizations and network engineers stay away from certain architectures and products citing vendor lock-in as their only argument but often lack the understanding to why they think vendor
Do I Need a WAN?
In the latest Network Break, Network Break 213 from Packet Pushers, they discussed some of the latest news in networking, such as Amazon Outpost. With the rise of SaaS applications, the questions was also raised, do I even need a
Snowflake Networks
Snowflake networks, sounds like a good name for a network design company, but this is not what this post is about. Are you familiar with the concept of a snowflake network? This terminology comes from the notion that each snowflake
General – Challenges in Load Balancing Traffic
For the last year I have been working a lot with IWAN which is Cisco’s SD-WAN implementation (before Viptela acquisition). One of the important aspects of SD-WAN is to be able to load balance the traffic. Load balancing traffic is
CCDE – The CCDE Mindset
This post was written to help CCDE candidates get into the right mindset but is very applicable to network architects and network engineers in general. We humans tend to have a lot of bias. Sometimes it’s based on experience but
Network Design Webinar With Yours Truly at CLN
I’m hosting a network design webinar at the Cisco Learning Network on Feb 19th, 20.00 UTC+1. As you may know, I am studying for the CCDE so I’m focusing on design right now but my other reason for hosting this
Routing Considerations in DDoS Protection Environments
Lately I have done some studying for the CCDE and one of the things I was looking at is how to protect against DDoS attacks. I’m not expecting it to be a big topic for the CCDE but it has
Why fast IGP timers aren’t always beneficial
Introduction When tuning your IGP of choice, the first thing people look at is usually the hello and dead interval. This is a flawed logic, it is true that it can help in certain cases but convergence consists of much
Network Campus Design
Introduction Modern networks need to be enabled for voice and video. These applications do not tolerate a lot of loss before quality becomes unacceptable. This requires us to build networks that are scalable, resilient and converge quickly. This post will