Packet Pushers - Fat Pipe

This week's Network Break podcast discusses Nokia's new beefed-up routing silicon, how Pica8 is pursuing campus switching with a controller/switch pricing bundle, and the latest critical security patches from Cisco. We also look at the latest ransomware attacks against US agricultural companies, a MacOS bug, and more tech news.

On today's sponsored Heavy Networking we talk with DriveNets about why it’s time to take the disaggregated model--where you buy whitebox hardware and put a network operating system of your choice on it--seriously. Along the way, we’re going to hit DriveNets network architectures and operating models, and get you thinking about why disaggregated networking might make sense for you.

Guest Shelley Benhoff stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to discuss essential skills for moving into tech management, and how to decide if management is the right career path for you. Shelley has twenty years' experience in IT as a developer and manager, runs a tech training company, and is a Pluralsight instructor.

Today's Network Break podcast discusses Juniper's new wired campus effort and how it leverages Mist Cloud for to help automate its campus fabric, a new set of Azure vulnerabilities, robust SD-WAN growth with the biggest players reaping most of the rewards, free space optics for hard-to-wire regions, and more tech news.

Today's Heavy Networking gets entangled in a discussion about quantum communications or quantum networking. We discuss qubits, the challenges of moving them across a network, use cases such as key distribution, and more. Our guest is Dr. Joshua Slater.

Today's Day Two Cloud sponsored episode dives into software-defined interconnects. The big idea is that you go up to a Web browser, click a few times, and now you've got a circuit stood up between your data center and AWS, or between you and a business partner, and so on. We'll get into the details about how it's done with Console Connect, a PCCW Global company.

This week's Network Break podcast wonders what Intel wants in return for a multi-year, multi-billion pledge to build European chip factories, marvels at Facebook's newly revealed data center designs, analyzes Comcast's Masergy acquisition, and more.

Today's Heavy Networking podcast discusses the pros and cons of building a private 5G network in the enterprise. We examine use cases, contrast 5G with Wi-Fi, unpack the hardware and software required, and more. Intel is our sponsor for this episode.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast topic is about moving from a tech role into management. Is it a good idea? Why might you want to make the change? How can you do it successfully? We speak with two guests who've made the leap.

Today's Network Break podcast opines on why Ciena acquired the Vyatta router from AT&T (and why AT&T wanted to sell), how T-Mobile failed current and former customers via a breach that exposed sensitive details on millions of people, financial results from HPE and Dell Technologies, and more.

Today's Heavy Networking podcast dives into academic research on DDoS attack techniques. Our guests have published a paper about how the TCP protocol and middleboxes such as firewalls can be weaponized by bad actors and used in reflective amplification attacks. We discuss technical details, how they performed this research, potential countermeasures, and more.

Today's Day Two Cloud episode dives into multi-cloud networking with sponsor Aviatrix. Aviatrix offers a cloud network platform with a common data plane and operational model that works across public clouds and supports visibility and automation. We dig into the product with Aviatrix guests and a customer.

This week's Network Break examines how ransomware has insurers rethinking premiums and coverage limits, discusses the pros and cons of ISPs sharing flow records with security companies, digs into Arista's efforts to tackle the router market, pontificates on TSMC chip price hikes, and more tech news analysis.

In today's sponsored Heavy Networking show, we talk to Opmantek about NMIS, an intelligent network management platform that spans monitoring, visibility, automation, and configuration management. Our guest is Opmantek CTO Keith Sinclair.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast discusses the challenges of stitching together a fabric across more than one public cloud. How do you architect a fabric given the constraints of each cloud? We also drill into the idea of API gateways. Our guest is Chris Oliver, a network architect at NI.

It's the Network Break! This week we analyze Cisco's $500 million acquisition of a container-based and serverless application monitor, Intel's announcement of Mount Evans, an Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) for network and storage offload, and more tech news. Guest analyst Johna Till Johnson, CEO and founder of Nemertes Research, joins Greg Ferro.

Like anything in the world of IT, TLS has gone through various versions. TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are still commonly used, but TLS 1.3 is really where it’s at. Our guest is Ed Harmoush. Ed’s a professional instructor who’s researched TLS 1.3 and more as he’s prepped for his latest course offering, Practical TLS, which you can find at http://pracnet.net/tls. Use coupon PacketPushers100 to get $100 off this deep dive course from Ed.

Kris Nóva, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Twilio, claims that managing infrastructure using tools like Terraform isn't that far away from just writing your own code to do the job yourself. Kris joins co-hosts Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks to challenge the notion that ops folks can't become developers. Kris says they can.

The world of virtual donuts is supply constrained. Extreme Networks finally gets SDWAN buying Ipanema from Infovista at a bargain price. Research firms that does the numbers Dell'oro pitches that Education and Government markets will be spending big on WiFi6E - we aren't so sure that campus spending will be big just some spending but Dell'oro told us that government economic stimulus is the driver. Most will focus on distributed work. Huawei posted 29% revenue reduction as the trade sanctions impact their overall business. A reminder that political solutions are slow if you have to make plans. And in space networking, SpaceX acquires pico-satellite company Swarm for IOT networking.

On today’s Heavy Networking, we drill into VMware’s vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) to learn how it provides end-to-end monitoring, how it uses flow records and other data sources, and its architecture. We’ll also discuss modeling/digital twin capabilities, and applying vRNI to security, troubleshooting, and other use cases. VMware is our sponsor.