Monthly Archives: May 2016

Episode 6 – Discussion with Avaya’s Roger Lapuh

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:33 — 23.1MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

We returned to record our sixth episode on Sunday May 22, 2016.

Discussion

This week we had the opportunity to speak with Roger Lapuh, Product Line Manager and Architect for Avaya.

Past

The history of Avaya Networking, Wellfleet and SynOptics merged to form Bay Networks back in 1994. Northern Telecom acquired Bay Networks in 1998 and renamed itself Nortel. In 2009 Avaya acquired Nortel’s Enterprise Voice and Data business units through a bankruptcy auction.

In 1997 Bay Networks acquired Rapid City which spawned the first layer 3 switch in the Accelar product line. The product line was renamed to Passport and would eventually be renamed to the Ethernet Routing Switch.

SMLT Story and development
Layer 3 extensions RSMLT //  VRRP BackUp Master

Present

The first ideas to Shortest Path Bridging (SPB), the  development of SPB and the challenges presented in its design. The standards process in IEEE 802.1aq, the first implementation in the Ethernet Routing Switch 8600.

Packet Pushers Show 44 – The Case For Shortest Path Bridging, with Paul Unbehagen and Peter Ashwood-Smith (Huawei).

Future

Distributed Virtual Routing (DVR) resolves the network tromboning between the Layer 2 fabric and Layer 3 gateways.

Port Mirroring over an SPB fabric creating a virtual tap network.

We have a large vibrant community using Avaya equipment over on the Network Infrastructure Forums, I would strongly urge you to stop by and see what’s going on.

Thanks again to Roger Lapuh for joining us!

Cheers!

Episode 5 – Network Monitoring

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:44 — 27.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

We returned to record our fifth episode on Sunday May 15, 2016.

Interesting News and Events

Roundtable Discussion – Network Monitoring

  • Network Monitoring (is something up or down?)
  • Performance Monitoring (how is something performing?)
  • Application Monitoring (is an application functioning properly?)
  • Environmental Monitoring (how humid or hot is my data center?)
  • Electrical Monitoring (what’s the state of my PDUs, UPSs, generators?)
  • Why should we monitor
  • What should we monitor
  • How should we monitor: SNMP , Agent …
  • Categorys of Monitoring Tools : Alarming , Graphs, Trap receivers , Flow Analyzer,
  • Vendor specific tools
  • Overview of available tools at Wikipedia:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_monitoring_systems
  • Vendor Products: PRTG, SolarWinds, HP OpenView, CA Spectrum, Microsoft SCOM, Statseeker, WahtsupGold, Grafana, Zabbix
  • Open Source: Nagios, Icinga, Check_MK (OMD), MRTG, RRD, Cacti,
  • Custom crafted Monitoring:
  • US department of Energy (https://my.es.net/)
  • Challanges:
    • Active vs passive monitoring (MPLS Explorer)
    • Visibility (https://my.es.net)
    • Maps and visualization
    • Keep it up to date
    • custom check development

What tools are you using?

Dominik highly recommends that folks check out Check_MK, if they are interested in looking at a new monitoring solution. Mike suggests you also give a look at PRTG, there is a 100 sensor version of PRTG available for free.

Cheers!