Monday, August 07, 2023

Nile's changing up how Enterprises design, build, and consume Access Networks at Network Field Day 32

Nile presented at Networking Field Day 32 on July 26, 2023 and they presented on their Enterprise Networking solutions. Nile has built out a set of networking solutions that focuses on the enterprise and commercial market and they are selling the solution in a Network as a Service model. The overview of what they provide:

  • Wired and Wireless LAN as a Service
  • Guaranteed Network Performance
  • Zero Trust
  • IT Simplicity

It seems they are competitors to Meraki, Mist, and Aruba from an enterprise solution offering and to Ubiquiti and Microtik in the commercial market. All of these competitors have strong market positions and install bases. This is a simplistic comparison, but for the purpose of understanding what market groups they are potentially suited for, it works just fine.

Here is their overview:


There are several more YouTube videos available, you can find them all over at the Tech Field Day 32 Nile page.

But in typical NFD fashion, the most interesting and relevant session ended up being the last video and the poor presenter was given the least amount of time because everyone else was unable to keep on track prior.

Note: If Nile presents at another field day, I suggest they START with this demo, focus on doing Q&A around it and expand everything else after it. Honestly, the first 30-45 mins of the overall timeslot was a waste of time and could have been cut (except the marketing people likely wanted that content - stop listening to them, you can record that stuff on your own, you don't need a bunch of delegates in the room for that part). If you are going to watch anything, watch this one:



My quick thoughts on what Nile presented:
Of course the IPv6 question was asked and they built a new generation of networking gear and solution without IPv6 as a first class citizen. I don't know if that is really forgivable in the current market. While I understand the US Federal Government is not their primary customer, or even a secondary, there will definitely be organizations that need IPv6. It is just such a glaring misstep I can't really take the rest of the product seriously, so you know my bias going into this. 

They also need to explain and position their place in the market a bit more clearly. A simple elevator pitch that says something like: "We are Meraki or Mist generation 2.0" or something similar to give a reference point. I get that they are doing Network as a Service (NaaS) and their billing/revenue model is slightly different but it puts them in front of the right general audience. The current pitch and explanation is too broad and doesn't narrow the field for buyers to understand what they do and why.

Effectively, they are wrapping together hardware, software, support, and installer/operator easy of administration in a recurring revenue model. I'm not sure that is revolutionary at this point. They did invest to brand their own hardware solution. I'm not sure putting simple diagrams on the equipment makes it unique in terms of IT Simplicity. Their management UI looks like a combo of Mist, Meraki and Ubiquiti so nothing super unique going on there, though that might be a plus, people who have used those other solutions can figure theirs out a bit faster.

I will be honest, I am not 100% sure what the large/important differentiator is for Nile. I either missed the key points in the presentation or they need to hone their message of how they are different, unique, and valuable for a customer. It just wasn't clear to me why I would want them versus any other product solution set out there right now. It should be the first, second, and third thing they talk about. I'm not even sure it was mentioned specifically.

I will keep an eye on Nile and what they are doing, but honestly, just like with Meraki, I won't take them seriously until they can work with IPv6 as a fully supported networking protocol.


 - Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD32. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own along with the ideas and thoughts.

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

Broadcom's AI Networking Solutions at Networking Field Day 32

Broadcom presented at Networking Field Day 32 on July 26, 2023 and they presented on their AI Networking solutions. These are products and architectures that address the needs of those building out AI data center focused networks. Obviously the design will work for regular data center workloads too. albeit, suboptimal because the design is focused on addressing AI workloads and not a more general workload. The attributes that Broadcom define for what makes an AI Network unique are:

  • Fewer flows (low entropy)
  • High bandwidth flows (elephant flows due to the large amount of data sets being moved around)
  • Synchronized and bursty traffic
  • Links are saturated in micro-seconds (<<RTT)
  • Training jobs run for long periods of time (hours/days)
  • Tail latency impacts job completion time significantly
And they shared some interesting info about "time spent in network" is impacted by:

  • Transient oversubscription
  • Flow collisions and link failures
  • Incast - many GPUs sends into one or a few GPU(s)
Broadcom says the solution is to build a Clos fabric that makes use of a receiver-based credit control process that can pace the senders accurately. This means it is impossible to oversubscribe the Clos fabric and therefore you can leverage techniques like packet spraying with receiver ordering. It is worth watching the presentation on YouTube to understand what they are doing and why. You can check that out here:



There are specific videos on the Tomahawk AI Interconnect here:



And also on Jericho3 AI here:


And their wrap up on AI/ML Data Center Fabric solutions can be found here:


My quick thoughts on what Broadcom presented:
I wasn't aware (more likely I haven't been paying attention to what is happening in AI/ML like I should be) that there was this much specific network design work going into addressing AI workloads. While I understand there are a lot of AI/ML projects, I wasn't aware that so many private firms might want this solution architecture for their own needs versus running on leased cloud models.

Clearly there is a pricing advantage to running stuff at scale on your own hardware (in terms of reduced network data ingress/egress costs, compute cycles, and having dedicated GPU access) otherwise Broadcom wouldn't be building these sorts of solutions. It seems most of the large scale cloud providers have built something similar on their own or have requested that Broadcom address a gap in what traditional Ethernet fabrics can provide.

What will be interesting to me is if this is a short term industry change to address a narrow vertical or if this will become the new default Ethernet fabric architecture because AI/ML workloads will become common place DC workloads. I'm not convinced it will go that way, perhaps a hybrid of specific AI/ML Ethernet fabrics that are L3 connected to traditional DC focused Ethernet fabrics to attempt to give an organization the best of both worlds.

You can also get Drew Conry-Murray's thoughts on Broadcom's presentation over at his Packet Pushers blog post.

 - Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD32. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own along with the ideas and thoughts.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

IPv6-only has become a thing

Outside of posting content around Tech Field Day events I occasionally participate in, my blog hasn't seen a lot of activity. Mainly because I have been posting content over at the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence or via the IPv6 Buzz Podcast. I recommend you check both those out, it isn't just me generating that content but also Scott Hogg, Tom Coffeen, Cody Christman, Tim Martin, and other great IPv6 content creators.

I did want to highlight one observation I have made starting at the end of 2022 and continuing throughout 2023 and that is the noticeable increase of discussions around IPv6-only. In the past, IPv6-only was a smaller corner case for many organizations as everyone thought the natural progression for IPv6 adoption (IPv6 transition) was to move to dual-stack first and figure out the deployment and operational issues and then shut off IPv4. The problem with this workflow was twofold. First, it is difficult to determine operational issues in dual-stack networks as happy eyeballs hides many of those issues from you. And second is that no one actually turns off IPv4, which defeats the whole purpose of adopting IPv6 for the long run.

There is no denying that part of the reason for some much IPv6-only conversation is due to the IPv6 transition requirement that OMB published regarding moving to IPv6-only. Deploying dual-stack doesn't help an organization meet the requirements defined in the memo, which leaves these departments and agencies to figure out how to do IPv6-only. There are also now more Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies who are having significant IPv4 address supply issues and realizing they only want to get around those is to either buy more costly public IPv4 address space or adopt IPv6-only to slow the burn rate of IPv4 usage.

Every organization has their unique business and technical requirements. IPv6-only may only address problems in one of those problems spaces. But it is a tool that more organizations are realizing they should have in their tool belt and that they can get wins in both business and technical requirements. For example, IPv6-only makes merger and acquisitions much easier to perform as making use of GUA space guarantees uniqueness of addresses, meaning it is a simple routing and peering problem to integrate the networks and not a NAT or re-addressing project that might take years to complete. It also means the timeframe to perform a merger or to integrate an acquired company drops dramatically. This has profound impact on the financial structure of the deal which is something that should not be overlooked.

I think it is important for people to realize there are not a lot of people with industry experience deploying IPv6-only networks. So, be cautious when talking with vendors, consultants, and industry peers about what to do. Very few people have the experience and design skills to navigate everything that goes into making IPv6-only a reality. I have interacted with a lot of vendors and consultants recently who claim they can do it, but the only IPv6 they have deployed is dual-stack and they have serious gaps in their knowledge and in the solutions that will actually work. So, do your homework and buyer beware. I will try and post some IPv6-only resources as I run across them (or just write them myself!)

- Ed

Friday, December 09, 2022

2022 - Year in review and a look ahead at 2023

 It seems my blogging has fallen off a lot since co-founding HexaBuild and working on IPv6 full time. I wanted to at least get a post out this year talking about some of the interesting things I have observed in the industry and note if I think they will be trends or simple market changes that won't have much impact.

First, regarding IPv6, it appears that IPv6-only design and architecture is accelerating at a rapid pace and I anticipate that will continue into 2023 and 2024. This is driven in part by the White House OMB mandate but also my the cost structure of IPv4 and the open market to obtain IPv4 addresses that have a clean reputation and are available to use immediate. While enterprise organizations will ponder over IPv6 in 2023 and 2024 and potentially kick off projects, they will, for the most part have limited deployments. The exceptions will be organizations that are consuming all their RFC 1918 address space and their public IPv4 address space due to rapid public cloud expansion. This has been a huge driving force around IPv6 discussions to try and help reduce the rate of IPv4 address space consumption. I don't see that changing in 2023 or 2024 but with some organizations repatriating their workloads, it may slow down.

Second, I think automation is the only way to safely adopt IPv6 for larger organizations and they need to invest in tooling, platforms and their staff to make that happen. Given the complexity of dual-stack for many organizations, getting a consistent deployment method that reduces typing/character mistakes is really important for IPv6. Since many organizations are moving that direction already, it is a natural fit and means that automation processes include IPv6 from day one.

Finally, security is becoming interesting again and Zero Trust is changing how team think about deploying and building services. Zero Trust is another natural fit for incorporating IPv6 early on in the process to ensure you can support all your potential network ingress/egress protocols. Thinking through the dual-stack solution and projecting that to IPv6-only allows you to work through many of the corner cases and potential access issues that end clients would run into in the real world.

So, 2023 will likely be a lot of work around IPv6-only, automation, and Zero Trust, is going to be my guess. Of course more cloud, but I think that is just a given going forward. What are everyone else's thoughts about what 2023 will likely consist of for technology focus?

- Ed

Monday, October 04, 2021

Kentik - Get Observability and Monitoring Under Control

 Kentik presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 15, 2021 and I think Kentik is on the right journey around doing observability and monitoring for enterprise networks. They understand they have to support all the traditional capabilities within networks but they also need to have full support and capabilities for public cloud services. I was very interested in what they are doing with Kentik Firehose which aggregates message bus/queue, observability, real-time analytics and data lake sources and provides telemetry and context. This seems like a super useful tool for companies who have a wide variety of cloud and other systems generating data. Check out Avi Feedman's presentation, it is worth listening to their strategy and how they want to address these issues that almost all companies are going to be facing.


They had a pretty impressive list of new features and capabilities. I think their focus on cloud to on-premises integration is going to be critical.


Kentik also showed off what they are doing for Observability for Cloud Networkers. This is an extremely hard space right now. Each public cloud provider does networking and the associated logging, telemetry and observability data differently. So it is a major pain to integrate it and have some sort of end to end solution that actually helps you determine what the problem or problems actually are so I think they are on to something.

For now, Kentik is a company to keep an eye on and see if their innovate in the right areas to address customers needs. It sure looks like they are heading in the right direction and I think they have a useful product that helps replace a lot of legacy logging and monitoring solutions we have typically deployed in the past with something more modern and extensible.

You can also check out Dr. Peter Welcher's LinkedIn post about Kentik. A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since the event was during Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.