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.

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.

Network Field Day 26 -

Excuse the bit of pre-ramble before the actual NFD26 content:

It is a bit unusual to do back-to-back Network Field Day event, mainly because diversity in delegates is a good thing for the community and for the vendors presenting. It means a greater mix of opinions, use cases, and influence around a topic, the technology and how it is being applied to the market. Those are all wins (at least I think so) until something like a worldwide pandemic makes in person events difficult to impossible to do and also the reality that delegate's time is a harder commodity now. There are two aspects as a delegate that are important that go unspoken, but given the current situation, I want to say specifically out loud.

1. You get access and a platform to interface with vendors because you give your time to participate and;

2.  also because you get a dialog going in the community about what you saw and heard!

The second part has been the challenge as of late. There have been a lack of blog posts, of YouTube videos, of missing podcast content, etc.. Honestly, like many of you, I am not sitting in my car for hours on end to listen to some of my favorite podcast shows because I no longer commute to an office location or to customer sites. I do still listen while going on my daily walks, or for the very short drives to the grocery store or gym. But honestly, my listening is way down, as I assume many of the rest of you are too.

How does this relate to Network Field Day 26?

It relates in a few ways. The delegates who are going to get invited back to participate in Tech Field Day are actually producing the content.* There are delegates who are able to free up their schedule to find the time to participate, and that is a good thing. But it appears, a good number can't find the time to do the second part. The reality is, that the second part is WHY the vendors choose to do Tech Field Day. Because the get feedback, community engagement and an open dialog about their product, how it applies in the technology landscape and what practitioners think of it. Without the second part, the first part doesn't happen. This is the reason you are seeing some repeat Field Day delegates, because they know the second part is just as important as the first. Okay, off the ramble, I just wanted everyone to know that, content and doing the work matters.

* - note: I also know that many of the delegates have a policy that if you don't have something nice to say about a technology, solution or product, then don't say anything. I get that, but you can still write something about the event overall to acknowledge the participation and effort. I know that personally, I tend not to write about companies that don't have a reasonable IPv6 answer and solution. Other delegates have their "thing" too.

- Now to the NFD26 post!

Network Field Day 26 (NFD26) is happening Sept 14-16, 2021. You can check out the full event schedule at the NFD26 website. The sponsors list has been growing so checking the site is the best until the event starts. I recommend watching live if you can, the playback later doesn't line up with the live twitter interaction so sometimes it is hard to get all the context.

First point, I thinks this NFD has a particularly strong list of delegates. So the interaction will be excellent, and I anticipate some of the blogging content will be good as a result. Also, because this is a virtual event, the fact that I know some many of the delegates on a personal level already means the event won't feel as awkward as many of the vendor events I have watched where you could tell this is the first time they have worked or even seen each other!

Second, I am going to say upfront that not addressing IPv6 is a big negative for me for the sponsors. To repeat my NFD25 blog post:
I won't be satisfied with some of the dismissive answers of the past like "our customers aren't asking for it" or "it is on our 3 year roadmap" or "we have IPv6 support, but I'm not familiar with it, can we get back to you?" Those presenting should know and understand IPv6 at this point, and it is NOT my job to explain it to you, justify why it is needed, or what the market for it is, seriously, that ship has sailed. We are in the early majority stage for IPv6 adoption and it will only accelerate from here.

So, there you go, let's get ready to have some serious fun with NFD26! If you are at all into networking then I encourage you to follow along live for the events on the Tech Field Day website or keep up with the activity via twitter by following the hashtag #NFD26. If you are interested in being a delegate, you can check out the website, they have all the details up there.

- 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 this is 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.

Network Field Day 25 May 12-14, 2021 - A Changing Networking Landscape

Here we go, Network Field Day 25 (NFD25) is May 12-14, 2021. It is a good line up of presenters and delegates so check out the full event schedule at the NFD25 website. First point, I thinks this NFD shows the changing networking landscape. Yes, some big network brands are still the focus but it is interesting seeing the list of presenters. What previously were second or third options for many companies are being first or second. Second point, the influence of a larger single vendor is slowing changing and the ecosystem is changing with it. I'm exciting to hear what all these sponsors have to say. Below I have some quick thoughts on some of the companies that I know something about.

Aruba/HPE - Just keeping up with all the changes and improvements Aruba has been doing can be tough now. They have built an impressive networking business around the Aruba product family and I believe they are a serious network vendor that enterprises should be evaluating. I'm looking forward to hearing what updates and product innovations they might have to share.

Juniper - It is going to be interesting to see if Juniper can make the sort of inroads that Aruba did in the Enterprise networking space. With Mist, they have a real chance and expanding their campus networking solutions seems to be a big goal for the company. I think their challenge is winning back trust after really stepping away from that market to focus on their core routing platforms. I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of talk around AI/ML.

Nokia - I have been hearing positive things around Nokia's networking products for a long time. I unfortunately haven't had the opportunity to actually work on and use their gear. I am hoping Nokia is out to change that and perhaps provide easier ways for those of us who aren't as familiar with their products to have the opportunity to learn more and perhaps see some good demos and use cases where they really shine.

Obviously, I will be asking each company their IPv6 plans, capabilities, use cases and such. I think there is a lot more weight to the question this NFD because of the White House OMB Memo M-21-07. Federal agencies need to put a focus on getting IPv6 deployed, and products that don't support IPv6 are going to have issues. So I won't be satisfied with some of the dismissive answers of the past like "our customers aren't asking for it" or "it is on our 3 year roadmap" or "we have IPv6 support, but I'm not familiar with it, can we get back to you?" Those presenting should know and understand IPv6 at this point, and it is NOT my job to explain it to you, justify why it is needed, or what the market for it is, seriously, that ship has sailed. We are in the early majority stage for IPv6 adoption and it will only accelerate from here.

If you are at all into networking then I encourage you to follow along live for the events on the Tech Field Day website or keep up with the activity via twitter by following the hashtag #NFD25. 

- 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 NFD25. 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. 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.

Cloud Field Day 7 - VMware Cloud on AWS

For those who are traditional VMware enterprise customers you are likely comfortable with their products and technologies and rely on it daily to help keep your company up and running in a highly available configuration. Adoption of public cloud, that is a different story for many. If you have not been keeping up with the innovations and use cases around public cloud you might be caught off guard by the adoption and scale that it is providing to many enterprise customers, some of them might even be your competitors. VMware recognized this gap and decided to brave the waters by partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make VMware Cloud on AWS. For anyone who has followed the public cloud market, you will be familiar with how daunting that can be for a well established enterprise software company like VMware. A lot of other software companies have tried and failed to move their solutions and buying patterns to a public cloud model.

Remarkably, I think VMware pulled it off. At least for now. They released a solution to help customers run workload in AWS and take advantage of their existing investment in VMware. They extended that to the scale and flexibility that AWS provides while also providing native hooks and features from AWS that extend what an enterprise can leverage from both VMware and AWS. Granted, it is not like going all in native AWS, but, for many companies that effort is incredibly daunting and likely too large an undertaking for any one team. A major workload migration of applications and services for many companies requires multiple projects and years to complete.

VMware is helping address this gap by allowing enterprises to migrate workloads into AWS but still leave them in their native VMware format. The tools and constructs (Software Defined Data Center or SDDC) that VMware customers are used to stay the same, so they can just leverage running them in AWS. This flexibility gives customers more time to determine what is the right environment, cost model and workload placement for their needs. Long term, I still believe that most customers will figure out how to properly leverage native cloud services (from all the public cloud providers) but this solution is a smart way to address an immediate need that will last several years. I think of it as the "easy button" for enterprise IT teams who need to have workloads running in AWS to help support their organization.

Day 1

The day one presentations at Cloud Field Day 7 focused on an overview of the offering, a deep dive into the networking and how that works, details into data center extension and hybrid cloud, and finally how to do migration and the tools available to you. If you are not familiar with VMware Cloud on AWS then watching these videos will go a long way to understanding what is offered. It is a unique offering, even though VMware has agreements with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud the integration and partnership is different. I won't belabor the points of how they are different, theses presentations were all about the AWS offering, just know that the work and partnership has been more extensive. I would recommend the migration and networking presentations if you already know a bit about VMware Cloud on AWS, it helps to explain how you will leverage what they have built out.

 

Day 2

The day two presentations jumped into specific services and attributes of the solution. It went over virtual desktop using Horizon 7 on top of VMware Cloud on AWS - I'm not entirely convinced this is any better than Workspaces that AWS provides, but it does keep things the same if you have already deployed Horizon 7 on-premises. DR as a Service (DRaaS) was up next showing off how to leverage SRM, very straight forward, they really did make this part easy for admins. No cloud service offering can go to long without bringing up Kubernetes (K8s) and this was no exception. The offerings and options are pretty overwhelming so check out the video for more information if K8s is your thing. If you want to integrate your VMware Cloud on AWS with native AWS services then you need to have a method to make that integration work. They presented on how this functions (it is slightly different than if you are used to using AWS service endpoints). Many organization who want to leverage application streamlining make use of marketplaces and pre-build packages to make standing up well known applications and platforms a bit easier. VMware has a cloud marketplace for that purpose. I'm not sure how viable their marketplace will be long-term given the ease that you can deploy from the AWS Marketplace to a VPC and leverage that native ability but it is a "nice to have" in the current transition for those that can't deal with porting their apps or platforms.

So what does this mean for enterprises running the full suite of VMware products and technology?

1. You have a relatively easy way to getting your existing environment running in public cloud - but it really isn't public cloud in how the IT market defines it. You are leveraging public cloud infrastructure and a few of their constructs but you are really running VMware SDDC as a Service.
2. You will be paying to run your existing application and platforms in AWS but you won't have as much control over size, scale and costs as if you were to do the effort to port and move to AWS.
3. You will have to address a shared administrative role and permissions (VMware is running the environment in AWS for you), some enterprises that is a deal breaker.
4. You need to evaluate the benefits this solution versus starting to adopt public cloud in an incremental way and port or migration your applications to a native cloud architecture.
5. You can potentially reduce or completely decommission any data centers you operate for disaster recovery or high availability reasons and leverage VMware Cloud on AWS and scale as needed.
6. You could use VMware Cloud on AWS to potentially spin out a division or company and then hand off that infrastructure, applications and platforms to a new team with much less headache than moving things out of your data center.
7. You will still have data gravity problems, they just won't look the same as they do for public cloud services.
8. You will need to have a savvy networking team as the requirements around VMware NSX and AWS networking services are not going to get easier.

If you decide to watch the videos and you have a question feel free to hit me up on twitter (@ehorley) and use hashtag #CFD7, that way others can jump in to help if I missed it. I'm always interested to hear a different perspective or view about a technology, let me know what you think about VMware Cloud on AWS and if it is a good solution for the market right now.

- 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 CFD7. 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, sometimes small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. 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.

SnapRoute - Is there something new happening in networking?

The launch (or relaunch depending on your opinion of when they started and on what they were building verse what they are doing now) of SnapRoute was an interesting event to be able to participate in. SnapRoute presented at Network Field Day 20 as part of the launch of their Cloud Native Network Operating System.

I think what SnapRoute is doing is the start of a fundamental shift in thinking about how network equipment, specifically data center switching and routing, should be deployed, managed and, more importantly, how they are classified. I believe they are the start of the transition where a managed resource in a data center is not something special but simply a compute object with different characteristics that can be assembled in a way that serves the purpose of the workloads that need to run in that data center.

For awhile now the push has been (for the networking industry anyway) scripting and automation working up to some sort of orchestration to make networking advance into the realm of cloud first or at least something a developer could code against. While this is important and will likely continue for the next decade or more it is far from the final goal of what a cloud first approach really entails.

Some in the industry are thinking the next evolution is intent based networking. Defining what you want to have happen and having the system orchestrate the outcome to match the intent. I actually consider that a big jump from where we are at today and companies like Apstra are trying to be an early market leader in that space. But I still consider that solution fundamentally orchestration and there are other methods and approaches out there that are just as valid but still only go up the stack as high as Level 3 (see the chart below).

I think a tweet from my friend Gian Paolo helps explain what is happening really well.

It is worth noting that this applies much wider than the networking industry overall. It seems what SnapRoute is attempting to do is the tooling for Level 4 and they are doing an end run around traditional networking tooling and methods. Instead, they have chosen to leverage cloud native constructs and tools to make networking adapt to those ethos instead. So, SnapRoute uses Kubernetes to run and deploy the resources on the Edge Core switches they support (more suppliers to be added, I imagine, depending on customer demand). Today, their solution runs on a single switch running Kubernetes but it is clear where their vision is going. A grouping of leaf/spine switches in the data center will be a Kubernetes Pod and likely Istio and Envoy will be used to expand the capabilities of what SnapRoute can do in that Pod. More importantly, a traditional network operator really has no choice but to learn cloud first methods and working with Kubernetes, Istio and Envoy are exactly the tools they must learn to make that transition.

I suppose the interesting question is, how is where SnapRoute going significantly different then where the networking market is currently going today? I think the simple answer is they are using the Cloud Native approach which really combines Level 2, 3 and 4 together. They get to avoid the incremental moves of the industry and have a first mover advantage, they are effectively leapfrogging several steps. This assumes they are able to pull off a Kubernetes Pod for the data center fabric but from what I can tell, it sure looks possible. What they are working on could really change the game for developers deploying in on premises data centers. They are worth keeping an eye on and seeing if they are able to make significant deals to help push their vision forward.
- 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 was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD20. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event. In addition, small swag gifts were provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was 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.