Full Stack Journey podcast
A few weeks back I was asked by Scott Lowe if I wanted to be interviewed. At first, I was puzzled. Why would someone want to interview me? Scott was looking for people to talk about their personal career journey.…
The impact of coding
I have spent a lot of my time over the last year going from a total novice with programming to actually being comfortable with Powershell. As someone who has come from a CLI networking background I did spent a lot…
Don’t forget how to be a user
## Don’t forget how to be a user I work for a large technology company that provides many product offerings. I live in a world that is at the forefront of the network industry that delivers a leading edge technology. There…
What is CloudFlare?
A new appraoch Established with the notion of being the ‘digital bouncer’ for the internet, CloudFlares beginnings are quite interesting. Stemming from Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway’s Honeypot project and combined with a business plan competition that Matthew entered in…
Hero culture must die
For a long time I worked in an environment that I thought was great. People were knowledgable when it came to networking and it was my first real step up from a junior role. I learnt a lot about a…
Micro segmentation and NSX
When you speak of security architectures the word Micro segmentation isn’t new. A Micro segment or a small subset of a larger overall has its roots in the financial industry. When micro segmentation is brought up in terms of a…
Logical boy in a logical world
There always has been to the idea of thinking in the logical headspace. Since the inception of Virtual Local Area Networks the wizards of the ether, Network Administrators, have had a notion of a logical and physical representation of the…
Spirent Avalanche Next
Spirent provides a focus on network and application testing software. Their traditional markets focused on cloud providers, hardware vendors, and traditional service providers. Recently Spirent has made plays into the Enterprise market with devices such as AXON for enterprise hardware,…
Lessons learnt from an old Nokia
Currently as some people are aware I am in between roles. Whilst there is a period of time before I start and receive my work phone I have reverted back to an old spare phone. We keep an old Nokia…
VMware NSX resources
This page seeks to cultivate NSX resources from around the web to give you all the information you need with my commentary on the links. Stay tuned for updates and more links as NSX is adopted. Main Resource page VMware…
Some numbers in 2013
I thought I would recap on some of the key numbers my blog saw this year. This year was a huge year for Cisco Inferno. I broke new records consistently and traffic to my little blog has soared. The numbers…
The year of 2013!
This year we saw the fruits and the go to market of many SDN and network virtualization products. It was great to see Nuage Networks NVP, Cisco ACI, Juniper’s Contrail and OpenContrail and VMware NSX hit the market. There were…
VMware VCP5-DCV
Last week I passed my VMware VCP5-DCV exam. This posts looks to review and give my impression on the sought after certification. Exam Quality Within the standard Pearson Vue test environment, VMware deliver an exam that is of high quality,…
SPARK: VMware NSX design document
I have spoken quite a bit about VMware NSX over the last couple of weeks. There were still quite a few unknowns amongst the twitterati and the community at large around designs. Today this has been solved with the release…
Cisco CCIE v5
As the news spreads the internet and as many people waited and speculated Cisco released the blueprint for the CCIE routing and switching version 5! This is one of the biggest steps forward in my opinion of the CCIE in…
The Wall of Fire – 07 – SDN and the future of firewalls
There has been a quite a bit of ‘SDN-washing’ when it comes to what the future holds. Just because there is an API it doesn’t necessarily mean a product leverages SDN. As marketecture around next generations firewalls hits its peak…
Wall of Fire – 06 – Lifecycle management
Developing your own lifecycle and proactive maintenance should be considered at the start of any investment. It allows administrators and managers and all stakeholders to understand the cost of the network. In some environments the network is purely seen as…
SPARK: My VMUG presentation
Recently I presented at the Melbourne VMware Users Group (VMUG) and delivered a presentation on the state of Overlay networking. It was a great night with presentations from VMware’s Nick Bradford on NSX, Nick Marshall on vFRC and yours truly…
SPARK: Cisco QSFP Bi Di
The Nexus 9000 and ACI is all the buzz at the moment and as an architect I need to look at what is out there, gain a sound understanding of it to realize business benefits. The unique part about the…
Plexxi Data Services Engine
Derick “Cloudtoad” Winkworth presented to us another gem from the vaults of Plexxi. Previously with Juniper Derick has presented on Development Operations (DevOps) and “How to navigate out of the broccoli forests of despair” which gained much traction within the…
MetaFabric by Juniper
Today Juniper Networks announced the MetaFabric. MetaFabric is the next step and evolution in data centre architectures. There has been a vast amount of chatter, noise and FUD recently when it comes to flow programmability and overlay networking. What Juniper…
Presenting at Melbourne VMUG
The NSX play for VMware has come through the Nicira acquisition and the evolution of vCloud Networking and Security. What NSX boils down to is an ecosystem of networking products that include orchestration, network function virtualisation, and hypervisor awesomeness. This…
Honesty Buffer
I received an email this morning from Buffer stating they were hacked. Buffer was sending spam from users accounts opposed to the original content. Immediately I rolled my eyes and thought of the linked accounts I have to the service…
VMware NSX is here and now
Previously I covered components surrounding VMWare’s NSX offering and what made up the solution. After a year since announcement and much hubbub surrounding the “network admin unicorn slayer”, VMworld Barcelona marked the GA release of NSX. After I had some…
Review: The Practice of Network Security Monitoring
When I saw this book on the coming soon list I was definitely excited. Richard Bejtlich, Chief Security Office of Mandiant, has delivered a book surrounding the venerable Security Onion distribution entitled “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring.. After the…