Packet Pushers - Weekly Show

SONiC is a network OS that can run on a variety of whitebox switches. Originally developed by Microsoft, SONiC is now an open-source project with distributions that target hyperscale and enterprise environments. Today's Heavy Networking is a deep dive into SONiC with Dave Maltz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who has been closely involved with SONiC's development. While Microsoft is a SONiC backer, this is an unsponsored episode.

Today's Heavy Networking podcast examines cross-domain automation. Our sponsor is Cisco and our guest is Omar Sultan, Leader, Product Management for Cisco's Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) product. While the discussion starts with NSO, the conversation also covers dealing with automation complexity, the need for tool choice, and the critical roles that organizational structure and teams play in a successful automation/orchestration effort.

In this discussion, Greg accosts...no, converses with...Simon Sharwood on a variety of issues highly relevant to networking's future. It turns out, Simon is not short on opinions. And thusly, Simon and Greg opine about sundry topics.

If you’ve been looking at automation for your network, you should listen to this episode. This is one of those discussions that can help you understand whether you should roll your own artisanal automation, lovingly handcrafted with Python scripts flowing from your keyboard, or whether your organization would be better served with a commercially supported tool like Apstra. That’s the choice Beelastic needed to make, and we’re going to discuss why they went the Apstra direction. Apstra customer Beelastic is going to tell their tale of data center fabric, multiple data centers, automation, validation, multi-tenancy, EVPN, and more.

Today’s Heavy Networking show dives into Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) with sponsor Catchpoint. Catchpoint combines synthetic testing with end user device monitoring to provide greater visibility into the end user experience while helping network engineers and IT admins support and troubleshoot a distributed workforce. Our guests from Catchpoint are Nik Koutsoukos, CMO; and Tony Ferelli, VP Operations.

Zero trust network access is ideal for today's distributed workforce, but it can be tricky to put into place. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking podcast, we talk with NetMotion about its remote access product that enable zero trust plus performance monitoring to help troubleshoot problems for remote workers. Our guest is Jay Klauser, VP of Worldwide Sales Engineering & Alliances at NetMotion.

Automated state validation is our topic today on Heavy Networking. The hard part isn't configuring the network: it's ensuring the configuration has resulted in the desired state. Guest John Capobianco regards automated state validation is an advanced automation technique. We dive into details in this episode.

Monitoring and visibility are critical to network operations. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking show, we talk with sponsor Codilime about custom development and integration of network monitoring and management tools for the data center and cloud. Our guests from Codilime are are Monika Antoniak, Head of R&D; and Edyta Kałka, Senior Project Manager.

Stuff breaks all the time. With so many people working from home, most of the stuff that's breaking isn't yours, but that doesn’t mean it’s not your problem. Today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by ThousandEyes, reviews critical outages in 2020 and considers network design tips for Internet and remote work. Our guests from ThousandEyes are Angelique Medina and Archana Kesavan.

Tom Hollingsworth stops by the Heavy Networking podcast to weigh in on a few topics, including the conflict between Broadcom and NVIDIA, and whether whitebox networking is becoming too risky for enterprise networks.