CLOUD NETWORKING GETS REAL k...

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BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT MARCH 2015 \ VOL. 6 \ N0. 2 IoT The Internet of Pings: Real Networks That Support IoT THE SUBNET From Ports to Programming: A Networking Career Evolves k k INFOGRAPHICS Pulse Check k SDN STARTER KIT Taking Some of the DIY out of SDN EDITOR’S DESK Networking for the Cloud? I’ll Drink to That k k INFOGRAPHICS Data Mine k CLOUD NETWORKING GETS REAL Cloud adoption is no longer a question of “if,” or even “when.” The real question is: Is your network ready for it?

Transcript of CLOUD NETWORKING GETS REAL k...

Page 1: CLOUD NETWORKING GETS REAL k INFOGRAPHICSdocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_12x/io_122295/item_1108093/Network Ev… · INFOGRAPHICS Pulse Check k Taking Some of the DIY out of SDN Networking

BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT

M A R C H 2 0 1 5 \ V O L . 6 \ N 0 . 2

I o T

The Internet of Pings: Real Networks That Support IoT

T H E S U B N ET

From Ports to Programming: A Networking Career Evolves

k

k

I N F O G R A P H I C S

Pulse Check

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S D N S T A R T E R K I T

Taking Some of the DIY out of SDN

E D I T O R’ S D E S K

Networking for the Cloud? I’ll Drink to That

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k I N F O G R A P H I C S

Data Mine

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CLOUD NETWORKING GETS REALCloud adoption is no longer a question of “if,” or even “when.” The real question is: Is your network ready for it?

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EDITOR’S DESK | JESSICA SCARPATI

Networking for the Cloud? I’ll Drink to That

For a long time, I just figured I wasn’t a “beer person.”

Beer never really tasted good to me. It was always too bitter, too carbonated and too zingy. My taste buds would read it as a combination of grass, grapefruit and the adhesive backing of postage stamps. But as the craft beer revival began to sweep across the United States several years ago, I de-cided it was time to give this beer thing an-other shot.

I tried a lot of beers. I hated a lot of beers. IPAs were the worst, but I was no great fan of most lagers either. I didn’t speak the lan-guage of beer drinkers, so I went by other

people’s recommendations. I had no clue how to articulate what it was that I specifi-cally liked or disliked. I was ready to just accept that beer is beer, and I didn’t like any of it.

Then I had my first pint of Guinness, and the world suddenly made sense.

So what does beer have to do with net-working? In this case, admittedly, the connection is oblique and maybe a little tenuous. Our cover story on cloud network-ing (“Building a Network That Supports the Cloud”) in this issue of Network Evolution got me thinking about one of the biggest contradictions in cloud computing. For

Got a cloudcomputing project on tap?Don’t forget aboutthe network.

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most clouds to be cost effective and opera-tionally efficient, they often must deliver a one-size-fits-all service. Enterprise IT needs, however, are anything but that.

That is to say, we can’t direct you to one common network architecture for every cloud deployment. That’s due to the fact that clouds, like beer, come in so many styles and flavors—see what I did there?—from public to private to hybrid.

The term cloud computing can mean anything from infrastructure as a service to software as a service, and it includes dozens of other as-a-service models in be-tween. And as contributor Sean M. Kerner explores in this issue’s cover story, the net-work strategy you develop to support the cloud must be equally multifaceted.

Also in this issue, we take a look at the re-cent flurry of software-defined networking

vendors offering starter kits (“Taking Some of the DIY out of SDN”), which aim to make small SDN deployments or labs more ac-cessible to enterprises. And don’t miss con-tributor Dina Gerdeman’s story profiling three enterprise-grade Internet of Things (IoT) deployments and the wireless LANs that bring them to life (“The Internet of Pings: Real Networks That Support IoT”).

Finally, be sure to check out this edition of “The Subnet,” in which one networking pro describes her personal and professional journey from pint-sized computer geek to Google data center engineer to network automation guru (“From Ports to Program-ming: A Networking Career Evolves”). n

Jessica Scarpati

Networking Media Group Features and E-zine Editor

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Ω Cloud computing has fundamentally changed theway enterprises deploy anduse IT resources. How much does the network also have to transform?

Building a network that supports cloud computing appears, for many net-work engineers, to be a path paved by fat pipes. But some enterprise networks need more than extra bandwidth to deliver what the cloud promises: operational efficiency, lower costs and greater agility to deploy, consume and manage IT resources.

And while there has been no shortage of hype about cloud computing, it isn’t all

Cloud

Building a Network That Supports the Cloud

BY SEAN M. KERNER

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just hot air. Public cloud service spend-ing is projected to hit $127 billion in 2018, up from $56.6 billion in 2014, according to IDC. With a compound annual growth rate of 22.8%, public cloud spending is grow-ing six times faster than the IT market as a whole, IDC reports.

Meanwhile, private and hybrid cloud de-ployments continue to flourish, with 58%

of the 600 IT decision makers re-cently polled by Current Analysis saying they used private cloud ar-chitecture in 2014. The poll found 28% had adopted a hybrid cloud strategy.

The task of designing, testing, de-ploying and managing cloud-ready networks is a multifaceted effort that presents several challenges, but it can also be an opportunity for

enterprises to optimize their network op-erations, improve security and lower costs. Achieving those goals requires more than the right technology investments. Take it from those who have been there: People, process and strategy are just as important to cloud networking as the actual infra-structure deployed.

At K&L Gates LLP, a Boston-based global law firm with more than 2,000 lawyers spread across five continents, the cloud isn’t just an idea; it’s an operational shift that has had a significant impact through-out the firm. K&L Gates uses both private and public cloud technologies today.

“We manage over two petabytes of data, and I wanted to be able to take advantage of cloud architecture,” explains Scott M. Angelo, chief information officer at K&L Gates.

Network forecast: Cloudy with a chance of pain

What’s your biggest challenge with cloud

networking?Take our quick poll

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Angelo has been at K&L Gates for three years and he has, in fact, been able to shift his organization to benefit from the cloud. But it’s an effort that wasn’t without its challenges—and it was no small undertak-ing either.

So, what had to change at K&L Gates in order to take advantage of the cloud?

“Everything,” Angelo says.

It’s Not Just About Fat PipesWhen enterprises consider a move to the cloud—public, pri-vate or hybrid—the first item on many networking professionals’ wish lists is more bandwidth. Even at companies that live and breathe networking, there has

been a cry for more capacity in order to move to the cloud.

Bask Iyer is the CIO of Juniper Networks and is responsible for the internal network and applications that Juniper’s employees use every day. As Iyer has transitioned Ju-niper’s own network to support public, pri-vate and hybrid cloud models, he’s had to try to make sense of what cloud networking truly requires.

“The SaaS [software as a service] vendors don’t want to make cloud sound compli-cated,” he says, “so they just tell you to put in a fat pipe.”

In reality, however, simply putting in a fat pipe—that is, a higher-bandwidth network connection—should be just one piece of a broader cloud networking strategy. That said, building a network for cloud is not a one-size-fits-all approach either. Network

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“The SaaS vendors don’t want to make cloud

sound complicated, so they just tell you to put

in a fat pipe.”

—Bask Iyer, CIO, Juniper Networks

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requirements for cloud depend on which model of cloud computing is going to be used, the way in which cloud-hosted appli-cations and workloads will be reached, and the amount of traffic expected between on-premises systems and the cloud, according to Jim Frey, vice president of research for hybrid cloud and infrastructure manage-ment at Enterprise Management Associ-ates Inc.

A dedicated WAN link to the cloud af-fords enterprises more con-trol over performance and security, and security, but connecting via the Internet enables cloud applications and workloads to be acces-sible from anywhere. In the simplest cloud deploy-ments, applications and their

associated data live entirely in a public or private cloud.

“In this case, there are few specific net-work requirements beyond the capacity re-quired to move files back and forth as well as a means for secure access,” Frey says. “Many cloud providers offer VPN services directly, or a cloud-based router can be de-ployed as a VPN gateway.”

Networking gets a little more complex with hybrid cloud, which EMA’s research indicates is growing at 40% annually—more than twice as fast as pure public or private cloud deployments. In a hybrid cloud, data resides both in the public cloud and in a private cloud, which ends up creat-ing a number of requirements for specific networking features.

“VLANs or overlay networks—i.e., VX-LAN, NVGRE or OTV—will be needed to

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76%of global data center traffic

will come from cloud services and applications by 2018.

Source: “Cisco Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2013–2018,” Cisco, November 2014

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segment or isolate traffic both within the cloud, if available from cloud provider, and to and from the cloud,” Frey suggests. Quality of service and DSCP traffic priori-tization may also be necessary to ensure enough bandwidth is reserved and avail-able for critical transactions or data flows, he adds.

Additionally, WAN optimization appli-ances or application delivery controllers may be used to compress and acceler-ate traffic, depending on the application type. Adoption of virtual appliances for network security and monitoring are also an option in deployments where they’re necessary, practical and cost effective.

The concept of network programma-bility, via software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualiza-tion (NFV), will also play a significant role

in optimizing enterprise networks for the cloud.

“SDN and NFV are both highly relevant to cloud networking, although live produc-tion usage is still in early stages,” Frey says.

Cloud Networking: Look at the Big PictureMaking big architectural shifts is often easier said than done, however, and the technical hurdles are often just one half of the equation. Juniper CIO Iyer says that, generally speaking, many people in an enterprise don’t pay attention to in-frastructure until it’s broken. In the past, events like Y2K and other big IT trends like VoIP put a focus on infrastructure. Now it’s cloud computing, security threats and mobility that have renewed emphasis on

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infrastructure.“We were potholing before,” Iyer says.

“We were building things where we saw holes and increasing bandwidth as we needed it.”

The problem with that approach was that he was spending a lot of time and money on infrastructure. By fully embracing a “why not cloud?” approach—continually evaluat-ing the cloud readiness of every service and

application—Iyer has been able to optimize Juniper’s internal IT operations with a dramatic data center consolidation project. He decommissioned 18 of the com-pany’s 20 data centers, lowering the total cost of the network.

“By building an infrastruc-ture that enables the move to the cloud, we ended up shutting

down a lot of our data centers,” he says. “You don’t need so much gear in so many data centers.”

While there’s no shortage of networking-savvy minds at Juniper, Iyer is still the “IT guy.” That means he got no special favors when it came to figuring out the best path forward.

“People would rather go help customers than help me with the network,” he says. “So I still have to get my architects and do design for policy, security, et cetera.”

The cloud provided an opportunity to remove the “mind-numbing” aspects of networking, he says, which included rou-tine tasks like IP address management and other common services that are now more centrally managed and controlled in a cloud network.

José Fernandez Balseiro, technical officer

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“By building an infra- structure that enables the

move to the cloud, we ended up shutting down a

lot of our data centers.”

—Bask Iyer, CIO, Juniper Networks

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and project manager at the European Space Agency (ESA), says that while more bandwidth was certainly necessary to sup-port the Paris-based space agency’s pri-vate cloud project, it’s only one piece of his cloud networking strategy.

By the time ESA undertook its private cloud project, it was already in the midst of upgrading parts of its WAN from a 100 Mbps, Layer 3 MPLS service to a 1 Gbps, Layer 2 WAN service. Balseiro faced a two-part challenge. First, the new WAN needed to allow traffic to flow seamlessly between all of ESA’s main sites and branches; some branches are in remote locations and do not have access to a large amount of band-width, so reusing the existing connections was mandatory.

Second, Balseiro also needed to design a business continuity plan for the agency’s

private cloud that could effectively lever-age, in a robust way, the Layer 2 features of the new WAN—while also maintaining the legacy network security infrastructure that imposes choke points to allow traffic to al-ways go through.

“Many organizations today do not really know whether they need business continu-ity at all and, if yes, whether this need could be addressed in ways that have a contained impact on the network,” he says.

Don’t Forget About PeopleIn addition to infrastructure needs, a suc-cessful cloud networking strategy also con-siders the people that need to be part of the network transformation. Such a shift typi-cally requires a networking team that has the technical know-how to navigate cloud

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computing and virtualization, and one that is willing to work closely with other groups within IT to coordinate a broader strategy.

For Angelo, at K&L Gates, a lot of his company’s journey to the cloud didn’t have to do with the pure technology aspects. Angelo faced a talent management chal-lenge—getting the right mix of people, part-nerships and vendors to come up with the best solution.

Also outside the world of switches and routers, IT pros dabbling in cloud for the first time often run into problems with leg-acy service provider and vendor contracts.

“I had existing contracts with data cen-ters that were major constraints for me get-ting to where I wanted and needed to be,” Angelo says. “There were also contracts with some of the older technology that we knew we wanted to get off of.”

The question of capital depreciation for technology assets is another consideration and challenge that needs to be part of a cloud network transformation.

“All the stars need to align so you can get things to happen, or you have to work really hard to make things happen,” Angelo says. n

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k What are you doing with your wireless LAN this year?Respondents could select more than one answer.

Source: “2015 IT Priorities Survey,” TechTarget, January 2015, N=934

$4 MILLIONThe average annual cost of application, network and server downtime from outages and degradations for a North American enterprise.

Source: “The Cost of Server, Application, and Network Downtime,” Infonetics Research/IHS, January 2015, N=205 medium and large businesses

40%

30%

20%

10%

0

Expanding it

Upgrading it

Integrating cellular

and Wi-Fi

None of these

38%33%

15%

24%

k The ‘dirty dozen’ of network securityThese 12 misguided—albeit frighteningly common—practices are guaranteed to reduce network availability, increase expenditure or risks, and alienate end users, according to Gartner.

• Shiny-new-object syndrome (unnecessary spending on latest-and-greatest products)

• Culture of “no” (denying all requests to maintain lockdown)

• Insufficient focus on users and business requirements

• Defense with inadequate depth (inadequate defense-in-depth strategy)

• Organizational misalignment

• Suboptimal branch architecture

• Security blind spots

• Uncoordinated policy management

• Noncompetitive vendor selections

• Hazardous network segmentation

• Inadequate end-user education

• Inadequate security event management

Source: “Avoid These ‘Dirty Dozen’ Network Security Worst Practices,” Gartner, January 2015

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Ω Want to get into software-defined networking but don’t know where to begin? So-called starter kits can eliminate some of the do-it-yourself aspectsof SDN and ease you into anew deployment.

Sometimes you’d rather order à la carte. You want to download one song, not the whole album. You only need one light bulb, not a pack of four. You want to eat one piece of chocolate, not a whole box. Choices like these usually come at a premium, but you get exactly what you want.

Other times, however, you may not be sure what items you need, how many are

SDN Starter Kits

Taking Some of the DIY out of SDN

BY JESSICA SCARPATI

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required or how they fit together. Most network engineers interested in

software-defined networking (SDN) but not yet SDN savants find themselves in the latter category. They’re excited about the prospect of network programmability, but

very few have the exper-tise, staff or budget to suc-cessfully design, test and launch a full-scale SDN deployment.

“SDN is a passion of mine, but I don’t see my employer getting into that area anytime soon,” says Aaron Paxson, global network manager at SVP Worldwide, a sewing machine manufacturer based in LaVergne, Tenn.

“It’s mostly due to the budget. None of my switches are OpenFlow-capable, so if you’re talking about SDN from an OpenFlow per-spective, it would basically take a rip and replace.”

Concerns like Paxson’s haven’t gone un- noticed by vendors, and they are respond-ing with kind of a prix-fixe alternative to the do-it-yourself model of SDN—a bun-dle-discount, no-assembly-required pack-age of products known as an SDN starter kit. Pica8 was the first to launch one in De-cember 2013, which led to an avalanche of similar announcements last year from Big Switch Networks, Cisco, Dell, NEC, Plexxi and Tallac Networks.

The kits range significantly in terms of cost, size and the variety of deployment op-tions, depending on what they’ll be used for. In general, however, they consist of a

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Enterprises still slow to deploy SDNDo you have any form of software- defined networking (SDN) deployed in your LAN, WAN and/or data center?

Source: Software-defined networking survey, TechTarget, January 2015, N=744

30+70+s70%No

30%Yes

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small number of switches and SDN control-lers with pre-integrated software, a short-term software license and a professional support contract.

The goal is straightforward: Convince enterprises they don’t need to be Google or Facebook to afford and find a use for SDN.

“There are some enterprises that look at their networks and say, ‘We do need to change, but we want to limit how fast we change and how much we change,’” says Brad Casemore, a research director at IDC.

“Cost is definitely a major consideration, but I also think it’s about making [SDN] less frightening,” Casemore adds. “One way to do that is to let people play with the tech-nology and begin to find out what they can do with it. They see fewer risks and more opportunities.”

Removing the Guesswork From SDNChristian Sarrasin is the founder and CEO of Clean Safe Cloud, a cloud provider in Switzerland, although the company hasn’t yet gone to market with its service. Sarrasin and his chief technology officer (CTO) are in the process of designing and building a data center network based on SDN for their cloud offering—housed in a nuclear-blast-proof, ex-Swiss Army bunker.

When they began evaluating the various approaches to SDN, the two entrepreneurs were initially interested in white-box switching, particularly switches that ran on Linux-based networking software from Cumulus Networks. The cost savings inher-ent in the model were attractive, and Sarra-sin says he liked any approach that would keep the threat of vendor lock-in at bay.

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But they also considered Big Switch, with a particular interest in how the vendor bridged physical and virtual switching. Big Switch ultimately won the deal—not only due to its architecture but also because the vendor’s starter kit, which Clean Safe Cloud is using to build its network, takes the guesswork out of what Sarrasin and his team need in order to implement SDN.

“Yes, we could do it our-selves [with white-box switches], but we don’t re-ally want to run that risk, and we don’t think that would be money wisely placed,” Sarrasin says. “We’re going to have pretty stringent SLAs, and we need to have a good vendor standing behind us from a

support perspective.” Clean Safe Cloud is using Big Switch’s

higher-end starter kit, which has a list price of $99,000 and is designed for a production environment, not a lab. The kit comes with four leaf and two spine bare-metal switches from Edge-Core Networks, redundant controllers, a three-year Big Cloud Fabric software license, three years of hardware/software support and 40 Gigabit Ethernet leaf-spine cables. The setup comprises two racks of gear, which translate into support for about 2,000 virtual machines on mod-ern servers, according to Prashant Gan-dhi, Big Switch’s vice president of product management.

Big Switch also sells a single-rack, $39,000 starter kit geared more toward lab environments; that kit has less redundancy, and it has a one-year support contract and

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“Yes, we could do it ourselves [with white-box switches],

but we don’t really want to run that risk, and we don’t

think that would be money wisely placed.”

—Christian Sarrasin, CEO, Clean Safe Cloud

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software license, Gandhi says. The licenses included in either kit have no limitations in terms of features, according to Big Switch, and all of the gear is modular, meaning it

could be used in or re-purposed for a larger deployment.

To say that no two SDN starter kits are the same would be an understate-ment. At the low end is NEC’s $3,000 Program-mableFlow Starter Pack, announced last October, which provides licensing for up to five switches on its ProgrammableFlow controllers and is targeted to lab environments and small-scale deployments.

At the other end is Cisco’s collection of four Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) starter kits, announced last July, which range from $250,000 to $350,000 and con-sist of various packages of Nexus switches, ACI software licenses, Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) clusters and 40-gigabit optical cables.

Darien Hirotsu is an SDN consultant at SDN Essentials in Newark, Del., which pro-vides SDN-related training, consulting and managed services. He uses Pica8’s Open-Flow-based Open SDN starter kit for the company’s internal lab as well as for train-ing sessions with clients. The kit, listed at $8,895 and intended for lab environments, contains only software—specifically, a CD-ROM loaded with Ryu, an open source SDN controller, plus an OpenFlow-based net-work tap application and Wireshark. The

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Top uses for SDNWhich SDN services do enterprises consider most important?

Network virtualization

Network monitoring/ management

Network orchestration

Load balancing and dynamic security (tied)

Application optimization

Source: Software-defined networking survey, TechTarget, January 2015, N=150

77%

49%

47%

34%

64%

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kit also requires the separate purchase of a Pica8 white-box switch, which runs the vendor’s PicOS software.

The value of starter kits like Pica8’s is their ability to let network engineers get hands-on experience with SDN technology in a preconfigured, pre-tested platform, Hi-rotsu says.

“For us, what’s appealing about the Pica8 SDN starter kit, in particu-lar, is it’s a little bit of every-thing—meaning if you want to dive into some Python code and understand how the guts of Ryu work, you have the option to do that,” he says. “On the flip side, if you’re more of a networking-centric person and want to learn OpenFlow and touch

white-box switching, you can do that as well.”

Cracking the Enterprise SDN MarketFor enterprises looking to make a gradual transition to SDN, starter kits can help lay the groundwork, says IDC’s Casemore.

“Workloads are shifting to greater virtu-alization—maybe even to containers over time—so you’re looking at how you need to automate your network, build a flatter to-pology and make it programmable,” he says. “You realize you’ve got to make changes to your network, but you realize you can’t make them overnight. Many organizations are looking at [how they can begin] spin-ning up new workloads on this new in-frastructure, so a starter kit can provide a

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“Workloads are shifting to greater virtualization, so

you’re looking at how you need to automate your network,

build a flatter topology and make it programmable.”

—Brad Casemore,

research director at IDC

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foundation for that.” Paxson, the global network manager at

SVP Worldwide, acknowledges that most SDN products still have big hurdles to over-come—primarily, the questionable level of support for multi-vendor networks. But by lowering other barriers to entry, such as cost and complexity, starter kits may be just what SDN needs to get a foothold in the enterprise, he adds.

“You have an industry that hasn’t changed in a very, very long time. Maybe the only things that changed are the pro-tocols, management and some speeds, but SDN changes all of that. So you really have to have something that’s put together and proven to work,” Paxson says. “I think [the starter kit] is a great business model to get SDN into an industry that hasn’t changed for 30 years.”

Starter Kits, Not Learning Kits For networking pros just looking to toy around with SDN, however, starter kits are far from the most economical option. Even the cheapest kits cost thousands of dol-lars, and they are aimed at enterprises tak-ing their first real steps into SDN. In other words, most starter kits are too expensive to be learning kits.

Free emulators like Mininet allow network engineers to experiment with OpenFlow networks on a virtual machine without the need for any switches or con-troller hardware. Some vendors like Big Switch provide free loaner gear to prospec-tive customers for a few months. Other vendors, including Pica8 and Brocade, are offering free, scaled-down versions of their operating systems for testing on bare-metal switches.

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“I’ve done the vast majority of my Open- Flow and SDN testing in pure virtual labs because, frankly, it’s very easy to set up a Mininet lab and play with OpenFlow and OpenFlow controllers. And that’s really all you need to understand the basics and core concepts of SDN,” says Brandon Mangold, a principal architect at United Airlines work-ing on developing a next-generation data

center architecture based on SDN.

Mangold is in the process of testing products from Nu-age Networks, Cisco’s ACI product suite and VMware’s NSX platform. He is not us-ing any commercial starter kits, and he is skeptical of their worth.

“The starter kits are valu-

able for people who don’t want to DIY, but at this stage, even if you buy one of these starter kits, you’re still doing a lot of do-it-yourself,” Mangold says. “I think the value in these starter kits is more for the vendors and them trying to get customers sold on their solutions.”

SDN Essentials’ Hirotsu also acknowl-edges that while starter kits eliminate the need to start from scratch, they are far from foolproof and still require specific skills and a familiarity with SDN.

“Any starter kit involves an investment in time and in growing your expertise. For ex-ample, if you’re a network engineer and you haven’t had to touch a lot of open source software, you may not be familiar with how to update the open source code,” Hirotsu says. “I think it’s a good place to start [if you have] the full range of skills that are

“Starter kits are valuable for people who don’t want

to DIY, but at this stage, even if you buy one of these starter kits, you’re still doing

a lot of do-it-yourself.”

—Brandon Mangold,

principal architect, United Airlines

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involved. But if you want to be an SDN en-gineer, one of the things that needs to hap-pen is you need to acquire skills that take you out of your comfort zone.”

As with any technology, United’s Man-gold contends, some of the most important lessons are revealed during traditional vendor bake-offs. The limitations Man-gold says he encountered in the SDN prod-ucts he’s testing are too vendor-specific to uncover in an emulation tool, and they’re significant enough that he wouldn’t find it acceptable to discover them after mak-ing an investment in the actual equipment, whether it comes in a starter kit or tradi-tional purchase.

Although a nondisclosure agreement prohibits him from getting too specific, Mangold says his biggest concerns with software-centric platforms like NSX and

Starter kits hint at vendor strengths

SDN STARTER KITS come in all shapes and sizes, ranging in cost from a

couple thousand to over a quarter-million dollars. But that’s not the only

factor that separates them from each other.

Several starter kits are marketed for specific use cases:

n Big Switch Networks pitches its two starter kits

as the foundation for building private clouds.

n Pica8’s starter kit focuses on a network tap application.

n Plexxi offers three distinct starter kits for agile data centers,

distributed clouds and big data analytics.

“You can learn a lot about where [these vendors] expect or hope to

make inroads,” says Brad Casemore, a research director at IDC. “They

definitely see that they have a value proposition for those use cases,

and they’re putting together really bite-sized ways of adopting the

technology.” n

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Nuage are that they don’t work best in anything but a single-hypervisor, fully vir-tualized data center, and he has found “sig-nificant scale issues.” As for ACI, he has found Cisco’s rapid-fire software updates for the various products aren’t keeping up with each other, making it difficult to achieve feature alignment across the whole ACI suite.

“We are disappointed with all of the so-lutions. Reality doesn’t meet the market-ing hype,” Mangold says. “Frankly, for any modern organization—enterprise, specifi-cally—with a mix of requirements, none of the solutions that we’re looking at are quite where they’re supposed to be. But we kind of expected that. We’re still early in the testing phases to validate what direction we

want to focus on, and we kind of knew all of the solutions were still going to be a work in progress.”

Starter kits don’t have all the answers, acknowledges IDC’s Casemore, who em-phasizes that the success of any SDN de-ployment depends on current and future technology needs, as well as the level of ex-pertise among IT staff.

“This is potentially one step in a much longer journey,” Casemore says.

“Enterprises need to look at various starter kit options and figure out which is appropriate for the sorts of workloads they want to run and intend to run—in other words, what they’ve got now and what they plan to deploy—and evaluate them within that prism,” he adds. n

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Pulse Checkk What happens when WAN performance goes south?Respondents could select multiple answers.

CIO gets pressure from bosses or other managers

It tarnishes the reputation of the IT department

The company loses revenue

The company may not meet regulatory requirements

The company loses customers

The company receives negative publicity

k Hold the phone: Who’s your primary telephony vendor?

Source: “2014 Wide Area Networking State-of-the-Market Report,” Ashton Metzler & Associates, April 2014, N=200+ IT prosSource: “2014 IT Decision Maker UC Survey Report,” Wainhouse Research, April 2014, N=153

44%Cisco

51% of businesses will increase their budget this year for network performance technologies. Source: “Visibility, Automation and Analysis: A Winning Combo for Reliable Networks,” Aberdeen Group, November 2014

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44%

43%

38%

14%

13%

7%1%

2%

14%Microsoft

NECSamsung

Siemens

Mitel NetworksPanasonicToshiba

ShoreTel

4%

23%Avaya

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Ω Enough already with the proverbial smart refrigerator that orders more milk when you’re out. Here are three enterprise-grade deployments of the Internet of Things and a look at the networks that make it all happen.

In the early 1980s, a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University was connected to the Internet. It reported on its inventory and provided information about whether newly loaded drinks were ice cold.

This was the beginning, as the legend goes, of what would become known as the Internet of Things (IoT).

IoT

The Internet of Pings: Real Networks That Support IoT

BY DINA GERDEMAN

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Today, IoT technology—physical objects with network connectivity for sending and receiving data—has become a powerful force in a variety of organizations, includ-ing cities, school districts and businesses.

In November, Gartner forecast that 4.9 billion connected “things” would be in use in 2015, up 30% from 2014. That number is likely to reach 25 billion by 2020, Gartner says.

Three organizations that have embraced IoT—the Las Vegas Sands, the city of San Jose and Texas beer distributor Del Papa—discuss their strategies and pull the curtain back on the networking technologies that enable them.

IoT: A Sure Bet for Las Vegas SandsThe Las Vegas Sands has two primary types

of customers at its hotels and expo center. There are the families who don’t want a va-cation to disrupt all the alerts and messages they’d normally get on their connected smartwatches, fitness devices, smart-phones, tablets and laptops. And then there are the groups that bring in large events re-quiring wireless connectivity for hundreds or even thousands of devices.

But in addition to serving its customers’ personal connectivity needs, the Sands’ network also facilitates many of its internal operations using IoT technology, allow-ing staff to remotely adjust the tempera-ture of hotel rooms and large exhibit halls, lock doors, change lighting, manage freezer temperatures and monitor pool chemical levels.

The Sands’ network is equipped to theo-retically handle up to 800,000 devices, and

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it has carried connectivity for as many as 34,000 at one time, says Justin Herrman, executive director of information technol-

ogy at the Sands. The company tapped

Xirrus for its network-ing needs, working with the vendor to build robust wired and wireless net-works, backed up by qual-ity of service to ensure performance. Traffic from IoT devices rides over the same infrastructure as standard wireless traffic, which means that in order to accommodate an in-creasing number of devices and growing data demands, Herrman needed to design

his Wi-Fi network for high density and ensure his LAN and WAN have sufficient bandwidth.

“The events are extremely high mainte-nance. One event can bring millions [of people] in two days,” Herrman says. “We can’t afford to lose [connectivity].”

The Sands’ Wi-Fi network includes 270 of Xirrus’ high-density arrays, and each of those units can provide connectivity for thousands of wireless devices at a time. The arrays flow back to a 10 Gbps wired LAN connection, and eventually out to a 6 Gbps WAN link, which consists of five 1 Gbps Metro Ethernet connections provided by multiple carriers for redundancy. The Sands also uses load-balancing devices to share all six lines simultaneously and pre-vent downtime.

“The benefit of installing 270 devices

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How do you think IoT will affect security?

Source: “Securing the Internet of Thing Survey,” the SANS Institute, January 2014, N=391; 13% chose “other.”

17% of networking professionals believe the Internet of Things (IoT) will be a security disaster

49% believe IoT will have the same level of security problems we have today with other apps and systems

21% believe IoT will provide an opportunity to improve security

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versus 1,200 is that it was only a fraction of the install, and the ongoing support will always be less. It’s been outstanding,” Herrman says. “You manage them all inde-pendently in the cloud, and you can man-age them simultaneously.”

The Sands tested a project recently that used guests’ flight and auto registration in-formation to automatically send a welcome message when they arrived at the airport or by car and were within city limits. The bell-man would know when to expect the cus-tomer, and a key to the hotel room door was provided on a mobile device with an app, so the guest didn’t have to go to the front desk to check in.

“When we ran the demo, quite a few peo-ple opted into it,” Herrman says. “We’re looking to get the capital and make this a reality next year. There are huge gears

moving for IoT accommodations in the near future.”

The hotel is hoping to take IoT a step fur-ther and perhaps get to the point of recog-nizing a customer’s preferences, making sure a special drink and certain cigar a cli-ent enjoyed at a sister property in Asia is also available in the customer’s Las Vegas room upon arrival.

“People want the future now. When they walk onto a property, they want the prop-erty to recognize them,” Herrman says. “And we’re trying to get there. We want the property to breathe with them at a micro level.”

As San Jose Grows, Wi-Fi Steps Up to Support IoT The city of San Jose is expecting its

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population to balloon from its current 1 million residents to 1.4 million—a 40% in-crease—by 2040. Last summer, the north-ern California city partnered with Intel to run a six-month pilot program to install a network of sensors around the city to col-lect data on everything from traffic flow to air pollution.

The city placed the sensors in strategic spots throughout its 180 square miles, in-cluding an area in south San Jose where two freeways intersect and a large mall and high school stand; a downtown site near a light rail, commuter train and bus system; an area in east San Jose near a small munic-ipal airport and mall; and in the northern end of the city near some wetlands.

The city intends to use the data it collects to make decisions about planning mass transit systems and roadways—as well as

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Cities that greenlight IoT projects to reduce traffic, pollution

Smart cities that combine sensor networks with traffic management and parking technologies will significantly reduce congestion on the roads over the next four years, according to a recent study. But less time in traffic isn’t the only thing that will make residents of those cities breathe easy.

Source: “Smart Cities: Strategies, Energy, Emissions and Cost Savings 2014-2019,” Juniper Research, January 2015

IoT technology

is expected to cumulatively reduce

carbon dioxide emissions by

164 million metric tons around the world

through 2019.

That’s equivalent to the annual emissions

produced by 35 million vehicles.

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commercial and residential buildings—to accommodate the expected population growth, says Vijay Sammeta, San Jose’s CIO.

“We didn’t walk into this with any pre-conceived notions,” Sammeta says. “We’re letting these data sets tell a story about what’s going on in our community. The ulti-mate goal is to take transit data, air quality data, how full parking lots are and any other data we collect to understand the data. From there, the city will decide what con-versations we can have about urban design and traffic patterns, and then we can take some action.”

The infrastructure requires two critical components: power for the sensor and the ability to get the data from the sensor to the cloud. The city connected the sensors to streetlights, and depending on which

streetlights they used, some used a wired connection, some used the city’s wireless LAN and others used cellular connectiv-ity. The city pulled some sensors down to switch them around as they got a feel for which type of connectivity worked best.

Pulling cable took longer than tapping into Wi-Fi or using cellular service, so the city found the wireless and cellular connec-tions easier to deploy.

“As long as we’re doing this project, we wanted to learn a little bit about what would be successful,” says Sammeta. “There are a variety of different models to deploy, and we wanted to test all three.”

On its wireless access points (APs) from Ruckus Wireless, the city deployed a sepa-rate wireless network specifically for the IoT data, allowing San Jose’s IT team to have tight control over security. Intel

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houses a Hadoop cluster in the cloud that all the data flows into, and all the micro-transactions get aggregated there for data analysis.

“It’s important for cities to look at this type of technology so they can continue to provide meaningful data to elected officials to make more informed decisions,” Sam-meta says. “It involves looking at IoT op-portunities that will shape those decisions.”

Smart Networks Brew Big Savings for Del Papa DistributingDel Papa—a Texas-based beer, water and energy-drink distributor—began integrat-ing Cisco’s IoT technology into its new Texas City facility in the spring of 2012. The company was simply hoping to reduce en-ergy costs, but it found that IoT technology

also came with a nice bonus: It helps work-ers fill orders and get them out the door more quickly.

The company can now monitor and make real-time remote changes to the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system. Keeping an eye on the thermostat is impor-tant, since Del Papa has an agreement with Anheuser-Busch to keep the warehouse at a certain temperature to protect the beer.

Similarly, the company can remotely control lighting in its buildings. Many of the lights are automated, with office lights turning on at 8 a.m. and turning off at 5 p.m. The warehouse has motion-sensor lights that turn off if no activity is detected within 15 minutes. This provides an additional se-curity bonus; if the system shows that the lights in the back of the warehouse turned on in the middle of the night, the company

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can look into whether it was because an intruder entered the building. And if the lights are accidentally left on at the end of the night, they can be remotely shut down.

“We had to sell the efficiencies to the board members,” says Steve Holtsclaw, in-formation systems manager at Del Papa Distributing. “There is this up-front cost, but when you look at the kilowatt usage

now versus what we could be using, we’re seeing an incred-ible savings. We can also set targets and decide we only want to use this much watt-age every month or every year, and we can control it so that we will hit those targets or come under them.”

The network supporting the IoT technology has also

led to big, albeit unintended, productiv-ity gains. The company’s previous wire-less infrastructure was unreliable, and if an employee stood in a certain section of the warehouse, the worker might lose a sig-nal and lose access to the details of an in-coming order on a wireless device. So the employee may then have had to move to a different section of the warehouse to see the order before pulling the products. Now the warehouse is saturated with strong, consistent wireless coverage to remove those dead zones.

“Filling orders is what sells beer and makes money,” Holtsclaw says. “You wouldn’t think it was time consuming, but the old system turned an eight-hour day into a 10-hour day in terms of overtime costs, delays in verifying orders and loading trucks. We don’t have that issue anymore.”

“We can also set targets and decide we only want to use this much wattage

every month or ev ery year, and we can control it so that

we will hit those targets.”

—Steve Holtsclaw, information systems manager, Del Papa Distributing

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Holtsclaw and his team had to gut most of their legacy network and start from scratch with the IoT infrastructure.

“We had a mismatched hodgepodge of vendors and equipment that didn’t work well with each other,” Holtsclaw says. “It was all out of date and not up to par with what we needed to do.”

Del Papa’s network runs on Cisco’s Cata-lyst 3850 series and 3750-X series switches

in its access and distribution layers, Nexus 7000 series switches in its core, Aironet 3602i APs for its WLAN and Cisco’s 5508 wireless control-ler. It also uses the vendor’s Integrated Services Rout-ers, along with a fiber optic backbone into the facilities with connecting intermediate

distribution frames inside each build-ing. Holtsclaw wanted to make sure all the switch ports were capable of going up to 10 Gbps to accommodate future needs.

“Not only did I buy this equipment to uti-lize it with what we have, but we are also thinking in terms of the future,” he says. “Everything is at a minimum now, but it is capable of being upgraded with an easy switch-over.”

The sensors use a mix of wireless and wired connectivity, and they all commu-nicate via the IP on the network. “Those sensors or nodes on my network have an active heartbeat back to the server and the application used to manage those devices,” Holtsclaw says. “That active connection al-lows for the real-time management of each device and provides an accurate read on the status and settings of the devices.”

20%of identity and access manage-

ment implementations made through 2016 will be driven by

the Internet of Things.Source: “Predicts 2015: Identity and Access Management,”

Gartner, December 2014

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The company encountered a few hiccups after installing the technology— although not in terms of the technology itself functioning as it should, but rather in training non-IT employees how to use it properly.

“Many of our people don’t normally deal with technology, so it took a lot of effort to make sure people were trained,” he says. “For the first couple of months, there were times when the gates weren’t opening be-cause warehouse personnel were getting

familiar with the software, so my team had to get involved sometimes.”

Stephen Lurie, vice president of IoT solutions at Zones, the Cisco partner that helped set up Del Papa’s network, says IoT is bound to grow as businesses find new ways of using data to pinpoint inefficiencies.

“All of these sensors, they have a voice,” Lurie says. “They speak a language. And now, with the adoption of IoT, that voice can be heard.” n

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THE SUBNET | Q&A | JESSICA SCARPATI

From Ports to Programming: A Networking Career Evolves

Leslie Carr has managed networks for some of the biggest names on the Web. She used to be a senior network operations en-gineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and before that, she was a network engineer at Twitter, Craigslist and Google.

These days, Carr, who chats with us for this edition of “The Subnet,” is a self-described “automation guru” at Cumu-lus Networks, a Silicon Valley technology company that develops Linux-based net-working software for bare-metal switches. Carr spends her days elbow-deep in batch scripts and programming languages like

Ansible, Python and Puppet, coming up with ways to automate configuration changes in Linux-based switches, just as sys admins have been able to do with serv-ers for years.

What are you working on lately?I’m doing all these demonstrations—it’s demonstration craziness—for our big 2.5 release. We’re putting in new features, so I’ve been testing the features in a more real-world environment. I’ve got a lab with three racks of switches, so I get to play with all those, which makes me super happy. I’ve

n Leslie Carrn Member

of Customer Experience

n Cumulus Networksn San Francisco, Calif.

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been doing a lot of testing and a lot of au-tomation for demos to show off all the new features.

How did you make that transition from being a “pure” network engineer to one that dabbles heavily in programming?When I started in IT, I did a lot of tech sup-port for little companies, so I think I’m lucky in that I had some exposure to the languages. It happened socially—just look-

ing over people’s shoulders and asking, “Hey, what are you doing? Oh, cool, let me see that.” And then when I started at Google, I started in the data centers, and that’s where I learned batch script-ing because there were a lot of processes we’d do over and

over again. I always think the best sysad-min is a lazy sysadmin because it’s like, “I don’t want to have to keep doing this over and over. Hey, if I use batch scripting, I can spend twice as long doing it once and then five minutes doing it every other time.”

Wikimedia is where I really got into it, and what really helped was having a very supportive team. My co-workers were al-ways really happy to help and review my code, which was really awful at first and be-came less awful as time went on. They’d cri-tique in a nice way. It can be hard to find a great group of co-workers who have no ego because some people will just say, “Oh, I can do this better,” instead of actually help-ing. But they said, “Hey, I see why you’re doing it this way, but if you do it this other way, it’s way better.”

And also being able to Google questions

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“If I use batch scripting, I can spend twice as long doing it once and then five minutes doing it every other time.”

—Leslie Carr, Cumulus Networks

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on the Internet. I mean, seriously! Without Stack Overflow, I don’t think I’d get half of my work done.

You’ve worked on networks for some of the largest Internet companies. What was that like?When I started at Google in the data cen-ters, we were replacing our core switches, so they had the vendor come out and give us this three-hour talk about how every-thing worked inside, and I thought, “Wow, this is amazing.” I think they had ten 24-port Gig-E blades, which back in 2004 was incredible. It was like, “Who’s going to use all that bandwidth?!” Just the way all the traffic flowed in between the chips was so mind-blowing. Then, not long after, we upgraded our entire network to 10 gig, and then we thought, “We’re doing this, so now

they’ve got plenty of breathing room.” Then video started to become popular,

and this was before [Google] bought You-Tube. I still remember when we finally got 100 gigs at the edge, which we thought was amazing and huge at the time and which is still pretty huge for a lot of companies.

We got little weights that were actually 100 grams [to represent 100 Gigabit Eth-ernet] and painted them gold because we were thinking, “This is amazing, and it’ll take us so long to get beyond this.”

Four months later, we got 250 gigs at the edge. Then about three months after that, we got 500 gigs at the edge, and they were saying, “All right, this is the last one.” How video took off was insane. We thought, “Fi-nally, the growth is going to slow down.” Of course, it turned out that it grew exponen-tially, and now, Google doesn’t even think

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in terms of gigabits anymore. Then I went to Craigslist, which is very

popular but is very text-heavy and very small-image-heavy—no video—so having to rescale my prefixes from terabits down to gigabits was a huge leap.

How did you get into IT and, specifically, networking?My mom loves to tell this story: I was in preschool, and our preschool got an Apple II. It was new and shiny, and I got sent to time-out every other day because after I started playing with it, I didn’t want to stop. I would push the other kids off the chair, and then I would lie and tell my mom I didn’t get to use the computer at all. The teacher would tell her, “Actually, she was sent to time-out because she did not want to share.”

Then in high school, I was always good at science and math, and people would say, “You should become an engineer!” I liked chemistry, so I went to college to become a chemical engineer.

I didn’t have a computer in college, so I had to use the computer labs. I know I sound like an old lady—I’m sure young people today all have laptops, but “back in the ’90s,” we had to share computers in a lab. The Windows and Mac computer labs always had long lines, but there also was this Linux computer lab and not only was it always empty, but the monitors were one inch bigger. So I was thinking, “I’d better learn how to use this Linux thing if I want to be able to get into the computer lab.” I just sat down and was very confused and started asking people around me, looking over their shoulder and seeing what they

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were doing. I finally learned enough so I could explore on my own. And, honestly, since it wasn’t my computer, I didn’t have a fear of breaking it because I could just go sit at the next one.

While I was in college, I changed majors a lot and found out that chemical engineer-ing was the least-exciting parts of chemis-try for me. But I also needed a job, so I had several awful retail jobs. One of my friends needed tech support for a Web hosting/ISP company his friend was starting to broaden, so I was thinking, “OK, I think I can do that.” I got to say a lot of times, “Are you sure your computer’s plugged in? Are you sure the modem’s plugged in?”

But that really got me started in IT, so I started doing lots of odd jobs. I built com-puters for six-packs of beer and things like that.

Then I had gotten laid off from my job in Pittsburgh during the economic down-turn in the early 2000s. There were no jobs in Pittsburgh, which sucked, so I thought, “This is going to be my low point. I am go-ing to apply for a job at McDonald’s.” I loved Pittsburgh and wanted to stay there, and then I got turned down from McDonald’s for “not having enough retail experience.” I was like, no, this is my low point. My unemployment was close to running out, and some of my friends who had moved to D.C. were saying, “There are jobs here.” I looked online and put my application in at a few places, and one of the places that wrote back was Google. I got a couple of other offers, which was amazing because I went from “turned down from McDon-ald’s” to getting several offers for tech-nical, entry-level positions. And back in

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2004, it was like, yes, I want to work for Google!

Back then, Google was smaller, so [after I got my first job there in the data centers], my manager called up the director of net-work engineering and said, “Hey, I’ve got a woman who really wants to get into your field. What should we do?” So the director of networking at the time, Cathy Chen, who is awesome, said, “Well, we have some de-ployments going on … so how about she just shadows and see how we work together? She can learn what’s going on.”

I started doing that and shadowing more and more. And I realized I was spending all of my time on the network and none of my

time on the data center, so then I moved over to the networking team.

OK, one more geeky question: What’s your favorite video game?It’s actually probably still Baldur’s Gate or Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s a ’90s D&D [Dungeons & Dragons] game, and they just rereleased it last year with a lot of bug fixes and upped resolution. It runs on my Mac laptop, and it’s still so much fun. Even though the graphics have obviously not aged as well, I still think good storyline and good game-play make for an awesome game. I have replayed it twice since it rereleased, and it’s still a great game. n

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CONTRIBUTORS

DINA GERDEMAN is as a freelance writer and editor, de-veloping content and editing copy for various Web publi-cations, including CMO.com, Harvard Business School’s publication and TechTarget publications. She has 16 years additional experience as a journalist and holds both a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s degree in communications from the University of Florida.

SEAN M. KERNER is an IT consultant, technology enthusi-ast and tinkerer, and has been known to spend his spare time immersed in the study of the Klingon language and satellite pictures of Area 51. He has pulled Token Ring, configured NetWare and has been known to compile his own Linux kernel. He consults to industry and media or-ganizations on technology issues.

JESSICA SCARPATI is features and e-zine editor of Network Evolution in TechTarget’s Networking Media Group. Scarpati was previously the site editor for Search-CloudProvider and the senior news writer for the Net-working Media Group. Prior to joining TechTarget, she worked as a reporter for several newspapers in the Bos-ton Metro area.

COVER ART: FANDIJKI/ISTOCK

Network Evolution is a SearchNetworking.com e-publication.

Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director

Jessica Scarpati, Features and E-zine Editor

Kara Gattine, Executive Managing Editor

Chuck Moozakis, Executive Editor

Antone Gonsalves, Director of News

Brenda L. Horrigan, Associate Managing Editor

Gina Narcisi, Senior News Writer

Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Neva Maniscalco, Graphic Designer

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Doug Olender, Senior Vice President/Group Publisher [email protected]

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©2015 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTar-get reprints are available through The YGS Group.

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