Enterprise SDN, with Greg Ferro from Packet Pushers

OVS Orbit

Greg Ferro is one of the Packet Pushers, a host of much more popular podcasts than this one. Greg's bio says:

Greg survived 25+ years of Enterprise IT as a network engineer, architect and designer. Involved with a wide range of companies in gaming, online, finance, carriers, energy and other, he was a team member or leader that designed, built and deployed quite a few medium & large solutions for well known large companies. He was CCIE#6920 (and a bunch of others) but thats not relevant now.

The conversation in this episode focuses on the relationship between virtual switching and enterprise networking. According to Greg, microsegmentation is the key selling point for SDN in the enterprise. The idea of pulling a whole physical network into a virtual environment, which was one of Nicira's use cases, is starting to acquire some currency in enterprises, although there's a great deal of stickiness from sales of physical hardware firewalls and other appliances:

"...so the customer says, 'I really like that poop sandwich, can I have another one?' and they don't realize that right next to it is a chicken sandwich if only they knew to ask for a chicken sandwich, so they get the poop sandwich and they go, 'Mmm, tastes just like the last one! Exactly what I wanted!'"

One important aspect of the Nicira vision was agility, the ability to add or change networks quickly without involving the networking team. According to Greg, this is not yet important to enterprises because they lack the belief that it really works:

"They're too used to being lied to... When you come to them and say, 'We've got all this agility and speed!' they just at you going, 'Why would I need that?' ... They don't trust what they're being told because they have a history of getting un-trustable advice."

Ben and Greg also briefly discuss SD-WAN and NFV. Greg expresses a theory that the end of net neutrality will terminate telco interest in ONAP and CORD. Greg expresses positivity about hardware with flow-based control APIs such as OpenFlow and P4.

Greg offers an opinion about public cloud in enterprises:

"I think we're going to see most people go into the public cloud, re-engineer, learn cloud principles, and then start to deploy it back. When will that happen? When we start to see the legacy IT vendors build hyperconverged platforms running things like OpenShift, and you won't even know it's OpenShift, it'll just be a private cloud, and clicky-clicky, here's an IaaS, here's a VM, here's a storage, here's a connection to the Internet, there's my public IP, boom!"

For more information about Greg, visit etherealmind.com. You can contact Greg via Twitter as @EtherealMind. For more information about Packet Pushers, visit packetpushers.net.

For the "reverse" of this podcast, where Greg interviews Ben, see PQ 138: Inside Open vSwitch.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.