cloud computing

Arista continues to drain Cisco’s brain

Arista Networks, a networking start-up that sells high-end Ethernet switches for cloud computing environments, continues to hire former Cisco Systems executives.  At the top is CEO Jayshree Ullal, who joined the company last year after leaving her role as a senior vice president in charge of Cisco’s $10 billion data center, switching and services business.

On her blog today, Ullal revealed two new hires, both former Cisco executives.

Doug Gourlay has joined the company as vice president of market, just a couple months after leaving his role as Cisco’s vice president of data center marketing.

Anshul Sadana has joined Arista as the company’s vice president of customer and systems engineering. Sadana has been with Arista since 2007, but Ullal is just announcing his appointment as an engineering VP. Before he came to Arista, Sadana headed up Cisco’s development team for the Catalyst 4500 and 4900 product lines and also managed strategic customer relations.

Are you a cable boy or a network engineer?

Recently SearchNetworking.com ran a news story highlighting the emerging skills necessary for network engineers and administrators to survive. The article summoned an outraged call (I believe the word he used for his temper was simmering) from a network engineer at a global firm. He was appalled that any network engineer or administrator would not already come equipped with the skills we outlined.

The story in question called on networking professionals to train themselves in application management, cloud computing, security – a lot more than providing simple IP pipe access.

“Opening dumb pipes is for cable boys. If you don’t know this stuff already, you’re not an engineer,” my annoyed friend said. “You’ve set the bar too low.”

My first thought? Do you really believe that all high level network professionals are ready to push into emerging technologies without some urging?

My second thought: What does this guy have against cable boys? And isn’t that as un-PC as you can get in the world of networking?

But that’s not what he meant.

“The assumption of the story should have been that the network is seeing a demand for more senior level network administrators,” he said.

Sound a bit arrogant? Maybe, but he explained that a real network engineer, administrator or manager is a homegrown product that starts as a cable boy and listens to others to learn. Real engineers, he said, don’t get one or even two certifications and settle for what vendors feed them.

As they grow, they find the humility to reach across IT silos and get over networking protectionism to learn more about complex technologies that increasingly sprawl across departments.

At every level of the networking team, a professional will find this is the time to form alliances between systems, security and networking groups.

“If you have one guy who does firewall and that’s all he does, you’re going to have a problem,” he said.

What’s more, if these departments don’t approach the C-level executives together, they are not likely to get the resources and support they need to implement complex technologies.

“If you’re not working as an alliance, you’re setting yourself up to be outsourced,” he warned.

Cisco puts the cloud computing on edge router blade

This week Cisco announced a bunch of new cloud-based security and collaboration products, including a new cloud-based intrusion protection system (IPS) and Cisco ASA 5500 Series 8.2, with a new botnet traffic filter.  The company also announced that is re-branding the WebEx MediaTone Network, a series of eight data centers around the world that make up the WebEx cloud, as the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud.  This cloud network now offers enterprise IT departments policy control over WebEx meetings, empowering IT to set policies about desktop sharing and file transfers. It also offers global load balancing and intelligent routing, making sure that users enter the WebEx cloud through the best ISP to the most convenient and least taxed data center in the network.

However, what caught my eye in this series of announcements was a new WebEx blade device designed for the ASR 1000 router series. The WebEx Node for ASR 1000 basically transforms Cisco’s ASR 1000 router into a node on Cisco’s WebEx cloud.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say a company wants to hold a WebEx training session for 500 employees. In the old days, each of these 500 employees would log onto WebEx individually across the wide-area network (WAN). With the WebEx Node blade, the ASR 1000 router acts as a broker between the users and the WebEx cloud. The blade establishes a single session with the WebEx cloud. The 500 employees connect through the corporate firewall to the ASR 1000 router and the router connects to the WebEx cloud. By having just one connection to the cloud, shared with hundreds of employees, an enterprise can reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed. This will be especially handy when a company wants to stream high-definition video or send voice-over-IP and/orlarge data sets through WebEx. Companies will avoid WAN bottlenecks and employees will enjoy a better user experience.