Heavy Networking

Alkira provides a Multi-Cloud Networking Service (MCNS) that lets you connect public cloud and on-prem locations using a cloud-delivered, as-a-service approach. But Alkira offers more than just multi-cloud connectivity. On today’s sponsored episode of Heavy Networking, we dig into Alkira’s full set of offerings, which include networking, visibility, governance, and security controls such as firewalls... Read more »

Ethernet competes with InfiniBand as a network fabric for AI workloads such as model training. One issue is that AI jobs don’t tolerate latency, drops, and retransmits. In other words, AI workloads do best with a lossless network. And while Ethernet has kept up with increasing demands to support greater bandwidth and throughput, it was... Read more »

AI is finding its way into more and more consumer and business applications. In particular, the widespread use of Generative AI raises a serious question: how secure is it? In this sponsored Heavy Networking episode we discuss security risks of AI tools and ways to mitigate those risks. Our guest is guest Rich Campagna, Senior... Read more »

On today’s episode, guest James Henderson joins the Packet Pushers to discuss Cisco’s Network Service Orchestrator (NSO). NSO’s role in network automation, its declarative management approach, and the challenges it presents are some of the things James shares with the hosts. They also cover operational requirements, deployment challenges, and performance considerations, in addition to discussing... Read more »

Our topic today is digital twins. Sponsor Forward Networks offers software that creates a “mathematically accurate” copy of your network, be it on prem or in the cloud. We talk about what “mathematically accurate” actually means, and how a digital twin can support network operations including change control, network automation, visibility, and troubleshooting. We also... Read more »

Mason Reimert, a CCIE expert, shares his journey in preparing for the Cisco CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure lab exam. He offers practical strategies for hands-on lab work with emerging technologies like SD-WAN. Mason dives into the importance of API understanding, resource management, and virtualization tools. He emphasizes the transition from traditional CCIE to the Enterprise track, all while highlighting best practices for setting up a robust lab environment. Engaging with the CCIE community is also discussed as a valuable resource for aspiring candidates.

On today’s episode, we cover open source Clabernetes, a tool that allows you to run Containerlab on Kubernetes. Containerlab provides a CLI for orchestrating and managing container-based networking labs. It starts the containers, builds a virtual wiring between them to create lab topologies of your choice and manages the lab’s lifecycle.  We discuss the answer... Read more »

On today’s episode of Heavy Networking, Rob Sherwood joins us to discuss the impact that High Performance Computing (HPC)and artificial intelligence computing are having on data center network design. It’s not just a story about leaf/spine architecture. That’s the boring part. There’s also power and cooling issues, massive bandwidth requirements, and changes in how we... Read more »

Our Heavy Networking guest today is Hans Driessens, and we sat down at AutoCon1 to talk through some of his network automation projects. Hans shares his journey from a service engineer to a consultant specializing in network automation. We discuss the evolution of programming languages, the importance of foundational programming skills, and the practicalities of... Read more »

On today’s episode we delve into OSPF filtering. That is, how to filter routes from a device’s routing table in an OSPF environment. This is a tricky business, because OSPF requires an identical database on every device in an OSPF area. That means you can’t stop announcing a route from one OSPF router because you... Read more »