HP / Cisco / Juniper - don't build me the network needed 5 years ago today - build me the network for 5 years from today.

Etherealmind has a great article on how hp could approach networking and model the things that cisco provides for customers.

http://etherealmind.com/what-hp-networking-successful/

Intrinsic to the article is - Cisco is "good enough".

I'm sick of good enough.

Actually, I think that cisco needs to do something exciting and enabling at the network layer and try to drive automation and virtualization deeper into the DNA of the platform.

I spending a lot of time noodling how to make utility computing portal and flexible. Have to give props to Alyssa Henry from amazon for putting me down this path.

"Trust us..." is what customers have to believe to use the EC2 / S3 computing / persistence clouds. And really - you do have to trust them - but how did they handle seamless DC replication / fail-over in minutes.

Nothing has to change - not the ip addresses, not the code, nothing.

"How the hell can they do that??", thinks me.

[snip] x-post from http://www.vyatta.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4525

Hello,

I'd like to introduce the cloonix network simulator and labs.

http://www.cloonix.net

d/l full lab directly @

http://www.vlcg.net/downloads/cloonix/cloonix-6.12-1.tar.gz

It's a KVM or User-Mode-Linux based networking simulator - it provides a virtual switch / canvas gui for arbitrary labs based on openwrt, debian, fedora, and vyatta (or a mix there-of).

It's possible to alter the loss / delay characteristics of layer2 links to affect upper layer protocols.

Vince / I have been diligently working on creating a vyatta router in the cloonix simulator. Vince has spent many hours ripping apart kvm / UML models of the vyatta router and as a result we have labs with vyatta as bgp / ospf peers at

http://www.vlcg.net/downloads/cloonix/cloonix-6.12-1.tar.gz

There are 11 total labs and (2) labs which are vyatta UML based.


peril@peril-desktop:~/Downloads/cloonix-6.12-1/virtual_platform_configs$ ls -altr
total 52
drwxr-xr-x 7 peril peril 4096 2010-07-18 23:30 rip_demo_openwrt_uml