The Network Shokunin

●  Introduction  ●  ●  Availability  ●  Scalability  ● Security ● ●  Supportability ● Simplicity ●  ● Pragmatism ●    

(#3 of 7) Continuing our series on design principles , the next area of consideration is scalability.  Every design guide you ever read extols the virtues of making networks scalable, but in reality what does this mean? The usual definition of the term relates to ensuring a network has sufficient capacity for the current usage patterns and for projected future growth.  This works at two levels - at a micro level, this is ensuring that we provide sufficient ports of the appropriate speed, that we use network devices with sufficient aggregate throughput, that the circuits we specify have sufficient bandwidth for the use cases identified during the collection of user requirements. We monitor those elements and carry out trend analysis to ensure the environment stays within the bounds within which we built the network, and we can add more capacity simply and with minimal disruption when it is required. At a macro level, we ensure our overall network archit...

So #CLUS is almost upon us, let the feast of networking goodness begin! Over the coming week or so I'm planning to immerse myself in the Kool-Aid (never mind drink it) and geek out about some of the exciting stuff that's coming up from the networking giant so many love to hate on!   I make no apologies for this - my recent career has been built on the back of their gear and this peculiar ability that I amongst many others have to be able to make it do what we (or our customers) want it to do *most* of the time.   Disclosure:  I am a fan and a #CiscoChampion.   (I am also pragmatic and obviously know when things aren't so good, but on the whole I think these things balance out) I'm expecting to see loads of announcements and developments for the Digital Network Architecture (DNA) - hopefully new integrations and some SD-WAN capability for DNA Center.   For Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) could we perhaps have some nice shiny hybrid cloud capabi...