Colin McNamara - CCIE 18233 , VCP, EMCIE, NCDA, GEEK » communication

Application Extension API notes – Cisco Live 2008

colinmcnamara — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:46:41 +0000

The AXP is a open platform for the Integrated Services Router (ISR) that enables you to program in-house, custom applications that leverage packet level interfaces with the ISR platform. You can choose to install either a daughtercard (AIM-102) or a network module platform.

Where would you use these ?

You want your custom application to be able to react, and act on network specific information. Integrating both at a very close level. Fundamentally your application can dynamically reconfigure your router in reaction to network events.

You want to remove common services such as AAA, Syslog, DHCP, etc, IVR apps, Unified communication apps all at the branch office in the ISR. If there is a failure, your router can dynamically reconfigure around that.

AXP architecture

Base Cisco Linux os, IOS CLI, Virtual Instances, C++, Perl, Java, OSGI, Bash. Fundementally this is very similar to a fedora core 4 systems doing paravirtualization.

API Fun – What can it do

You can query and change both the router and the network module
Leverage Embedded Event Manager (EEM) to trigger events on changes, and react to network events.
Network Packet monitoring .. Sniff, Sniff, Sniff

My Questions –

How do I automate network updates, similar to YUM?
Is Cisco using KVM for paravirtualization?

Tags: AXP Application Extension API, C, CISCO, Cisco Linux, cisco live, communication, daughtercard, Instances, isr, IVR, kvm, linux, NDA, Network, Networkers, packet, paravirtualization, reconfigure, Router, virtualization

Cisco Nexus NX-OS and DCNM XML API’s – Cisco Live 2008

colinmcnamara — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:46:33 +0000

Since I am at Cisco Live Networks all week, and I take notes anyways, i thought I would share them with you.

NX-OS / DCNM XML API Fundamental Technology

Netconf – platform for secure communication of XML data between DCNM / NX-OS and mgmt station.

XML, using clear text tags, creates a self describing API. This is necessary because of the confusion and unneccessary complexity inherent in the current SNMP MIB based structure commonly in place today.

Webservices API = SOAP/XML over HTTPS.

Netconf/XML on NX-OS capabilities.

Must be run over SSH
Maximum of eight concurrent NetConf Sessions per nexus virtual device context.
Every single CLI capabilities is assigned a XML tag

JMS is supported in DCNM as wel as NETCONF

Native integration with IBM Message Queue

Tags: C, CISCO, cisco live, communication, NDA, Network, Nexus, NX-OS, Technology, virtual device

Usability features in Cisco’s Nexus 7000

colinmcnamara — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 07:57:31 +0000

Douglas Gourlay, Sr Director, Marketing and Product Management for Cisco’s Data Center Business Unit and writer of Cisco’s Data Center Blog commented on my celebrity sighting post (me and the nexus 7000). He asked two questions regarding my post about the Nexus 7000, and I feel that it best serves everyone to answer them here.

What useability enhancements do you feel are the most beneficial?

A separate, IP enabled, Management Interface. This has been a long time coming. The out of band management interface is very similar to a Ilo card in the HP world. it is effectively a supercharged console server that happens to site on the backplane of the sup engine. I am sure whoever pushed this feature through is going to get flowers one day from a Tech who DIDN’T lock himself out because the management interface was effectively a separate system.
Finally, a functionally USB Interface that I can transfer IOS (well, now NX-OS) images through. Everyone has a USB key nowadays, even my Grandmother has one, it will make life so much easier when I can have a 4 gig key with me that has most IOS / NX-OS versions and my common configs and just pop them right in.
The integrated Cabling system is CLEAN. I love that it forces you to reserve the appropriate space for cabling, and that there finally is the possibility to avoid the flying spaghetti train wreck we see so often in Data Centers.
Front to back Cooling. The cooling design is well thought out. I liked the fact that it draws from directly above the front floor and exits rear top.. This should help out in raised floor data centers that have a large temperature gradient as you move to the top of the rack. It also negates problem of having multiple 6500 chassis side to side and having warm air blowing from the exhaust of one 6500 to the intake of another 6500.
Fan Slots are now placed where it is IMPOSSIBLE to cover with cables. I would say 7 out of 10 times when I walk into a new customers Data Center I find that there are cables run directly over the fan tray with no slack. That is not a failure in design per say, but it could have been avoided. With the Nexus 7000 fan trays in the back the problem is solved before it is created.
Power supplies are in the back . FAR away from the data cabling. It never fails that 20 amp circuits get uncomfortably close to copper cabling. By moving the power supplies to the back side of the chassis, this becomes a mute point and we remove any shadow of a doubt about EM interference causing craziness in our cabling.
This one sounds really mundane, but a quick heads up grouping of status lights. In the past these were normally in a position where you had to squat down to see them, or they are obscured by cables. Buy putting them on the front of the cable tray assembly it ensures these will always be visible.

What can we focus on now to make it a better platform?

One thing that worried me a little was the placement of the compact flash cards in the supervisory module. For those how haven’t it up close look at this picture of the chassis and look for the Grey cover midway up the sup modules in the center slots. Behind them are two flash cards, one for system partition extension, and one to dump log files into. Having these cards available are great features however I could see an operational process of security rotating out the log partitions, or more likely and engineer pulling the flash card after dumping some data for analysis to it, and then pulling the wrong card by accident. Having a simple strap (like the screw downs for power supply plugs) or something similar would go along way towards mitigating that risk.
Continue with the spirit of innovation that has defined Cisco over the years. Cisco has consistently came out with or acquired and integrated many great products that directly address the needs of the market place into the product line (MARS, ASA, AireSpace, TelePresence, MDS, ACE, Etc) but frankly the last GAME CHANGING product that set the industry on its heals and forced everyone to rethink how we utilize technology to accelerate business as a whole was the acquisition of Selsius and the introduction of VOIP as an enterprise class product to the world. I remember having the hair stand up on my arms from the excitement of going up against Avaya and Nortel back then and fighting that uphill battle, educating customers and peers about this “new thing called VOIP and how CallManager (now Unified Communications Manager) is your ticket towards productivity.
When we talk about the Virtual DataCenter, I/O Virtualization (FCOE) and VFrame Automation it is not just another incremental improvement of existing technology. It is a paradigm shift, a leap ahead, a GAME CHANGER. I get the same chills that I did when VOIP was new because I know that those are technologies that will force us to rethink how we approach computing and data systems. These technologies are to the Data Center what IP telephony was to the PBX, and Cisco is the only company with technologies and engineering know how in all the verticals necessary to pull this off.

Tags: blog, C, CISCO, communication, Data Center, DC3.0, DESIGN, enhancements, FCOE, HP, mars, mds, NDA, Nexus, Nexus 7000, NX-OS, Pic, Power, security, Technology, virtualization

RSS feeds – an intranet aggregation solution?

colinmcnamara — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:43:00 +0000

So I am sitting at work last week, and the boss suggests that everyone on my team starts a blog. He has valid reasons – Communication of random ideas, encouraging collaboration, etc etc. So this gets me thinking of challenges that are faced aggregating information within corporate intranets, file stores, and databases. One of the large challenges I face day in day out is “where is that file on X”. Most of the time, I really have no clue. I may hit up our legacy intranet search app. Or maybe search a share point index, assuming that the users actually published the information. Maybe next hit up Docman. This continues on and on, until I finally give up and start asking around.

This highlights a pretty fundamental trend. Vendors imbed search functionality inside their own apps, or at least they attempt to. But god forbid you want to search across multiple applications or repositories.

In the past the solution was to expose a http interface into your repository, then use a spider to index said interface. This presents one problem – documents placed into repositories have horribly non-descriptive url’s. So as I am running my intranet search I hope and pray that someone put descriptive comments that are indexed by the spider. Sadly, I rarely have luck.

That highlights the second problem. Users are horrible about populating metadata within their documents. I am as guilty as anybody. I have been known to publish files with a less then descriptive name, and then leave my metadata blank. Recently however, I have improved my behavior. This behavior modification was brought on by using M$ SharePoint. Its basically a wiki front end to a SQL database, which is good and bad. What it does do good is encourage end users like me to utilize metadata for organizational structures instead of the classic folder method. It seems that as time goes on, metadata becomes more and more important in data classification. And it seems like both end users and large sites are catching on.

One thing I have noticed, is that pretty much every content provider is publishing their information via RSS feeds. It is about freaking time. Now end users just like me can have all their favorite information sources presented to them in one aggregated view.

This tactic is being used on the large user sites, because that is exactly what they want. If they make it easy for end users to get to content, they sell more product / show adds. This same tactic seems valid for corporate intranets. I can see an RSS feed of a project site you are working on, or coworkers site. Communicating status without adding to meeting burdens. Or to expand on that idea, RSS feeds doing keyword searches for patterns that you are interested in. I think there is true value is gathering information relevant to your job, without working to hard to do it.

This would be quite an accomplishment. Classically corporate apps seem to be architected to focus on capturing files and data. And on the flipside, they are pretty bad at expressing said information outside or themselves. You might call it a black hole of corporate data. So by combining RSS output of disparate corporate applications, with a RSS spider engine you should be able to get a nice summary pushed from disparate applications with links to extended metadata contained in these feeds. Maybe now I can find that file…

Tags: blog, C, CCIE, Colin, communication, NDA, Provider