Myth-Busting: The Network Layer

Full Day
(9:00 am-5:00 pm)

Willow Room A

LISA14: Dev-Ops
T1
Stuart Kendrick, EMC Isilon
Chris Shaiman, Watchguard Technologies
Description: 

Our industry has its share of urban legends. In this tutorial, we split into teams, pick an adventure, and practice a methodology to separate myth from reality. We then come together as a class, listen to each other's reports, discuss what is surprising and how the underlying technology actually works. By the end of the day, you've repeated this cycle several times, have experience employing the methodology, and are ready to apply these techniques back at the office. You bring basic equipment and complete your homework prior to class; we provide test environments and coaching.

Who should attend: 

Sys admins and network engineers involved in designing operational IT environments or trouble-shooting client/server problems … and who enjoy discovering that sometimes what we believe just ain’t so.

Take back to work: 

Practice using a methodology for sanity-checking performance claims, a deeper understanding of popular technologies, and experience working in ad-hoc teams.

Topics include: 

Your team will pick several adventues during the course of the day:

  • Jumbo Frames: Do they make your server go faster
  • Packet loss: When does it start to matter
  • Hops: How many switches does it take to slow down your server
  • Contention: When the pipe is full, how much of a difference does it make
  • Firewalls: The bad boys of the network -- how much do they skim off the top
  • WAN Compression: How much does this buy us
Presentation Type: 
Training