San Francisco - Day 5

This morning was a cool 50°F but I didn't need to be to the conference hotel until 9. I picked up a cream cheese & tomato bagel on the way. It's a great combination. This was the view from the meeting room looking towards the bay and it may be the best view I've had this whole week. My 7th story room looks out into an alley at a brick wall. Today (Thursday) is also the last day of the meeting. I head home tomorrow morning.

Here is a picture of the group that is meeting for most of the day. The group is made up of network engineers from either research universities or regional networks. In some cases, it's the same individual.

This picture would be a good Apple advertisement as the room is about 80% Mac, two Microsoft tablets and most of the remaining PCs are running some Linux variant. I believe out of the thirty six participants, two are running Windows. It would also be a great example of why STEM education initiatives are so important. Out of the 36 participants, only 3 are women.

Just in case anyone is interested, here is the preliminary list of topics...

Discussion Topics and Notes

• Next Generation I2 Infrastructure
  • Equipment
  • End-to-end
  • Flexible Edge
• How can I2 improve cloud connectivity
  • What does the community need
• SDN for real, not just as a plaything.
  • Intentionally provocative language for the title. Most of what I see in terms of SDN is point solutions (often around the Science DMZ) that seem more oriented towards solving the problem of not having SDN. That’s fine at small scale, and it adds spice to the job, but is it really scalable? What does real SDN in a production, campus network look like? Probably not what has been done to date.
• Automation
  • Ansible and Salt
  • Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes
• IPv6
  • State of IPv6 implementation on campuses across US - SLAAC vs DHCPv6
  • Device registration portal with IPv6 support - does such a thing exist?
  • Challenges in tying IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to a user without .1x
  • Experiences with NAT64 or some variant
• IPv4 - Buying more space vs. NAT?
• Data Center Networking:
  • Virtualization of the networking
  • NSX? Contrail? ACI?
  • EVPN? MPLS? VXLAN?
  • Extending to the Cloud
• Wireless
  • 5ghz only SSID?
  • Device Registration & Fingerprinting
  • Service Assurance
• On-campus speed test/self network diagnostic tool solution

• On-campus CDN installs

• Security topics
  • DNS RPZ feeds
  • Border/Edge Firewalls
  • IDS/IPS in-band/out-of-band
  • NAC & Client Posture Assessment
• Traffic flow and pcap monitoring tools
• R&E Connectivity
• Cooperative grant funding projects and ideas