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HPE Buys Juniper

In 2007, I left Cisco after two brutal years in high-touch TAC.  I honestly hated the job, but it was an amazing learning experience.  I draw on my TAC experience every single day.  A buddy of mine got a job at a Gold Partner, offered to bring me in, and I jumped on the opportunity.  Things didn’t go so well, and in 2009, I was laid off and looking for a job again.  That’s when another buddy (buddies help!) called me and told me of an opportunity at Juniper.

I knew little about Juniper.  We had a Juniper SSL box in the network I used to manage, but the routers were mostly for service provider networks.  When I was at TAC, I had one case where a major outage was caused by misconfiguration of a Juniper BGP peer.  But otherwise, I didn’t know a thing.

The opportunity was to be the “network architect” for Juniper’s corporate network.  In other words, to work in internal IT at a network vendor.  It seemed like a good career move, but little did I know I would be thrust the corporate politics at the director-level instead of technical challenges.  I ended up spending six tumultuous years there, with several highlights:

  • My boss disappeared on medical leave on my very first day.
  • I was re-assigned to a Sr. Director who was an applications person and not knowledgeable in networking.  He viewed the network a bit like Col. Kendrick, the Marine, viewed the Navy in the movie A Few Good Men:  “Every time we gotta go some place to fight, you fellas always give us a ride.”
  • I proposed and got buy-off for a program to ensure we actually ran our own gear internally and to ensure we built solid network architectures.
  • I subsequently had the program taken away from me.
  • I found out a job posting with the identical title and JD to mine was listed on Juniper’s public site without my knowledge.
  • My manager was changed to a person two pay grades below me in another country without even informing me.  (Someone noticed it in the directory and told me.)
  • I quit in disgust, without any other job.
  • I was talked into staying.
  • After another year or misery, I was demoted two pay grades myself.
  • I focused on doing the best job I could ended up getting re-promoted to director and left on good terms.

Some of the above was my own fault, much of it was dysfunctional management, some of it was the stupidity we all know lurks in every good size company.  I actually bear Juniper no resentment at all.

I worked at Juniper in the pre-Mist days, and in the midst of the fiscal crisis that began in 2008.  We went from CEO Kevin Johnson’s rah-rah “Mission10” pep rallies that we would be the “next $10B company” (uh, no), to draconian OpEx cuts when a pump-and-dump “activist investor” took over our board.

At the time I was there, Juniper made some mistakes.  NetScreen firewalls had done well for us, but then we made the decision to kill the NetScreen in favor of the JunOS-based SRX.  This is the classic mistake of product management–replace a successful, popular product with a made-from-scratch product with no feature parity.  There were some good arguments to do SRX, but it was done abruptly which signalled EOL to NetScreen customers, and SRX didn’t even have a WebUI.

We also did QFabric while I was there.  We installed one of these beasts in a data center on campus.  I have no idea if they improved it, but the initial versions took a full day to upgrade.  Imagine taking a day-long outage on your data center just to do an upgrade!

Another product that didn’t work out was Space.  JunOS Space came out at the time when the iPhone was still new.  Juniper borrowed the idea.  Instead of building an NMS product, we’d build a platform, and then software developers could build apps on top of it.  Cisco might be able to get away with that approach, but Juniper didn’t have enough of the networking market to attract developers.

In addition, a bunch of other acquisitions fizzled out, including Trapeze, our WAN accelerator, our load balancer.

All that said, Juniper had some fine products when I worked there.  (And believe me, my current employer has had many failures too.)  I got my JNCIE-SP, working on MX routers, which were a really good platform.  I thought the EX switches were decent.  And the operating system was nicely done.  Funnily enough, I worked a solid year on the JNCIE and promptly went to Cisco.  I never renewed it and now it’s expired.

I left after meeting with a strategy VP and explaining our mission to use Juniper’s corporate network to demonstrate how to build an enterprise network to our customers.  She looked at me (and the CIO) and said, “Juniper is done with enterprise networking.  I’m not interested.”  I left after that.  In her defense, Mist was years off and she couldn’t have seen it coming.

She was right, in that Juniper certainly had a core SP market.  Juniper came about at the time when Cisco was still selling 7500’s and 12000’s to its service provider customers, dated platforms running a dated OS.  Juniper did such a nice job with their platform that Cisco had to turn around and build the CRS-1 and IOS-XR, both of which had, ehm, similarities to Juniper’s products.  Juniper really couldn’t crack the enterprise market while I was there.  The lack of a credible wireless solution was always a problem.  Obviously Mist changed the game for them.

Juniper always felt like a scrappy anti-Cisco when I was there, but it was fast becoming corporatized and taken over by the MBAs.  Many old-schoolers would tell me how different things were in the startup days.  It still always had the attitude of an anti-Cisco.  One of our engineers ALWAYS referred to Cisco devices as “Crisco boxes”, and when I announced I was returning to Cisco, a long-time IT guy called me an “asshole”.  A couple funny stories around this:

A customer came in to our office for training and looked in the window of one the data centers nearby.  He saw it was packed with Cisco gear and subsequently published a video on social media captioned “Juniper uses Cisco.”  He didn’t realize that we leased the building from another company called Ariba, and the data center was theirs, not ours.  In fact, we worked very hard to not run Cisco in our internal network.  Juniper subsequently asked Ariba to block out the window.

One time we solicited a proposal from one of our largest service provider customers to host a data center for us.  The SP came back to us with an architecture which was 100% Cisco.  Cisco switches, Cisco routers, Cisco firewalls.  I told the SP I would never deploy our DC on Cisco gear.  What if a major bug hit Cisco devices causing outages and our data center went down too?  What if we got hacked due to a Cisco PSIRT and it became public?

The SP didn’t care.  We were their customer, but they were also ours.  They used Cisco in their data center, and had no desire to re-tool for another vendor.  I escalated all the way to the CEO, who agreed with me, and the deal was scuttled.  Ironically, I used this story in my Cisco interviews when asked for an example of a time when I had taken a strong stand on something.

I work at Cisco now, and even ran the competitive team for a while.  Competition is healthy and makes us all better.  I actually value our competition.  Obviously my job is to win deals against them, but I have friends who work at Juniper and I have friends who work at HPE.  We’re all engineers doing our jobs, and I wish them no ill will.  I always respected Juniper, their engineering, and their scrappy attitude.  While I know some of this will be retained as they get absorbed into a large corporation, it’s definitely the end of an era, for the industry and for me.

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1

Cleared for nothing

I wrote this post on Feb 20, 2020, and I always thought it was an entertaining episode.  FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who features prominently in the post, has been in the news lately as he played a major role in the Twitter Files.  I will stay out of politics, except to note that Elvis was indeed a liaison to the business community, as seen here.

I was working at Juniper when the CIO asked me to apply for a government security clearance.  There were a number of hacking attempts on our network, and a security clearance would make me eligible for briefings from the government on the nature and scope of the threats against the United States’ networks.  Being one of the few US citizens in our department, and having a security background, it made sense.

I met with our “FSO”, the on-site liaison to the clearance-granting agency, in this case the Department of Defense.  I’ll call him Billy.  Billy pointed me to the government web site which housed the application, called “OPM”.  The OPM application was extensive, requiring me to input huge amounts of information about myself and my family.  It required a bit of work to track down some of the information, and when I printed the PDF copy of the application it totaled around eighty pages.

One day Billy called me into his office and told me I had been awarded a secret clearance.  He let me know that I could be subject to the death penalty if I divulged any classified information.  I signed some documents, and that was it. “Don’t I get a card for my wallet or anything?” I asked Billy.  He just smiled.

Shortly after getting my clearance, one of our other cleared employees brought me into a secure office in one of Juniper’s buildings where we could look at classified information.  He pulled a secured laptop out of a locked drawer, and a password out of a sealed envelope.  We began perusing classified information.  None of it was relevant to us, and none of it was particularly memorable.  For example, we read an article about several criminal gangs, the existence of which was unclassified.  The only classified information in the article happened to be the names of particular gangs.  They didn’t mean much to me, and I probably forgot them within a day or two.

One day I was invited to the San Francisco FBI office, to receive a classified briefing.  Billy had to fax the clearance over, because the DoD and FBI didn’t have an electronic way to exchange clearances.  I showed up, excited, to the federal building in San Francisco and proceeded up to the floor where the briefing was to take place.  Nobody was there.  I wandered around the white hallway with locked doors unable to make contact with anyone.  The elevator opened after a few minutes, and another equally confused attendee emerged.  We were wandering around for several minutes before someone showed up and told us to go to a different floor.

On the new floor a couple of young-looking FBI agents setup a table, checked our ID’s, and then took our cell phones.  The security did not seem very rigorous.  They then admitted us to the SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.  The room we were led into was just a conference room, with a low ceiling and no windows.  Another young-looking FBI agent approached me, wearing a tie but no coat.  “Hi, I’m Elvis,” he said.

“I’m a special agent and the coordinator of the briefing today.  We’re very excited to have you here.”

We had a brief conversation about my job and role, and then I asked to use the bathroom.

“Go out the back door of the SCIF and hang a right, he said.”

I did this, and found myself walking with a wall on my right, and a row of waist-level cubicles on my left.  Nobody was in the the cubes, but paperwork was sitting on most of the desks. I wanted to peer at the paperwork as I walked by.  I have a clearance, I figured, so if I had a right to at least take a peek and see if the names of anyone I knew appeared.  Unfortunately, without pausing and staring, a chance I didn’t want to take, I couldn’t read anything.

I found the bathroom, and as I was participating in nature’s call, a couple of guys came in wearing ties but no sport coats.  They each had side-arms on their belts.  I wondered why these agents, who are basically office workers, needed to walk around armed.

As I came out of the bathroom, a female FBI agent was standing there, tapping her foot in anticipation of my emergence.  She looked like my school librarian.  Diminutive in stature, she had a side-arm that looked as big as she was.

“Are you FBI?” she asked pointedly.

“No,” I replied, thinking the answer was obvious.

She let out a long sigh, looking like a satisfied cop who has caught a perp.  “You can’t be here without an escort,” she scolded me.

“But Elvis told me I could!” was my retort.  I had a sudden realization that, in a large FBI office like San Francisco’s, it was entirely possible that not every FBI agent knew every other FBI agent, and that my host agent may have been entirely unknown to her.  Here I was, by myself, in the inner sanctum of an FBI office, explaining to an armed federal agent that I happened to be there because Elvis had sent me.

Fortunately, a glimmer of recognition flashed across her stern countenance.  “Oh, Elvis!” she said, exasperated.  “Come on,” she snapped, and led me back to the SCIF.

Back in the SCIF, the briefing began.  The first presenter was an FBI agent wearing a tie, with a coat this time.  Whatever he had learned at the FBI training center in Quantico, VA apparently did not include the fundamentals of haberdashery.  Anyone who buys a suit knows that you immediately have it tailored, as the pant legs are way too long.  Apparently this agent bought his cream-colored suit, with piping, and never sent it for alterations.  The trouser legs were so long he was actually walking on the bottom of his pant legs.  His presentation was no better than his tailoring.  Presenting on computer security, it was clear this was not somebody with even a basic knowledge of computing.

After him, two Homeland Security analysts presented.  They wore rumpled khakis with jacket and tie, and sported similar pyramid mustaches.  They presented on SCADA systems, a subject I could care less about.  Almost all of it was unclassified.

Shortly after my briefing, I learned that the OPM database had been hacked by the Chinese military.  All the personal information about myself and my family is in their hands now.  When I left Juniper, Cisco declined to renew my security clearance.

Some people hide that they have/had a clearance, as they can be targeted by foreign governments.  Personally, I don’t care.  What little classified information I saw, I can’t remember.  You could waterboard me and I wouldn’t be able to tell you a thing.

3

Are coffee and networks the same?

I shall avoid naming names, but when I worked for Juniper we had a certain CEO who pumped us up as the next $10 billion company.  It never happened, and he left and became the CEO of Starbucks.  Starbucks has nothing to do with computer networking at all.  Why was he hired by Starbucks?  How did his (supposed) knowledge of technology translate into coffee?

Apparently it didn’t.  Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ former CEO, is back at the helm.  “I wasn’t here the last four years, but I’m here now,” he said, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal (paywall).  “I am not in business, as a shareholder of Starbucks, to make every single decision based on the stock price for the quarter…Those days, ladies and gentlemen, are over.”  Which of course, implies that that was exactly what the previous CEO was doing.

What happened under the old CEO?  “Workers noticed an increasing focus on speed metrics, including the average time to prepare an order, by store.”  Ah, metrics, my old enemy.  There’s a reason one of my favorite books is called The Tyranny of Metrics and why I wrote a TAC Tales piece just about the use of metrics in TAC.  More on that in a bit.

As I look at what I refer to as “corporatism” and its effect on our industry, it often becomes apparent that the damage of this ethos extends beyond tech.  The central tenet of corporatism, as I define it, is that organizations are best run by people who have no particular expertise other than management itself.  That is, these individuals are trained and experienced in generic management principles, and this is what qualifies them to run businesses.  The generic management skills are translate-able, meaning that if you become an expert in managing a company that makes paper clips, you can successfully use your management skills to run a company that makes, say, medical-device software.  Or pharmaceuticals.  Or airplanes.  Or whatever.  You are, after all, a manager, maybe even a leader, and you just know what to do without any deep expertise or hard-acquired industry-specific knowledge.

Those of us who spend years, even decades acquiring deep technical knowledge of our fields are, according to this ethos, the least qualified to manage and lead.  That’s because we are stuck in our old ways of doing things, and therefore we don’t innovate, and we probably make things complex, using funny acronyms like EIGRP, OSPF, BGP, STP, MPLS, L2VNI, etc., to confuse the real leaders.

Corporatists simply love metrics.  They may not understand, say, L2VNIs, but they look at graphs all day long.  Everything has to be measured in their world, because once it’s measured it can be graphed, and once it’s graphed it’s simply a matter of making the line go the right direction.  Anyone can do that!

Sadly, as Starbucks seems to be discovering, life is messier than a few graphs.  Management by metric usually leads to unintended consequences, and frequently those who operate in such systems resort to metric-gaming.  As I mentioned in the TAC Tale, measuring TAC agents on create-to-close numbers led to many engineers avoiding complex cases and sticking with RMAs to get their numbers looking good.  Tony Hsieh at Zappos, whatever problems he may have had, was totally right when he had his customer service reps stay on the phone as long as needed with customers, hours if necessary, to resolve an issue with a $20 pair of shoes.  That would never fly with the corporatists.  But he understood that customer satisfaction would make or break his business, and it’s often hard to put a number on that.

Corporatism of various sorts has been present in every company I’ve worked for.  The best, and most successful, leadership teams I’ve worked for have avoided it by employing leaders that grew up within the industry.  This doesn’t make them immune from mistakes, of course, but it allows them to understand their customers, something corporatists have a hard time with.

Unfortunately, we work in an industry (like many) in which the stock value of companies is determined by an army of non-technical “analysts” who couldn’t configure a static route, let alone explain what one is.  And yet somehow, their opinions on (e.g.) the router business move the industry.  They of course adhere to the ethos of corporatism.  And I’m sure they get paid better than I do.

Starbucks seems to be correcting a mistake by hiring back someone who actually knows their business.  Would that all corporations learn from Starbucks’ mistake, and ensure their leaders know at least something about what they are leading.

2

Memories of Cisco Live

The last Cisco Live I attended was in Barcelona in January 2020.  As I was in the airport heading home, I was reading news of a new virus emerging from China.  I looked with bemusement at a troop of high-school-age girls who all had surgical masks on.  Various authorities told us not to wear masks, saying they don’t do much to prevent viral spread at a large scale.  The girls kept pulling the masks on and off.  I thought back on my performance at Cisco Live, and looked forward to Cisco Live in Las Vegas in the summer.  Who knew that, a few months hence, everyone would be wearing masks and Cisco Live,  physically, would be indefinitely postponed.

For Technical Marketing Engineers (TMEs), Cisco Live (technically Cisco Live!) measures the seasons of our year like the crop cycle measures the seasons of a farmer’s year.  Four times annually a large portion of our team would hop on an airplane and depart for Europe, Cancun, Melbourne, or a US city.  Cancun and Melbourne were constant, but the European and US cities would change every couple of years.  In my time with Cisco, I have traveled to Cancun and Melbourne, Berlin, Barcelona, Las Vegas, Orlando, and San Diego to present and staff Cisco Live.

A trade show may just be a corporate event, but for those of us who devoted our career to that corporation’s products, it’s far more than a chance for a company to hawk its products.  The breakout sessions and labs are critical for staying up-to-date on a fast-moving industry, the keynotes are always too high-level but with entertaining productions, and the parties are a great chance to connect with other network engineers.  CL was fun for participants, exhausting for those of us staffing it, but still my favorite part of the job.

Cisco Live was originally called Networkers, and started in 1990.  For many years I badly wanted to go to this temporary Mecca of networking technology, but I worked for companies that would not pay the cost of a badge and the travel fees, a total of thousands of dollars.  Even when I first worked at Cisco, from 2005-2007, as a lowly TAC engineer I never had the opportunity to attend.  My first trip to CL came in 2007, when I was working for a Gold partner.  They sent several of us to the Anaheim show, and I remember well the thrill of walking into a CL for the first time.  I walked the show floor, talked to the booth staffers, and attended a lot of breakout sessions of varying quality.  I was quite excited to go to the CCIE party, but I’m not sure why I thought a party full of CCIEs would really be all that exciting.  I remember hanging out by myself for an hour or so before I gave up because I didn’t know anyone there.

The same partner sent me to Orlando in 2008 as well, just barely.  The recession was starting and we were short on cash.  My boss wanted me to share a badge with a colleague, and I didn’t like the idea of having to juggle time slots nor or trying to explain to security how my name could be “Nguyen”.  Thankfully, they ponied up the cash for a second badge.  I’m not a fan of loud music, so I generally don’t go to the CL party, but for Orlando they opened up Universal Studios for us and the aforementioned Nguyen and I, along with a couple others, had a great time on the rides and attending the Blue Man Group.  (OK, some loud music there, but it is an entertaining show.)

I attended CL once more before I came back to Cisco–in 2014, ironically, as an employee of Juniper.  Somehow I convinced my boss to give me a pass on the grounds of researching what Cisco IT was doing.  (They do present at Cisco Live.)  I remember sitting in just a few rows back at the keynote as John Chambers presented, amused I’d be bringing a report back to Juniper about what I’d heard.

 

My view of Chambers at CL 2014

It was actually at Cisco Live when I first got the idea to be a technical marketing engineer.  It’s a bit embarrassing, but I sat in a presentation given by a TME and thought, “I could do better than this guy.”  It took a few years, but I finally managed to get into tech marketing.

I became a Principal TME at Cisco in late 2015 and was told I’d be presenting at Cisco Live in Berlin in January, 2016!  Needless to say, I was thrilled to be given the opportunity, humbled, and more than a little nervous about standing up in front of an audience at the fabled event.

It’s been a sad year in so many ways.  After I came home from Barcelona in January 2020, I received another Distinguished Speaker award and knew I would be inducted into the Hall of Fame.  This was a dream of mine for years, but instead of standing up in front of my peers at Cisco Live Vegas to receive the award, it was mailed to me.  There would be no show floor, no breakouts, no CCIE parties.  The event would go virtual.  I must say, I am impressed with the CL team’s ability to pivot to a virtual format in so short a time.  Still, it was a sad year for those of us who organize the event, and those who were hoping to attend.

In the next couple posts, I thought I would offer a little behind-the-scenes look at how we put on CL, and look at a few events from the past.

In Praise of Vendor Lock-In

There is one really nice thing about having a blog whose readership consists mainly of car insurance spambots:  I don’t have to feel guilty when I don’t post anything for a while.  I had started a series on programmability, but I managed to get sidetracked by the inevitable runup to Cisco Live that consumes Cisco TME’s, and so that thread got a bit neglected.

Meanwhile, an old article by the great Ivan Pepelnjak got me out of post-CL recuperation and back onto the blog.  Ivan’s article talks about how vendor lock-in is inevitable.  Thank you, Ivan.  Allow me to go further, and write a paean in praise of vendor lock-in.  Now this might seem predicable given that I work at Cisco, and previously worked at Juniper.  Of course, lock-in is very good for the vendor who gets the lock.  However, I also spent many years in IT, and also worked at a partner, and I can say from experience that I prefer to manage single vendor networks.  At least, as single vendor as is possible in a modern network.  Two stories will help to illustrate this.

In my first full-fledged network engineer job, I managed the network for a large metropolitan newspaper (back when such a thing existed.)  The previous network team had installed a bunch of Foundry gear.  They also had a fair amount of Cisco.  It was all first generation, and the network was totally unstable.  Foundry actually had some decent hardware, but their early focus was IP.  We were running a typical 1990’s multi-protocol network, with AppleTalk, IPX, SNA, and a few other things thrown in.  The AppleTalk/IPX stack on the Foundry was particularly bad, and when it interacted with Cisco devices we had a real mess.

We ended up tossing the Foundry and going 100% Cisco.  We managed to stabilize the network, and now we were dealing with a single vendor instead of two.  This made support and maintenance contract management far easier.

Second story:  When I worked for the partner, I had to do a complete retrofit of the network for a small school district.  They had a ton of old HP, and were upgrading their PBX to a Cisco VoIP solution.  This was in the late 2000’s.  I did the data network, and my partner did the voice setup.  The customer didn’t have enough money to replace all their switches, so a couple of classrooms were left with HP.

Well, guess what.  In all the Cisco-based rooms, I plugged in the phones and they came up fine.  The computers hanging off the internal phone switch port also came up fine, on the correct data VLAN.  But on the classrooms with the HP switches, I spent hours trying to get the phones and switches working together.

There is a point here which is obvious, but needs restating.  If Cisco makes the switches, the routers, the firewalls, and the phones, the chances of them all working together is much higher than if several vendors are in the mix.  Even with Cisco’s internal BU structure, it is far easier to call a meeting with different departments within a company than to fix problems that occur between vendors.  Working on Software Defined-Access, I learned very quickly how well we can pull together a team from different product groups, since our product involves switching (my BU), ISE, wireless, and APIC-EM.

As I mentioned above, the other advantage is easier management of the non-technical side of things.  Managing support contracts, and simply having one throat to choke when things go wrong are big advantages of a single-vendor environment.

All this being said, from a programmability perspective we are committed to open standards.  We realize that many customers want a multi-vendor environment and tools like OpenConfig with which to manage it.  Despite Cisco’s reputation, we’re here to make our customers happy and not force them into anything.  From my point of view, however, if I ever go back to managing a network I hope it is a single-vendor network and not a Fraken-network.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to hear my podcast with Ivan, click here.

Goodbye Juniper, Hello Cisco

I feel a bit of guilt for letting this blog languish for a while. I can see from the response to my articles explaining confusing Juniper features that my work had some benefit outside my own edification, and so I hate to leave articles unfinished which might have been helpful. In addition, WordPress is not easy to maintain and I keep losing notifications of comments, which means that when I am not logging in, I miss the opportunity to respond to kind words and questions.

As it is, my work explaining Juniper to the masses will have to be put on hold, as I have left Juniper after six years and returned to my old employer Cisco! I worked at Juniper longer than I had anywhere else, and it’s amazing to consider that I just closed the door on half a decade. But, I even after attaining my JNCIE I always felt like a Cisco guy at heart, and so here I am again. A few random thoughts then:

1. I interviewed for a number of jobs, and now that I am hired I can say that I really hate interviewing. My interviews at Cisco were very fair and reasonable. Just for the heck of it I did a phone screen with Google and completely bombed it. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I’m not supposed to reveal their questions, and I won’t, but they were mostly basic questions about TCP functionality, and MAC/ARP stuff, and it’s amazing how you forget some of the basics over the years. I wasn’t really interested in working there so I did no preparation, and in fact the recruiter warned me to brush up on basics. I just figured my work and blog show that I am at least somewhat technical. I plan to write some posts on the art of technical interviewing, but I was certainly underwhelmed by Google’s screening process, as I’m sure they were by my performance. I really wanted the Cisco job, and what a difference attitude makes! (Oh, and I completely munged an MPLS FRR/Node & Link protection question, less than a year after passing the JNCIE-SP. Uh, whoops.)

2. I bear Juniper no ill will. It was an interesting six years. When I came on board, during the Kevin Johnson years, it was all rah-rah pep talks about how we were going to be the next $10 billion company (errr, no…) followed by a plethora of product disasters. Killing off Netscreen gave the firewall market to Palo Alto, Fortinet, and amazingly resuscitated Checkpoint. Junos Space was a disaster, and Pulse slightly less so. QFabric was not a bad idea, but was far too complex. You needed to buy a professional services contract with the product, because it was too complex to install by itself. And yet it supposedly simplified the data center? There was a fiasco with our load balancer product. And then came the activist investors with their Integrated Operating Plan. I will permanently loathe activist investors. Juniper was hurting and they just magnified the hurt. There’s nothing worse than a bunch of generic business-types who wouldn’t know a router if they saw one trying to tell a router company how to do its business. They thought they could apply the same formula you learn in B-school to any company no matter what it manufactures or does. Then we had the CEO revolving door.

Despite all of this, as I said, I like Juniper. I did ok there, and there are a lot of people I respect working there. Rami Rahim is a good choice for CEO. I left for personal reasons. They still have some good products and good ideas, and I think competition is always good for the marketplace. For the sake of my friends there, I hope Juniper does well.

3. If you read my bio, you will see that I was THE network architect for Juniper IT, meaning I covered everything. This included (in theory at least) campus LAN, WAN, data center, wireless, network security, etc. I did something in all of these spaces. It was a broad level of knowledge, but not deep. That’s why I did my JNCIE-SP–I was hungering to go deep on something. My new job at Cisco is principal technical strategy engineer for data center. This is an opportunity to go deep but not as broad, and I’m happy to be doing that. The data center space is where it’s at these days, and I can’t wait to get deeper into it.

4. Coming back to Cisco after an eight year hiatus was bizarre. It was cool to pull up all my old bugs and postings to internal aliases to see what I was doing back then. Heck, I actually sounded like I knew a thing or two. I was thrilled to find out I am on the same team as Tim Stevenson, whose work as a Cat 6K TME I admired when I worked in TAC. Just for fun I walked though my old building and floor (K, floor 2) and nearly fell over when I saw that it looked identical. I mean, not only the cubes, but there were these giant signs for the different teams (e.g. “HTTS AT&T TEAM”) which were still hanging there as though the intervening eight years had never happened.

Unfortunately, I have to leave a few in progress articles in the dustbin. First, I shouldn’t really be promoting Juniper now that I am working for Cisco. And second, I’ve lost access to VMM, the internal Juniper tool I used to spin up VM versions of Juniper routers. However, I hope to start posting on Cisco topics now that I have access to that gear. Cisco’s products are generally better documented than Juniper’s, but I promise to fill any gaps I might find. And I will leave my previous articles up in hopes that they will benefit future engineers who struggle with Junos.

Onwards!

Passed JNCIE-SP: Initial Thoughts

Back to the blog, now that the JNCIE-SP is finished. I got #2332. The last time I did an expert-level exam was 2008, and I forgot just how challenging it is. I passed my JNCIP in June and it took me until November, working solidly most of the time, to get my number. It’s been a great experience. I work in a director-level architecture role at Juniper, and I am getting more and more removed from day-to-day, hands-on work. When I was in Cisco TAC, it was extremely technical, detailed work every day. Now it is meetings and PowerPoints. However, my ability to contribute at this level is entirely dependent on my technical expertise, and it feels great to refresh the knowledge and hit the CLI again. They say CLI will be dead with automation and SDN–don’t count on it. They can’t change the fundamental way networks operate, and when you look at SDN solutions, they are a lot more complicated then how they are presented. Being acquainted with MPLS and routing protocols in depth is the best preparation for anything to come, and the only way to learn those topics is at the command line. Period. Read More »

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Juniper’s mysterious inet.3 table

When I first started configuring MPLS on Juniper routers, I came across the strange and mysterious inet.3 table.  What could it possibly be?  When I worked in Cisco TAC I handled hundreds of MPLS VPN cases, but I never had encountered anything quite like inet.3 in IOS land.  As I researched inet.3 I found the documentation was sparse and confusing, so when I finally came to understand its purpose I decided to create a clear explanation for those who are searching in vain.  I will focus on the basics of how inet.3 works, leaving details of its use for later posts. Read More »

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