I recently had the pleasure of attending NANOG 76. The event took place in Washington DC from June 10 – 12, 2019. The long-running North American Network Operators’ Group event brings together industry veterans, entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world to speak on the latest in network scaling for enterprise, IPv6 implementation, internet security, and 5G network requirements.
On that last topic, Extreme Distinguished Engineer Mikael Holmberg presented ‘Transport Network Requirements and Architecture for 5G’. Mikael discussed 5G architecture at a high level pointing out that 5G services are all “softwarized” i.e. cloud-native with NFV and SDN enabling flexibility in service deployments. He says, “This means that you still need to have a core wired network in place to get to your virtualized services like vRAN, etc. residing in a data center somewhere.”
[Mikael Holmberg preparing before his NANOG presentation]
The session walked the audience through things like network slicing, TSN, automation in relation to the new 5G services like massive IoT, mission-critical services, fixed mobile broadband, and more. If you missed it, watch the recording of his Mikael’s talk on NANOG’s YouTube Channel.
In a 5G cloud-native world, the network becomes a critical component in delivering the connectivity with very low latency that is required to connect large data centers and smaller micro-data centers. Applications will reside in many distributed data centers around the country to enable critical services; such as connectivity for autonomous driving or critical healthcare apps. With such a highly virtualized infrastructure, networks are ideally based on network fabrics, starting with small data center networks or Clos 3 or Clos 5 networks.
The NANOG 76 agenda was jam-packed with hot topics and started off as usual with a hackathon. Participants teamed up to develop strategies around network operations such as device provision, network scaling, and open configuration with assistance from volunteer experts.
Following the hackathon, there were about 30 sessions, and a peering coordination forum to meet and network with the North American peering community.
I was impressed with the number of attendees, there were more than 900 people! This is a new record for the NANOG committee. That has certainly increased over the years and it shows that networking is still a hot topic among the technical community.
[NANOG 76’s Beer n Gear session (Photo by NANOG)]
The Beer n Gear session, that we co-hosted with our customer Telehouse had great attendance as well. We had lots of conversations around our end-to-end network solution portfolio and how we can help our customers to achieve their business goals.
We’re happy to work with NANOG to serve the Internet community.
With the conclusion and success of NANOG 76, eyes are all on NANOG 77 taking place October 27 – 30 in Austin, TX. is to outnumber the attendance from Washington, DC
Extreme Networks will co-host the event again with our customer Telehouse.
We look forward to welcoming the best in networking, hope to see you there!
