Adam's Thoughts

Category: Uncategorized

  • From the archives… What’s the Value of Money?

    Originally posted 24th April 2013

    Lately we have seen Bitcoin surge and fall in value. At first, it was said to be down to the economic issues in Cyprus turning investors to look at other (safer?) forms of storing their money. And now, since I first started this article, collapse in value in under a less than a month. Is Bitcoin a new haven for investors, or a new way to throw notes on to the fire?

    Although even Bitcoin claims not to be an investment haven free of banks and governments, it certainly seems it is being used that way by some. Besides the obvious issue of the financial crisis, how did this new virtual currency suddenly become to be seen as safer than a traditional bank? Admittedly the situation in Cyprus has certainly impacted the view of where your money might be safe, but is Bitcoin any better? At first a surge in value made it look rather attractive at a glance. But that was a week ago.

    For a ‘currency’ in its infancy, having started under 5 years ago, it has had its fair share of disaster stories and things going wrong. There are several examples of hackings or failures wiping out vast amounts of money, of theft or bugs resulting in people trying to get rich quick, or little technology flaws resulting in the system failing.

    Sure, banks have had their issues – recent problems resulting in no payments being processed for a bank in the UK for up to a week for instance. But they come with assurances, you know (or at least are told) they have backups if disaster struck; they spend lots of money on DR etc. And there is some government backing to a point, varying where you live.

    With Bitcoin, your money becomes a little bit of mathematics really. If you keep your own digital wallet, then you become your own custodian of your money (presuming the whole system around it stays running and there’s someone to trade with later). There are comparisons to Bitcoin being a bit like gold – at least with gold though you know it is rare and there will always be a market for it. Bitcoin is creating itself this rarity with controlled release and a cap of how much will ever be in circulation. But that is still several years away and who knows what might change in the middle. Or, again not that dissimilar to gold, you could trust someone else to look after your digital wallet. Someone most likely with no insurance, who if they get hacked or suffer a major failure could end up losing your valuable Bitcoins. Some have just disappeared completely leaving Bitcoin holders wondering if they will see their money back.

    With Bitcoin, if there’s a big electromagnetic storm caused by solar events for instance then even if you’ve been extra careful and have paper printouts of your Bitcoins, it is now worth as much as the paper it is printed on without the systems out there to process it and check the authenticity.

    However, those flaws exist in almost anything we do and rely on today. Would the loss of your Bitcoins be the worst thing to hit you if all the computers went bang? Indeed, would your money be any safer in your traditional brick and mortar bank – they are reliant on their own computer systems to know how much money you actually have.

    So what does all that mean? Have I rushed out and invested in virtual currency (I keep using the term loosely, at Bitcoin isn’t actually recognised as a currency)? No… It is still sitting firmly as 1s and 0s in the computer systems of a traditional bank instead.

    So back full circle as to what might be safer! A key premise to Bitcoin’s security is the complexity of the mathematical proofs used to track transactions. As long as the good guys have the larger amount of computer power, then the currency will be fairly safe. However if the bad guys suddenly have more processing power, they could be the ones who can generate the solutions faster than the good guys. I tried to put the mathematics from my degree days back to some good use to understand the algorithms behind it all, but in the end it all seems a bit too hypothetical to me to trust in the long term! And that doesn’t even touch on the vast instability of the currency itself. It hit $142 a Bitcoin at the start of April 2013 (to drop down to under $120), yet traded at $37 on the 12th March at one point – far more volatile than a traditional currency (and was even lower back in February). And after I started writing this, I saw an article over a Denial of Service attack on one of the major Bitcoin exchanges taking place this week causing devaluation. A new view on what a run on a bank means to queue in front of cash machines? And now yet another update as it soared to over $250, only to collapse back down to $52. Yet… it is still higher than it was a month ago. I must say since I started writing this article, it has been somewhat of a headache of having a major new development to try and update before publication!

    So back to the original question… what is the value of money? Well today, a few servers, hopefully some offsite backups and a trust that the people running it all have some idea what they are doing! Or perhaps a nice shiny slab of gold to put under your mattress …

  • From the archives… Spanning tree, the bad guy on the block?

    Originally posted 23rd May 2012

    I recently spent a week at Cisco Live, and one thing I kept seeing across presentations was the theme of how ‘insert acronym here’ means the solution to no more spanning tree loops.

    Spanning tree, in my opinion, is an old hero of networking and personally something I still see as very much relevant. But let’s take a look at some of these alternatives….

    What we seem to have as helpers and alternatives are a minefield of acronyms… MEC, VPC, VCS, FabricPath, TRILL, VPLS, OTV… Some of these are complementary technologies; others are there to solve different problems, and some just don’t like each other! And just as a forewarning, without a basic knowledge of spanning tree, some of this blog post might not make much sense!

    So what problem are we solving in kicking out our old saviour of resilient topologies and relegating it to the rubbish bin? The goal of all these new technologies is to prevent loops and through that to utilise the full fabric, maximise bandwidth, and of course to prevent the broadcast storm that takes down your network!

    There’s no denying that spanning tree (or STP), despite allowing us to build resilient networks for the last 20 years, has a lot of flaws. A number of these have been addressed over the years, but ultimately you always ended up with links doing nothing waiting for a failure to step up to action. And in the occasions where something went wrong, whether it be human error, hardware failure or a simple software bug, the results could be catastrophic to a network. So let’s say we’re addressing two issues – maximum utilisation of the infrastructure, and preventing the failures that could take down a network. Sounds simple enough!

    STP has certainly been doing well on gathering replacements; there are a lot of standards out there that act to either replace or reduce the need for it. Let’s briefly look at some of these acronyms.

    MEC is a Cisco proprietary technology related to their VSS technology, which allows for multiple links to act as one across two switches running as a VSS pair – this was an area traditionally spanning tree would be required. No loops… problem solved. Except it’s only applicable with a 6500 VSS solution…

    So VPC… except that relates to the Cisco Nexus 7000 product line, and performs a similar job to MEC as an end result… but it’s a different technology. And VCS is Brocade’s version of the same thing. Three acronyms, all incompatible, all doing something along the same lines!

    FabricPath is again a Cisco proprietary technology that came out before the TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links) standard was finalised in 2011. Both are quite similar and use ‘Layer 2 Multi-Pathing’ (layer 2 routing effectively) to make use of your resilient links, but do this through different (and incompatible) methods. This might bring back some memories of Cisco’s spanning tree enhancements, released to improve spanning tree before standards caught up. Even though they aren’t interoperable, it does give us a solution in the data centre for removing spanning tree and making use of redundant links. The biggest issue again is still limited support platform. Presuming we do get a wider range of platform support, surely that’s the solution then?

    But no… At least not yet in my opinion. VPC and MEC are widely deployed and understood… they create etherchannels, a staple of networking for years… the latter are basically replacing spanning tree with something new… and it certainly doesn’t have the proven track record yet to be free of the problems that dog spanning tree in the first place! However it is a big step forward, and both have methods inherited from routing protocols to prevent loops.

    The last two acronyms on my starting list are something different – they are designed to connect data centres (or perhaps even just areas in one data centre) together and allow for the same LANs to exist across them, but keep each site as its own spanning tree (or STP replacement) domain. Certainly one of the bigger disasters waiting to happen was connecting data centres together via trunks using spanning tree to make it all work. As soon as there was a resilient link, there was a potential to take out not one but two or more data centres. VPLS is the open of the two, OTV the Cisco standard. And of course they both work quite differently, and presently have different scale and hardware support.

    So where does that leave us? What should I do if I implemented a network today? Indeed will the technology I decide to implement still be a supported standard in a few years? Should my hardware platform be dictated by these technologies?

    Please feel free to comment and share your stories of how you view the various new and old technologies. For me, I see a hybrid approach based on the infrastructure you have. MEC, VPC and VCS, although I hope there will be unification, both serve a place on their particular hardware platforms. TRILL might be a new guy, but again, if you are running a multi-vendor network that supports it why not give it a trial run, or FabricPath if you’ve got lots of Cisco Nexus switches around and don’t intend to deploy another vendor (or inter-operate with TRILL in the future). But in my opinion, to fully allow interoperability and ensure your network will work with whatever might need to be plugged in, you certainly can’t go typing in ‘no spanning-tree’ on your switch for a while to come, even if you do think you maintain a loop free topology through the above technologies.

  • The Art of Connection

    The Art of Connection

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  • Beyond the Obstacle

    Beyond the Obstacle

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  • Growth Unlocked

    Growth Unlocked

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  • Collaboration Magic

    Collaboration Magic

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  • Teamwork Triumphs

    Teamwork Triumphs

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  • Adaptive Advantage

    Adaptive Advantage

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