Infrastructure Insights & Perspectives
Real-world guidance from 30 years at the intersection of enterprise networking, data center design, and service provider infrastructure. Alan Sukiennik shares vendor-neutral analysis, architecture perspectives, and field-tested insights to help IT leaders make better technology decisions — without the sales pitch.
Latest Articles
Each article draws on direct experience across enterprise, service provider, and cloud environments — from hands-on engineering at Arista Networks, F5, BlueCat, and Nokia to advising IT leaders on high-stakes architecture decisions. No vendor endorsements. No filler. Just informed perspective.
Most enterprise networks were not built for the traffic patterns that GPU clusters and AI inference workloads generate. This article breaks down exactly what AI-ready fabric design requires — RoCEv2, RDMA, lossless Ethernet, and low-latency switching — and offers a practical assessment framework for identifying where your network falls short.
Leaf-spine with EVPN/VXLAN has become the dominant data center architecture for good reason. But as workloads evolve and vendors push alternatives, it’s worth revisiting the fundamentals: what makes it the right choice, where it has real limits, and how to think about spine redundancy, BGP underlay design, and east-west traffic optimization in modern deployments.
Multi-year OEM agreements can quietly erode your organization’s flexibility, inflate renewal costs, and leave you negotiating from a weak position. This article walks through how lock-in happens, what it actually costs over time, and how to structure evaluations that protect your negotiating leverage before you commit.
BGP was once the domain of service provider engineers managing global routing tables. Today it’s running inside your data center fabric, on the campus, and in multi-cloud connectivity scenarios. This article explains how BGP got here, what it means for your operations team, and what IT leaders need to understand — and fund — to operate it well.
DNS is the first thing that breaks when something goes wrong and the last thing that gets funded. Drawing on hands-on experience with enterprise DDI environments at BlueCat Networks, this article makes the case for treating DNS as a strategic infrastructure layer — covering architecture resilience, security implications, IPAM integration, and the organizational blind spots that leave most enterprises exposed.
Nevada has become one of the fastest-growing data center markets in North America — driven by land availability, favorable regulation, and the connectivity demands of the entertainment and gaming industries. For IT leaders in the Southwest, this shift creates real opportunities and new considerations around colocation strategy, fiber connectivity, latency planning, and disaster recovery architecture. A ground-level perspective from Las Vegas.
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New articles are published as time permits — focused on the topics Alan hears most often from IT leaders and executives navigating real infrastructure decisions. Send an email with “Subscribe” in the subject line and you’ll be notified when new content is live. No mailing lists, no marketing automation — just a direct note when something worth reading is ready.