Recently while winding down from a long day I flipped the channel and “The Goonies†was on. I left it there thinking an old movie I’d seen a dozen times would put me to sleep quickly. As it turns out I quickly got back into it. By the time the…
Category: Technical Deep Dive
Network Abstraction and Virtualization: Where to Start?
Network Abstraction and Virtualization: Where to Start? With the growth of server virtualization network designs and the associated network management constructs have been stretched beyond their intended uses. This has brought about data center networks that are unmanageable and slow to adapt to change. While servers and storage can be…
Taking a Good Hard Look at SDN
SDN is sitting at the peak of it’s hype cycle (at least I hope it’s the peak.) Every vendor has a definition and a plan. Most of those definitions and plans focus around protecting their existing offerings and morphing those into some type of SDN vision. Products and entire companies…
VXLAN Deep Dive – Part II
In part one of this post I covered the basic theory of operations and functionality of VXLAN (http://www.definethecloud.net/vxlan-deep-dive.) This post will dive deeper into how VXLAN operates on the network. Let’s start with the basic concept that VXLAN is an encapsulation technique. Basically the Ethernet frame sent by a VXLAN…
VXLAN Deep Dive
I’ve been spending my free time digging into network virtualization and network overlays. This is part 1 of a 2 part series, part 2 can be found here: http://www.definethecloud.net/vxlan-deep-divepart-2. By far the most popular virtualization technique in the data center is VXLAN. This has as much to do with Cisco…
Digging Into the Software Defined Data Center
The software defined data center is a relatively new buzzword embraced by the likes of EMC and VMware. For an introduction to the concept see my article over at Network Computing (http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/the-software-defined-data-center-dissect/240006848.) This post is intended to take it a step deeper as I seem to be stuck at 30,000…
SDN – Centralized Network Command and Control
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a hot topic in the data center and cloud community. The geniuses <sarcasm> over at IDC predict a $2 billion market by 2016 (expect this number to change often between now and then, and look closely at what they count in the cost.) The concept…
Server Networking With gen 2 UCS Hardware
** this post has been slightly edited thanks to feedback from Sean McGee** In previous posts I’ve outlined: How UCS server failover occurs from a network perspective: http://www.definethecloud.net/ucs-server-failover How Inter-fabric traffic is handled in End-Host mode: http://www.definethecloud.net/inter-fabric-traffic-in-ucs How inter-fabric traffic is handled in switch mode: http://www.definethecloud.net/inter-fabric-traffic-in-ucspart-ii If you’re not familiar…
How to Boost Cloud Reliability
Clouds fail. That’s a fact. But if your company uses business apps that are tied to the availability of public cloud services, you can—and must—take steps to mitigate these failures by getting schooled on a few key factors: service-level agreements (SLAs), redundancy options, application design, and the type of service…
Technical Deep Dive
Why NetApp is my ‘A-Game’ Storage Architecture
One of, if not the, most popular of my blog posts to date has been ‘Why Cisco UCS is my ‘A-Game’ Server Architecture (http://www.definethecloud.net/why-cisco-ucs-is-my-a-game-server-architecture.) In that post I describe why I lead with Cisco UCS for most consultative engagements. This follow up for storage has been a long time coming,…