Brad Hedlund recently posted an excellent blog on Network Virtualization. Network Virtualization is the label used by Brad’s employer VMware/Nicira for their implementation of SDN. Brad’s article does a great job of outlining the need for changes in networking in order to support current and evolving application deployment models. He…
Tag: Data Center
CloudStack Graduates to Top-Level Apache Project
The Apache Software Foundation announced in late March that CloudStack is now a top-level project. This is a promotion from CloudStack’s incubator status, where it had lived after being released as open source by Citrix. This promotion provides additional encouragement to companies and developers looking to contribute to the project,…
OpenStack Video Cage Match With Colin McNamara
This post is a little late, mainly because I’m both lazy and distracted. That being said I hope you’ll enjoy this video of Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara) and I debating the merits of OpenStack. For more Engineer’s unplugged goodness from Amy Lewis (@commsninja) visit: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/. Related posts: The Stack Wars: OpenStack…
WWT GeekDay 2013
I had the privilege this week to attend the opening keynote and SDN panel of WWT’s Geek Day. The SDN panel was made up of heavy hitters from Cisco, VMware, HP, and Embrane. They each presented their vision and solutions for SDN, then teamed up for questions. The session was…
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…
Why We Need Network Abstraction
The move to highly virtualized data centers and cloud models is straining the network. While traditional data center networks were not designed to support the dynamic nature of today’s workloads, the fact is, the emergence of highly virtualized environments is merely exposing issues that have always existed within network constructs….
Data Center Overlays 101
I’ve been playing around with Show Me (www.showme.com) as a tool to add some white boarding to the blog. Here’s my first crack at it covering Data Center Network overlays. Related posts: Data Center 101: Server Virtualization Data Center 101: Server Systems Data Center 101: Local Area Network Switching Network…
Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT)
STT is another tunneling protocol along the lines of the VXLAN and NVGRE proposals. As with both of those the intent of STT is to provide a network overlay, or virtual network running on top of a physical network. STT was proposed by Nicira and is therefore not surprisingly written…
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…
Much Ado About Something: Brocade’s Tech Day
Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Brocade’s Tech Day for Analysts and Press. Brocade announced the new VDX 8770, discussed some VMware announcements, as well as discussed strategy, vision and direction. I’m going to dig in to a few of the topics that interested me, this is no way…