Stacking up electronics equipment in precise form factors that slide into standard racks is not a new idea, and in fact it is one that predates the modern era of computing. As is the case with any standard, the constraints it imposes brings order to the market while at the same time restricting it, and making any substantial change in something as fundamental as the datacenter rack requires a pretty significant payback.
Any standard also requires volume manufacturing to really take off and yield benefits, and this has certainly not happened with rack-scale architectures to date. The time is perhaps …
One Rack To Stack Them All was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
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The next person I interviewed about the future of networking is my friend Pete Lumbis. Pete used to be the routing escalations TAC leader at Cisco and now he is working at Cumulus as a SE. Pete holds both a CCIE and a CCDE.
Daniel: The networking world is changing. What are the major changes coming up in the next few years that you think we will see?
Pete: Automation is the big thing these days. Either through APIs or abstraction tools like Ansible or Puppet. I think there will be more embracing of automation, but as a side effect I think we will have to start building networks that are more automation friendly by creating fewer exceptions and one-offs. This also touches on a larger point which is the need to build systems and networks that are less fragile. Automation is less scary when you have an architecture that can tolerate some level of failure.
Daniel: What are the major skills that people in networking need to learn to stay ahead of the curve?
Pete: Fundamentals don’t change. ARP is ARP. MAC addresses still have 48-bits. Understanding fundamentals will always be key. Beyond that it’s going to be about Continue reading