Speed, Power, Performance: NSX & Memorial Day Motorsports

With Memorial Day weekend coming up, for me, it’s all about hot dogs, hamburgers, and fast car racing. I am huge Formula 1 fanatic, but Memorial Day is a bonanza of racing from the F1 Monaco Grand Prix, to NASCAR’s Coke 600, and of course the Indianapolis 500 all on the same day! The raw speed and performance of these races remind me of a 2016 VMworld presentation (NET8030) on NSX performance.

The argument still comes up now and again that “hardware is faster than software.” Network guys like me just assume that’s true. So, it came as a surprise to me when I watched the session which turned that assumption on its head. In this session, the presenter demonstrated that software is faster than hardware, way faster. Of course, I was dubious at first but quickly learned that physical networking and virtual networking is like the difference between the pace car and the race car. I always assumed the physical switch was the race car, but in the throughput presentation, Samuel showed two VM’s running on the same host with NSX routing, switching, and firewalling between them could get up to 106G! This information surprised me. Sort of like the same experience I had Continue reading

401k, ROTH IRA, and NSX, Wait What?

Today is “tax day” here in the United States where the deadline to file your personal income taxes is due and many of us are looking at our tax burden, investments, and how to deal with the 4 million words in the U.S. tax code. So why not take this day to compare the complexity of taxes with the complexity of traditional data center networking and security. If legacy networking is the 1040-long form then NSX is the 1040-EZ form. Akin to the questions I have for my tax advisor, I sometimes get questions from customers about NSX asking: “We don’t need micro-segmentation, we have VLANs and Firewalls”, or “We don’t need network virtualization, we can do that today with routers and switches…If have to have network hardware anyways, why do I need network software as well?”

So, in the spirit of Tax Day here in the US, let’s compare hardware and software to what they really are…investments. And yes, different investments are taxed differently. Let’s think of traditional networking as a 401K and NSX as a ROTH IRA. Both are investments, and both get taxed.

• Traditional networking investments are “tax-free” UNTIL you retire (or refresh Continue reading

401k, ROTH IRA, and NSX, Wait What?

Today is “tax day” here in the United States where the deadline to file your personal income taxes is due and many of us are looking at our tax burden, investments, and how to deal with the 4 million words in the U.S. tax code.