The future of web-scale networking is here

A guest post by David Iles of Mellanox . This is the 4th blog in a 4-part series highlighting many of the features in our Cumulus Linux 3.2 release that are designed to help our customers move towards web-scale networking.

Must be this tall to play in this data center

If you’ve ever been to an amusement park, you’ve seen those “must be this tall to ride” signs. With data centers, instead of goofy signs mocking the vertically challenged, network architectures plant strict feature requirements into RFPs to weed out the less mature offerings. In many cases, they even place features they don’t really need – sometimes as a way to measure the breadth of the offerings that get submitted.

Just as an archaeologist can determine the historical date of excavation sites based on the artifacts found there, I can usually identify the age of network RFPs by the features embedded in them:

•  TRILL –  the RFP is at least 2 years old
• RIP –  the RFP is at probably 4 years old
• Stacking (in the datacenter) –  RFP is probably 6 years old
• Token Ring or FDDI – RFP must be 20 years old
• MLAG (VPC) – no more Continue reading