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Category Archives for "ipSpace.net"

To YANG or Not to YANG, That’s the Question

Yannis sent me an interesting challenge after reading my short “this is how I wasted my time” update:

We are very much committed in automation and use Ansible to create configuration and provision our SP and data center network. One of our principles is that we do rely solely on data available in external resources (databases and REST endpoints), and avoid fetching information/views from the network because that would create a loop.

You can almost feel a however coming in just a few seconds, right?

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SDN Use Cases: Featured Webinar in March 2017

The featured webinar in March 2017 is the SDN Use Cases webinar describing over a dozen different real-life SDN use cases. The featured videos cover four of them: a data center fabric by Plexxi, microsegmentation (including VMware NSX), SDN-based Internet edge router built by David Barroso, and Fibbing - an OSPF-based traffic engineering developed at University of Louvain.

To view the videos, log into my.ipspace.net, select the webinar from the first page, and watch the videos marked with star.

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Worth Reading: Building an OpenStack Private Cloud

It’s uncommon to find an organization that succeeds in building a private OpenStack-based cloud. It’s extremely rare to find one that documented and published the whole process like Paddy Power Betfair did with their OpenStack Reference Architecture whitepaper.

I was delighted to see they decided to do a lot of things I was preaching for ages in blog posts, webinars, and lately in my Next Generation Data Center online course.

Highlights include:

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CloudScale ASICs on Software Gone Wild

Last year Cisco launched a new series of Nexus 9000 switches with table sizes that didn’t match any of the known merchant silicon ASICs. It was obvious they had to be using their own silicon – the CloudScale ASIC. Lukas Krattiger was kind enough to describe some of the details last November, resulting in Episode 73 of Software Gone Wild.

For even more details, watch the Cisco Nexus 9000 Architecture Cisco Live presentation.

Leaf-and-Spine Fabrics versus Fabric Extenders

One of my readers wondered what the difference between fabric extenders and leaf-and-spine fabrics is:

We are building a new data center for DR and we management is wanting me to put in recommendations to either stick with our current Cisco 7k to 2k ToR FEX solution, or prepare for what seems to be the future of DC in that spine leaf architecture.

Let’s start with “what is leaf-and-spine architecture?

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Facebook Backpack Behind the Scenes

When Facebook announced 6-pack (their first chassis switch) my reaction was “meh” (as well as “I would love to hear what Brad Hedlund has to say about it”). When Facebook announced Backpack I mostly ignored the announcement. After all, when one of the cloud-scale unicorns starts talking about their infrastructure, what they tell you is usually low on detail and used primarily as talent attracting tool.

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NextGenDC: Securing a Hybrid Cloud with Matthias Luft

Imagine you were asked to migrate some of the workloads running in your data center into a public (or managed) cloud. These workloads still have to access the data residing in your data center – a typical hybrid cloud deployment.

Next thing you know you have to deal with your (C)ISO and his/her usual concerns as well as the variety of articles on tech sites stating that "security is the biggest challenge of cloud adoption".

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Q&A: Migrating to Modern Data Center Infrastructure

One of my readers sent me a list of questions after watching some of my videos, starting with a generic one:

While working self within large corporations for a long time, I am asking myself how it will be possible to move from messy infrastructure we grew over the years to a modern architecture.

Usually by building a parallel infrastructure and eventually retiring the old one, otherwise you’ll end up with layers of kludges. Obviously, the old infrastructure will lurk around for years (I know people who use this approach and currently run three generations of infrastructure).

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