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Category Archives for "Networking"

The Choice Has Never Been Clearer

I am very excited about our next-generation R3 Series routing platforms, which are setting new standards for throughput, density, power efficiency and price performance. We designed these products to address the growing bandwidth demands in cloud datacenter and public networks, supported by significant Arista EOS enhancements including route scale, telemetry and security.

NVMe over Fabrics creates data-center storage disruption

It's quite a mouthful, but Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics (NVMeoF) is shaping up to become perhaps the most disruptive data center storage technology since the introduction of solid-state drives (SSD), promising to bring new levels of performance and economy to rapidly expanding storage arrays.NVMe over Fabrics is designed to deliver the high-speed and low-latency of NVMe SSD technology over a network fabric. There are currently three basic NVMe fabric implementations available: NVMe over Fibre Channel, NVMe over remote direct memory access, and NVMe over TCP.To read this article in full, please click here

NVMe over Fabrics creates data-center storage disruption

It's quite a mouthful, but Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics (NVMeoF) is shaping up to become perhaps the most disruptive data center storage technology since the introduction of solid-state drives (SSD), promising to bring new levels of performance and economy to rapidly expanding storage arrays.NVMe over Fabrics is designed to deliver the high-speed and low-latency of NVMe SSD technology over a network fabric. There are currently three basic NVMe fabric implementations available: NVMe over Fibre Channel, NVMe over remote direct memory access, and NVMe over TCP.To read this article in full, please click here

Building Fabric Infrastructure for an OpenStack Private Cloud

An attendee in my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course was asked to deploy numerous relatively small OpenStack cloud instances and wanted select the optimum virtual networking technology. Not surprisingly, every $vendor had just the right answer, including Arista:

We’re considering moving from hypervisor-based overlays to ToR-based overlays using Arista’s CVX for approximately 2000 VLANs.

As I explained in Overlay Virtual Networking, Networking in Private and Public Clouds and Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure (plus several presentations) you have three options to implement virtual networking in private clouds:

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Nutanix offers unified data backup and recovery, allies with AMD

Nutanix is adding a data backup and recovery software package called Nutanix Mine to its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offerings, which integrates third-party data backup and recovery software with Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software.This allows Nutanix customers to manage their primary and secondary data storage and backup and recovery through a single management console. Nutanix claims that Mine will streamline overall deployment and will simplify the full lifecycle of data backup operations, including ongoing management, scaling and troubleshooting.Nutanix Mine will support a number of data backup and recovery software products, including Veeam, HYCU, Commvault, Veritas, and Unitrends.To read this article in full, please click here

Tech Bytes: SnapRoute’s NOS Targets The Intersection Of NetOps And DevOps (Sponsored)

Today we welcome sponsor SnapRoute for a Tech Bytes conversation. SnapRoute makes CN-NOS, a network OS that runs on whitebox hardware. We discuss the NOS's containerized design that lets you update, test, and replace components; its use of Kubernetes to tie into automation pipelines; and customer use cases.

The post Tech Bytes: SnapRoute’s NOS Targets The Intersection Of NetOps And DevOps (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Gall’s Law and the Network

In Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, John Gall says:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

In the software development world, this is called Gall’s Law (even though Gall himself never calls it a law) and is applied to organizations and software systems. How does this apply to network design and engineering? The best place to begin in answering this question is to understand what, precisely, Gall is arguing for; there is more here than what is visible on the surface.

What does a simple system mean? It is, first of all, an argument for underspecification. This runs counter to the way we instinctively want to design systems. We want to begin by discovering all the requirements (problems to be solved and constraints), and then move into an orderly discussion of all the possible solutions and sets of solutions, and then into an orderly discussion of an overall architecture, then into a nice UML chart showing all the interaction Continue reading

Install the Antidote (NRE Labs) network emulator on a Linux system

Antidote is a network emulator combined with a presentation framework designed to create and deliver networking technology training. Its user interface operates in a web browser, including the terminals that students use to run commands on emulated network devices and servers.

Antidote is the engine that runs the Network Reliability Labs web site. Antidote is an open-source project, released under the Apache license. A standalone version of Antidote may be installed and run on your personal computer using the selfmedicate script. In this post, I will install Antidote on my Linux laptop and make a few changes that improve Antidote performance on my Linux system.

Antidote documentation

The Antidote documentation is being expanded regularly but, at the time I am writing this, the most helpful information is in the NRE Labs blog and in the videos produced by the developers. Most of these are accessible from the NRE Labs Community Resources page.

Also, Antidote is in active development and it is changing quickly as the developers create new features and content. Keep that in mind when following this blog post. Some things may already have changed about the way Antidote installs or operates.

Install prerequisite software

Antidote requires that you Continue reading

When to be concerned about memory levels on Linux

Running out of memory on a Linux system is generally not a sign that there's a serious problem. Why? Because a healthy Linux system will cache disk activity in memory, basically gobbling memory that isn't being used, which is a very good thing.In other words, it doesn't allow memory to go to waste. It uses the spare memory to increase disk access speed, and it does this without taking memory away from running applications. This memory caching, as you might well imagine, is hundreds of times faster than working directly with the hard-disk drives (HDD) and significantly faster than solid-state drives. Full or near full memory normally means that a system is running as efficiently as it can — not that it's running into problems.To read this article in full, please click here

Top auto makers rely on cloud providers for IoT

For the companies looking to implement the biggest and most complex IoT setups in the world, the idea of pairing up with AWS, Google Cloud or Azure seems to be one whose time has come. Within the last two months, BMW and Volkswagen have both announced large-scale deals with Microsoft and Amazon, respectively, to help operate their extensive network of operational technology.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)