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Category Archives for "Networking"

Cisco’s Nexus 9516 review: About line rate

Much ink has been spilled on the topic of what constitutes true “line rate,” and in the past we’ve advocated offering traffic at, and only at, 100.00 percent of theoretical line rate to determine if frame loss exists. However, the distinction between 99.99 percent (which we used in these tests) and 100.00 percent load is not all that meaningful, especially at higher Ethernet speeds, for a couple of reasons. First, Ethernet is inherently an asynchronous technology, meaning each device (in this case, the device under test and the test instrument) uses one or more of its own free-running clocks, without synchronization. Thus, throughput measurements may just be artifacts of minor differences in the speeds of clock chips, not descriptions of a system’s fabric capacity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Nexus 9516 review: How we did it

The device under test for this project was the Cisco Nexus 9516 data center core switch/router, a 16-slot chassis equipped with 1,024 50-gigabit Ethernet interfaces and two supervisor modules. Cisco equipped the switch with its N9K-X9732C-EX line cards, each of which offers 32, 64, or 128 ports of 100-, 50-, and 25-gigabit Ethernet capacity.The traffic generator/analyzer was Spirent TestCenter equipped with its 10/25/40/50/100G MX3 modules. The Spirent instrument has a measurement precision of +/- 2.5 nanoseconds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Nexus 9516 review: How we did it

The device under test for this project was the Cisco Nexus 9516 data center core switch/router, a 16-slot chassis equipped with 1,024 50-gigabit Ethernet interfaces and two supervisor modules. Cisco equipped the switch with its N9K-X9732C-EX line cards, each of which offers 32, 64, or 128 ports of 100-, 50-, and 25-gigabit Ethernet capacity.The traffic generator/analyzer was Spirent TestCenter equipped with its 10/25/40/50/100G MX3 modules. The Spirent instrument has a measurement precision of +/- 2.5 nanoseconds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Nexus 9516 data center switch aces a grueling high-density stress test

How many ports are enough at the core of the data center? How does 1,024 sound?That’s the configuration we used to assess Cisco Systems’ Nexus 9516 data center core switch. In this exclusive Clear Choice test, we assessed the Cisco data center core switch with more than 1,000 50G Ethernet ports. That makes this by far the largest 50G test, and for that matter the highest-density switch test, Network World has ever published.As its name suggests, the Nexus 9516 accepts up to 16 N9K-X9732C-EX line cards, built around Cisco’s leaf-and-spine engine (LSE) ASICs. These multi-speed chips can run at 100G rates, for up to 512 ports per chassis; 50G rates for up to 1,024 ports; or 25G rates for up to 2,048 ports. We picked the 50G rate, and partnered with test and measurement vendor Spirent Communications to fully load the switch’s control and data planes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Nexus 9516 data center switch aces a grueling high-density stress test

How many ports are enough at the core of the data center? How does 1,024 sound?That’s the configuration we used to assess Cisco Systems’ Nexus 9516 data center core switch. In this exclusive Clear Choice test, we assessed the Cisco data center core switch with more than 1,000 50G Ethernet ports. That makes this by far the largest 50G test, and for that matter the highest-density switch test, Network World has ever published.As its name suggests, the Nexus 9516 accepts up to 16 N9K-X9732C-EX line cards, built around Cisco’s leaf-and-spine engine (LSE) ASICs. These multi-speed chips can run at 100G rates, for up to 512 ports per chassis; 50G rates for up to 1,024 ports; or 25G rates for up to 2,048 ports. We picked the 50G rate, and partnered with test and measurement vendor Spirent Communications to fully load the switch’s control and data planes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tapping big data to predict the future

Big data visualization tools are great for graphing past data to see patterns and trends, but future trends is a tougher nut to crack, since past performance is often no indicator of future actions. But graph database technology vendor Franz Inc. is doing just that with the latest version of its graph visualization software.Gruff 7.0 adds a new feature called a “time slider” that serves as a kind of time machine for temporal graph analytics. The new feature is intended to allow both novices and graph experts alike to visually build queries and explore connections as they develop over time and uncover hidden relationships within time-based data. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Is cloud moving too fast for security?

That’s at least five-major cloud application and infrastructure data breach incidents for 2017, and we’re only in July. Add in the number of ransomeware and other attacks during the first half of this year and it’s clear the cloud has a real security problem. By now, most everyone recognizes the benefits of the cloud; bringing new applications and infrastructure online quickly and scaling it to meet ever changing business demands. —Doug Lane @ Cloud Security Alliance

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Change in the Work Place: Attitude Can Be Everything

Change in the work place can be hard, unsettling, uncomfortable and… oh screw it… let’s just say it…. Change in the work place can just be down right scary when we are in the midst of it. 

I’m 52 so I’ve been through a lot of changes in my work environment over the years.  Since I’m a control freak it likely isn’t much of a shock that work changes like taking on a new job in a new company or new department aren’t the ones that I have the hardest time with.  I can see that this is because I feel like I’m the one who initiated the change in those situations.  I made the decision to move to that new company, job, or department.  I interviewed for it.  I felt it “called to me”.

But change in the work place is change in the work place.  Whether it is me initiating the change… or the change being “done to me”.  So why does a large re-organization in the same company feel scarier to me than me going to a new job at a new company?  They are both change.  Continue reading

Africa DNS Forum: Taking Stock and Planning Ahead

The 5th Africa Domain Names System (DNS) Forum was successfully closed on 28 July after three days of insightful reflections on the Africa DNS Industry and the business opportunities it can provide. This forum follows on the success of previous fora that have taken place in Africa over the past few years – namely South Africa in 2013, Nigeria in 2014, Kenya in 2015, and Morocco in 2016. 
 

Betel Hailu

IP Infusion powering the world from behind the scenes

Founded by Kunihiro Ishiguro and Yoshinari Yoshikawa the founders of GNU Zebra, came together to form IP Infusion back in 1999 as a commercial-grade, hardware-independent networking software company. If you’re not familiar with Zebra, you probably know it’s little brother Quagga which powers everything from Cumulus Linux to Vyatta and even my old digs.. Imagestream routers. Ishiguro and Yoshikawa took Zebra, and built ZebOS, which has been working behind the scenes in products we all use every day for years. IP Infusion’s ZebOS powers everything from F5 LTM’s and Citrix Netscaler’s to Plexxi, SK Telecom, and Huawei networking products.

Today IP Infusion is selling two variants of ZebOS to OEMs, OcNOS and VirNOS. OcNOS is a full featured network OS built specifically for White Box OEMs looking for switching, routing, MPLS, and SDN support. It can support a hybrid, centralized, or distributed network framework which provides a scalable, modular, and robust framework that can be deployed on merchant silicon. VirNOS is their NFV solution that can be used for distributed or cloud based vCPE, vPE, or vRouters in your data center.

Whitebox networking is a really exciting market that I have been looking into since the SDN craze started. Continue reading

JUNIPER NORTHSTAR 3.0 – SIGNAL TRAFFIC ENGINEERED MPLS LSPs BETWEEN TE DOMAINS

In this post, I’m going to explain how we can use an SDN controller to provision traffic-engineered MPLS LSPs between PE nodes situated in different traffic-engineering domains.

The SDN controller that we’re going to use is NorthStar from Juniper Networks running version 3.0. For more information regarding NorthStar check here. There is also a great Day One book available: NorthStar Controller Up and Running.

Overview

Typically, in order to provision traffic-engineered MPLS LSPs between PE nodes, it is necessary for the PEs to be situated in a common TE domain. There are some exceptions to this such as inter-domain LSP or LSP stitching. However, these options are limited and do not support end-to-end traffic-engineering as the ingress PE does not have a complete traffic-engineering view. I personally haven’t seen many deployments utilising these features.

So, what’s the use case? Many service providers and network operators are using RSVP to signal traffic-engineered LSPs in order to control how traffic flows through their environments. There are many reasons for doing this, such as steering certain types of traffic via optimal paths or achieving better utilisation of network bandwidth. With many RSVP deployments, you will see RSVP used in the core of Continue reading

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