NEC Director of Business Development Don Clark shares the latest SDN deployment lessons and guidelines in a special SDxCentral webinar based on the new SDN Controller Report.
CCIE Candidates! We’re excited to announce a few updates to our CCIE Data Center, R&S, and Collaboration product portfolios!
Data Center:
1) Our Volume 1 WB (and DSG) has been overhauled. Jason now has all labs that can be done on our Technology Racks covered in this book. It’s very thorough and covers everything you’ll see on the lab from a technology basis.
2) Our Volume 2 WB (and DSG) has had a MAJOR overhaul. Quite a few updates, changes and we’re happy that all 5 labs are very up-to-date. This workbook consists of 5 Mock Labs that must be done on our Full-Scale Mock Lab Racks – which have been booked solid for several months.
3) We have just finished the addition of 5 more Full-Scale Mock Lab racks! First, they’ve cost us a fortune, but our commitment to you is to have the resources you need to prepare for your lab. There are timeslots ready and open NOW if you need time on these Full-Scale Mock Lab racks.
Routing & Switching:
1) JP has finalized an updated R&S V5 Volume 1 WB (and DSG), and it’s posted and available now.
2) We anticipate having our R&S V5 Continue reading
Thanks to hyperconvergence and virtualization, storage and compute have rapidly evolved over the last decade. Conversely, network architectures have remained virtually unchanged. Here at Plexxi, we believe it’s networking’s turn to innovate through consolidation and convergence. On August 27 from 2:00-3:30 p.m. EST, we’ll be hosting a webinar on how the network can finally keep pace with storage and compute. We’ll take thirty minutes to discuss application centric networking, convergence and how to optimize networks for east/west traffic. You can register here, we hope you can make it.
Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!
Tech.co: What Converged Infrastructure Means for Today’s Businesses
By Rick Delgado
Many organizations are currently undergoing a significant shift in how they operate, particular when it comes to IT departments. The idea is to slowly but surely move away from the traditional data center technologies that have been in use for years. With the traditional data center, operations have gotten quite complex and require expert IT personnel to keep up with the ever increasing workload. The complicated infrastructure and large teams simply weren’t compatible with business goals in many ways, which Continue reading
Innovation applications will change the ways we interact.

C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations
The post Civilization appeared first on 'net work.
Fibre Channel isn't dead, but IP is on the way up.
With the advent of layer-3 leaf-and-spine data center fabrics, it became (almost) possible to build pure layer-3-only data center networks… if only the networking vendors would do the very last step and make every server-to-ToR interface a layer-3 interface. Cumulus decided to do just that.
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Networking gets a major boost, but mainly from Aruba.
Big Switch recently launched major updates to their products Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) and Big Monitoring Fabric (BMF), formerly Big Tap. This post isn’t going to cover the updates or the products from an architectural standpoint, but rather two specific features that are meant to help general day to day network operations.
The first feature is simple – it shows command history, but also API history across the entire Big Cloud Fabric (BCF). The feature is accessed through the central UI of the BCF controller and you can simply look at the last N commands or APIs that were executed on the system. The great thing is that you don’t need a separate AAA system to capture the commands being made and should you want to see the API calls being generated from the CLI commands (because remember the CLI is just an API client), you can also view them. If the CLI isn’t being used, you can also still see each API call that has been recently made on the fabric. It’s my understanding that there is a certain amount of storage dedicated to this function so when the space does fill up, the history Continue reading