PCIe versus Ethernet in a Composable System

I posted a link to a worth reading story last week about Liqid’s composable hyperconverged system. A reader (Vova Moki) commented on the LinkedIn post with this question—

Although I don’t understand how much faster is the PCIe than regular NICs?

Excellent question! It certainly seems that 100g Ethernet should be much faster than PCIe; this article lists the highest speed of PCIe as 15.8G/s across 16 lanes, with faster speeds expected into the future. Further, PCIe runs on parallel lanes, which means it must be very difficult to build a switch for the technology. The simplest way to build such a switch would be to pull the signals off the 16 different lanes, serialize them into a single packet of some sort, and then push them back out into 16 lanes again (potentially in different order/etc.).

So why should composable systems use something like PCIe, rather than using 100g Ethernet. After all, the Ethernet NIC is essentially doing precisely what a PCIe switch would need to do by pulling the data off a PCIe bus, serializing the data, and sending it over a network to a switch, which can, with the right design, already switch these packets Continue reading

Worth Reading: Balancing Trademarks and Domain Names

The UDRP is a simple-worded, non-territorial, specialized forum for adjudicating claims of cybersquatting. It is conducted wholly online. It is not a trademark court. If there’s any analogy with litigation, it is that the complaint should be treated as a motion for summary judgment. Whether there is cybersquatting depends on arbitrators (called Panels) applying core principles to the particular facts that have been brought to their attention. The record is paramount; silence (failure to make a case) is deadly. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Not all who wander are lost

Not all who wander are lost is a favorite “Lord of the Rings” nerd-ism, and one I’ve always personally loved. Gandalf, however, never tried to learn computer programming, and also he already had a pretty sweet job in the wizardry sector. For those of us working toward that first junior web dev job, though, wandering can be a serious issue. —The New Stack

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M-m-monkey

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Worth Reading: Ego is the enemy

When you hear the word enemy, you probably think about regular expressions, bugs, deployments, meetings, and deadlines. Actually, in our quest to reach our goals and become the software developers we want to be, we are usually our own worst enemies. Ego is what prevents us from asking for help, learning, collaborating and working hard. Here with ego we are referring to the unhealthy belief in our own importance: our arrogance and our self-centered ambition. That petulant child in every person who chooses to win all the time and at the expense of others. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Making providers responsible for content

When online content hosts face a risk of litigation over user-generated content, they will respond with overbroad censorship measures that limit individuals’ rights to post and access lawful, constitutionally protected speech. This is true whether the litigation risk comes from the government (as it would under the proposed online censorship bill we’re fighting in Germany) or from private actors. —CDT

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Disaggregated, Hyperconverged, and Composed

The future of network is a big topic; while I have written about this, and spoken about it, in other venues, I thought it would be useful to make a two part video sharing some thoughts on where I think we are headed.

Part 2 will post in a week or two.

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Worth Reading: Liqid’s Composable System

Hardware is, by its very nature, physical and therefore, unlike software or virtual hardware and software routines encoded by FPGAs, it is the one thing that cannot be easily changed. The dream of composable systems, which we have discussed in the past, is something that has been swirling around in the heads of system architects for more than a decade, and we are without question getting closer to realizing the dream of making the components of systems and the clusters that are created from them programmable like software. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: What if there is no money in systems?

Making money in the information technology market has always been a challenge, but it keeps getting increasingly difficult as the tumultuous change in how companies consume compute, storage, and networking rips through all aspects of this $3 trillion market. It is tough to know exactly what do to, and we see companies chasing the hot new things, doing acquisitions to bolster their positions, and selling off legacy businesses to generate the cash to do the deals and to keep Wall Street at bay. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: The next five years of IPv6

The qualities of this deployment seem to me (at least) to best fit a logistic supply curve. Why? Because the economics application is often to model the rate of uptake of innovation, where we know it starts low (or zero) and it winds up hopefully at 100%, but it can’t go on forever — there is a foreseeable endpoint that might not be approached. The early days are slow, then things hit a critical mass and it seems to explode into action, and then things tail off again as the market saturates. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: vDoS for Money

At the height of vDOS’s profitability in mid-2015, the DDoS-for-hire service was earning its proprietors more than $42,000 a month in PayPal and Bitcoin payments from thousands of subscribers. That’s according to an analysis of the leaked vDOS database performed by researchers at New York University. —Krebs on Security

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On the ‘web: All you ever wanted to know about EIGRP

In episode 5 the Network Collective panel dives deep into the inner-workings of EIGRP and how to tune the protocol to work best for you. This isn’t your run of the mill EIGRP training session though, so buckle up and dig in to learn a lot about a protocol which appears pretty straight forward on the surface.

This last week I was on the Network Collective discussing EIGRP with Nick Russo; even if you think this protocol is dead, it’s well worth watching or listening to. And if this isn’t enough EIGRP for you, the EIGRP book on Addision-Wesley is another good resource.

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Worth Reading: World IPv6 Report

On the fifth anniversary of World IPv6 Launch, we’re excited to share a detailed report on the State of IPv6 Deployment in 2017. It really is staggering how far IPv6 deployment has progressed in five years. In mid-2012, Google measured less than 1% of users accessing their services over IPv6. Today that figure is getting close to 20%. Since World IPv6 Launch, several major operators are now delivering the majority of traffic from major content sources like Google, Akamai and others over IPv6. Individual operators, like T-Mobile USA, have deployed IPv6-only networks for their subscribers. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Keeping positive while job hunting

Like many cities, Washington DC is a place one’s job title can define his or her success or self-worth. In the digital age, many still carry business cards with our titles. Romantic meet-ups begin with “So, where do you work?” —The Federalist

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Nonblocking versus Noncontending

“We use a nonblocking fabric…”

Probably not. Nonblocking is a word that is thrown around a lot, particularly in the world of spine and leaf fabric design—but, just like calling a Clos a spine and leaf, we tend to misuse the word nonblocking in ways that are unhelpful. Hence, it is time for a short explanation of the two concepts that might help clear up the confusion. To get there, we need a network—preferably a spine and leaf like the one shown below.

Based on the design of this fabric, is it nonblocking? It would certainly seem so at first blush. Assume every link is 10g, just to make the math easy, and ignore the ToR to server links, as these are not technically a part of the fabric itself. Assume the following four 10g flows are set up—

• B through [X1,Y1,Z2] towards A
• C through [X1,Y2,Z2] towards A
• D through [X1,Y3,Z2] towards A
• E through [X1,Y4,Z2] towards A

As there are four different paths between these four servers (B through E) and Z2, which serves as the ToR for A, all 40g of traffic can be delivered through the fabric without dropping or queuing a single packet (assuming, of Continue reading

Worth Reading: Processing Logs in Real Time with Naiad

You have lots of components in your datacenter producing logs (about 13,000 service instances in the datacenter logs studied for this paper). The authors assume a unique Id is assigned to every request entering the system, and that this is propagated on service requests, leading to log records with metadata such as… —The Morning Paper

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Large Scale Network Design Video on Sale

The Large Scale Network Design video Alvaro and I recorded for Pearson is on sale as part of the Cisco Live preshow sale. This is a great video series. It might even keep you entertained until the new book is published (hopefully early next year).

You can find the sale here.

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Worth Reading: Tracing down flashing dialogs

In a recent update to their Office suite on Windows, Microsoft made a mistake where every hour, for a fraction of a second, a black window pops up on the screen. This leads many to fear their system has been infected by a virus. I thought I’d document how to track this down. —Errata Security

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Ducks

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Worth Reading: Fast changes, illustrated

A new industrial revolution has begun. Here are two small examples to illustrate what it will be like. Extrapolate these a thousand fold. Then do so again. That’s what will happen in the next 70 years. Let’s start to prepare now. —Fabius Maximus

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