A Network Artist left a lengthy comment on my Brief History of VMware NSX blog post. He raised a number of interesting topics, so I decided to write my replies as a separate blog post.
Using Geneve is an interesting choice to be made and while the approach has it’s own Pros and Cons, I would like to stick to VXLAN if I were to recommend to someone for few good reasons.
The main reason I see for NSX-T using Geneve instead of VXLAN is the need for additional header fields to carry metadata around, and to implement Network Services Header (NSH) for east-west service insertion.
Read more ...File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from 10 years of Ceph evolution Aghayev et al., SOSP’19
Ten years of hard-won lessons packed into just 17 pages (13 if you don’t count the references!) makes this paper extremely good value for your time. It’s also a fabulous example of recognising and challenging implicit assumptions. In this case, the assumption that a distributed storage backend should clearly be layered on top of a local file system. Breaking that assumption allowed Ceph to introduce a new storage backend called BlueStore with much better performance and predictability, and the ability to support the changing storage hardware landscape. In the two years since it’s release, 70% of all Ceph users had switched to running BlueStore in production.
Ceph is a widely-used, open-source distributed file system that followed this convention [of building on top of a local file system] for a decade. Hard lessons that the Ceph team learned using several popular file systems led them to question the fitness of file systems as storage backends. This is not surprising in hindsight.
Sometimes, things that aren’t surprising in hindsight can be the very hardest of things to spot!
In a 100 switch deployment, Pica8's pricing is roughly 98.5% lower than Cisco's, the vendor...
What could be scarier than non-scalable networking systems, outdated solutions and slow deployment time? Nothing. Luckily for you, there’s none of that in this months content roundup.
We kept busy with a very exciting announcement (hint: it has to do with campus networks) and we think you’ll be excited about it too. Read October’s content roundup to catch up with all the latest Cumulus news, releases, and what’s to come. Happy reading!
From Cumulus Networks:
The ease and importance of scaling in the enterprise: Out with the old and in with the new. Check out this blog by Finn Turner to find out how flexible, scalable network technologies are helping organizations smoothly take their network to the next level.
Securing open source: a brief look at dependency management: Ready to dive into dependency management? This post will cover three categories of dependency management, and which one is the right fit for your project.
How inspiration from your data center can modernize your campus network: While we originally designed Cumulus Linux for data center networking, we’ve now entered into the campus network. Not sure what that entails? Read this informative post by Scott Ciccone to find out about all Continue reading
The goal is to boost app performance without compromising security.
The vendor added proactive and defensive capabilities across its security portfolio as part of its...