In the previous VXLAN labs, we covered the basics of Ethernet bridging over VXLAN and a more complex scenario with multiple VLANs.
Now let’s add the EVPN control plane into the mix. The data plane (VLANs mapped into VXLAN-over-IPv4) will remain unchanged, but we’ll use EVPN (a BGP address family) to build the ingress replication lists and MAC-to-VTEP mappings.
With the hyperscalers and the cloud builders all working on their own CPU and AI XPU designs, it is no wonder that Nvidia has been championing the neoclouds that can’t afford to try to be everything to everyone – this is the very definition of enterprise computing – and that, frankly, are having trouble coming up with the trillions of dollars to cover the 150 gigawatts to more than 200 gigawatts of datacenter capacity that is estimated to be on the books between 2025 and 2030 for AI workloads. …
Nvidia’s $2 Billion Investment In CoreWeave Is A Drop In A $250 Billion Bucket was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Amid the myriad discussions about AI – from the astounding amount of money being spent by vendors and enterprises and the debate about actual ROI those businesses are getting to the technology’s effect on cybersecurity, jobs, and the fear of disinformation and resulting distrust – it’s easy to forget its usefulness in particular industries. …
Nvidia Takes The Open Road In AI Weather Forecasting was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
SPONSORED Your phone buzzes at 2 AM. The website is down. …
AI Is Coming To Solve Your System Outages was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
One of the things I like to do in my twenty-eight minutes of spare time per week is play Battletech. It’s a table top wargame that involves big robots and lots of weapons. Some of them are familiar, like missiles and artillery. Because it’s science fiction there are also lasers and other crazy stuff. It’s a game of resource allocation. Can my ammunition last through this fight? You might be asking yourself “why not just carry lots of lasers?” After all, they don’t need ammo. Except the game designers thought of that too. Lasers produce heat. And heat, like ammunition, must be managed. Generate too much and you will shut down. Or boil your pilot alive in the cockpit. Rewind a thousand years and the modern network in a data center is facing a similar issue.
The average AI rack is expected to consume 600 kilowatts of power by next year. GPUs and CPUs are hungry beasts. They need to be fed as much power as possible in order to do whatever math makes AI happen. They have to come up with creative ways to cool those devices as well. We’re quickly reaching the Continue reading
In 2025, we observed over 180 Internet disruptions spurred by a variety of causes – some were brief and partial, while others were complete outages lasting for days. In the fourth quarter, we tracked only a single government-directed Internet shutdown, but multiple cable cuts wreaked havoc on connectivity in several countries. Power outages and extreme weather disrupted Internet services in multiple places, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine impacted connectivity there as well. As always, a number of the disruptions we observed were due to technical problems – with some acknowledged by the relevant providers, while others had unknown causes. In addition, incidents at several hyperscaler cloud platforms and Cloudflare impacted the availability of websites and applications.
This post is intended as a summary overview of observed and confirmed disruptions and is not an exhaustive or complete list of issues that have occurred during the quarter. These anomalies are detected through significant deviations from expected traffic patterns observed across our network. Check out the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center for a full list of verified anomalies and confirmed outages.
The Internet was shut down in Tanzania on October 29 as violent protests took place during the country’s Continue reading
Imagine you want to use netlab to build training labs, like the free BGP labs I created. Sometimes, you want to give students a device to work on while the other lab devices are already configured, just waiting for the students to get their job done.
For example, in the initial BGP lab, I didn’t want any BGP-related configuration on RTR while X1 would already be fully configured – when the student configures BGP on RTR, everything just works.
In the previous post, we covered the basics of multicast. In this post, we will focus on IGMP, Internet Group Management Protocol.
Just as a quick recap, in multicast, the source application (sender) sends multicast traffic to a multicast group address. Somewhere in the network, a receiver wants that traffic stream, so the receiver needs a way to signal that interest.
The router closest to the source is called the First Hop Router (FHR), and the router closest to the receiver is called the Last Hop Router (LHR). Between these two points, the multicast network, meaning all multicast-enabled routers, needs to build a loop-free tree that connects the sender to all interested receivers. IGMP plays a key role in making that happen.
Suresh Vinasiththamby
IGMP is the protocol used by receivers to signal their interest in multicast traffic. When a host wants to receive a multicast stream, it sends an IGMP Membership Report, also known as an IGMP join, to the multicast group address.
Multicast is one of those topics I have been meaning to learn properly for a long time. When I did my JNCIS-ENT about eight years ago, I studied multicast, but I honestly do not remember much of it now.
I recently started doing some revision and decided to write a series of blog posts as I go through it again. I want something I can come back to in the future without having to relearn everything from scratch. Hopefully, as a reader, you will also find it useful and easy to follow. If you want to learn multicast, I am going to assume you are already familiar with unicast and broadcast.
As always, if you find this post helpful, press the ‘clap’ button. It means a lot to me and helps me know you enjoy this type of content. If I get enough claps for this series, I’ll make sure to write more on this specific topic.
Unicast is the most common method of IP communication. It is simply a one-to-one conversation between two devices. One device sends traffic, and one specific device receives it. Most of what we do on a network every day is unicast. Continue reading
Intel has been pushing its two-core server CPU strategy for so long, in one form or another, that we have become accustomed to differentiating products the way Intel does and then try to figure out what workloads these chips might be useful for. …
Intel Is Still Struggling In The Datacenter, But It Could Get Better was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Is there an interaction between Moore’s Law and network computing? If so, what is the relationship? How do advances in silicon capabilities and network speeds and feeds rely and drive one another. Geoff Huston joins Russ on this episode of the Hedge to look at a bit of the history.
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