A Universal Snap Works Across All Linux Distributions
Canonical contributed the initial code for the snap.
Is It Real, or Is It Cumulus VX?
Phew! Cumulus Linux 3.0 has just been released! A big shout out to all of my engineering colleagues who worked so hard to make this happen. JR Rivers gave an overview of all the goodies included in 3.0 in his recent blog post. Stay tuned for more blog posts from other engineers for details on all of those new features.
But Cumulus Linux isn’t the only beneficiary of all the 3.0 work. Cumulus VX, our free virtual machine-based version of Cumulus Linux, also has some pretty cool new tricks. When we launched Cumulus VX last August we thought it would be a way for people to get hands on with a Linux-based switch operating system, in their own environment and without any commitment. Boy, Were we surprised at how it quickly became so much more. With over 3,800 unique users, Cumulus VX is being deployed in all sorts of ways we never dreamed of. As just one example, existing customers are using it to validate their configurations before upgrading their physical switches from one release to another.
What’s New?
And that brings me to the first change we’ve made: concurrent releases. Our plan from now on Continue reading
The Walls Come Down On The Last Bastion Of Proprietary
Open source software has done a lot to transform the IT industry, but perhaps more than anything else it has reminded those who architect complex systems that all elements of a datacenter have to be equally open and programmable for them to make the customizations that are necessary to run specific workloads efficiently and therefore cost effectively.
Servers have been smashed wide open in large enterprises, HPC centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders (excepting Microsoft Azure, of course) by the double whammy of the ubiquity of the X86 server and the open source Linux operating system, and storage has followed suit …
The Walls Come Down On The Last Bastion Of Proprietary was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Worth Reading: The end of the hypervisor
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Framing Questions for Optimized I/O Subsystems
Building high performance systems at the bleeding edge hardware-wise without considering the way data actually moves through such a system is too common—and woefully so, given the fact that understanding and articulating an application’s requirements can lead to dramatic I/O improvements.
A range of “Frequently Unanswered Questions” are at the root of inefficient storage design due to a lack of specified workflows, and this problem is widespread, especially in verticals where data isn’t the sole business driver.
One could make the argument that data is at the heart of any large-scale computing endeavor, but as workflows change, the habit of …
Framing Questions for Optimized I/O Subsystems was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
What is flow-based load balancing ?
Flow-based load balancing is used mostly in layer 2 networks, although in Layer 3 routing, packets can be load balanced per packets or per flow, flow-based load balancing is commonly used with the Local area network, datacenter and datacenter interconnect technologies. There are two important load balancing mechanisms in layer 2. Vlan-based load balancing and […]
The post What is flow-based load balancing ? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.
No Capes, No Wands
As a keen observer of the network engineering world for the last twenty… okay, maybe longer, but I don’t want to sound like an old man telling stories quite yet… years, there’s one thing I’ve always found kind-of strange. We have a strong tendency towards hero worship.
I don’t really know why this might be, but I’ve seen it in Cisco TAC—the almost hushed tones around a senior engineer who “is brilliant.” I’ve seen it while sitting in a meeting in the middle of an argument over some technical point in a particular RFC. Someone says, “we should just ask the author…” Which is almost always followed by something like: “Really? You know them?”
To some degree, this is understandable—network engineering is difficult, and we should truly honor those in our world who have made a huge impact. In many other ways, it’s unhelpful, and even unhealthy. Why?
First, it tends to create an “us versus them,” atmosphere in our world. There are engineers who work on “normal” networks, and then there are those who work on, well, you know, special ones. Not everyone needs those “special skills,” so we end up creating a vast pool of people Continue reading