Subash Bohra from Alcatel Lucent Enterprise and Toshal Dudwhala from NEC America join Packet Pushers Greg Ferro & Ethan Banks in a discussion about SDN in the data center.
The post PQ 48 – Multi-Tenant DC with ALE & NEC – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
The genesis of our 33rd and 34th data centers in Auckland and Melbourne started a short hop away in nearby Sydney. Prior to these deployments traffic from all of New Zealand and Australia's collective 23 million Internet users was routed through CloudFlare's Sydney data center. Even for those in faraway Perth, the time necessary to reach our Sydney PoP was a mere 55ms of round trip time (RTT). By comparison, the blink of an eye takes 300-400ms. In other words, latency wasn't exactly the pressing concern. The real concern was a failure scenario in our Sydney data center.
Fortunately, our entire architecture starts with an assumption: failure is going to happen. As a result, we plan for failure at every level and have designed a system to gracefully handle it when it occurs. Even though we now maintain multiple layers of redundancy—from power supplies and power circuits to line cards, routing engines and network providers—our ultimate level of redundancy is in the ability to fail out an entire data center in favor of another. In the past we've even written about how this might even play out in the case of a global thermonuclear war. In this instance, the challenge Continue reading
As VMware NSX gains broader adoption, we have heard many customer requests for guidance to help them run NSX on top of the latest Cisco infrastructure, namely Cisco UCS and Nexus 9000 series switches.
With customers choosing the benefits of VMware NSX along with the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), the underlying hardware (Ethernet fabric, x86 compute, etc) provides reliable, resilient capacity, but the configuration, state and advanced features move to faster, more flexible software. The requests were for deploying NSX with Cisco infrastructure running in a standard IP-based fabric with the Nexus 9000’s in standalone mode (NX-OS Mode), as opposed to the proprietary ACI Mode. As with any IP fabric, VMware NSX works great with Nexus 9000 as the underlay. The combination of VMware NSX and Nexus 9000 in standalone mode enables the benefits customers have chosen to embrace with the SDDC.
We had previously put out a design guide on deploying VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 to help deploy NSX in current environments. Today we are putting out a new reference design for deploying VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 9000 infrastructure, providing an easy path to the SDDC while incorporating the latest Cisco Continue reading
In the case of troubleshooting poor performance for an off-site application, improving mean time to innocence is really important. Businesses need to understand whether the problem is in the local infrastructure, in the remote cloud, or somewhere in the middle. This is not especially easy to track down by hand. Manual traceroutes, simple ping tests, and DNS resolution checks are most of what can be done with the average workstation, but in fact there is a great deal more information that is publicly accessible.
The post Improving Mean Time To Innocence With ThousandEyes appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
Maybe my excuse should be that it was somewhere around two in the morning. Or maybe it was just unclear thinking, and that was that. Sgt P. and I were called out to fix the AN/FPS-77 RADAR system just at the end of our day (I normally came into the shop around 6:30AM after swimming a mile in the Ft. Dix pool, showering, and eating breakfast, so I truly had an early start), so we’d been fighting this problem for some seven or eight hours already. For some reason, a particular fuse down in the high voltage power supply kept blowing. Given this is the circuit that fed the magnetron with 250,000 volts at around 10 amps (yes, that’s a lot of power, especially for a device originally built in 1964), it made for some interesting discussion with the folks in base weather, who were thus dependent on surrounding weather RADAR systems to continue flight operations.
They weren’t happy.
We traced the problem back, using our best half splitting skills in a high voltage circuit that took minutes to power up and down, and finally decided it was a particular resistor located over on a corner of one assembly (we Continue reading
Back in December of 2014, I wrote a blog post about the complexities of the network as a distributed system. In it I pointed out that networks have traditionally been built as distributed systems, and that our entire management and knowledge base for networks is based on this. But, is this the best approach for current and future networking needs?
As humans we have our own ideas of how to best solve problems. While we are immensely creative, our solutions aren’t always the best (or will never be). We often look to nature as a guide for how to improve our manmade solutions. When we look at how large complex systems in nature have been created and evolved, perhaps we should look no further than ourselves. The human body is possibly one of the most complex systems we know. If we think of the brain as the centralized control system, it is easy to see that we are, in fact, highly centralized beings.
We live and function, however, in a social environment that has no clearly established central control system. We are organized by different permanent and temporary control systems. We create environments with centralized direction of work to be Continue reading
VMware continues to build out its own container infrastructure, including a container-optimized spin on Linux.
Broadcom is announcing a new version of its Trident II Ethernet switch chip family today, with one notable feature being improved performance for VXLAN and other tunneling protocols. The StrataXGS Trident-II+, a drop-in replacement for the Trident II, arrives as Broadcom tries to spread its Ethernet switch franchise into new areas. The recently announced StrataDNX Read more >
