Plexxi Pulse – Big Data is Driving Datacenter Infrastructure Development

You may have seen last week that we partnered with Cloudera, certifying the Plexxi Switch on Cloudera’s Enterprise 5 platform.

This partnership, while exciting for us and our partners, plays a larger role in the IT landscape as a whole. According to an article this week by Arthur Cole of Enterprise Networking Planet, this move embodies Cole’s belief that networking infrastructure development is increasingly being driven by Big Data applications. He cites the key challenge as not finding somewhere to store all the data (e.g. storage) but rather how to make it available to “diverse and disparate sets of resources quickly and at a relatively low cost.”

He closes out with his piece by admitting that there’s still progress to be made with this technology. Nevertheless, we’re proud to be leading the charge.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!

 

InformationAge: Converged infrastructure: a networking panacea or just another nice idea?

By Ben Rossi

It’s a real-time, data-heavy, multimedia world. Legacy networks with their siloed environments are simply not designed to deliver today’s enterprise demands, which are focused more and more on delivering applications Continue reading

Forming a Local User Group

I just read a short post by Lindsay Hill titled Doing Community Programs Right. I think the points made are accurate and well-founded. Prior to working for Cisco, I was part of the “CLN Designated VIP Program”. I had the opportunity to connect with others in and around the industry. I think these online communities are great and there is a wealth of knowledge sharing that happens. During key conferences many of our paths cross and even more interesting conversations happen.

I’d personally like to bring some of those concepts into the local communities I work in. I think many of the same tenants would be important. I wouldn’t want a local group to be about any single vendor (even Cisco) or partner. It would be really interesting to just get a bunch of people together that wanted to share their technology challenges and how they are addressing them.

If you have started such a group, I’d love to hear what worked and what didn’t. Were you able to get attendance even in smaller or rural communities? Maybe you are located in Central Kentucky or East Tennessee and would like to work together in such an effort? If so, reach out to Continue reading

Going Over the Edge with your VMware NSX and Cisco Nexus

What could possibly be more fun than connecting your awesome new NSX gear to your Cisco Nexus gear? For the life of me I really don’t know. All right then. Lets do it!

Lets kick things off with this email question I received from a reader.

Hi Brad, In our environment we have two prevailing server standards, rackmounts and UCS. I read your excellent NSX on UCS and 7K design guide and the section on not running routing protocols over the VPC links makes sense. My related question concerns how we can achieve a routing adjacency from the NSX Distributed Router to the N7K with a rack mount with 2x10gbe interfaces connecting to 2x7Ks via VPC? (we don’t use the NSX Edge Router).

This reader has politely pointed out that my VMware NSX on Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 design guide could have provided a bit more detail on NSX Edge design. I totally agree. There’s no time like the present, so let’s dive into that now and stir up some content that might end up in the next version of the guide.

All right. We won’t worry too much about the form factor of the servers right now. Whether Continue reading

Going Over the Edge with your VMware NSX and Cisco Nexus

Hey! Cisco Nexus peeps! What could possibly be more fun than connecting your awesome new NSX gear to your Cisco Nexus gear? For the life of me I really don’t know. All right then. Lets do it!

Lets kick things off with this email question I received from a reader.

Hi Brad, In our environment we have two prevailing server standards, rackmounts and UCS. I read your excellent NSX on UCS and 7K design guide and the section on not running routing protocols over the VPC links makes sense. My related question concerns how we can achieve a routing adjacency from the NSX Distributed Router to the N7K with a rack mount with 2x10gbe interfaces connecting to 2x7Ks via VPC? (we don’t use the NSX Edge Router).

This reader has politely pointed out that my VMware NSX on Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 design guide could have provided a bit more detail on NSX Edge design. I totally agree. There’s no time like the present, so let’s dive into that now and stir up some content that might end up in the next version of the guide.

All right. We won’t worry too much about the form factor of the Continue reading

Going Over the Edge with your VMware NSX and Cisco Nexus

Hey! Cisco Nexus peeps! What could possibly be more fun than connecting your awesome new NSX gear to your Cisco Nexus gear? For the life of me I really don’t know. All right then. Lets do it!

Lets kick things off with this email question I received from a reader.

Hi Brad, In our environment we have two prevailing server standards, rackmounts and UCS. I read your excellent NSX on UCS and 7K design guide and the section on not running routing protocols over the VPC links makes sense. My related question concerns how we can achieve a routing adjacency from the NSX Distributed Router to the N7K with a rack mount with 2x10gbe interfaces connecting to 2x7Ks via VPC? (we don’t use the NSX Edge Router).

This reader has politely pointed out that my VMware NSX on Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 design guide could have provided a bit more detail on NSX Edge design. I totally agree. There’s no time like the present, so let’s dive into that now and stir up some content that might end up in the next version of the guide.

All right. We won’t worry too much about the form factor of the Continue reading

Brocade acquires Riverbed ADC to bolster virtual delivery services

Brocade this week said it will acquire Riverbed Technology's SteelApp product line in an all-cash asset transaction. Terms were not disclosed. SteelApp is a virtual application delivery controller (ADC) for enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications. The SteelApp product line controls traffic to and from applications to improve application delivery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Doing Community Programs Right

You know I’m not the biggest fan of vendor clubs (or influencer marketing programs, call them what you like). But if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. Don’t let it just become a ‘free T-shirt club':

@pandom is spot-on. The ideal community program should not just be a method to blast out press releases, or give out a few free shirts in the hope of currying favour. The program manager has taken care to select people who are positive about the company, share with the community and have opinions about where the vendor is going.

That is a valuable resource that should not be wasted. A good program should seek to engage in a two-way dialogue. Not just pushing out info, but seeking feedback on what’s working, and what’s not. Don’t just push out a few early release notices – have honest discussions about roadmaps, plans, etc. Help your members connect with each other – who knows what benefit that might lead to in future?

FWIW, I’m Continue reading

Verdict’s In, Size Does Matter…

I just wanted to take a moment and make a new podcast recommendation. This recommendation is the handiwork of several of our industry friends. The premise is around the unique use of technologies by small and medium business. This podcast should server as a good listen for everyone interested in SMB tech!

No related content found.

The post Verdict’s In, Size Does Matter… appeared first on PacketU.

Cloud analytics

Librato is an example of a cloud based analytics service (now part of SolarWinds). Librato provides an easy to use REST API for pushing metrics into their cloud service. The web portal makes it simple to combine and trend data and build and share dashboards.

This article describes a proof of concept demonstrating how Librato's cloud service can be used to cost effectively monitor large scale cloud infrastructure by leveraging standard sFlow instrumentation. Librato offers a free 30 day trial, making it easy to evaluate solutions based on this demonstration.
The diagram shows the measurement pipeline. Standard sFlow measurements from hosts, hypervisors, virtual machines, containers, load balancers, web servers and network switches stream to the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine. Metrics are pushed from sFlow-RT to Librato using the REST API.

Over 40 vendors implement the sFlow standard and compatible products are listed on sFlow.org. The open source Host sFlow agent exports standard sFlow metrics from hosts. For additional background, the Velocity conference talk provides an introduction to sFlow and case study from a large social networking site.


Librato's service is priced based on the number of data points that they need to store. For example, a Host sFlow agent Continue reading

The F-Script – Now on GitHub

GitHub Logo

A while back I posted about my “f-script”, a tool that reads device configurations and extracts IP/subnet information so that it can quickly and easily queried to find where an IP might exist on the network, and what else is on the same subnet.

I was also lucky enough to take part in an early episode of Ivan Pepelnjak’s “Software Gone Wild” podcast where I talked about network automation and in particular, the f-script. In that podcast I promised that I would put the f-script up on GitHub once I had the time to clean it up a little and remove things that tied it to a particular environment.

At the end of 2014 I finally uploaded the scripts, and you are now in the lucky position of being able to laugh at how badly it’s written (and really, it is) or, better still, to help me improve it by submitting your own edits. Bear in mind that this started off as a hack (“I’ll do it like this just to prove that it can work”) and as with so many temporary solutions, ended up never being rewritten “properly”. Still, it works and has been pretty Continue reading

Using Vagrant with CoreOS, etcd, fleet, and Docker

As a follow-up to my recent #vBrownBag session on “Docker and Friends,” I wanted to provide a quick and relatively easy way for VMware administrators to experiment with some of the technologies I demonstrated. Since not everyone has their own OpenStack cloud running in their basement, Vagrant seemed like a reasonable solution. So, in this post, I’ll show you how to use Vagrant to experiment with some of the technologies I demonstrated in the #vBrownBag session.

If you’d like to follow along on your own, I’ve uploaded the necessary files to the GitHub repo I created for the #vBrownBag session. Just have a look in the coreos-vagrant folder in that repository.

What You’ll Need

  • Vagrant (I tested with Vagrant 1.7.2)
  • VMware Fusion (I used Fusion 6.0.5 on OS X 10.9.5)
  • the VMware plugin for Vagrant
  • the CoreOS Vagrant box for the vmware_fusion provider (more on that in a moment)
  • the necessary supporting files (more on that in a moment as well)

I’m not going to cover installing Fusion, Vagrant, or the VMware provider for Vagrant, as those steps are reasonably well-documented by the respective vendors. I will, though, talk about getting the CoreOS box Continue reading

Updating the DNS Registration Model to Keep Pace with Today’s Internet.

CloudFlare is, arguably, the largest third-party DNS Authoritative operator in the world. We manage well over 1 million domains and have registrations in almost every TLD open for registrations. Our role as a DNS operator is to maintain customer information and publish their records in the global DNS.

In this blog, we’ll introduce a significant problem that DNS operators like CloudFlare face when trying to provide the best possible experience to our customers. If you are a CloudFlare customer, you’ll remember during the sign up process you were asked to login to your registrar account in order to change your nameservers (NS). The absence of an automated process for changing NS records not only makes our signup process one step longer than we’d like, it also prevents CloudFlare, and other 3rd party DNS operators, from doing a slew of other things that would benefit customers and the Internet as a whole.

Note: In this blog we’ll use the term DNS Operator mainly in the context of operators that provide Authoritative DNS service. This is sometimes called Managed DNS service.

Manual Updates

For those who are not yet CloudFlare customers, let’s run through the sign up process:

When CloudFlare customers enable Continue reading

Networking Field Day 9: Fresh Perspectives on Open Networking

The community-selected delegates of Networking Field Day 9 #NFD9 are coming to Cumulus Networks on February 11, 12:30pm-2:30pm PST, to learn more about open networking – and it’s going to be live streamed for everyone, so mark your calendar.

We’ve assembled a team of industry experts from Cumulus Networks to discuss with 13 NFD9 delegates data center evolution and what makes us different.

The topics to be presented are:

  • Overview and what makes Cumulus Linux compelling — JR Rivers, co-founder and CEO
  • Data center architectures and how we make it easier to build networks — Dinesh Dutt, Chief Scientist
  • Data center network operations and how we make it easier to manage networks — Matt Peterson, Office of the CTO
  • Real world examples, from a network admin to a cloud admin — David Sinn, Customer Solutions Engineer

Networking Field Day is not just a one-way presentation; it brings us together with independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. If you’re a networking technologist, this is a great opportunity for you to join the live stream and participate in the discussions on Twitter #NFD9 and @CumulusNetworks. If you’ve heard about open Continue reading

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