There are many people who are dissatisfied with the social media platforms. I am too. I'm challenging myself to blog 30 times in 30 days to highlight the blog as the best social media platform.
The post I Challenge Me And You To 30 Blogs in 30 days appeared first on EtherealMind.
Randall Greer left a comment on my Revisited: Layer-2 DCI over VXLAN post saying:
Could you please elaborate on how VXLAN is a better option than OTV? As far as I can see, OTV doesn't suffer from the traffic tromboning you get from VXLAN. Sure you have to stretch your VLANs, but you're protected from bridging failures going over your DCI. OTV is also able to have multiple edge devices per site, so there's no single failure domain. It's even integrated with LISP to mitigate any sub-optimal traffic flows.
Before going through the individual points, let’s focus on the big picture: the failure domains.
Read more ...Lauren Malhoit, Paul Stewart, and Ed Henry join Packet Pushers hosts Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks for a discussion about what it’s like to work for a networking vendor. Lauren and Paul recently started working at Cisco in two very different roles, while Ed went the startup route, landing at Plexxi. Why did they do it? What […]
The post Show 208 – So, You Want To Work For A Vendor? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
Is Enterprise IT starving its operational process by reducing headcount and overcapitalising on assets ? If so, what arguments can we make for or against this idea ? Part 2 of an essay on investing in people instead of equipment.
The post Blessay: Human Infrastructure Poverty & Over-Capitalisation In The Enterprise – Part 2 appeared first on EtherealMind.
I am currently performing a bit of maintenance on the blog (moving host), so there might be some small errors here and there. I apologise for this! – Hopefully everything will be up and running smoothly in a few days time.
Thank you for your patience!
/KP
Welcome to Technology Short Take #45. As usual, I’ve gathered a collection of links to various articles pertaining to data center-related technologies for your enjoyment. Here’s hoping you find something useful!
If you weren’t paying attention, it was easy to miss. NX-API, Cisco’s new JSON/XML switch API is now shipping as version 1.0. NX-API originated on the Nexus 9000 platform created by the Insieme group, and I’ve explored this in detail before.
In review, NX-API is a new, programmatic method of interacting with a Cisco Nexus switch. In many ways, Cisco is playing catch-up here, since this interface is really just a wrapper for the CLI (admittedly with some convenient output parsing), and most of their competitors have had similar interfaces for a while. Nevertheless, it is better than scraping an SSH session, so it’s worth looking into.
I’d like to go over a few new things you should know about if you are or will be working with this interface.
From a strictly API perspective, not a lot seems to have changed. I would be more specific, but as of yet I’ve been unable to find release notes from Cisco on what’s changed from 0.1 to 1.0. If I ever find something like this, I’ll get my hands on it – part of publishing a good API means publishing good documentation, and Continue reading
This post was written by Roie Ben Haim and Max Ardica, with a special thanks to Jerome Catrouillet, Michael Haines, Tiran Efrat and Ofir Nissim for their valuable input.
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The modern data center design is changing, following a shift in the habits of consumers using mobile devices, the number of new applications that appear every day and the rate of end-user browsing which has grown exponentially. Planning a new data center requires meeting certain fundamental design guidelines. The principal goals in data center design are: Scalability, Redundancy and High-bandwidth.
In this blog we will describe the Equal Cost Multi-Path functionality (ECMP) introduced in VMware NSX release 6.1 and discuss how it addresses the requirements of scalability, redundancy and high bandwidth. ECMP has the potential to offer substantial increases in bandwidth by load-balancing traffic over multiple paths as well as providing fault tolerance for failed paths. This is a feature which is available on physical networks but we are now introducing this capability for virtual networking as well. ECMP uses a dynamic routing protocol to learn the next-hop towards a final destination and to converge in case of failures. For a great demo of how this works, you can Continue reading
If the future of IT is about integrated infrastructure, where will this integration take place? Most people will naturally tend to integrate systems and tools that occupy adjacent spaces in common workflows. That is to say that where two systems must interact (typically through some manual intervention), integration will take place. If left unattended, integration will grow up organically out of the infrastructure.
But is organic growth ideally suited for creating a sustainable infrastructure?
In the most basic sense, integration will tend to occur at system boundaries. If A and B share a boundary in some workflow, then integrating A with B makes perfect sense. And if B and C share a boundary in a different (or even further down the same) workflow, then it makes equal sense to integrate B with C.
In less abstract terms, if you use a monitoring application to detect warning conditions on the network, then integrating the monitoring application and the network makes good sense. If that system then flags issues that trigger some troubleshooting process, then integrating the tools with your help desk ticketing system might make sense to automatically open up trouble tickets as issues arise.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #45. As usual, I’ve gathered a collection of links to various articles pertaining to data center-related technologies for your enjoyment. Here’s hoping you find something useful!
Cormac Hogan has a list of a few useful NSX troubleshooting tips.
If you’re not really a networking pro and need a “gentle” introduction to VXLAN, this post might be a good place to start.
Also along those lines—perhaps you’re a VMware administrator who wants to branch into networking with NSX, or you’re a networking guru who needs to learn more about how this NSX stuff works. vBrownBag has been running a VCP-NV series covering various objectives from the VCP-NV exam. Check them out–objective 1, objective 2, objective 3, and objective 4 have been posted so far.
In July I wrote about an Amazon Kindle version of my Data Center Design Case Studies book and complained about their royalties model. Someone quickly pointed out how to adapt to their system: split the book into multiple volumes and charge $9.99 for each.
It took me months to get there, but the first two volumes are finally on Amazon:
Read more ...A previous post listed the excitement I felt when reading through the Cavium XPliant announcement. Programmable fast packet forwarding hardware? Awesome! In a previous life I worked with embedded electronics and wrote several interesting algorithms in C and assembly for applications from noise filtering for AD conversion, LCD screen drivers and TCP/IP stacks (which was fun). This kind of thing really excites me. Nuff said.
So I was more than happy to read the announcement from Broadcom announcing their latest child, the StrataXGS® Tomahawk™. This chipset is formed from more than 7 billion transistors, can forward packets at 3.2Tbps and is optimised for SDN and high port density devices, not to mention it is an authoritative chipset for 25GE and 50GE Ethernet and provides sub 400ns port-to-port operation. Sound good? It’s the next evolutionary step from Trident II and matches the offering from Cavium with their XPliant child.
The Broadcom StrataXGS® Tomahawk™ can deliver 32x 100GE, 64x 40/50GE or 128 ports of of 25GE on a single chip. SINGLE CHIP! This all boils down to 25Gbps per-lane interconnections. Bit of a waste perhaps for 40GE? Which is good considering this chipset is based on upgrading switches with 10GE host Continue reading
Basics is must for Network Engineer.Traceroute is an imp and handy tool while troubleshooting any network issue.How Traceroute works ? Whats the concept behind it ? Its task is to determine the path taken by packet to reach its destination .Before going further ,lets see the IP header . 0 1 2 3 0 1 […]
The post Traceroute – A Small Tool for Big Problems appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Anurudh Dubey.
When we spend millions of dollars on a network product we don't actually expect it to work. That's why it is completely normal to see job advertisement for a 5 day contract engagement to perform a validation that product doesn't have any bugs. Think about the cost incurred by this company to check if this Cisco Nexus is actually fit for purpose.
The post Rant: Oh, You Want It To Work As Well ? appeared first on EtherealMind.
