SDN control of hybrid packet / optical leaf and spine network

9/19 DemoFriday: CALIENT, Cumulus Networks and InMon Demo SDN Optimization of Hybrid Packet / Optical Data Center Fabric demonstrated how network analytics can be used to optimize traffic flows across a network composed of bare metal packet switches running Cumulus Linux and Calient Optical Circuit switches.


The short video above shows how the Calient optical circuit switch (OCS) uses two grids of micro-mirrors to create optical paths. The optical switching technology has a number of interesting properties:
  • Pure optical cut-through, the speed of the link is limited only by the top of rack transceiver speeds (i.e. scales to 100G, 400G and beyond without having to upgrade the OCS)
  • Ultra low latency - less than 50ns
  • Lower cost than an equivalent packet switch
  • Ultra low power (50W vs. 6KW for comparable packet switch)
The challenge is integrating the OCS into a hybrid data center network design to leverage the strengths of both packet switching and optical switching technologies.

The diagram shows the hybrid network that was demonstrated. The top of rack switches are bare metal switches running Cumulus Linux. The spine layer consists of a Cumulus Linux bare metal switch and a Calient Technologies optical circuit switch. The bare metal Continue reading

Report: Burrito Quest I

At Docker, we are lucky to be able to spend time exploring San Francisco, one of the world’s great cities in terms of culture, architecture and, of course, burritos. Forget about crabs or sourdough, what San Francisco does best is the burrito, that noble combination of beans, meat, cheese, salsa, and love, all in a convenient wrapper that let’s you eat it one-handed. And. like the City itself, the burrito is incredibly diverse. Do you prefer black beans or pintos? Are you a carnivore who craves the al pastor and the carne asada, or do you seek out the elusive perfect chile relleno burrito (the turducken of Mexico)?

So many options, so many questions. As an engineer-driven company, we needed to know the optimal solution. We had to know where to find the City’s finest burrito.

And so it came to be that Burrito Quest was born. We decided that once a month we would walk to another potential purveyor of the perfect burrito. In order to build a comprehensive test harness, we decided that each user would pursue their own story, be it a simple pollo or a bold lengua. or even a chili relleno, the turducken of Continue reading

Thinking About Intel Rack-Scale Architecture

You may have heard of Intel Rack-Scale Architecture (RSA), a new approach to designing data center hardware. This is an idea that was discussed extensively a couple of weeks ago at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 in San Francisco, which I had the opportunity to attend. (Disclaimer: Intel paid my travel and hotel expenses to attend IDF.)

Of course, IDF 2014 wasn’t the first time I’d heard of Intel RSA; it was also discussed last year. However, this year I had the chance to really dig into what Intel is trying to accomplish through Intel RSA—note that I’ll use “Intel RSA” instead of just “RSA” to avoid any confusion with the security company—and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and conclusions here.

Intel always seems to present Intel RSA as a single entity that is made up of a number of other technologies/efforts; specifically, Intel RSA is typically presented as:

  • Disaggregation of the compute, memory, and storage capacity in a rack
  • Silicon photonics as a low-latency, high-speed rack-scale fabric
  • Some software that combines disaggregated hardware capacity over a rack-scale fabric to create “pooled systems”

When you look at Intel RSA this way—and this is the way that Continue reading

Private VLANs when, where, & how.

Recently PVLANs came into a design discussion, which in turn led into me reminiscing on my Route/Switch days. So naturally when I wanted to re-visit the topic if anything to make sure I still remembered everything what was important and to see if any features have been added with the new IOS’s. It’s been a […]

Apple Working Hard to Improve Siri?

That’s right, in the face of strong competition from “Google Now” (home of “Ok Google”) and Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s software developers are working hard to add features and improve Siri’s capabilities and responses. After all, with Microsoft running commercials recently where Cortana … Continue reading →

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Apple Working Hard to Improve Siri? and give me a share/like. Thank you!

[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series SDN Protocols

In this post, we will be discussing a relatively new protocol to the SDN scene – OpFlex. This protocol was largely championed by Cisco, but there are a few other vendors that have announced planned support for this protocol. I write this post because – like OVSDB – there tends to be a lot of confusion and false information about this protocol, so my goal in this post is to provide some illustrations that (hopefully) set the record straight, with respect to both OpFlex’s operation, and it’s intended role.

Before I get started, I would be remiss to not point you towards a brilliant article by Kyle Mestery titled “OpFlex is not an OpenFlow Killer“. At the time the article was written, Kyle was working for Noiro, a team within the INSBU at Cisco focused (at least primarily) on open source efforts in SDN, and the creators of OpFlex.

 

The Declarative Model of Network Programmability

Before we get into the weeds of the OpFlex protocol, it’s important to understand the model that OpFlex intends to address. OpFlex is the protocol du jour within a Cisco ACI based Continue reading

Jim — I’m an Engineer, not a…

mcoyDoctor McCoy, on the original Star Trek series had a signature line — he was forever complaining about this or that with the exclamation that he was just a doctor, and not a… Well, whatever, from shuttle driver to politician.

And how many times, in my career, have I wanted to stop in the middle of some meeting and scream, “Jim — I’m an engineer, not a politician!”

After all, there’s some sense in which engineers become engineers because we’re focused on the problem at hand, we’re focused on the technical issue, not the people issue. I once saw a cartoon that expressed the feeling in the technical community almost perfectly — an engineer talking to her manager, who has apparently just been told she needs to work on her “people skills.” Her answer? “I only went into computers in the first place because I don’t like people.”

Exactly.

And there used to be a time when engineers could get away with this. There was once a time when IT was in the basement (we used to joke about putting on the asbestos suites when going down to the basement to get to our desks in one Continue reading

New VMworld 2014 Hands-on Labs with VMware NSX Goodness

In 2013 we introduced VMware NSX Hands-on-Labs for the first time. The NSX 1303 Hands-on-lab has been by far one of the most popular labs, giving you an in-depth view of VMware NSX. Hands-on-labs are one of the best ways to get a good tour of the product. You can take all of these labs online at http://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/ . It requires a registration, but is open to everyone. .

This year at VMworld we introduced several new NSX labs to give you a deeper look at NSX, and to showcase the depth of integration NSX provides with 3rd party partners and other VMware products. All of the new 2014 Hands-on-labs have been published and are available to you. Here is a quick tour of the labs and what you can expect to see.

 

HOL-SDC-1403

If you are just getting started with NSX and want to know what Network Virtualization is all about, we recommend you start here.

HOL-SDC-1403-2nd Image

This lab will walk you through five modules of exercises:

  • NSX Components – Host Preparation, Controller deployment
  • NSX Logical Switching – building VXLAN logical switches
  • NSX Logical Routing  - Distributed Routing, Dynamic Routing with OSPF
  • NSX Distributed Firewall – Micro-segmentation with Continue reading

It’s the Applications, Stupid (Part 1 of 3)!

I remember when we first started talking to customers about the concepts of applications driving networks, about 3 years ago (This was a very different conversation from other networking era’s where we talked about ‘intelligent’ networks that could better understand and adapt to applications.) While most customers loved the concepts of a scale-out network that leveraged dynamic photonic connections instead of hard-wired paths, most of them also told us that they “didn’t really know (or want to know)” about the applications at all. Some even said they didn’t want their networks to understand the applications at all!

Hmm.. this was very strange. After all, we were talking to Data Center networking folks, and wasn’t the purpose of the data center network to provide connectivity solutions for applications? How could the folks in charge of these networks not know (and worse, not want to know!) about the whole purpose of their network in the first place?

But of course, it wasn’t really strange. After all, networking, like many IT disciplines, had developed into a nice neat silo that defined nice neat operational boundaries that allowed folks within those boundaries to say “I don’t know, and I don’t want Continue reading

Cisco ACI: Allowing the smarts to scale

As horizontal scalability demands increase for policy based fabrics such as Cisco’s ACI and performance demands push the development of high speed Ethernet standards like 25G, 50G, 100G and beyond in to 400G, how that data is pushed and pulled on the fabric begins to become a problem. In the words of Scotty, devices of today “canne take any more” due to issues with physics, traditional approaches to ASIC interfaces and currently used materials.

A company that was born to attack this problem from a different direction has recently been acquired by Cisco. Memoir, the said acquired startup, has been inserted in to the Insieme business unit within Cisco which says much about the strategy of the policy capable hardware and the company faith in the direction of the ACI strategy. So why Memoir? They offer a solution for multiple areas of memory to be addressed concurrently, making the operation more akin to a parallel one instead of a fast serial operation. They call this: Algorithmic Memory™ and it can increase memory options ten fold!

Cisco in keeping with their origins will always try and hold the hardware networking space. As commodity devices start threatening profits in bread and butter networking, Continue reading

Thinking About Intel Rack-Scale Architecture

You may have heard of Intel Rack-Scale Architecture (RSA), a new approach to designing data center hardware. This is an idea that was discussed extensively a couple of weeks ago at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 in San Francisco, which I had the opportunity to attend. (Disclaimer: Intel paid my travel and hotel expenses to attend IDF.)

Of course, IDF 2014 wasn’t the first time I’d heard of Intel RSA; it was also discussed last year. However, this year I had the chance to really dig into what Intel is trying to accomplish through Intel RSA—note that I’ll use “Intel RSA” instead of just “RSA” to avoid any confusion with the security company—and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and conclusions here.

Intel always seems to present Intel RSA as a single entity that is made up of a number of other technologies/efforts; specifically, Intel RSA is typically presented as:

  • Disaggregation of the compute, memory, and storage capacity in a rack

  • Silicon photonics as a low-latency, high-speed rack-scale fabric

  • Some software that combines disaggregated hardware capacity over a rack-scale fabric to create “pooled systems”

When you look at Intel RSA this way—and this is the way that Continue reading

Formal Announcement: Software Gone Wild Podcast

If you’ve been reading my blog in the last few months, you might have noticed that I started a new podcast focused on software-defined everything (hence the name: Software Gone Wild – thanks to Jason Edelman).

The latest episodes are always available on this page; you can also subscribe to the podcast feed in RSS, Atom or iTunes format… and if you wonder why we need yet-another podcast, read the About Software Gone Wild document.

Where Is Cisco UCS Headed?

UCS-Grand-Slam-Social_Baseball2_v1-300x300If you happen to read my writing(as infrequent as it is these days), you know that I am a networking focused person. I live my day to day within the walls of routing, switching, wireless, and other “network centric” platforms and technologies. The days of Unix, Windows, and other generalist type administration duties are gone for me. However, like many IT professionals, I have a strong desire to understand all of the different areas in order to enhance my capabilities within the networking space. If you wish to implement IT in any particular silo, it helps to understand all the different pieces. With that in mind, I happily accepted my invite to the Cisco UCS Grand Slam event in New York City a few weeks ago. My involvement with Cisco UCS usually stops at the fabric interconnect point, and occasionally down into the virtual networking piece as well.

I mention that to state that while I understand the moving parts within storage, compute, and virtualization, I DON’T understand it at the level of people who live in those worlds full time. In light of that, I have to point out that I may be completely wrong in my predictions or Continue reading

[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

In this post, we will be discussing a relatively new protocol to the SDN scene - OpFlex. This protocol was largely championed by Cisco, but there are a few other vendors that have announced planned support for this protocol. I write this post because - like OVSDB - there tends to be a lot of confusion and false information about this protocol, so my goal in this post is to provide some illustrations that (hopefully) set the record straight, with respect to both OpFlex’s operation, and it’s intended role.

[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

In this post, we will be discussing a relatively new protocol to the SDN scene - OpFlex. This protocol was largely championed by Cisco, but there are a few other vendors that have announced planned support for this protocol. I write this post because - like OVSDB - there tends to be a lot of confusion and false information about this protocol, so my goal in this post is to provide some illustrations that (hopefully) set the record straight, with respect to both OpFlex’s operation, and it’s intended role.

[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

In this post, we will be discussing a relatively new protocol to the SDN scene - OpFlex. This protocol was largely championed by Cisco, but there are a few other vendors that have announced planned support for this protocol. I write this post because - like OVSDB - there tends to be a lot of confusion and false information about this protocol, so my goal in this post is to provide some illustrations that (hopefully) set the record straight, with respect to both OpFlex’s operation, and it’s intended role.
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