The Lippis Report

Servers, storage and networks form the anchors of today’s IT infrastructure. Companies around the world are constantly seeking to enhance this infrastructure. With 10GbE connectivity the new infrastructure requirements are distinctive and differ in many ways from the needs of traditional enterprise IT needs. The new environments often require unique compute density, power density and ultra low latency. Such hyper-scale computing environments – where deployments are measured by up to millions of servers, storage and networking equipment – are changing the way they approach IT to drive growth and decrease operational expenses.

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By Arista Networks

Arista Networks views storage networking as a key horizontal technology in the data center and an important area of focus because of the architectural disruption that has started, but is far from finished. This white paper reviews all the major storage networking technologies and provides Arista’s view of a Unified Storage Strategy.

Find out what Arista thinks about Unified Storage Strategy by downloading this paper.

By Arista Networks

For many years, networks have been oversubscribed. Such oversubscription was tolerable in enterprise networks as the applications were not bandwidth intensive, but not anymore. In a datacenter, the primary reason for this oversubscription is insufficient uplink bandwidth from each rack. Each top-of-rack switch is typically connected to two aggregation switches for redundancy. However, half the uplinks are blocked by spanning tree to avoid loops in the network; this reduces the available bandwidth between the rack and aggregation layer of the network by 50%. Arista’s Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) feature removes this bottleneck and allows the utilization of all interconnects.

To learn how, download this paper from Arista Networks.

By Arista Networks

Extensibility is a system design principle where the implementation of the operating system takes into consideration future growth. It is a systemic measure of the ability to extend the operating system and the level of effort required to implement the extension. Extensions can involve the addition of new functionality or the modification of existing functionality.

Find out how Arista’s Network Operating System EoS improves system uptime and delivers rapid service restoration in the event of failure by downloading this whitepaper.

By Arista Networks

Can Ethernet compete with Infiniband in the low-latency trading and high performance computing markets? Administrators and IT professionals face a choice when deciding whether to invest in Infiniband or Ethernet for their low-latency networks. This paper addresses many of the characteristics of Infiniband that have made their way into Ethernet.

To learn more, download the Arista Networks whitepaper.

Our industry is in a compute innovation cycle thanks to virtualization and cloud computing and it’s changing fundamental networking requirements and design. These changes are beyond increased packet processing performance and ultra low latency. They extend to network design and product features that enable increased server virtualization scale, workload mobility and cloud computing. I discuss a new model for networking born out of data center virtualization and cloud computing with Doug Gourlay, Vice President Marketing at Arista Networks. This is Arista Networks’ first podcast; sure to be a classic.

Enjoy, Nick

Networks today require predictable performance and are much more aware of application flows than traditional networks with static addressing of devices. Enterprise networks in the past were designed for specific applications while new cloud designs in the data center can address a multitude of applications. This is clearly a radical departure from today’s oversubscribed networks in which delays and high transit latency are inherent.

To learn more, download the Arista Networks whitepaper.

Arista’s new 7500 Series of Ethernet switches is touted as the fastest Ethernet switch on the planet. Arista Networks has been delivering ultra high performance fixed 1/10 Gb Ethernet switches for high performance computing and cloud computing data centers. But this week Arista shocked the industry by introducing a massively powerful Ethernet switch platform that is 10 GbE port dense, compact, cloud spec fast, amazingly green plus smart and prepared for 40 and 100GbE with a price tag 50% below competitive offerings. I talk with Douglas Gourlay, Vice President Marketing and Anshul Sadana Vice President, Customer & Systems Engineering both from Arista Networks about a new age of network design in the cloud-computing era.

By Arista Networks

What is Arista’s definition of scalability of a data center network? What are the critical requirements and what issues must be solved to address data center scalability? Scalability of the data center network is the ability for network technologies to accept increased traffic or new devices without impacting the contribution margin. In this white paper Arista Networks discuses network design best practices for scaling up Data Center Networks.

Find out how by downloading this paper.

By Arista

The standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (IEEE802.3ae) was ratified in 2002. While 10GbE deployments have grown every year since then, the technology has primarily been used to interconnect switches and routers. Almost all of the server connections in data centers have remained at 1 Gbps, limiting the amount of network throughput available to each server. With recent enhancements in CPU performance, system I/O, and storage I/O the gigabit network has increasingly become the application and workload performance bottleneck.
The primary reason for staying with Gigabit Ethernet has been cost-performance. Until recently it has been more cost-effective to have multiple GbE connections rather than a single 10 GbE port. In addition, most installed servers typically cannot utilize the full bandwidth of a 10 GbE connection. However both of these factors are changing, which are leading to widespread adoption of 10 GbE for server connectivity over the next few years.

Download this white paper for an overview of the factors that are driving the growth for 10 GbE in the data center.

By Arista Networks
The adoption of virtualization in datacenters creates the need for a new class of networks designed to support elasticity of resource allocation, increasingly mobile workloads and the shift to production virtual workloads, requiring maximum availability. Building a network that spans both physical servers and virtual machines with consistent capabilities demands a new architectural approach to designing and building the IT infrastructure. Performance, elasticity, and logical addressing structures must be considered as well as the management of the physical and virtual networking infrastructure. Once deployed, a network that is virtualization ready can offer many revolutionary services over a common shared infrastructure.

By Arista Networks

The adoption of virtualization in data centers creates the need for a new class of networks designed to support elasticity of resource allocation, increasingly mobile workloads and the shift to production virtual workloads, requiring maximum availability. Building a network that spans both physical servers and virtual machines with consistent capabilities demands a new architectural approach to designing and building the IT infrastructure. Performance, elasticity, and logical addressing structures must be considered as well as the management of the physical and virtual networking infrastructure. Once deployed, a network that is virtualization-ready can offer many revolutionary services over a common shared infrastructure.

Find out how by downloading this paper here.

By Arista Networks

The standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (IEEE802.3ae) was ratified in 2002. While 10 GigE deployments have grown every year since then, the technology has primarily been used to interconnect switches and routers. Almost all the server connections in datacenters have remained at 1 Gbps, limiting the amount of network throughput available to each server. The primary reason for this has been cost-performance. Historically it has been more cost-effective to have multiple GigE connections rather than a single 10 GigE port. In addition, today’s servers typically cannot utilize the full bandwidth of a 10 GigE connection. However both of these factors are changing, which will lead to widespread adoption of 10 GigE for server connections over the next few years.

This white paper is an overview of the factors that are driving the growth for 10 GigE in the datacenter; download it now.

By Arista Networks

Performance and stability of the network is a business requirement for datacenter networking, where a single scalable fabric carries both network and storage traffic. Management processes must be scalable for successful deployment and operation, requiring a high degree of automation and integration into the customer’s unique environment. The design and architecture of the network operating system provides the foundation for meeting these requirements. The monolithic software architecture that runs on almost all of today’s network switches presents a fundamental design limitation to high network reliability. The stark reality is that a single bug or defect anywhere in the OS exposes the entire system to disruption since there is no mechanism for software fault containment. At the same time, with no isolation between multiple tasks it is difficult to scale these systems from a performance perspective or to add new functionality. In fact, making any significant changes to a code base that is measured in millions of lines of code will reduce product stability and reliability. The fragile monolithic approach inherently prevents extending the network operating system to implement new features such as integration with customer specific management processes.

Arista’s Extensible Operating System (EOS) leapfrogs traditional network OS designs. Learn how by downloading this paper.