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Thought Leader Podcast Series
Our Thought Leader Podcast Series brings you the absolute best from our podcasts.
Lippis Enterprises and Ixia are very excited to announce a new test suite for active-active cloud networks at the modern iSimCity plus a more flexible testing schedule. The active-active test is in addition to 10GbE & 40GbE data center switch performance and power consumption test. Vendors may choose one or both tests to submit products. The fall testing schedule will span over three months providing greater flexibility and lab access for vendors to submit products.
The industry is offering multiple active-active protocol options such as Brocade’s VCS Fabric, Cisco’s FabricPath, Juniper’s Qfabric, TRILL or Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links, SPBM or Shortest Path Bridging MAC mode, ECMP or Equal-Cost Multi-Path and MLAG or Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation Protocol. We plan to test them all. This video explains the new Active-Active Ethernet Fabric test and flexible schedule.
The term “fabric” has nearly as many definitions and permutations as “cloud,” so in this Lippis Report podcast Vikram Mehta, Vice President IBM System Networking joins me to discuss the top 10 attributes that a data center network fabric should possess. With the back half of 2012 kicking-off aggressive data center fabric deployments listening to this podcast is a must to help you with your planning.
In this Lippis Report podcast I talk with Prashant, Sr. Director of Server Access Virtualization Product Marketing at Cisco Systems about the new challenges of managing applications and layer 4-7 services in modern data center environments that consist of multiple hypervisors, a wide variety of workloads types and mobile/dynamic virtual machines.
Modern corporate networks are under increasing pressure to support a wider variety of applications thanks to mobile and cloud computing, desktop virtualization plus video traffic having skyrocketed. Not only are bandwidth rates increasing from 1 to 10 to 40 GbE, but most importantly network services are needed to manage and support a different application portfolio mix and network access methods. Network services such as firewalls, WLANs, network diagnostics and monitoring plus application performance acceleration are needed to deliver a consistently excellent user experience. Cisco recently announced an upgrade to its popular Catalyst 6k with the availability of the Supervisor 2T that included re-vamped high performance service modules to deliver these network services. Goyal, product line manager at Cisco Systems joins me to discuss which network services need to be available in modern networks.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
There are a growing number of options to make data center networking more flexible. One option is the use of Edge Virtual Bridging or EVB, which has been standardized in project IEEE 802.1Qbg and championed by IBM, HP, Brocade, QLogic, Emulex and many others. This approach extends the Virtual Ethernet Bridge or VEB sometime called Virtual Ethernet Switch (VES) used by hypervisors to connect VMs to the data center network. Renato Recio, IBM Fellow & System Networking CTO joins me to discuss IBM’s approach to virtual network infrastructure overlays and in particular its support for Edge Virtual Bridging.
Having a plan to transition to IPv6 has moved way up in the priority list of IT projects for IT leaders as 2011 was officially the year we ran out of IPv4 unallocated addresses and not having IPv6 could cut-off corporations and applications from accessing the internet. In addition employees en masse are “BYOD” or bring your own device meaning smartphone and tables to work increasing the number of devices on the network significantly. These devices and their applications are driving support of both IPv4 and IPv6 as many mobile devices are now set for IPv6 as the default. As dual stack IP v4/v6 is the best practice, the real challenge lies within the domain name service or DNS. Infloblox has developed a range of solutions to automate the transition to IPv6 by supporting both addressing schemes. Tom Coffeen, Chief IPv6 Evangelist at Infoblox talks about solutions to automate the transition to IPv6. It’s one of our best IPv6 discussions.
While the Lippis Report test were being conducted of the Brocade VDX™ 6730-32, Gautam Roy, Product Marketing Manager at Brocade joined me to discuss the firm’s latest product investment. We talk cloud network architecture, data center fabric and convergence with a focus on how the VDX™ 6730-32 Data Center Switch contributes and delivers on Brocade’s Ethernet fabric strategy.
Download “Fall 2011 Open Industry Network Performance And Power Test Report” here.
During the Lippis Report test of the Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 at Ixia’s iSimCity we perform an upgrade from Supervisor Engine 720 to 2T. What IT business leaders are looking for are incremental network upgrades with minimal disruption. Therefore, we swap out Sup720 for Sup2T and bring up existing service modules and line cards. Remember that line cards represent the largest investment in switching equipment, so we’ll demonstrate that older line cards interoperate at high performance when the new Sup2T replaces the Sup720. We find that the upgrade process is easy and smooth with compatibility of line cards, configuration code, service modules, transceivers and chassis.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
IT business leaders are seeking data center fabrics that scale to support increasing density of physical and virtual servers at cloud spec. In October of this year, Cisco delivered a monster data center fabric announcement aimed at increasing scale, security and new data center services. A few highlights are the second-generation Nexus 7000 capabilities, a new Nexus 7009 platform, plus FabricPath capabilities on the Nexus 5500 and expanded Nexus 1GbE and 40GbE form factors of the Nexus 3000. Shashi Kiran, Director of Market Management for Data Center/Virtualization and Enterprise Switching at Cisco Systems joins me to talk about what IT business leaders will gain from this new announcement from a business outcome and data center fabric design perspective.
Andre Kindness, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research and Zeus Kerravala, principal at ZK Research join me to discuss the shift-taking place in data center networking. Data Center networking is at an inflection point thanks to industry transitions driving new economics, technologies and IT delivery via mobile and cloud computing. These market transitions happen only once every decade or so and we detail its dynamics in this industry analyst round table. We discuss virtualization, merchant silicon, software defined networking, the rise of best of breed products, what network designs are working and which aren’t. We end with how IT business leaders can navigate an industry is transition.
Power over Ethernet or PoE has evolved from delivering 7 Watts/port to support IP phones to now 60 Watts/port to power a wide range of devices that span WLAN access points, surveillance video cameras, video conferencing end points, IP turrets for financial trading, and now, thin client desktop devices to support virtualized desktops. The current high PoE standard is IEEE 802.3at that details 30 Watts/port, so Cisco’s Universal PoE or UPOE solution at 60W is a pre-standard offering. The key point about UPOE is that it provides a new range of design options in both power distribution, but more importantly, how virtualized desktops and other electronics are powered. Pradeep Parmar, Senior Marketing Manager, Borderless Networks, at Cisco Systems, joins me to talk about the fundamental change PoE is taking, thanks to Cisco’s UPOE solution.
In Cisco’s Data Center Fabric, it has delivered a set of features and innovations that solve some of the most difficult networking challenges found in virtualized infrastructure. IP address and VM mobility plus adapter and VM Fabric EXtenders (FEX) offer increased support for virtualized data center infrastructure, offering designers flexibility to move virtualized assets independent of location. These innovations are proposed by Cisco that promises virtualization aware networking, lower cost and increased performance. Omar Sultan, Senior Manager, Data Center Architecture at Cisco Systems, and I discuss Cisco’s new data center virtualization tools.
Two years after Cisco launched its Unified Computing System it has 5,400 customers, holds the #3 market share ranking for x86 blade servers WW, behind only HP and IBM, according to IDG and recently broke numerous world computing performance benchmark records. While UCS has leaped frog competitors with performance plus memory and I/O capacity the most important aspect of UCS is the business value it drives. I explore this topic with Todd Brannon, Senior Manager for UCS marketing at Cisco Systems about the vision and strategy of Cisco’s Fabric Compute and the value its customers are gaining from its use. Todd brings great customer examples to this podcast, which is a must for any IT leader evaluating a data center fabric.
Cisco’s Nexus Operating System that runs on the Nexus switches and evolved from Cisco’s MDS SAN-OS is a fundamental building block of its Data Center Fabric. Berna Devrim, Senior Manager of Data Center and Virtualization Marketing at Cisco Systems, discusses the next generation of Nexus OS designed to address the biggest data center issues. These issues are virtualization scale and mobility, cloud spec scale, LAN and SAN convergence plus operational efficiency. This is one of the best audio podcast we’ve produced, so sit back listen, learn and enjoy.
