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Prashant Gandhi, Cisco Systems
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.
By Extreme Networks
Colleges and universities have made large investments in wiring dormitories and residence halls. However, today’s students are using mobile devices with no wired Ethernet connector. Today’s laptops, tablets and smartphones rely on 802.11n Wi-Fi. Campus administrators require a simple and effective way to deliver wireless service quickly; leveraging existing wired investment to keep cost down. It is also beneficial to maintain a wired connection in the rooms, delivering both wired and wireless service. Extreme Networks Altitude 4511 uniquely enables administrators to meet student demands while achieving business goals, with a cost-effective solution that is a snap to install and can scale as needs grow.
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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.
Renato Recio, IBM Fellow & System Networking CTO
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.
By IBM
The cloud model isn’t about transforming IT. It’s about reinventing the way organizations do business. Organizations in every industry, regardless of size or geography, are embracing cloud computing as a way to reduce the complexity and costs associated with traditional IT approaches. Organizations that approach cloud in a tactical fashion risk adding complexity and inefficiency (not to mention security exposure) due to fragmentation, redundancy and operating silos. Conversely, organizations that embrace cloud strategically—from a business as well as IT perspective—can capture new business value through innovation, flexibility, speed, integrity and security—while reducing cost and complexity.
To deliver the cloud’s full business value, cloud-enabled data centers require speed, flexibility, cost-effective operation and scalability. This paper discusses the technical and business requirements of cloud computing, focusing on the networking layer of the cloud.
While the Lippis Report test were being conducted of the Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitchTM 6900-X40, Jean Luc Ronarch, Director Product Line Management Stackable Switches at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise joined me to discuss the firm’s latest product investment. We talk cloud network architecture and what’s unique about the new OmniSwitchTM 6900-X40.
Download “Fall 2011 Open Industry Network Performance And Power Test Report” here.
The Lippis Report has conducted three open industry test of 10 and 40GbE data center fabric switches at Ixia’s iSimCity. Michael Githens of Ixia interviews Nick Lippis of the Lippis Report to look back on what we have learned after testing eleven products from nine vendors including Alcatel-Lucent, Arista Networks, Brocade, Dell/Force10, Extreme Networks, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Juniper Networks and Mellanox/Voltaire. We then look forward as to what the industry will be serving up in 2012 for data center fabrics.
Download “Fall 2011 Open Industry Network Performance And Power Test Report” here.
While the Lippis Report test were being conducted of the Extreme Networks BlackDiamond® X8 Core and Summit® X670V ToR data center fabric switches at Ixia’s iSimCity, Darius Goodall, Product and Technical Marketing of Extreme joined me to discuss the firm’s latest product investment. We talk cloud network architecture and what’s unique about the new X8 and X670V.
Download “Fall 2011 Open Industry Network Performance And Power Test Report” here.
Access Control List or ACL are important tools in the configuration and customization of network attributes, especially with the Catalyst 6500. In the Catalyst 6500 upgrade with Sup2T, the TCAM has been both increased and its architecture improved. For ACL, a major concern was the lack of visibility of TCAM overflows when new ACL scripts were submitted, disrupting network operation. Therefore, Cisco developed the ACL Dry Run and ACL Atomic Commit to mitigate this scenario. To verify ACL improvements, we use ACL Dry-Run to assure that the TCAM would not overflow, and then implement the changes safely with ACL Atomic-commit; assuring no network interruption. It’s a great short video that verifies how useful these new tools are in ACL management.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
During the week of October 31, 2011, the Lippis Report tested Cisco System’s new Catalyst 6500 with Supervisor 2T or Sup2T for performance, upgradability, control and scalability at Ixia’s modern iSimCity laboratory in Santa Clara CA. By all counts, Cisco’s upgrade of the Catalyst 6500 via its new Sup2T, is its most ambitious and thoughtful yet for the venerable platform. The Sup2T is a major upgrade to the most widely-deployed switching platform in campus and data center networking. It’s the new Catalyst 6500’s network services that deliver most of the value, which is partially found in the Sup2T’s Policy Feature Card or PFC that increases NetFlow monitoring and a new TCAM design offering improved Access Control (ACL), Quality of Service design options, encryption security and many other features. This Lippis Report test verifies many of Cisco’s performance and upgradability claims. While it’s impossible to test all of the Catalyst 6500’s new 200-plus features with the Sup2T, we rather focus on a select few that will have the widest impact on IT business leaders’ product acquisition decision process.
MACsec encryption has become increasing popular and important to campus network design, but previous switch performance degraded when encrypted traffic was passing through it. Here we show that the catalyst 6500 does not suffer a performance degrade while MACsec traffic is passing through it. We tested the Catalyst 6500 via the cPacket Networks cTap 10G passive probe to verify traffic flows were either MACsec encrypted or unencrypted. We found that there is no material difference in throughput performance, other than 802.1ae encryption key overhead, thanks to 16 additional bytes per packet. The cPacket passive probe also measured line rate throughput performance. This is a great short video that verifies how the old encryption performance penalty is now gone.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
For IPv4 and IPv6, dual stack implementations are most popular where desktops and mobile devices run both IPv4 and IPv6, therefore, the network infrastructure needs to support both equally at high performance. IPv6 performance has not been on par with IPv4 until now. To demonstrate how the Catalyst 6500 upgrade with Sup2T has improved IPv6 performance, we measure IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and bidirectional traffic performance via RFC 2544. IP Multicast traffic has been on the rise, thanks to the increased use of video services within the enterprise. Therefore, we test IP Multicast performance via RFC 3918 on the new Catalyst 6500 Sup2T to stresses its packet replication ASIC built into the 6908-10G line cards. We find that the new Catalyst 6500 delivers equal Ipv4 and Ipv6 performance; a 2x increase from the Sup720 for IP unicast, bidirectional and multicast forwarding.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
One of the most impressive network design options available on the Catalyst 6500 is the use of VSS. Connecting two Catalyst 6500s equipped with Sup2Ts creates a virtual switch, adding each switch’s performance while operating as a single switch thus eliminating spanning tree in favor for active-active links. We configure two Catalyst 6500s via VSS. We measure throughput performance to verify that VSS throughput rates are equally high performance as the MPLS and VPLS scenarios. Check out the two-Catalyst 6500 configurations we deployed for this test.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
