The Lippis Report

Pablo Espinosa, Director of Data, Video and Voice Network Infrastructure at GAP Inc plus ONUG founding member shares his hope of what Software-Defined Networking will enable at GAP Inc via video with the IT executives at the first Open Networking User Group or ONUG. Northbound APIs need to unlock automated orchestration, idle server and network capacity needs to be accessed and put to work and network configuration needs automation.

At Ixia’s iSimCity I sat down with Renuke Mandis, Technical Marketing Engineer at Extreme Networks to discuss the problem of VM moves not only between racks, but also between Layer 3 boundaries, which is a much harder problem to solve.  Extreme Networks demonstrates how to extend VMs across Layer 3 boundaries using VPLS.

At Ixia’s iSimCity I sat down with Michael Francini, System Engineer/Technical Marketing Engineer at Arista Networks to discuss the problem of VMs joining, moving and being deleted from an Ethernet fabric. Michael demonstrates how Arista’s VM Tracer interacts with VMware’s Vcenter to provide administrative views to both network and virtualization operations groups and most importantly auto provision Arista’s Software-Defined Cloud Network to support VM joins, moves and deletes.

To show how Avaya’s VENA supports VM dynamics we demonstrate Avaya’s Virtualization Provisioning Service management tool that integrates into VMware’s vCenter to provide an end-to-end view of the virtualized Data Center, including VMs, physical hosts, and network devices across both physical and virtual environments. We put this to the test at iSimCity and with the help of Jeff Cox Solutions Architect and Elmer Balino Product Verification Test Engineer at Avaya. The goal is measure the level of difficulty to join, move and remove VMs from the Avaya VENA fabric.

At Ixia’s iSimCity we test Brocade’s VCS for the level of ease associated with how the VCS fabric supports virtualized data centers with Viral Vimawala Brocade, Technical Marketing Engineer. Thanks to VCS’s distributed intelligence VM moves are easily supported with the fabric providing auto-provisioning to support the new VM location.

At Ixia’s iSimCity I sat down with Jeff Cox Solutions Architect from Avaya to discuss Avaya’s approach to Ethernet Fabric design with its Fabric Connect solution. We were testing Avaya’s VSP 7000 Top-of-Rack Switch for the Data Center, in the industry’s first test of Ethernet Fabric technologies.

Nick Lippis describes the Layer 1, 2 and 3 multipathing test created to demonstrate Brocade VCS’s ability to join a switch into a fabric, create a trunk by simply connecting switches with multiple cables, evenly distributed hashing between a large number of links in a LAG and how multiple layer 3 gateways evenly share traffic load for layer 2 extension. These sets of test are the most telling about how easy it truly is to build a Brocade VCS fabric. Jeevan Sharma Manager Technical of Marketing at Brocade joins Nick Lippis as they dive into Brocade’s Active-Active feature set.

I talk with Renuke Mendis, Technical Marketing Engineer at Extreme Networks as we discuss Extreme Network’s Open Fabric test results of the Lippis/Ixia Active-Active Ethernet Fabric Test at iSimCity. This was the first time the networking industry has ever attempted to test an Ethernet fabric in public across multiple vendors. We tested Extreme Network’s X670V Top of Rack and BlackDiamond X8 core data center Ethernet switches for this industry fabric test. We tested Extreme’s fabric for performance and reliability as well as VM support.

Nick Lippis analyses Brocade’s VCS Ethernet fabric from an attribute point of view. He briefly describes the test we run the two-tier VCS fabric consisting of VDX 6720 Top-of-Rack and VDX 8770 Core switches through at Ixia’s iSimCity.

Nick Lippis and Gautam Roy, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Brocade describe Brocade’s VCS architecture before it’s tested for the first time in public at the modern Ixia iSimCity laboratory.

Jeff Cox Solutions Architect at Avaya describes the Avaya VENA Fabric Connect two-tier network architecture configured with the VSP 7000 for the Lippis/Ixia industry test. We administratively disconnect a link in the core of the fabric and measure packet loss and packet loss duration too to show the resiliency of Avaya’s Ethernet Fabric solution.

The ability to scale is an important criteria for any Ethernet fabric. At Ixia’s iSimCity I discuss this attribute with Gautam Roy, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Brocade as we discuss the scale out attributes associated with VCS.

Dan Lynch, founder of Interop, shared an empowering message via video with the IT executives at the first Open Networking User Group or ONUG to control their own destiny and let their wallets dictate to vendors their mandate for open networking solutions to lower operational cost, increase IT delivery flexibility and prevent vendor lock-in.

Dave Dhillon, Product Marketing Manager, Cisco Systems

Dynamic Workload Scaling or Cloud bursting is commonly referred to as the ability to expand or contract workload between two or more virtualized data centers or cloud providers.  It sounds simple enough, but there has not been a practical approach to securely and automatically facilitate elastic IT resources in response to demand.  Cisco Systems is offering one of the most realistic approaches to cloud bursting that leverages the Nexus 7000 and its Application Control Engine or ACE load balancers.  Overlay Transport Virtualization or (OTV) is a feature of the Nexus 7000 and provides Layer 2 connectivity extension across any transport connecting two or more data centers.  ACE provides VM aware load balancing over OTV, which creates the basis for Cisco’s Dynamic Workload Scaling cloud bursting strategy.  I talk with Dave Dhillon Product Marketing Manager at Cisco Systems as we dive into Cisco’s approach to cloud bursting.

Duration: 9 minutes 59 seconds

Lippis Intro/Analysis @ : 00:10 sec

Question 1 @ 2:01 sec: let’s start with a Dynamic Workload Scaling definition and how much demand Cisco sees for this capability?

Question 2 @ 3:46 sec:  Ok great, so let’s talk about Cisco’s Dynamic Workload Scaling approach.  It leverages ACE, OTV, Nexus 7000 and its partnership with VMware.   Can you talk to the piece parts of the approach and how they work together to deliver Dynamic Workload Scaling?

Question 3 @ 6:53 sec: Thank for solution overview, so what are the new levels of business flexibility or outcomes enabled when Dynamic Workload Scaling is implemented?

Question 4 @ 7:59 sec: How do IT business leaders implement DWS in their private clouds?