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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.
By all counts, Cisco’s upgrade of the Catalyst 6K via its new Supervisor 2T, or Sup2T, is its most ambitious and thoughtful yet for the venerable platform. The Sup2T is a 2 Terabit (Tb) platform that triples the previous Sup720 performance. Thanks to the support of Virtual Switching System (VSS), the platform allows two 2 Tbps switches to combine into a single 4 Tbps virtual switch. The Sup2T is a major upgrade to the most widely-deployed switching platform in campus and data center networking in the industry. But while these performance numbers are impressive, it’s the new Cat6K’s network services and pricing that deliver most of the value. From a services’ point of view, the Cat6K stands alone.
VMWARE VXLAN is a new network technology developed by VMware that enables stateful VM mobility across traditional L3 routed boundaries. This enables more freedom and flexibility in matching workloads to computing power. By enabling a larger, and essentially flatter network while building on top of proven models for stable scaling of networks such as routing and equal-cost multipath forwarding, VXLAN enables any workload to be provisioned on any virtualized host, anywhere in the network that is IP reachable. No longer do routed topology decisions restrict workload mobility.
If you are a VMware and network administrator who is building virtualized networks with more than 250 VMs or want to stretch a virtual machine farm across two data centers or two or more routed domains with full workload portability, then you need to read this white paper.
Several technology inflection points are coming together that are fundamentally changing the way networks are architected, deployed and operated, both in the public and private cloud. From performance, to scale, to virtualization support and automation to simplified orchestration, the requirements are rapidly changing and driving new approaches to building data center networks. This white paper does an excellent job at articulating cloud-scale network architecture via an open fabric that accounts for all major industry trends.
Back in November of 2009, I wrote Lippis Report Research Note 136 titled “HP Plans to Acquire 3Com Accelerating a New IT Convergence Era.” In that Research Note, I wrote
“When 3Com is fully integrated into HP what kind of networking revenue and market share can HP gain? ProCurve + 3Com is approximately $2B of revenue now. With the existing product lines can HP generate $5B, $10B or more of network revenue over five years? Time will tell.”
Well after nearly two years, HP Networking or HPN’s North America (NA) layer 2/3 Ethernet switch market share by revenue is nearly the same, bouncing between 5% and 6.1%, according Dell’Oro, with HPN’s Q2CY11 NA switch revenue share being down to 6%. Considering HPN’s limited results after significant investments in sales, channels and marketing, including its “proof-of-concept” plus “A Catalyst for Change” Cisco Trade-in program, not to mention engineering investment, the question is can HP make it in networking? We attempt to answer that question in this Lippis Report Research Note.
Use of Ethernet as a switching fabric provides servers with a single connection and can greatly reduce the amount of equipment required in the data center. Companies with storage networks are switching from Fiber Channel to Ethernet-based storage solutions that use 10GbE. This trend is accelerating now with lossless DCB or Data Center Bridging Ethernet products such as IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124. With the adoption of the new DCB Ethernet protocols, Ethernet switching fabric can offer the technical features and the economic value necessary to become the switching fabric of choice for data center networking, storage and clustering. Find out how by downloading this white paper.
Most IT organizations have implemented server, storage and/
or network virtualization to some degree, but to fully realize
the benefits of virtualization, IT organizations need to consider
adopting all three in an integrated manner. Server virtualization for
x86 servers has been around for about a decade, and is relatively
mature. Storage virtualization is not quite as mature, but numerous
storage virtualization products are available today. And while
network virtualization in the form of VLANs and VPN has been
around for many years, new types of network virtualization are just
now being introduced to the industry. In this white paper, we’ll
take a look at virtualized servers, storage, and networking, and see
how automated network switching helps unify these environments
into a cohesive whole.
Avaya has expanded its cloud networking product portfolio with the Virtual Services Platform or VSP 7000, a 10GbE Top of Rack (ToR) Switch and its new Virtualization Provisioning Service or VPS management software.
The VSP 7000 boasts a multi-Terabit Fabric capable of horizontally stacking many 7000s, offering a new approach to server connections. The VPS virtualization management application provides visibility and automated control of virtualized infrastructure. VPS is designed to provide NetOps and SysOps shared visibility of physical, logical and now virtual IT assets. Dan DeBacker, Director of Data Solutions Architecture at Avaya, discusses the new VSP 7000 plus VPS and the new data center design options they afford.
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.
The tech sector is at a crossroads. In just 18 short months, mobile and cloud computing has fundamentally changed business assumptions and technical underpinnings of IT delivery. And in the process IT business leaders are fundamentally changing their buying requirements and corporate IT investments challenging existing vendor relationships. The tech sector served up corporate IT along technical lines of computing, networking, storage and applications, but these lines are blurring as every major multi-billion dollar IT firm now seeks to deliver vertical offerings comprised of a single rack of compute, storage and networking to address scale and simplicity associated with the new mobile and cloud computing models. Cisco, IBM, HP, Dell and Oracle all are repositioning their data center offers to address the market opportunity and shift to assist IT leaders building iBusinesses. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we dive into Cisco’s Data Center Fabric as it’s the furthest along at integrating compute, networking and storage access for corporate advantage offering a glimpse of IT’s future.
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.
In November of 2010 Avaya launched its Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture or VENA, which describes its computer networking investment strategy and technology direction. VENA was designed for virtualized data center infrastructure but has been expanded to include campus and branch office networking. Dan DeBacker, Director of Data Solutions Architecture at Avaya discusses the unique attributes VENA possesses to meet today’s enterprise networking needs and the business outcomes its customers are gaining by its deployment.
Organizations of all sizes are transitioning to virtualization technology at a dramatically increasing rate. Conducted between September and December 2010, Gartner’s annual survey of 2,014 CIOs collectively responsible for $160 billion in IT spending in 50 countries across 38 industries found that “Currently, 3% of CIOs have the majority of IT running in the cloud or on SaaS technologies, but over the next four years CIOs expect this number to increase to 43%.” The motivation for adopting the new technology is enticing: increased flexibility, decreased workload for internal IT departments, faster access to on-the-fly infrastructure needs, increased worker productivity, and significant capex cost reductions. Despite this worldwide trend across all industries, most organizations will fail in the conversion process to these new technologies, thanks to complexity. This white paper explains how network automation calms complexity allowing IT business leaders to reap the rewards of dense virtualization deployment.
