There is a lot of discussion in the industry around FCoE’s current capabilities, and specifically around the ability to perform multi-hop transmission of FCoE frames and the standards required to do so. A recent discussion between Brad Hedlund at Cisco and Ken Henault at HP (http://bit.ly/9Kj7zP) prompted me to write…
Month: May 2010
Welcome to the New Site!
Today Define the Cloud officially transfers here to the new hosted site. It was time for an upgrade from the wordpress.com hosted blog. Through privately hosting I’ll be able to provide additional site content and functionality as things progress. If you find any issues, broken links, or links pointing back…
Technical Deep Dive
Why Cisco UCS is my ‘A-Game’ Server Architecture
A-Game: When I discuss my A-Game it’s my go to hardware vendor for a specific data center component. For example I have an A-Game platform for: Storage SAN LAN (access Layer LAN specifically, you don’t want me near your aggregation, core or WAN) Servers and Blades (traditionally this has been…
Learning from FaceBook’s failures
In the interest of honesty I’ll start this post by saying I’m not a fan of FaceBook and never have been. This is based on two major things: If you and I don’t keep in touch through email or phone there is a reason for that. I have no desire…
The Cloud Storage Argument
The argument over the right type of storage for data center applications is an ongoing battle. This argument gets amplified when discussing cloud architectures both private and public. Part of the reason for this disparity in thinking is that there is no ‘one size fits all solution.’ The other part…
FCoE initialization Protocol (FIP) Deep Dive
In an attempt to clarify my future posts I will begin categorizing a bit. The following post will be part of a Technical Deep Dive series. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a protocol designed to move native Fibre Channel over 10 Gigabit Ethernet and above links, I’ve described the…
What the iPad means to cloud computing
Let me preface is by saying I am far from an Apple fan boy, in fact I would consider myself the exact opposite. I don’t like their business tactics (iTunes trying to force Safari down my throat for example) or their hardware lock-in for their laptops. I would never buy…
HP Flex-10, Cisco VIC, and Nexus 1000v
When discussing the underlying technologies for cloud computing topologies virtualization is typically a key building block. Virtualization can be applied to any portion of the data center architecture from load-balancers to routers, and from servers to storage. Server virtualization is one of the most widely adopted virtualization technologies, and provides…