This post is a little late, mainly because I’m both lazy and distracted. That being said I hope you’ll enjoy this video of Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara) and I debating the merits of OpenStack. For more Engineer’s unplugged goodness from Amy Lewis (@commsninja) visit: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/. Related posts: The Stack Wars: OpenStack…
Category: Concepts
The App on the Crap (An SDN Story)
I’m feeling Seussish again and looking to tackle SDN this time. If you missed my first go it was on Hadoop: Horton Hears Hadoop. Here’s another run: The app could not flow Net was too slow to change. It sat on the server Waiting on admin for change. …
Network Overlays: An Introduction
While network overlays are not a new concept, they have come back into the limelight, thanks to drivers brought on by large-scale virtualization. Several standards have been proposed to enable virtual networks to be layered over a physical network infrastructure: VXLAN, NVGRE, and SST. While each proposed standard uses different…
Why We Need Network Abstraction
The move to highly virtualized data centers and cloud models is straining the network. While traditional data center networks were not designed to support the dynamic nature of today’s workloads, the fact is, the emergence of highly virtualized environments is merely exposing issues that have always existed within network constructs….
Data Center Overlays 101
I’ve been playing around with Show Me (www.showme.com) as a tool to add some white boarding to the blog. Here’s my first crack at it covering Data Center Network overlays. Related posts: Data Center 101: Server Virtualization Data Center 101: Server Systems Data Center 101: Local Area Network Switching Network…
NVGRE
The most viable competitor to VXLAN is NVGRE which was proposed by Microsoft, Intel, HP and Dell. It is another encapsulation technique intended to allow virtual network overlays across the physical network. Both techniques also remove the scalability issues with VLANs which are bound at a max of 4096. NVGRE…
Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT)
STT is another tunneling protocol along the lines of the VXLAN and NVGRE proposals. As with both of those the intent of STT is to provide a network overlay, or virtual network running on top of a physical network. STT was proposed by Nicira and is therefore not surprisingly written…
Something up Brocade’s Sleeve, and it looks Good
Brocade’s got some new tricks up their sleeve and they look good. For far too long Brocade fought against convergence to protect its FC install base and catch up. This bled over into their Ethernet messaging and hindered market growth and comfort levels there. Overall they appeared as a company…
The Art of Pre-Sales Part II: Showing Value
Part I of this post http://www.definethecloud.net/the-art-of-pre-sales received quite a few page views and positive feedback so I thought I’d expand on it. Last week on the Twitters I made a comment re sales engineers showing value via revenue ($$) and got a lot of feedback. I thought I’d expand on…
Support St. Jude and the Fight Against Childhood Cancer
For some time I’ve been looking for a charity that Define the Cloud could support. I have no desire to try and monetize my traffic through ads and clutter the content. I also get plenty of benefits from running the site and wouldn’t ask for help with that. That being…