This is a followup to my previous article, Redundancy in Data Storage: Part 1: RAID Levels, where I discussed various site-local data redundancy technologies. Here, I will attempt to detail many of the choices available to provide redundancy beyond the data center that organizations use to solve disaster recovery, business…
Category: Technical Deep Dive
Inter-Fabric Traffic in UCS–Part II
In the first part of this post (http://www.definethecloud.net/inter-fabric-traffic-in-ucs) I discuss server traffic flows within a UCS system focusing on End-Host mode (EH mode.) EH mode is the default and recommended mode for the majority of UCS implementations, but the system can also be used in ‘Switch mode’ which causes the…
Redundancy in Data Storage: Part 1: RAID Levels
I recently read Joe Onisick’s piece, “Have We Taken Data Redundancy Too Far?â€Â I think Joe raises a good point, and this is a natural topic to dissect in detail after my previous article about cloud disaster recovery and business continuity. I, too, am concerned by the variety of data…
Intel’s Betting the Storage I/O Farm on the CPU
I had the privilege of attending Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week as a delegate thanks to Stephen Foskett and Gestalt IT. It was a great event and a lot of information was covered in two days of presentations. I’ll be discussing the products and vendors…
Inter-Fabric Traffic in UCS
It’s been a while since my last post, time sure flies when you’re bouncing all over the place busy as hell. I’ve been invited to Tech Field Day next week and need to get back in the swing of things so here goes. In order for Cisco’s Unified Computing System…
Access Layer Network Virtualization: VN-Tag and VEPA
One of the highlights of my trip to lovely San Francisco for VMworld was getting to join Scott Lowe and Brad Hedlund for an off the cuff whiteboard session. I use the term join loosely because I contributed nothing other than a set of ears. We discussed a few things,…
What’s the deal with Quantized Congestion Notification (QCN)
For the last several months there has been a lot of chatter in the blogosphere and Twitter about FCoE and whether full scale deployment requires QCN. There are two camps on this: FCoE does not require QCN for proper operation with scale. FCoE does require QCN for proper operation and…
Networking Showdown: UCS vs. HP Virtual Connect (Updated)
Note: I have made updates to reflect that Virtual Connect is two words, and technical changes to explain another method of network configuration within Virtual Connect that prevents the port blocking described below. Many thanks to the Ken Henault at HP who graciously walked me through the corrections, and beat them…
UCS Server Failover
I spent the day today with a customer doing a proof of concept and failover testing demo on a Cisco UCS, VMware and NetApp environment. As I sit on the train heading back to Washington from NYC I thought it might be a good time to put together a technical…
FCoE multi-hop; Do you Care?
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…