Driving Digital Transformation “Digital, Digitization, Digital, Digital, Digital Transformation. There, I’ve hit my mandatory quota of 5 digital mentions for my presentation, now we can get to something interesting.†That was my opening line at a large data center and cloud conference in Rome. It wasn’t the one I’d planned,…
Tag: cloud
True Software Defined Networking (SDN)
The world is, and has been, buzzing about software defined networking. It’s going to revolutionize the entire industry, commoditize hardware, and disrupt all the major players. It’s going to do all that… some day. To date it hasn’t done much but be a great conversation, and more importantly identify the…
It’s Our Time Down Here– “Underlays”
Recently while winding down from a long day I flipped the channel and “The Goonies†was on. I left it there thinking an old movie I’d seen a dozen times would put me to sleep quickly. As it turns out I quickly got back into it. By the time the…
Focus on the Ball: The Application
With the industry talking about Software Defined Networking (SDN) at full hype levels, there is one thing missing from many discussions: the application. SDN promises to reign in the complexity of network infrastructure and provide better tools for deploying services at scale. What often seems to be forgotten are the…
Network Abstraction and Virtualization: Where to Start?
Network Abstraction and Virtualization: Where to Start? With the growth of server virtualization network designs and the associated network management constructs have been stretched beyond their intended uses. This has brought about data center networks that are unmanageable and slow to adapt to change. While servers and storage can be…
What Network Virtualization Isn’t
Brad Hedlund recently posted an excellent blog on Network Virtualization. Network Virtualization is the label used by Brad’s employer VMware/Nicira for their implementation of SDN. Brad’s article does a great job of outlining the need for changes in networking in order to support current and evolving application deployment models. He…
CloudStack Graduates to Top-Level Apache Project
The Apache Software Foundation announced in late March that CloudStack is now a top-level project. This is a promotion from CloudStack’s incubator status, where it had lived after being released as open source by Citrix. This promotion provides additional encouragement to companies and developers looking to contribute to the project,…
VXLAN Deep Dive – Part II
In part one of this post I covered the basic theory of operations and functionality of VXLAN (http://www.definethecloud.net/vxlan-deep-dive.) This post will dive deeper into how VXLAN operates on the network. Let’s start with the basic concept that VXLAN is an encapsulation technique. Basically the Ethernet frame sent by a VXLAN…
Digging Into the Software Defined Data Center
The software defined data center is a relatively new buzzword embraced by the likes of EMC and VMware. For an introduction to the concept see my article over at Network Computing (http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/the-software-defined-data-center-dissect/240006848.) This post is intended to take it a step deeper as I seem to be stuck at 30,000…
SDN – Centralized Network Command and Control
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a hot topic in the data center and cloud community. The geniuses <sarcasm> over at IDC predict a $2 billion market by 2016 (expect this number to change often between now and then, and look closely at what they count in the cost.) The concept…