Developer: Network team, did you order the Code upgrade?! Operations Manager: You don’t have to answer that question! Network Engineer: I’ll answer the question. You want answers? Developer: I think I’m entitled! Network Engineer: You want answers?! Developer: I want the truth! Network Engineer: You can’t handle the truth! Son,…
Tag: Virtualization
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…
Engineers Unplugged Episode 14: Application Affinity
I had the pleasure of speaking with Nils Swart (@nlnils) of Plexxi about applications and the network. You can watch the quick Engineer’s Unplugged below. Related posts: Focus on the Ball: The Application Cloud Success Factor: Rethink Application Development Application Centric Infrastructure – The Platform True Software Defined Networking (SDN)…
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…
Taking a Good Hard Look at SDN
SDN is sitting at the peak of it’s hype cycle (at least I hope it’s the peak.) Every vendor has a definition and a plan. Most of those definitions and plans focus around protecting their existing offerings and morphing those into some type of SDN vision. Products and entire companies…
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…
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…