Dodging open protocols with open software
I have a hunch. Pure speculation, in fact, that there may be an even more interesting story developing here with the unveiling of networking software startup Nicira Networks. The story being that of open source networking software minimizing the role of network “protocols” and the diminishing role of standards bodies in building next generation networks. Nicira Network’s [...]
Construct a Leaf Spine design with 40G or 10G? An observation in scaling the fabric.
Should you construct a Leaf/Spine fabric with 10G or 40G? In this post I’ll make the simple observation that using 10G interfaces in your leaf/spine fabric scales to more servers than using 40G interfaces, all with the same hardware, bandwidth, and oversubscription. Let’s suppose you’ve decided to build a Leaf/Spine fabric for your data center [...]
On optimizing traffic for network virtualization
The era of network virtualization and software overlays is coming (read: VXLAN, OpenFlow, SDN, etc.) and with it the role of the physical network and what we define as “the network”, is all about to change. How does this change the way application flows map to traffic on the network and servers? How does this change [...]
First take on Embrane heleos
Embrane came out of secrecy today and announced their solution that virtualizes the deployment of network based services. In the context of how this affects network virtualization, here’s my initial thoughts on Embrane’s announcement.. My first take is that Embrane heleos is a positive thing for the network virtualization movement. (Read: good for Nicira, good [...]
Hadoop network design challenge
I had a bit of fun recently working on a hypothetical network design for a large scale Hadoop implementation. A friend of mine mentioned he was responding to a challenging RFP, and when I asked him more about it out of curiosity he sent me these requirements: (4) Containers In each Container: (25) Racks (64) [...]
Network Virtualization is like a big virtual chassis
This is something I’ve been chewing on for a while now and here’s my first rough attempt at writing it down: Network Virtualization is the new chassis switch, only much bigger. (and a lot less proprietary) The x86 server is the new Linecard The network switch is the new ASIC VXLAN (or NVGRE) is the new [...]
Starting a new journey with Dell Force10
With mixed emotions, this week I submitted my resignation to Cisco, a fantastic company with great products and great people. This was the result of an exhausting and drawn out thought process lasting several months. The data center networking industry is changing fast and this was purely a forward-looking move to best position myself and [...]
Understanding Hadoop Clusters and the Network
This article is Part 1 in series that will take a closer look at the architecture and methods of a Hadoop cluster, and how it relates to the network and server infrastructure. The content presented here is largely based on academic work and conversations I’ve had with customers running real production clusters. If you run production [...]
Distributed systems trickle down into Enterprise IT
In my new role at Cisco I’ve had the opportunity to observe and study something happening that is (in my opinion) truly significant and mind blowing. The IT data center landscape as we know it is on the precipice of a major upheaval. I’m not talking about virtualization, and cloud, and all that other stuff that’s been [...]
On “Why TRILL wont work for the data center”
Today I came across “Why TRILL won’t work for data center network architecture” by Anjan Venkatramani of Juniper. Anjan’s article makes a few myopic and flawed arguments in slamming TRILL, setting up a sale for QFabric. The stated problems with TRILL include FCoE, L3 multi-pathing, VLAN scale, and large failure domains. The one and only Ivan Pepelnjak has already tackled the [...]
“Jawbreaker”, merchant silicon, QFabric, and flat networks
Brad, can you elaborate on Cisco’s Jawbreaker project? What exactly is it? Is it a response to Juniper’s Q-Fabric? Is it an attempt to rectify the inconsistencies in the differing purpose-built approaches of the N7K and N5K? Why create a new architecture? It seems like Cisco is really in trouble – creating a new architecture, [...]
Incomplete thought: Just in time QoS
Imagine a data center where network QoS is adaptive and self adjusting to the current application conditions. Just in time QoS. Something much different from the static, stale, and generic configurations we are accustomed to today. Configuring QoS is a pain, most people avoid it to begin with. Yet some switches are very good at [...]
TCP Incast and Cloud application performance
Incast is a many-to-one communication pattern commonly found in cloud data centers implementing scale out distributed storage and computing frameworks such as Hadoop, MapReduce, HDFS, Cassandra, etc. — powering applications such as web search, maps, social networks, data warehousing and analytics. Incast can also more specifically be referred to as TCP Incast, as the cloud [...]
On data center scale, OpenFlow, and SDN
Lately I’ve been thinking about the potential applicability of OpenFlow to massively scalable data centers. A common building block of a massive cloud data center is a cluster, a grouping of racks and servers with a common profile of inter-rack bandwidth and latency characteristics. One of the primary challenges in building networks for a massive [...]
Inverse Virtualization for Internet Scale Applications
The word virtualization is one of those words that can mean a lot of things, sorta like cloud. When people think of server virtualization today they often think of it in terms of taking a physical server and having it host many virtual servers each with their own operating system and application (One to Many). [...]
