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April 30, 2008
Thoughts from Interop & winning Best of Interop
It's great to see Interop continue to rebuild intensity and attendee size from the boom to bust days and back. The floor certainly seems busy, as do many of the sessions we've attended and spoken at.
Application delivery continues to grow in focus over the last few years, and 2008 is no exception...
...nearly half of the advertising banners outside the main showfloor entrance are from app delivery vendors. And an entire track of speaking sessions moderated by senior analyst Jim Metzler is around the subjet. This definitely is a topic that has reached mainstream.
Cisco has also reached mainstream with its WAAS WAN optimization solution, as the judges for Interop awarded CIsco yesterday.
If you're at Interop while reading this, please come by our booth and say hello. If you're reading this anywhere else, please post your thoughts on where WAN optimization technology is in your planning or production cycle -- we and our readers want to learn from your experience.
Cheers from Interop.
Posted by Mark Weiner at 09:29 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Live from Interop 2008: Community Weighs in on Top Data Center Trends....Cast your vote now….
Text 8020 to 41411 for Policies
Text 8021 to 41411 for Performance
Text 8022 to 41411 for Instability
Text 8023 to 41411 for Costs
Posted by John Murphy at 09:05 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Live from Interop 2008: Community Weighs in on Top Data Center Trends....Cast your vote now….
Text 8010 to 41411 for Virtualization
Text 8011 to 41411 for Energy Efficiency
Text 8012 to 41411 for Scalability
Text 8013 to 41411 for Facilities
Posted by John Murphy at 08:47 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Interop 2008 Winner Best of Award for Infrastructure
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is the recipient of Interop 2008 Product of the Year. It is the first Data Center class switch in the Nexus portfolio offering transport flexibility, operational continuity and infrastructure scalability.
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series
Posted by John Murphy at 08:32 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
Interop 2008 Winner Networking & Application Best of Award
Cisco WAE 674 and Cisco WAAS v4.1 is the recipient for providing application optimization, services for customers to improve application performance over Wide Area Networks.
Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) Appliances
Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Software
Posted by John Murphy at 08:22 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 29, 2008
In the Know at Interop 2008
Jayshree Ullal, Senior Vice President, Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group, Cisco, shares key customer insights from Interop 2008
Posted by John Murphy at 04:47 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 28, 2008
Interop 2008
It's that time of year again, trade-show season! Interop has always been one of my favorites- I guess it's the technical roots of it. Interop started back as Networld and Interop. One more of a trade show, the other an interesting technical challenge and exercise. Back when Interop started no one was certain which protocols would win, whether bridging or routing was the way to go, whether it would be Ethernet, ATM, Token Ring, or FDDI/CDDI to the desktop, etc. What Interop did was force multiple vendors to work together to build a network to support the show floor in a matter of days. There were also interoperability tests of new protocols and such between multiple vendors hardware, software, protocols, etc. In the end it became a gathering place for 20,000+ network professionals to see what worked, what didn't, hear about the latest and greatest...
What made Interop unique is that in a way it and by some measure the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab really helped spur an industry. While Ethernet evolved 'in the open' and the interworking between vendors was tested openly at events like Interop some other areas where this openness did not exist caused massive vendor interoperability problems, FibreChannel comes glaringly to mind. The two main vendors 6 years ago barely worked together at all and you were lucky if plugging one into another would not crash your entire fabric.
I remember about 9 years ago working with a few other Cisco engineer and some folks from Nortel to set up the first multi-vendor MPLS network, at Interop. It was running over ATM on some Lightstream 1010s on our side, I can't remember what Nortel's was, but we got it working.
This year we are showing Fibre Channel over Ethernet interworking with several other vendors, a technology that I hope enjoys the open testing and development environments that IP and Ethernet and even MPLS all enjoyed through open standards bodies and events like Interop.
To Lenny and the rest of the gang that make Interop what it is to us as an industry, Thank You!
I'll be around our booth Tuesday and Wednesday and at some speaking sessions, feel free to come chat about anything with us.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 08:52 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
April 25, 2008
Administrative Professionals Week
I know this is completely off-topic, but I just wanted to take a minute to recognize the great work my executive administrator does. Diane McSweeney is as good as they get - the reason I have time to write on this blog is because she manages me with an iron fist and sometimes a goading smile. She took a week off these past few days, but still managed to ensure that I will be meeting with as many of you as possible next week at Interop.
Diane, a very public thank you for being a great part of Cisco's Data Center team and making all of us have a bit of fun!
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 07:37 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 24, 2008
Silos Belong on the Farm
Another vendor reportedly made the following statement: “We should leave [virtualization] control to the server guy and leave the network to the networking guy. That's an easier approach to swallow." I found this to be a curious statement and somewhat ironic, considering it was a networking vendor who said this.
I think it is clear that virtualization cannot continue to be a silo-ed activity if it going to make the transition from tactic to strategy. For example, if you are going to use VM portability as part of you strategy for things like DR/DC, power and cooling management or SLA compliance, you are going to have to do it in an orchestrated manner in coordination with the other teams in the data center if you are going to be successful. And, if you want to be able to do this in anything close to real time, you are also going a management framework to support this. In short, virtualization is everyone’s job.
Which, leads me to the other point this statement brings out: the need to re-think the IT organization. I believe that the IT infrastructure and the IT organization need to be mirrors of each other. I don’t think you can successfully transform your data center while clinging to existing notions of organizational structure (i.e. network gal, server guy). Some of our more forward thinking customers have seen good results by integrating into “critical teams” that span technologies. I think this is a best practice that would benefit many of our customers. We have actually been spending some cycles on the organizational impacts of Data Center 3.0, so look for more info on this in the coming months.
Posted by Omar Sultan at 01:30 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 23, 2008
Interop Las Vegas 2008
Just a quick invite to everyone to drop by our booth at Interop next week. We will have demonstrations of FCoE, the Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, and our virtualized Application networking technologies as well. I'll be running around at a few presentations on Data Center as well as a fun panel on 10Gb Ethernet and where the technology is heading, then drop by and do some booth duty.
I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible next week, travel safe if you are joining us.
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 03:01 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
April 21, 2008
20/20 Blogging
I just read John Rath's recent post on Data Center Links about Cisco's Data Center Vision. It really reaffirms something for me that I was sitting with some of our key data center leadership discussing today, and that is that blogging just plain works. We get feedback, broadly, in minutes and days that would takes months with 'focus groups' and other traditional marketing machinations. We hear from our customers, our partners, our competitors, and we learn what works and what doesn't- rapidly. I love it.
There has been a veritable furor and at least heart-pounding discussion on the merits of FCoE, iSCSI, FCIP, and many other acronyms. Can you imagine the T-shirt? "CISCO NEXUS: My Acronyms are better than your Acronyms! "
What our vision comes down to in the end is a simple statement: "Any application, any workload, any server, anywhere, in seconds, configured in software. "
It's a complimentary vision to many of our top-tier partners. It's one that challenges many niche companies. It's one the solves many customer challenges. It's a vision that w feel we can deliver, and we're on the trajectory to make more and more of it into a reality this year and over the next few.
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 03:23 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
WAN Optimization getting Hot
The number of competitors left standing gets smaller, WAN Optimization heats up. In the current market economy technologies that save money, very tangibly will most likely do well- WAN Optmization, Data De-Duplication, etc have a nice outlook. Gaining market share in downturned economic climates is often a good strategy as you can gain footprint and the business is well poised during the regression to the growth mean over time.
dg
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Blue Coat Systems Inc. (BCSI) agreed to acquire Packeteer Inc. (PKTR) in a $268 million all-cash deal that will augment Blue Coat's ability to speed the flow of corporate network traffic.
The purchase will allow Blue Coat, Sunnyvale, Calif., which provides equipment and software that helps its corporate customers better manage and protect their networks, to add Packeteer's technology to its product portfolio. The company sees the deal strengthening its standing in the wide area network optimization market, a lucrative segment that deals with helping remote workers connect to their company's networks faster.
"We took a broader view of the WAN optimization market and found profound changes taking place," said Brian NeSmith, president and chief executive of Blue Coat.
As companies strive to increase the efficiency and productivity, the business of boosting network speeds has become an attractive one. In particular, Packeteer, Cupertino, Calif., specializes in improving the performance for users who connect to the corporate infrastructure remotely through a virtual private network - an increasing trend as more workers go mobile.
But in the past year, Packeteer's business has cooled down, with 2007 sales dipping slightly over the year-earlier period. Rival Riverbed Technology Inc. (RVBD), meanwhile, more than doubled its revenue in the same period.
Blue Coat is hoping Packeteer's technology will allow it to break free from a cutthroat pack of WAN optimization providers that includes Riverbed and networking titan Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO).
"(The deal) differentiates us from more vanilla operations purely focused on WAN optimization," NeSmith said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, taking a veiled shot at Riverbed's sole focus on WAN optimization.
Blue Coat's offer to pay $7.10 a share in cash represents a 15% premium over Packeteer's Friday closing price of $6.18. Packeteer recently traded at $6.98, up 13%, or 80 cents. Blue Coat fell 3%, or 57 cents, to $19.18.
The deal is expected to contribute to earnings in the fiscal second quarter, excluding one-time costs related to the acquisition.
Blue Coat already has a WAN optimization business, and NeSmith said job reductions and other merger-related cuts would occur. He didn't provide any more specific information.
NeSmith acknowledged Packeteer's recent problems, noting that the company didn't invest in its core products and failed to make a dent in the newer segments of the market.
Packeteer plans to "reinvigorate" its product line and "bring a discipline of execution that will work more effectively than what they had," he said.
In swooping in and buying Packeteer, Blue Coat side-stepped Elliot Associates LP, which was also interested in the company. Elliott Associates previously offered to buy Packeteer for $5.50 a share in cash, or $190 million.
Blue Coat agreed to issue $80 million of zero coupon convertible notes in a private placement to Francisco Partners II LP, an associate of Elliot. Elliot, meanwhile, will terminate its tender offer and sell its 9.9% interest in Packeteer to Blue Coat, the company said.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 10:44 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 18, 2008
Cisco MDS 9500 Continues to Innovate
As Doug mentioned in his recent blog:
http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/2008/03/fcoe_fibrechannel_ethernet_eag.html
the MDS platform is here to stay. There have been a lot of announcements from Cisco recently on Nexus, FCoE, and Data Center Ethernet and that's certainly important news. However, the MDS quietly continues to innovate in the Fibre Channel market while maintaining a leadership position in Director market share (Dell'Oro CQ407).
According to Gartner, there is over $50B in installed base of Fibre Channel switching and storage equipment and it is unlikely to be obsoleted anytime soon.
FCoE offers a very important value proposition to consolidating I/O on servers that tradionally have several different interfaces and cables. To be sure, most of the complexity of running two parallel networks is at the server access layer where 80% of the ports typically exist and where there is the most concentration of cables.
However, storage arrays, tape drives, VTLs, FICON, and other Fibre Channel assets will continue to use standard Fibre Channel attachments and will likely require upgrades to 8G soon.
The MDS 9500 Director, announced in 2002, with support for 1/2/4G Fibre Channel will deliver on this requirement by delivering 8G interfaces without requiring a forklift upgrade.
And as servers begin to use FCoE to attach to the Fibre Channel SAN, the MDS 9500 will also offer FCoE line cards to ensure there is interoperability between both environments.
Investment protection is the ulitimate form of innovation.
Posted by Deepak Munjal at 11:11 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 16, 2008
The Anti-FCoE Sentiment
One more anti-FCoE post , this time from Greg Ferro, who seems to be a supporter of storage over IP.
I am not yet sure I understand why people who should support FCoE (i.e. the networking community) are taking side against it, while the strongest supporters seem to be coming from the storage community. I do not even understand why we should take any sides at all, but I think it's important to clarify the facts and let readers make the final call.
There is one piece of the post that is important to correct, and it's the one that talks to the "reasons not to use FCoE." Let's go line by line:
* FCP endpoints are inherently costlier than simple NICs – the cost argument (initiators are more expensive)
This is absolutely true, but the comparison is not correct. You should be comparing FCoE cards with TOE (TCP Offload Engine) cards or iSCSI HBAs. If you do that comparison, you immediately realize that the cost advantage is on the FCoE side. The iSCSI adapters are priced anywhere between $1,000 and $2,000 and they are mostly 1GE today.
With FCoE you can also opt for a software only implementation (much lighter stack than iSCSI/TCP/IP.) If you do that, the cost is reduced because you can use a regular 10GE NIC ($799 list price) to run FCoE with a software stack.
* The credit mechanisms is highly unstable for larger networks (check switch vendors planning docs for the network diameter limits) – the scaling argument
The credit mechanism is a link-level flow control mechanism and has nothing to do with the size of the network. Fibre Channel networks are small because the domain ID field in FC frames is a 8-bit field. This means that you cannot have FC SANs with more than 255 Domain IDs (i.e. switches.) If you use VSANs you can multiply that by the number of VSANs (up to 4000.) I do not think this is a "real" problem. I never heard single storage administrator complaining about the size of their FC SANs; the problems are usually elsewhere.
Besides all that, FCoE does not use credits as Ethernet is the transport protocol.
* The assumption of low losses due to errors might radically change when moving from 1 to 10 Gb/s – the scaling argument
There is no "assumption" of "low losses". FCoE runs on top of a "lossless Data Center Ethernet" network, which is the real differentiator. Data Center Ethernet (as pointed out by Cisco and Dell in previous posts) will benefit any kind of storage traffic over IP, be that FCoE, iSCSI or NAS (CIFS/NFS)
* Ethernet has no credit mechanism and any mechanism with a similar effect increases the end point cost.
Ethernet has had the standard PAUSE mechanism defined for a long time and you have been paying for it with every single NIC or switch that you purchased over the past few years. We have just never found the right application for using it. 802.1Qbb expands the use of PAUSE by defining PFC (Priority-based Flow Control) which allows network nodes to selectively decide which types of traffic should be lossless and which ones should not.
On a more theoretical note, if all of Ethernet became lossless by deploying PAUSE (I am far from suggesting this is the right thing to do) the cost of end points (and switch ports) would be lower because in a lossless environment buffers can be sized more easily than in a best-effort network, where you have to size buffers according to the maximum size of bursts that you would like to support.
* Building a transport layer in the protocol stack has always been the preferred choice of the networking community – the community argument
Once again, very true, but it is not the real point. This is not about the networking community in isolation, but the broader data center community, which includes the storage administrators, who for the better or the worse, do their job with Fibre Channel today and would like to find the smoothest and simplest way to leverage Ethernet without putting their jobs at risk.
* The “performance penalty” of a complete protocol stack has always been overstated (and overrated). Advances in protocol stack implementation and finer tuning of the congestion control mechanisms make conventional TCP/IP performing well even at 10 Gb/s and over.
True, but I think it is difficult to argue that more protocols are better than less protocols in terms of performance. Always remember that "perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but there is nothing let to take away."
* Moreover the multicore processors that become dominant on the computing scene have enough compute cycles available to make any “offloading” possible as a mere code restructuring exercise (see the stack reports from Intel, IBM etc.)
All true, but once again, not necessary. The issue is not TCP, but the fact that iSCSI is a different beast than FC and the storage community does not necessarily like it (if they did, do you think they are all so "blind" not to see the oportunity with iSCSI; they must be smarter than that!)
* Building on a complete stack makes available a wealth of operational and management mechanisms built over the years by the networking community (routing, provisioning, security, service location etc.) – the community argument
This is a very good argument and I agree with it, but once again, it's a benefit that has not reasonated well with the storage community so far. We need to keep in mind that storage folks have a job to do and have been doing it just fine so far. iSCSI is better, no argument there, but it's different and not necessarily simple to understand and use for someone, who is already familiar with FC. Also, it's one more thing to deal with and people are not just going to rip and replace FC because iSCSI is better. FCoE gives them a migration path and over time might make even iSCSI easier to adopt.
* Higher level storage access over an IP network is widely available and having both block and file served over the same connection with the same support and management structure is compelling – the community argument
Very true, but let's not forget that the large majority of storage traffic is local, where Ethernet represent a unifying transport as much as IP does. Data Center Ethernet is the key enabler for unified fabric, which translates in benefits for all of the storage transports.
* Highly efficient networks are easy to build over IP with optimal (shortest path) routing while Layer 2 networks use bridging and are limited by the logical tree structure that bridges must follow. The effort to combine routers and bridges (rbridges) is promising to change that but it will take some time to finalize(and we don’t know exactly how it will operate). Untill then the scale of Layer 2 network is going to seriously limited – the scaling argument
There are two things to consider here:
(1) Data Center Ethernet includes the ability to run alternative topology selection protocols that enhance the scalability of layer 2 domains by ultimately removing the STP (Spanning Tree Protocol,) and
(2) To benefit of the FCoE value proposition all you need is an access layer switch (I would suggest the Cisco Nexus 5000 ;-) ) The rest of the infrastructure (Ethernet and FC) remains unchanged.
Almost every Fortune 1,000 company has a large installed base of FC storage arrays and SANs. FCoE allows new servers to utilize the existing infrastructure with few cables, adapters, etc… without incurring any performance penalty. It is not a realistic scenario for people to rip out all of these storage arrays and replace them with iSCSI targets, or go through and upgrade each array to make it iSCSI enabled (load new firmware, plug in more Ethernet cards in the array, expand out the Ethernet network to accommodate all the new array ports, etc…).
Once again, this is about building a Unified Fabric over Ethernet and allow for the smoohest, realistic transition possible. iSCSI and FCoE should not be positioned as alternatives as they address and solve different problems.
Posted by Dante Malagrino at 08:21 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
April 15, 2008
Numbers Don't Lie (Vendors Often Do) -- WAAS Results from TheInfoPro
TheInfoPro, a leading market survey and analysis firm, has completed its fourth "WAVE report" on enterprise IT spending and priorities. Not suprisingly, WAN optimization came out as a very hot technology focus area: "WAN Data Compression and Acceleration Hardware has overtaken 10 Gbps Ethernet to assume the top spot on the Data Networking Infrastructure Technology Heat Index®in Wave 4."
But another interesting point comes up when TheInfoPro looks at specific vendors in the market...
When TheInfoPro gets into detail on what their respondents said about different vendors, the results are quite interesting: "Riverbed continues to appear in a strong position, but has lost its designation as the lead in plan vendor in this segment to Cisco...Cisco now leads among both F1000 and MSE organization for mentions in consideration...."
So if that's the case per non-vendor funded TheInfoPro research, then how do recent #'s from other vendors come out like this: "Riverbed's top two competitors remain Cisco (competing in 40% of customer decisions) and Juniper (competing in 23% of customer decisions). Riverbed continues to maintain a 90% win rate against all of its competitors.
Source: CNN Money pick up of Riverbed announcement.
Especially when TheInfoPro's prior WAVE 3 report (July 2007) also stated Cisco had become the lead vendor under consideration.
Are Cisco and other vendors winning a lot of "non competitive deals", like some recent vendor blog posting have suggested...or are those vendors' win analyses not as accurate as they could be? Since Cisco has 2500+ customers, and other vendors besides Riverbed have their base too, any "90%+ number" seems a little circumspect, large market oppty aside...but we'll leave that to your own judgement, blog posts and future TheInfoPro and other firms' reports.
Posted by Mark Weiner at 11:03 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
WAAS Up Larry!
Recently a partner to one of our competitors, decided to deride our claims of success in the WAN Optimization market. Thought I would post this recent video of a healthy sized deployment of WAN Optimization technologies by Pacer International.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 07:42 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 14, 2008
Ummm, is your switch... Backwards????
When we introduced the Nexus Family as a family of switching products that were purpose-built for the data center we meant this at every conceivable level. Silicon, Systems, Software, Hardware, Power Architecture, even a 'Form Follows Function' physical design of our chassis.
At the Partner Summit in Honolulu last week, amidst this thing called VOG (Volcanic Fog) I had someone ask me why the Nexus 5000 looked so different than the 7000 from an aesthetics point of view. I came back to the 'form follows function' design methodology. The Nexus 5000 is designed for the data center....
What side of a server are the network ports on- THE BACK
Where does hot air need to exhaust- THE BACK
If we hold these two truths to be self evident (or at least documented somewhere by ASHRAE or a random and cursory check of most server vendors portfolios) then we can infer the following logical statement- "The exhaust and the ports need to be on the back of the LAN Switch" as this will allow shorter and less complex cable runs, simplify operations, and maintain the established airflow models.
Thus we can again infer, that just about every product from every other company, designed for a rack switching deployment is... well..... backwards!
We have a few of those as well, fine for 1 Gigabit, and enabling a transition to 10Gb. But when we purpose-built a product for 10GbE, FCoE, and designed uniquely for data center deployments - it was time to change.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 06:19 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
NX-OS 'VERY IOS-Like'
Just saw a good write up from Mark Lewis over at NEtwork World on NX-OS analysis he did off a build we sent over to him here.
'WR T' still to be added, or you can alias it ;)
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 10:32 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 11, 2008
InfiniBand "or" FCoE - This time you should care
Last night I posted on FCoE vs. iSCSI. This morning I picked another debate on FCoE vs. Infiniband. The post I have commented to Jerome Wendt's "Is FCoE a diabolical plot?"
I posted the following on Jerome's blog as a reply, but I want to make sure that Cisco's blog readers have an opportunity to learn and have an opinion on the topic as well.
I do not think that FCoE is a way to lock customers into FC. If anything, it is the other way around. Infiniband has always been faster than Ethernet and FC and for a while it will continue be (it was true for HIPPI, FDDI,... what happened with them?) and InfiniBand has alwayst touted the I/O consolidation value proposition, but that comes at a cost that makes it prohibitive and unrealistic. And I am not only talking of the pure hardware costs, but all of the implementation costs associated with it.
I think the point of FCoE is that it can ultimately represent the easiest transition 'out' of FC, assuming that is what you want. And I am saying that becasue despite of what you and I may believe in terms of protocol superiority (see also my post of FCoE vs. iSCSI in response to Marc Farley) I still talk to customers, who have no intention whatsoever to move away from FC, hence Cisco continues to have a solid roadmap on the MDS.
While I do believe that there will be a role for iSCSI and FCoE in the Unified Fabric, I do not believe there is a role for InfiniBand there. InfiniBand today is required not for its bandwidth, but for its latency. The application of InfiniBand is ultra low-latency high performance computing.
InfiniBand is not easy and people know this. Even in HighPerformanceComputing situation, customers try to use Ethernet as much as they can and they only revert to IB when the business case for low latency justifies that.
From a Cisco perspective, we do not really push one technology or the other (we offer a solution in every one of those camps,) but I think it's important to keep the customer's perspective in mind and if customers ask for simple, integrated, transitionary solution, I think we are honest if we propose FCoE.
Posted by Dante Malagrino at 06:44 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
April 10, 2008
The Other Nexus News
By now, I would hope, you are aware of our newest addition to the Nexus family, the Nexus 5020. I’ll dig into that a bit more in a second, but the other Nexus news I wanted to note is that we have started customer shipments of the Nexus 7000 this week (yay--although I am guessing the blogger who accused us of only having cardboard models might be a bit disappointed).
So back the the Nexus 5020 launch this week. I think this announcement is going to take a while for folks to digest because there was so much to it. Not only did we add to the Nexus family, we delivered FCoE with an eco-system of partners and we rolled out data center Ethernet.
I think these two technologies are are going to be game changers once folks have a chance to get acquainted with them. FCoE now lets us take advantage of a unified data center fabric in a way that provides investment protection and is non-disruptive to the SAN and the storage team. Meanwhile, data center Ethernet ups the ante on what we can expect from our layer two transport and is an advance that will benefit not only FCoE, but also iSCSI and pretty much any other traffic you care about.
Finally, I think its important to note that those customers that will shortly be taking delivery of their Nexus 7000s (no we don’t have consensus on what the plural of Nexus is) are already good to go for both data center Ethernet support and FCoE support. Because of the planned forward investment protection in the platform, all they will need to do is add are the appropriate I/O modules--no other upgrades necessary.
Posted by Omar Sultan at 11:49 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
FCoE "and" iSCSI - Who cares? It's all about Data Center Ethernet
Innovation in networking has always been associated with animated (sometimes religious, but who cares) debates about what's right and what's wrong. And it was only a matter of hours before the iSCSI vs. FCoE debate got started.
This time, though, I do not believe it is a either/or type of situation, but rather an "and"...
Marc Farley is a brilliant storage expert, who I have had the pleasure to work with in one of my past life. I always enjoy his insights into technology and I love the fact that he believes in what he writes and he does it with passion. Marc posted an entry today on "FCoE is a great dead end". Considering some of the positions he has already taken in the past on FCoE and iSCSI, I was not surprised to see that, but I think his passion came out stronger than some of the technical arguments he made. I did not completely disagree with his statements, but I think some of them would require further clarification and are probably less black and white than they seem.
A follow on post by Matt Baker on "FCoE, let's not be too hasty..." is much closer to my view of the storage networking world and I would overall agree with it, even though I am less optimistic on the universal applicability of iSCSI and I would point out that FCoE is as available as iSCSI today.
I certainly agree that Data Center Ethernet (if properly implemented) is the real key differentiator and enabler of Unified Fabric, whether we like to build it with iSCSI or FCoE. Nonetheless, as much as FCoE and iSCSI may sound similar in the objective they try to achieve, they are substantially different in the way they do it, and because of this they may be applicable to different environments.
FCoE is not a new storage protocol, it is just a new transport for Fibre Channel; Fibre Channel sees an FCoE link as a different type of physical media and nothing else. iSCSI looses any relationship with Fibre Channel (some may claim this is a good thing...) and is a new transport for SCSI, which implies a more substantial change to the storage stack.
It is true that FCoE is a "stupid" technology (if simple can be synonim of stupidity,) but its "stupidity" is its strength: it does not change anything in Fibre Channel, it is Fibre Channel over a better and faster media. All the key concept of Fibre Channel are preserved intact: WWNs, Zoning, DNS, RSCN, FSPF, etc work unmodified. iSCSI does all of those things in a much "better" way, but it's not the same way as Fibre Channel. I would completely agree that iSCSI is a "superior" protocol to FCoE. iSCSI is the absolutely correct way to define a transport for SCSI over IP, but still that deos not make iSCSI easily applicable in environments (especially in the enterprise) where Fibre Channel is the prevalent storage transport and backward compatibility and co-existence are a key requirement.
iSCSI is perfect for environments where there is no FIbre Channel legacy and maybe there is no existing IT competence around Fibre Channel. Small-Medium Businesses will greatly benefit of iSCSI and possibly also some larger environments where storage consolidation has not happened, yet.
FCoE, on the other end, allows for an easier coexistence between Fibre Channel and Ethernet-based storage networking, and it represents an easier and smaller step towards Unified Fabric. In a hybrid FCoE/FC environment there is no need for stateful gateways, while in a hybrid iSCSI/FC environment you need to have a stateful gateway, which will necessarily introduce additional latency and complexity (we ship these gateways, so I am not being exactly politically correct either, here.)
The bottom line is that I agree with Matt and I think that both FCoE and iSCSI have a role in evolving storage networks and ultimately making storage much more pervasive. The key enabler for both is Data Center Ethernet and the ability to leverage a lossless transport for storage traffic. To this last point, I would like to point out that TCP delivers better performance over a lossless transport, and I am willing to bet that it will not be long before we see iSCSI over UDP with Data Center Ethernet. That would be an interesting development...
Posted by Dante Malagrino at 09:58 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)
April 09, 2008
Fibre Channel Over Ethernet: Where to Learn More?
This morning I spent some time with a collegue and friend of mine, who I deeply respect for his technical knowledge and, of course, we were discussing some of the elements of the Nexus 5000 launch that happened yesterday.
He asked me a few questions, which made me realize that we will need to do a lot of work over the next couple of months to make sure that everyone, who is involved with Data Centers, has an opportunity to learn more.
Hence, I decided to begin that process by sharing some hopefully useful tips with all of you.
To avoid building too long of a list, here are the places where I would start:
Silvano Gai has also recently written a book on Data Center Networks and Fibre Channel over Ethernet, which will be available sometime next week and as soon as that happens I will let you all know.
If you visit the FCoE.com website, do not miss the CNBC video. I love it!
Posted by Dante Malagrino at 01:12 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 08, 2008
Cisco Nexus 5000: The human side of technology
What a long day! At least for my team. The Unified Fabric launch and the introduction of the Cisco Nexus 5000 was a significant one for Cisco, and certainly had quite a big impact on my team. But this is not the "human" side that I wanted to talk about...
One thing that has come up quite a lot in my briefings today is the human side of implementing a Unified Fabric in the Data Center, i.e. the impact that network unification would have on existing teams and ultimately on individuals.
One thing that I believe to be a key differentiator for the Unified Fabric is its "transitionary" nature. Network convergence can not be a revoluton, but it needs to be a gradual evolution of Data Center networks. I certainly believe that the organizations that will be able to take advantage of this architectural evolution faster will also be the ones that will see the biggest returns and the biggest gains in competitive advantage, but at the same time I understand the concern that some people have expressed to me on how this technology might impact existing organizations.
Out of the four main pillars that were presented by Soni Jiandani during the press conference this morning, there are two that certainly speak to backward compatibility and preservation of existing management best practices: Data Center Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet.
Data Center Ethernet is a collection of standard-based extensions to Ethernet, while Fibre Channel over Ethernet is the simplest possible way to transport storage and data traffic on the same physical link. More specifically, FCoE is pure encapsulation of Fibre Channel into Ethernet packets and because of that, it does not change the existing management architectures.
Because of how these fundamental elements of Unified Fabric have been designed and implemented, it will be possible for an IT organization to leverage the benefits of Unified Fabric while continuing to operate in the very same way they are operating today (storage admin manages storage, network admin manages the network.)
Technology is important, but it will fail if it does not take into account the impact on people. With the Unified Fabric, this was part of the design.
Posted by Dante Malagrino at 08:56 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Cisco Nexus 5000 Enables Virtualization Optimization
Dante Malagrino and Ed Bugnion explain how Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches enable virtualization optimization for data center managers.
Posted by John Murphy at 04:28 PM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
"Oops I Did It Again..."
Not sure why I wanted to quote the inimitable Britney Spears today as I sit in Honolulu. It could be the great weather. It could be the fun experience of 'hanging' with 2500 of our top partners. It could also be the fact I am idling for 45 minutes while my MacBook Air renders about an hour of video for me for a presentation I am doing in 2 hours - not that I am stressed.
Or it could be that I am just flat out excited about the prospects for our Nexus 5000! :) Ok, so it's the 5000 that has me most excited. Last week I talked about a company stumbling a bit. I also had a bunch of investor meetings where the insightful analysts all agreed that the first-mover advantage in Unified Fabrics was key, but only if coupled with the right partnerships.
One week later, here we are. We have the right product, people, partnerships, and now with our new incentive programs even partner profitability is being addressed as well. This product delivers on the promise of Unified Fabrics, and introduces a new concept - Cisco Data Center Ethernet. A series of standards-based extensions to existing Ethernet, that when combined enable data to be forwarded in a lossless fashion. Just like FibreChannel. This enables a new series of protocols like FibreChannel over Ethernet, that drive the next phase of convergence.
Every 5-7 years we reinvent ourselves, but do what we do best - consolidate parallel network infrastructures. Multiprotocol Network convergence, LAN Convergence, Mainframe and IP Convergence, Voice Video Data. Now... Data Center.
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 03:36 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Would you like to be the first one to hear about Cisco Data Center announcement today?
If you do, you may want to check the Cisco News Conference Live Webcast today.
Post your feedback on this blog and let's talk more about it this week.
-- Dante
Posted by Dante Malagrino at 09:15 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Securing Data at Rest
This week brought a couple of important announcments from HP and EMC supporting Cisco's Storage Media Encryption (SME) technology.
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=150282&WT.svl=news2_1
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=124653
Of course there are many existing approaches to encrypting data at rest. Many tape drive vendors offer this capability and there are appliance vendors that do the same. But just like other intelligent storage services that once resided on a host, an appliance, or a target device, encryption services will likely migrate to the network.
Services such as SAN routing, SAN extension, and Storage Virtualization are increasingly being deployed in the network fabric eliminating the need to support multiple devices and multiple administrative models. Fewer devices also mean lower power consumption.
Encrypting data at rest should be no different. Leveraging the MDS 9222i or the 18/4-port Multiservice Module (MSM) on the MDS 9500 Director, SAN administrators can deploy a non-disruptive, heterogenous solution that scales with increasing network speeds.
What do you think? Where should encryption services typically be placed in a SAN? Should the network fabric provide this service or should customers continue to deploy multiple appliances to deliver the same solution?
Posted by Deepak Munjal at 08:46 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 07, 2008
Unified Fabric - a Myth or a Reality?
The topic of “a unified fabric” has recently been generating some buzz in the blogosphere, with both advocates and skeptics weighing in. I actually think the question of “Myth or Reality” has been answered. We currently have customers that use both InfiniBand and iSCSI to create a unified fabric and each technology has staunch supporters. So, I think we are past the question of "if" and on to the question of “when?”
So. what are the current inhibitors for broad-based adoption of a unified fabric?
Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of points to consider:
- Architectural Intertia:There needs to be some compelling reason to change--cost, performance, features, etc
- Investment Protection: related to inertia, there needs to be a compelling reason to abandon infrastructure that is has been bought and paid for, especially if it is working well
- Operational Characteristics: unified fabric is not just an exercise in payload encapsulation, but in maintaining the correct operational characteristics, such as Fibre Channel’s losslessness
- Operations and Management Disruption: what is the learning curve for new technologies--how disruptive will they be to existing design and operations best practices
So, what do you think--in the next three years, do you see yourself considering or deploying a unified data center fabric? Why or why not?
Posted by Omar Sultan at 07:49 PM Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
April 04, 2008
Longer Sales Cycles in WAN Optimization
I am going to do my best here to avoid casting too many stones, but this just amuses me. Six quarters ago I started in this role. A new director on my team was leading a product launch for a technology we call Wide-Area Acceleration Services, or WAAS for short. It was a promising technology but I was a bit circumspect for a variety of reasons- sales channel, who do we sell it to, how do I get our own sales force excited about it, and one very strong competitor in Riverbed.
Mark, and the General Manager for this product, George Kurian, turned me around over the course of the next four quarters by working to with the support of over 1000 customers for WAAS, integrating it into our branch office routers, and showing an aggressive roadmap that has been consistently delivered to.
Two quarters into my 'WAAS-experience' Riverbed decided to mention that they are winning 98 out of 105 deals, and touting that there would be two memorable IPOs in the past decade, Riverbed and Google. Ya gotta love the hype factor here, but there is nothing that infuriates a sales organization and catalyzes them like tactless rhetoric with poorly substantiated claims.
So yesterday I got twp pieces of almost simultaneous enlightening news. Not only is the company I once viewed as a competitor about equal with us in market share (20.2% for them, 20.0% for us according to a leading analyst firm), they also had to pre-announce their miss on their earnings for this quarter. That's really gotta hurt.
The best part for me, almost the 'sport' in the entire thing, is that January was challenging month in the market, the roughest we've seen in a while. When we reported our earnings for our Q2, ending at the end of January it included this rough month. Many point-product vendors though have a January to March quarter though and are just now reporting on what we talked about a couple of months ago. Maybe our 'weird' fiscal quarters do have a benefit after all!
So while our competitions bemoans, lengthening sales cycles, enterprise softness, etc I have to raise the question- "While you used to claim 98% win rate and no competition, could the equality in market share really be more an indication that you are simply not seeing all the opportunity and be a sales coverage issue, or simply that there is now a more superior product and solution in the market? Or was the 98% just bluster and hype designed to 'pump up the volume' so to speak?"
While I guess I grew into this market initially trying to figure out how to outflank a competitor, as we gained momentum, crossed significant product milestones, and have moved more and more to an integrated solution I guess I don't see Riverbed as a competitor now but more as a niche player that will always help keep us on our toes but no real threat.
Next week, we'll talk about how to take on and out another has-been....
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 06:19 AM Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)
April 03, 2008
Gaming Routers and Switches
As a self-avowed bit of a gamer (yes I have my Level 70 World of Warcrack character, and can go all the way back to Ultima Online, MUDs, Zork, Bard's Tale, and Wizardry (anyone remember Werdna?) to establish a lineage...) I was reading a question today about 'What is the Best Router for Gaming'???
This is a very good question, but there are two sides to it! Sure, from home I would advocate something like a Linksys WRT54G or newer 11N radio. But what about on the hosting side of things!?!?!?!? A gaming company (of course to remain nameless) commented to me that the Cisco Nexus 7000 would be ideal for their service, being able to offer uninterrupted services to their end-users while using Zero Service Disruption upgrades to maintain security compliance and such as well. CRS is great for the peering edge routers to connect to hundreds of peers and optimize latency and ping time, especially useful for twitch games (love Call of Duty 4 btw... fabulous work by the devs there.)
Are there ways to better optimize designs of hosting farms for gaming? Differences between MMORPGs and twitch games? Can we get a decent combined MMORPG with 'twitch' combat models? What has to happen to the network to enable that...
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 05:36 PM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
April 01, 2008
Large Scale Data Centers
Microsoft was quoted in this article by TechTarget where they discussed many interesting factors about how to design, build, and operate large-scale data centers. I especially liked the reality check that governments wil regulate this and we will need to offer greater visibility and transparency into IT operations if we are going to accurately account for carbon credits and such.
Also there is really no way to accurately measure 'good workload performed' versus just 'workload performed'. This is a fundamental problem that will plague us a bit moving forward. i.e. I can drive a 60-70% utilization of a CPU by loading up VMs on it, each with their own O/S and all running say a finance application or web sites. But if no one is using the web sites or the finance app then is it really 'efficient' or am I simply gaming the system.
Lastly the not-so-subtle jab at Google's secrecy surrounding their facilities designs was cute.
Speaking of, tune in next Tuesday. We have some amazing new stuff coming that will really change the game in the data center. It's so fun to be working in this space right now!
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 10:36 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
