Is your network ready to help you transform and be the strategic partner that you can be? Let’s face it… Today’s data centers are challenged with siloed resources and facilities… Limited scalability… Poor resource utilization… Growing complexity…Perhaps the biggest challenge is time. When 80% of your resources are dedicated to “keeping the lights on” and managing all what you have, there is very little time left for innovation that benefits the business.
And the reality is that the role of IT has to change – from a cost center to a business strategic partner! Why? Because there are increasing demands on IT to help your business differentiate in order to survive and grow in these rough economic conditions. And let’s not forget that the increasing cost pressures, technology changes, and the advent of game-changers like cloud are forcing IT executives to look at how to deliver IT differently.
These growing demands put even more pressure on the shoulders of IT especially given the current state of your Data Centers. The data center network sits at the core of IT and is key to how IT can deliver services and provide value back to the business.
In this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged, storage industry luminaries Chad Sakac (@sakacc) of EMC and Vaughn Stewart (@vstewed) of NetApp discuss the concept of Stretch Clustering, a topic they’ve been covering at tech events for awhile now. Check out their discussion here:
Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:
Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
Practice drawing unicorns
Collaborative Storage Unicorn, courtesy of Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart
For more information on stretch clustering and all storage topics, be sure to check out Chad’s blog and Vaughn’s blog. Questions, comments, thoughts? Post them here or join the conversation with @CiscoDC on Twitter!
So, lets dig into LISP Routing a little more. If you have not done so, I would recommend you read my first post, since I am not going to review the concepts here. In this post, I am going to break things down into three steps: 1) how packets are forwarded (i.e. the data plane operation), 2) how mapping information is propagated (i.e. control plane operation), and 3) how we internetwork with non-LISP locations.
For starters, lets head into the weeds and take a look at the LISP header format. In the last post, I mentioned there is some flexibility in how handles IP addressing. The two examples below show a couple of scenarios: pure IPv4 and a IPv4/IPv6 hybrid:
I am going to spend the next couple of posts digging through one of the more interesting new technologies we are working on: a standard called Locator/ID Separation Protocol (or LISP). Why should you care—well if you are looking at deploying clouds, supporting mobility of end-points or VMs or are managing a routing architecture or any meaningful size or complexity, I think it will be worth your while to check out LISP.
LISP is a new approach to routing that is designed to address the changes in how we are using our networks. Lets explore LISP through the lens of one of the biggest challenges facing network architects today: properly tackling mobility, whether its mobile endpoints like smartphones, tablets or squirrels or the mobile workloads that are at the heart of server virtualization and cloud computing. While mobility this is probably the “sexiest” use case right now, there are a number of other use cases, like routing architecture scalability and IPv6 migration, which, while less alluring to all but the biggest networking nerds, are no less important.
The networking industry has recently developed a renewed interest in virtual overlays, often wrapped in an “SDN as the controller” context. Amidst the promise, the hope and the hype, the following questions present themselves:
What exactly is an overlay?
What distinguishes an overlay from a VPN?
How decoupled can an overlay be from the underlay network and what are the tradeoffs?
What are the advantages of overlays and will they emerge as the new networking world order? Read More »
I am going to spend the next couple of posts digging through one of the more interesting new technologies we are working on: a standard called Locator/ID Separation Protocol (or 