The marketing people in IT tend to be overwhelmed by complexity and deep technology. For many liberal arts graduates, they take the drowning option and latch onto certain terms and then grossly abuse it. The most egregious abuse today is “cloud” but “fabric” comes a close second. In this series of posts I want to look at what is a FABRIC and provide a canonical look at what it does and how it works for us.
Internets of Interest:29 Jun 2011
29th June 2011 by
Collection of useful, relevant or inane places on the the Internets for 29 Jun 2011:
Cisco C6500 Service Modules – Not My Choice, Now.
19th June 2011 by
These all suggest that the time for planning and designing Service Modules is over. There are no suggestions that service modules for the Nexus 7000 will be developed that I can see. I can prognosticate that it would slow down the development of the core switch / route / performance functions, and it will be some years before those core capabilities is complete enough that service modules would become viable product development tasks — they might be in development, but not much chance of going into production. [^1]
Do I sound bitter about Service Modules ? A bit. I’ve had a number of hard to solve problems that lasted months before code fixes arrived. I’ve been fan of the NAM but the price is now far removed from it’s practical value. USD$30K List is way over priced for its capabilities and even with a 30% discount, you can buy a lot of network management systems that deliver much better functions and features for that price.
Internets of Interest:17 Jun 2011
17th June 2011 by
Collection of useful, relevant or inane places on the the Internets for 17 Jun 2011:
RFC 6291 – Guidelines for the Use of the “OAM” Acronym in the IETF
17th June 2011 by
Just a gut feeling, but network management and cost of ownership hasn’t come out of “stealth mode” but it’s long overdue for another burst of markitecture – I can feel it.
Outburst: Oh Really ?! Telstra Throws AU$800m at Clouds – The Register.
17th June 2011 by
Oh, wow. Look at that — a little bit of rounding and you have $800 million. Anyone want to take a bet that 100% growth every year for five years is grossly unlikely ?
Do you think that allocating 0.01% of their gross revenue to a “cloud” project is big money ? Then consider that their broadband rollout projects is measured in the billions, every year.
Not such a big cloud project at all. Not even really committed. Pocket money at best for some executive who convinced the business it’s the “next big thing”. Compare this with the money spent at Amazon / Google / Facebook for a single data center.
The Packet Pushers Design Clinic – Beta
15th June 2011 by
The Packet Pushers are taking the Virtual Whiteboard on the Virtual Road in their MPLS powered Virtual Bus so that you can join in on your own VLAN.
We’ve strapped a bunch of whitepapers and textbooks to the roof with PseudoWires, the QoS is prioritised and we are ready to take your suggestions and walk through designs of your choosing. In an open forum, we want to get whole bunch of people together to talk through a design.
Yeah, it might be chaotic but it’s all good clean fun. Leave your WAN Accelerator and join us for the the very first Design Clinic.
Bring your design questions and lets see if we have an answer. We might, or we might not, but we’ll give it a go.
Design Clinic. The Virtual Whiteboard Just Got Real.
.
Show 48 – Juniper Junosphere
15th June 2011 by
This week we talk to Juniper about their Junosphere emulator and make the case for why the current version is very good but not suited for the Enterprise market ( because its actually too good ) and question why they are charging a customer for the hosted service. junosphere, unlike other emulators, is a fully [...]
OpenFlow and Network Value – Network Computing
14th June 2011 by
The value proposition of OpenFlow is that it reduces the friction of implementing network changes for many organizations. In public cloud networks, where low cost is a primary driver, it’s likely they will move to adopt OpenFlow as the primary configuration tool for almost all network requirements and downshift their purchasing even further to “white box” hardware to achieve lowest possible capex and opex while building flexibility and faster deployment speeds. The OpenFlow software networking will enable public clouds to dynamically adapt to changes and improve service levels with intelligent management platforms. In the future, deeper manipulation and control of the forwarding table will offer a range of performance, forwarding and security features that further extend the network’s value.
vCenter Integration Mantra – vEverything Is Not Wise.
12th June 2011 by
One of the problems of the dominance of VMware is that many engineers see the entire Infrastructure solution framed and solved within the reference of VMware products. VMware is a great product, and have good market positioning, but there are other products in the markets such as Xen, HyperV that also are markets for management tools.
Calling for all products to conform to VMware’s view of the world is a bit narrow and self-centred. I hope it doesn’t become wide spread. Or you’ll end up like networking where people only understand Cisco’s way of networking and now that Cisco isn’t quite a good as it used to be, it’s a complicated and challenging time in the networking business.
