Network design, architecture, thinking, working. Tech.
Nominations for the UK Network Heroes award from Spirent are open. Since I’ve been asked to be a eminent judge, I’d like to see some of the best talent that UK has to offer stand up and be counted. The UK has a lot of great engineers and architects but they are rarely recognised. Here is your chance.
I stumbled over a collection of photos from Network Field Day 3 that showed some of what happened at the event. Most of the event is sitting in boardrooms going through vendor presentations, discussions and review. Lets face it, that doesn’t make for great photos.
Quick review of one of my favourite system tool for the Mac – SmartSleep
Continuing the series from the Brocade Virtual Symposium. In a special video session that was sponsored by Brocade, we got Chip Copper in the room with Stephen Foskett to talk about storage convergence.
Over the last few years, I’ve been very critical of Ethernet storage protocols like [FCoE](http://etherealmind.com/tag/fcoe/) and the fact that storage protocols are unlikely to work well. There are few times here where Chip was able to give me answers and a different viewpoint that gave me a different take on the solutions.
In this post, I’m looking at network designs with ECMP cores using TRILL or SPB, I’m realising that STP is equally improved in terms of risk and performance by reducing the STP domain size which leads to better stability, reduced risk and impact mitigation
Omar Baldonado talks about the value of openness for SDN & OpenFlow My takeaway from that panel and the other speakers is that we’ve arrived here at this point in the industry because of the openness of software-defined networking. Many of the components of SDN already existed as the audience pointed out, but it is [...]
SDN/OpenFlow is about Network Management, at least, in part. But the rich tools for software control dont’ exist. I also think don’t think that todays management _platforms_ (such as Tivoli, OpenView and BMC) are suitable for network orchestration in the future.
Intel talks about the their Fulcrum silicon (FM6000) fully supporting OpenFlow. If one of the bigger merchant silicon vendors is shipping OpenFlow ready silicon, then I would expect new products to arrive in the next few months. I believe Intel is demoing this at Interop. We’ve also contributed our Barcelona 10GbE TOR switch reference platform [...]
Brad Casemore makes that case that HP is not telling us enough about it’s OpenFlow technology. HP has been a major contributor to several initiatives, including QoS code for OpenFlow v1.1 and the first vendor to offer OpenFlow support on it’s network switches. Yet, HP is not necessarily getting the recognition it deserves for these [...]
In this Gigaom.com piece, Stacey talks about the arrival of Huawei in America. When Huawei arrived in Europe about three/four years ago, Cisco lost a LOT of business especially when BT and other carriers changed their standard purchase to include Huawei on the approved list. Huawei had a rocky start with widely known hardware failures [...]
