Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 3rd October 2012 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:
Unplanned Obsolescence: EOL for FC? – A PDF on the obsolescence of FibreChannel
In fact, FC has been so comfortably entrenched in the SAN market, that when alternative storage networking protocols over Ethernet finally matched it in performance, it was caught unprepared and lacking a competitive response. And as Ethernet storage leaps over in both performance and features, the unplanned obsolescence of FC seems in sight. This crossover has coincided with several other market trends – datacenters, clouds and, in general, converged infrastructure – that are not aligned with FC, hence accelerating the migration away from FC for all new installations. FC’s lack of flexibility and capability in enabling general purpose networking and latency sensitive compute applications has further relegated the protocol to a single purpose, and closed off any avenues to move it forward.
Chelsio makes fancy Ethernet adapters so it’s somehat biased but lots of good detail in there if you want to FUD out the FC nazis. And who doesn’t want to do that ?
HP Blogs – Software-Defined Networks leadership defined – The HP Blog Hub – HP outlines their SDN strategy. While it’s difficult to explain an entire SDN strategy in a limited space, I didn’t get a sense of how it’s working from this post. SDN is a b-i-g and has many moving parts so maybe it’s just that. Judgement suspended.
The Princess Bride :: Official Site – “The Princess Bride” official site. Grins all around.
TCP Small Queues « jg’s Ramblings – Linux 3.6 includes code that addresses bufferbloat.We have a podcast to be release
Linux 3.6 just shipped. As I’ve noted before, bloat occurs in multiple places in an OS stack (and applications!). If your OS TCP implementation fills transmit queues more than needed, full queues will cause the RTT to increase, etc. , causing TCP to misbehave. Net result: additional latency, with no increase in bandwidth performance. TCP small queues reduces the buffering without sacrificing performance, reducing latency.
Ultrabook sales forecast slashed in half for 2012 – Oct. 1, 2012 – Most of the Ultrabook category are similar to the MacBook Air and priced at the same level. My view is that Windows buyers go for cheap more than quality after years of discounting. Pay $1000 for a laptop ? You must be crazy, I can get one for $350……
One year ago, skinny, sleek ultrabooks were being hailed as the great savior of the struggling PC business. The white knight hasn’t arrived yet. Ultrabook sales so far have sorely disappointed, and one research firm is slashing its 2012 forecast by more than half.
Connection Handling in the Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE30) Module [Cisco Services Modules] – Cisco Systems – Still interesting even through the ACE 30 hardware has been killed off.
This document also discusses connection load balancing, Network Address Translation (NAT), SSL offload, and HTTP compression at the hardware architecture level. This document is intended as a technical reference for networking professionals familiar with application delivery, network design, and facilitation of services, and those who are interested in better understanding how the Cisco ACE30 Module uses network processors to handle connection processing.
Review: Parallels Desktop 8 vs. VMware Fusion 5 | Macworld – If you decide to use Mac OSX you will still need Windows for all the custom windows apps that exist for network equipment. This articles review the two commercial options – Parallels and Fusion. I’m currently considering switching to Fusion because the price of Parallels is too high for little gain.
What’s New in Cisco Product Documentation – September 2012 [Support] – Cisco Systems – Latest documentation updates for Cisco products for September 2012.
Vicky Chijwani’s answer to Computer Programming: What are some things that programmers know, but most people don’t? – Quora – I don’t like Quora, but even a diamond mine can find something useful in lots of dirt. Brilliant discussion of hidden complexity.
Let’s simplify.
You just pressed a key on your keyboard.
Simple, isn’t it?
What just actually happened?
Well, when you know about bit about how input peripherals work, it’s not quite that simple. You’ve just put into play a power regulator, a debouncer, an input multiplexer, a USB device stack, a USB hub stack, all of that implemented in a single chip. That chip is built around thinly sliced wafers of highly purified single-crystal silicon ingot, doped with minute quantities of other atoms that are blasted into the crystal structure, interconnected with multiple layers of aluminum or copper, that are deposited according to patterns of high-energy ultraviolet light that are focused to a precision of a fraction of a micron, connected to the outside world via thin gold wires, all inside a packaging made of a dimensionally and thermally stable resin.
draft-pfaff-ovsdb-proto-00 – The Open vSwitch Database Management Protocol -
Open vSwitch is an open source software switch designed to be used as
a vswitch (virtual switch) in virtualized server environments. A
vswitch forwards traffic between different virtual machines (VMs) on
the same physical host and also forwards traffic between VMs and the
physical network. Open vSwitch is open to programmatic extension and
control using OpenFlow and the OVSDB (Open vSwitch Database)
management protocol. This document defines the OVSDB management
protocol.
