21st May 2012

Spirent Network Heroes 2012 – Nominations Open

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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.

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Sponsored: Brocade Virtual Symposium – Storage Convergence

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.

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved

Poster: Cloud Price Negotiations

Poster: Cloud Price Negotiation

Some time ago, I was asked to work with a Cloud Provider to establish a budget for a potential project. I was unable to set a project budget because there was no way of capping the cost and meeting a budget. This is how the conversations with the sales representative went when discussing “How much [...]

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Brocade HyperEdge and “Effortless Network”

Today, Brocade has announced “Effortless Network” strategy[^1] which is their first solid move into the campus networking and replacing the tired FastIron products with the Brocade ICX64x0 switches. It’s a good start even if the strategy won’t really get going until next year.

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved

Ethernet Fabrics – Picking Apart the Threads at the Data Centre Fabric Symposium

“Ethernet Fabrics” or a “Data Centre Fabrics” have been much discussed and presented in the last couple of years. A Fabric is a good term for wide range  of design methods, technologies and vendors technologies that build a new type of Ethernet network for the Data Centre – and they all compete for customer attention. This [...]

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved

Defining Flow Forwarding Instead of Switch or Routing

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Wherein I make the case OpenFlow like technologies are neither switching or routing. It’s Flow Forwarding, or just Forwarding.

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved

Predicting What Will Not Be Big in 2012

I’ve been working on making some predictions about 2012 and networking. I like to do this in the year of 2012 (not 2011 like everyone else) and I like to go further than anyone else and predict what WILL NOT be big in 2012.

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved

Updated: Webinar on SDN and OpenFlow on Feb 7th – Now With More “Space”

ipspace openflow webinar 20111118

The original Webex session for this event was booked out within two weeks and we closed the event. We have increased the webinar ‘seats’ and have re-opened the bookings. This post is a repeat of the earlier so that you can sign up to the event if you missed out. I’m pleased to announce that [...]

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved

My Networking Beliefs

Someone wrote me and asked “Greg, What do you believe is the future of Networking”. Here is my (mostly) humorous response.

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved

VRRP. CARP. Open Standards and Royalties on LC Connectors

LC-Fibre-Optic-Connector.png

In which I look at CARP vs VRRP, the nature of open standards and closed source fibre optic connectors that you pay royalties on, but you probably don’t know about.

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved