17th May 2012

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Sponsored: Brocade Virtual Symposium – Storage Convergence

16th May 2012 By Leave a Comment

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.

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Filed Under: Blog, Featured, Storage Tagged With: , , , ,

How TRILL (and SPB) Can Reduce STP Risk and Mitigate Impact

13th May 2012 By 2 Comments
trill-improves-stp-1.jpg

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

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Filed Under: Blessay, Blog, Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Repsonse: Big Switch Networks – The Value of Openness

9th May 2012 By 2 Comments

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 [...]

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: ,

Does SDN Represent the Evolution of Network Management ? Yes but No It Doesn’t

9th May 2012 By 2 Comments
1090755_sulpher_springs_yellowstone_park.jpg

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.

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Filed Under: Blog, Opinion Tagged With: , , , ,

Response: Intel- New Switch and More Software Defined Networking

8th May 2012 By Leave a Comment

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 [...]

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: ,

Response: Time for HP to Show Its SDN Hand

8th May 2012 By 1 Comment

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 [...]

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: ,

Watch Out Cisco. Huawei’s Coming!

7th May 2012 By 10 Comments

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 [...]

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Filed Under: Blog, Musing

Response: Omar Sultan – Final Thoughts on the Open Networking Summit

7th May 2012 By 1 Comment

Responding to Omar’s wrap on the ONS

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: ,

Check Point Launches ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus and Firewall 2013

7th May 2012 By 5 Comments

Once upon a time, ZoneAlarm was the best personal firewall available. It was free, stable and excellent. I seem to remember using it from 2002-2003 or so – then Zonealarm was acquired by CheckPoint and the product was lost to the retail market. CheckPoint moved the product to corporate desktops and was lost to the [...]

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Filed Under: Blog, Opinion, Security Tagged With:

Network Engineer’s Late Note

3rd May 2012 By 1 Comment

One of my co-workers sent this email after being caught in traffic.   Morning All All nodes in the M25 pool are currently OOS. VIP is at present being serviced by  back-up pool on the A25 ( this unfortunately is only a Pentium 386 with 500Mb of memory). That said it’s only holding a splash [...]

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With:
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