trill — My EtherealMind

What Is the Definition of a Switch Fabric ?

30th June 2011 By Greg Ferro 26 Comments

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.

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

Rant: Why SPB Doesn’t Get Any Attention

25th March 2011 By Greg Ferro 23 Comments

Someone made a comment that Packet Pushers hasn’t discussed SPB as alternative to TRILL or other Fabric solutions. Here’s why.

Filed Under: Blog, Rant Tagged With: data centre, trill

Would You Implement a Proprietary L2 ECMP Protocol Today ?

5th December 2010 By Greg Ferro 2 Comments

So Cisco’s much ballyhoo’d FabricPath protocol for “Data Centre of the Future” is proprietary. Not an extension or a fancy product name. Full ‘EIGRP style’ we own it and you can’t have it. What’s that all about ?

Filed Under: Blessay, Blog, Cisco, Opinion Tagged With: data centre, trill

Internets of Interest:5 Aug 10

5th August 2010 By bookmarks Leave a Comment

Collection of useful, relevant or inane places on the the Internets for 5 Aug 10:

Filed Under: Bookmarks Tagged With: Bookmarks, datacenter, trill

Runt Packet – Cisco Fabric Path

12th July 2010 By Greg Ferro 2 Comments

Packet Pushers are adding a new series of sporadic and occasional podcasts where we take a single topic, probably technical and very focussed and discuss just that thing. These podcasts should be about fifteen minutes and be brief and hard hitting.

And we are going to call it, in Packet Pushers style ——RUNT PACKETS.

So herewith is the FIRST Runt Packet.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Cisco, data centre, trill

The TRILLing Brain Split

6th July 2010 By Ivan Pepelnjak 3 Comments

The split personality Cisco has exposed at Cisco Live 2010 is amazing: on one hand you have the Data Center team touting the benefits of Routing at Layer 2 (an oxymoron if Iíve ever seen one), on the other hand you have Russ White extolling the virtues of good layer-3 design in the CCDE training (the quote I like most: ìIt all meets at Layer 3 … thatís why CCDE is layer-3 centricî). If youíre confused, youíre not the only one, so letís try to analyze whatís going on.

Filed Under: Rant Tagged With: dcb, Design, trill

Show 10 ñ ItíS a TRILL to Cius at CiscoLiveÖ

4th July 2010 By Greg Ferro Leave a Comment

Wow, we actually managed to do ten episodes. Jeremy Filliben, CCIE #3851 & CCDE #20090003 (@jfilliben) and Brandon Carroll, CCIE #23827 (@brandoncarroll) join the Prime Pushers for an hour-long round-table discussion of the week’s news. And if you missed Greg last week, he’s back – with rant mode decidedly ON. More on Cisco’s shipping and [...]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Cisco, data centre, podcast, trill