Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 25th July 2013 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:
vSAN vs. ScaleIO fight! – Virtual Geek – This suggests that EMC deliberately designs products which overlap apparently because they don’t know what customers want:
“Yes, we have overlap by design. It eliminates seams that our competitors can drive through. We run multiple bets down a path by design to see what sticks/holds. The challenge for us is to always consider first the customer and the requirements and focus on the ‘right’ solution on a campaign by campaign basis.” – Joe Tucci
Implicit in this statement is that features and products can be deleted from production if customers don’t buy them. This is perfectly acceptable in some companies but it’s not a notion that it usually associated with EMC. Storage admins are big on telling me that EMC doesn’t delete products or features – which tells me that EMC marketing has got them blinded to the reality. It’s a two way bet that seems to be working for EMC.
Thunderspace ~ Unwind in a thunderstorm –
How it works: When you hear a bird in a tree, the sound reaches one ear faster than the other depending on the horizontal direction, while the shape of your ears colorize the frequencies of the sound depending on the vertical direction. Your brain then decodes these cues to give you a direction of the sound in 3D space.
I can;t work in noisy offices and this is one tool that I use to ‘de-tune’ my ears from the working environment.
Influx of New Technology Contributions to OpenDaylight Advances Software-Defined Networking | OpenDaylight – Big things afoot in the OpenDaylight Project
OpenDaylight reviewed and accepted contributions from Cisco, ConteXtream, Ericsson, IBM, NEC, Pantheon, Plexxi, Radware and developers Brent Salisbury and Evan Zeller from the University of Kentucky. Membership in OpenDaylight, having grown to 27 companies since launch, combined with strong community growth is fueling an accelerated pace of development for the open source SDN project.
Ageism and your career in I.T. – Not sure I agree with Keith Tohas at the Packet Pushers on this one:
So that’s the problem, what’s the solution? Well, as I approach the crest of the I.T. hill and prepare for my downward saunter I’ve started taking subtle action. The farther away you are when you spot the pothole, the less drastically you have to swerve to avoid it, so at 37 years old I ….
I’m 47 (you will need to check with my wife, she knows, I don’t really keep up). I am planning to slow down some day but it doesn’t happen in your late 30’s. Late 50’s maybe…….
SDN 101: Software-defined networking explained in 10 easy steps – InfoWorld – “SDN 101: Software-defined networking explained in 10 easy steps” – my latest article (slideshow) for InfoWorld
The very heart of networking is about change. Your current network infrastructure is a platform on which the entire IT portfolio depends for communication and services. Although the network is made of many physical elements, such as routers, switches, and firewalls, it is for all practical purposes a single system. A change in any part of the network can cause a failure of the whole. This interdependence has led to a fear of change among network operators that prevents new services, new features, and even good operational practices.
Hardware – Differential Signaling – Excellent! I love fundamentals.
The first topic I want to cover is called differential signaling. Differential signaling is used in just about every important communication interface; PCIe, SATA, InfiniBand, 10GigE XAUI and many more. I want to cover this because it is a fundamental component of network systems and secondly because it is just simple and elegant engineering.
Never Too Old To Learn – Route-Map Naming – Lame Journal –
I am not, as you can tell, a fan of using numbers when a word will do just as well. Older readers will also recall that I like naming things sensibly. So take your “ROUTES4REDIST” prefix-list and bite my shiny metal rack post. One response to this tweet stood out to me though.
My advice, use dashes and not underscores.
Fragmentation Needed: Network Toolkit –
My case full of network doodads always generates lots of questions when people see it for the first time. I don’t carry dedicated iPhone chargers anymore, but Apple cube chargers forgotten behind hotel nightstands is where this started.
Overly obsessive about his toolkit but still a great post.
Latest Backbone Data: 50% Of Internet Traffic Comes From Only 35 Sites/Services (video) – Dan Rayburn – StreamingMediaBlog.com – Fascinating insights into traffic flows on the Internet. Some of the data felt shaky but the overall impact of Content Delivery Networks really stands out. At least, read the PDF of the presentation.
At the Content Delivery Summit in May, we had a lot of information shared by those who collect data on the type and volume of content being distributed over the Internet. One of these companies, DeepField, presented their latest findings on the massive ongoing changes in content distribution. Check out their video presentation below for details on overall CDN traffic growth and market share, a list of content services driving the most volume and trends they are seeing across backbone networks.
iSCSI with PFC? « ipSpace.net by @ioshints – Ivan continues to answer real questions :
It’s definitely not bad to randomly drop an occasional TCP packet of a mouse session – if you have thousands of TCP sessions on the same link and drop a single packet of one or two sessions to slow them down, the overall throughput won’t be affected too much … and if you randomly hit different sessions at different times, you’re pretty close to effective management of a mice aggregate.
