The Lippis Report

June 7th, 2011

In Lippis Report 172, I mentioned three huge trends that are starting to interact with each other creating a perfect storm that is gripping the tech industry. One of those trends is the creation of a software ecosystem in the networking market, thanks to the Clean Slate program out of Stanford University that has spawned the Software Defined Network (SDN) initiative and open controller protocol called OpenFlow. I spent a week in the Valley talking to people at Stanford and many industry executives from Cisco, Juniper, Marvell, Big Switch, Nicira, Arista, IBM and others. In this Lippis Report Research Note, I share with you what I learned. OpenFlow-based SDN is being both hyped and in its current state, limited, but it does represent a new paradigm that has the industry abuzz, filled with possibilities.

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May 24th, 2011

By Force10 Networks

Storage networks present major challenges for data center switches that must be resolved to ensure fast and error-free transport of storage traffic. Force10 S60 switches are purpose-built to handle storage traffic with line-rate performance in Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet networks.

February 28th, 2011

The data center switching market is heating up. To address the scale issues posed by mobile and cloud computing nearly every network vendor is launching its own version of a 10/40/100 GbE fabric to connect servers and storage to the internet. At the heart of this fabric is a two-tier (Fat-Tree) network made up of leaf/ToR and spine/Core switches. Here leafs connect servers and spines connect leafs while also being interconnected in a logical mesh. The protocols to create this logical mesh are based upon IS-IS link state routing, but each vendor is taking a unique approach with Cisco using its FastPath, Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya using SPB (802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging) while Brocade VDX is based upon TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links). Juniper recently announced QFabric but has not detailed what it’s using for logical meshing. At the center of new data center design are leaf and spine switches. In Lippis Report Research Note 166, we detailed the latest ToR switches. In this Lippis Report Research Note 167, we dive into performance and power consumption measurements plus the use of SPB of Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch 10K, a new entry into spine/core data center switching market.

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February 14th, 2011

During December 6-10, 2010, the Lippis Report and Ixia conducted the industry’s first 10GbE data center switching evaluation of Top-of-Rack and Core Ethernet switches at the modern iSimCity lab in Santa Clara, CA. We evaluated Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch 10K, Arista’s 7504 Series Data Center Switch, BLADE Network Technologies’, an IBM Company, IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 and IBM BNT RackSwitch G8264, Force10 Network’s S-Series S4810, Hitachi Cable’s Apresia 15000-64XL-PSR, Juniper Network’s EX Series EX8216 Ethernet Switch and Voltaire®’s Vantage™ 6048. We are conducting a second round of test scheduled for the week of April 4-8 at iSimCity, and it is open to all suppliers of 10GbE data center switching. We learned a lot about these products, both in the lab and out. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we dive into the Top-of-Rack 10GbE switches we tested as they represent a new generation of products that exhibit low power consumption, low latency, high performance and are all based upon new single chip designs from Broadcom, Marvell or Fulcrum Micro.

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February 14th, 2011

By Ken Won, Director of Product Marketing at Force10 Networks

Server and storage environments have seen a lot of changes in the past ten years, while developments in networking have remained fairly static. Now, the demands of virtualization and network convergence are driving significant changes in the data center network. Networks have always been considered as plumbing that connect servers and storage, but new, dynamic switches are changing the network’s role in the overall data center. It’s not your father’s network anymore, and savvy data center managers need to understand and plan for the changes that are coming.

This white paper discusses new network technologies, explains what they are, and suggests how to plan for them in future data center architectures.

February 14th, 2011

By Arista Networks

While servers and applications have fully embraced the concepts of automation, sadly the network infrastructure, on which they all rely, is still mired in legacy technologies. Current methodology, such as CLI, requires extensive hands-on provisioning and configuration by knowledgeable personnel. In modern cloud infrastructure, network managers must be able to centralize provisioning and configuration roles to improve reliability, minimize bring-up costs, and contain the expenses of creating a cloud data center service. Whether you are looking to maximize the efficiency and reliability of your existing operations, or you are looking to take advantage of a cloud-based infrastructure, fully automated provisioning is an essential capability, and Arista’s Zero Touch provisioning offers the first approach to automated network configuration.

February 14th, 2011

By Voltaire

The Data Center Bridging Group of the IEEE worked to enhance Ethernet to support class isolation, low latency, I/O and switch virtualization, lossless traffic flows, congestion control, multi-path L2 routing, and L2 discovery and capability exchange. These new technologies are referred to as Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) or Data Center Ethernet (DCE). Voltaire’s CEE switches and software offer performance requirements thanks to its scalable Ethernet fabric that lowers overall fabric costs, lowers power consumption, has greater efficiencies, and simplifies management.

This document describes the challenges inherent in traditional Ethernet solutions and how Voltaire’s scale-out Ethernet architecture effectively addresses those challenges.

February 14th, 2011

By BLADE Network Technologies, an IBM Company

King’s College London medical researchers, who specialize in the field of genetics, strive to better understand the causes of a range of serious health issues, including skin disease, diabetes and cancer. Such research depends heavily on its new IBM iDataplex HPC system with IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches for maximizing compute processing power to deliver data analysis in the fastest possible time. This white paper details the design and outcome of the Biomedical Research Centre’s (BRC) High Performance Computing (HPC) and storage solution.

January 31st, 2011

by Lippis Report Testing

This report details the test results of the Force10 Networks S-Series S4810 enterprise Top-of-Rack (ToR) Ethernet switch. All 48 10GbE ports of the Force10 Networks S-Series S4810 are populated and tested for performance, throughput, latency and power consumption. The Force10 Networks S-Series S4810 test results are then compared against IBM BNT RackSwitch G8264, Voltaire Vantageâ„¢ 6048 and Apresia 15K ToR switches.

To download the test report please CLICK HERE

January 31st, 2011

by Lippis Report Testing

This report details the test results of the IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 & G8264 enterprise Top-of-Rack (ToR) Ethernet switches. All 24 and 64 10GbE ports of the IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 & G8264, respectively, are populated and tested for performance, throughput, latency and power consumption. The IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 & G8264’s test results are then compared against Force10 Networks S4810, Voltaire Vantage™ 6048 and Apresia 15K ToR switches.

To download the test report please CLICK HERE

January 31st, 2011

by Lippis Report Testing

This report details the test results of the Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch™ 10K enterprise core Ethernet switch. All 256 10GbE ports are populated and tested for performance, throughput, latency and power consumption. The OmniSwitch™ 10K’s test results are then compared against Juniper’s EX8216 and Arista Networks 7504 core switches.

To download the test report, please click here

January 23rd, 2011

A cross vendor comparative test report conducted at Ixia’s iSmiCity defined by The Lippis Report. This report provides detailed test information on the following new products that have not been previously tested in public. The report details test results of the following products:

Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 10K,
Arista 7504 Series Data Center Switch,
Arista 7124SX 10G SFP Data Center Switch,
Arista 7050S-64 10/40G Data Center Switch,
Brocade VDXTM 6720-24 Data Center Switch,
IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124,
IBM BNT RackSwitch G8264,
Force10 S-Series S4810,
Hitachi Cable, Apresia15000-64XL-PSR,
Juniper Network EX Series EX8216 Ethernet Switch,
Voltaire® VantageTM 6048.

This 93-page report is a must for those evaluating 10/40 GbE data center switching equipment for private or public cloud infrastructure. You don’t want to buy data center switching gear until you read this report.

To download the report click here.

January 17th, 2011

By BLADE Network Technologies, an IBM Company

Server virtualization brings both benefits and drawbacks to the data center: it can maximize underutilized resources and minimize infrastructure spending—but add complexity and administrative overhead for the network administrator. BLADE Network Technologies’ VMready™ software addresses this problem by automatically migrating network policies along with virtual machines as they migrate across different physical servers.

Find out how by downloading this white paper

November 1st, 2010

Move a Virtual Machine (VM) from one physical server to another, and network port profiles, VLANs, security settings, etc., have to be manually reconfigured, adding cost, delay, security issues and rigidity to what should be an adaptive infrastructure. BLADE Network Technologies’ data center 1/10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet blade and top-of-rack switches incorporate what its calls VMready with Virtual Vision that enables data centers to deploy VM-aware networks that automate network change management as VMs come online and move between physical servers within or across data centers. Vikram Mehta, CEO of BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE), joins me to talk about BLADE’s data center network virtualization strategy, plus the company’s pending acquisition by IBM. It’s a great talk, and we hit lots of industry nerves in this thought-provoking podcast.