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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June 7th, 2011

In the world of High-Frequency Trading (HFT), opportunities exist only fleetingly and therefore trading solutions must run at the lowest latency to be competitive. Low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet has become the interconnect of choice for HFT solutions. IBM® and Mellanox® have demonstrated a solution that performs at high throughput rates and low latency to facilitate High-Frequency Trading solutions.

May 24th, 2011

Three strong trends are taking shape that are so powerful they threaten the status quo of the networking industry. These trends are more like storms than new markets; in fact they represent a major industry discontinuity. The first storm is happening now and is represented by merchant silicon for 10 and 40 GbE chips lowering the barrier of entry for new entrants in the Ethernet switch market. The second storm is much weaker but promises to be just as big, or bigger, than the first. This second storm is the creation of a software ecosystem in the networking industry, thanks to initiatives such as Software Defined Networks (SDN), OpenFlow, Arista Network’s EOS Central, etc. The third storm is the paradigm shift in enterprise IT spending thanks to mobile and cloud computing. These three storms are starting to interact and feed upon each other, forming a perfect storm in the networking industry. The perfect storm is already doing damage, as all major IT firms position product portfolios to navigate through it and prepare for its aftermath of making existing networking legacy.

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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.

May 24th, 2011

By Extreme Networks

This white paper is targeted to enterprise and service provider IT managers who may be evaluating the ability of iSCSI SANs to satisfy the performance requirements of their most demanding storage applications. Storage application performance is dependent on more than just the performance of the storage array. The full data path and the integration with the other layers of the data center architecture must be taken into consideration. Optimizing the full data path from the server, through the network to the storage can contribute to significant improvements in performance and service levels.

This white paper and the accompanying configuration guide details the work of Intel, Extreme Networks® and NetApp to demonstrate the impact on iSCSI performance in real-world environments, using Extreme Networks CLEAR-Flow technology to help you achieve optimal iSCSI performance.

The output of the collaborative testing is presented in two separate documents:

• White Paper: provides an overview of the latest advancements around iSCSI SAN capabilities and performance, including real world, end-to-end performance results with CLEAR-Flow.

• Configuration Guide: provides a sample reference architecture with step-by-step configuration details for all the components and describes the end-to-end solution performance across a number of configurations.

May 24th, 2011

By IBM

Data centers host the computational power, storage, networking and applications that form the basis of any modern company. To reduce costs and increase the efficiency of this business-critical resource, IT organizations commonly implement new technologies and make fundamental architectural changes.

OpenFlow is an emerging technology with the potential to increase the value of data center services dramatically. Implementing OpenFlow can provide network administrators with greater control over their resources, integrated network and server management, and an open management interface for routers and switches.

May 24th, 2011

To create a seamless collaboration environment for mobile and remote workers, Avaya has fully embraced mobile computing by integrating Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Symbian mobile endpoints plus Windows and Mac computing into its Aura core infrastructure. In this podcast Avaya’s VP of Unified Communications Product Marketing, Nancy Maluso, discusses Avaya’s UC mobile collaboration strategy and how IT business leaders can put this technology to work in their corporation.

April 25th, 2011

By Force10 Networks

Bare Metal Provisioning (BMP) or jumpstarting is a function that allows for virtually hands-off provisioning of many devices. When you hear about BMP today, it is primarily in reference to the automated provisioning of server infrastructure. As demand increases for larger and larger networks to support server infrastructure growth, however, we must adapt this technology to the provisioning of network devices themselves to keep up. Force10’s BMP function automates switch configuration to significantly improve data center build productivity. In this guide, we will see how to use BMP to automate configuration of Force10 switches.

April 11th, 2011

By Talari Networks

Cloud Computing is making service centralization easier and much more cost effective in the Enterprise. This results in growing demand for scalable, reliable and inexpensive WAN access to deliver new WAN-based services. However the cost of private WAN services like MPLS remain stubbornly high and continued telecom service provider investment in Internet-based wired and wireless (4G) consumer-targeted WANs is delivering as much as a 100x price performance benefit for Internet-based connectivity. In addition, co-location facilities are becoming the lowest cost place to locate server/services and provide diverse low cost bandwidth. WAN virtualization allows IT business leaders to use these higher bandwidth but lower cost WAN services in their enterprise reliably.

April 11th, 2011

By Gartner

This document evaluates the potential benefits and drawbacks of converging data center networks and debunks a myth about lower costs and complexity. It includes quantitative analysis, along with insights gained from discussions with Gartner clients about organizational issues that affect convergence decisions.

April 11th, 2011

Written by Jim Metzler for Cisco Systems

The movement on the part of enterprises to adopt a Cloud-based service model combined with the growing interest on the part of IT organizations to provide an internal SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the services they provide creates tremendous opportunities for Communications Service Providers or CSPs. The primary opportunity is for CSPs to offer a wide range of network centric solutions that are supported by an SLA. CSPs are in a unique position to offer these solutions because, unlike the Internet, the Next Generation Networks (NGNs) that CSPs have deployed are capable of providing contracted levels of availability, delay, jitter and packet loss. This paper provides three recommendations for CSPs to capture Cloud-based service revenues.

April 11th, 2011

By BLADE Network Technologies, an IBM Company

Private clouds describe an architecture in which servers and networks in the data center can rapidly respond to changing demands, by quickly scaling compute capacity and connecting that server capacity where it is needed. The technology underlying this fluidity is server virtualization, which by now has been established as a reliable and essential core technology for most data centers. Five critical networking technologies are needed to build a private cloud network:

• Up to 1.28Tbps of line-rate, loss-less bandwidth
• Single-wire networks for data and storage with DCB support
• Support for thousands of virtual ports
• Virtual machine awareness
• Extremely low power requirements

This white paper details a cloud network architecture that incorporates these five success factors.

April 11th, 2011

The UC market is rapidly moving toward a cloud service for the small to medium business (SMB) market, thanks to Siemens Enterprise Communications and others offering powerful communications and office productivity software delivered as a service. Cloud services offer the SMB market with some of the same IT services that large enterprises enjoy, but without the complexity and cost. For example, Siemens has been working with Google to offer its OpenScape Cloud Service that integrates features into Google applications, like click to call/conference, etc. In this Lippis Report podcast, I talk with Paul McMillan, Director UC Technical Vision & Strategy at Siemens Enterprise Communications, about the SMB market and how its OpenScape Cloud Services is offering new, innovative solutions that allows these firms to be more competitive and agile.

March 28th, 2011

In the Lippis Report, we have discussed the fundamental changes shaping a new data center network architecture. These drivers are massive virtualization, a sea change in traffic patterns that are now dominated with east-west flows on top of existing north-south traffic, ultra low latency, the emergence of cloud spec data centers, etc. As a result, data center networking attributes are changing with requirements of traffic, steering in virtualized infrastructure, avoiding manual network changes as VMs move, removing oversubscription (thanks to spanning tree), streamlining network tiers to hasten east-west traffic flows, etc. The industry is responding to these changes and requirements with new approaches to data center networking, such as the Open Networking Foundation, Cisco’s FabricPath, Juniper’s QFabric, Brocade’s VCS, Avaya’s VENA, Nicira Networks’ network virtualization software, etc. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we explore a key technology to enabling two-tier network fabrics, and that’s link aggregation and its various approaches, including Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation Group, Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) and Shortest Path Bridging (SPB).

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