Resources for Business & IT Leaders
Free Access to
Thousands of Downloads
Register for Access. Existing User? Login.
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.
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.
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.
March 28th, 2011
By BLADE Networking Technologies, an IBM Company
Today, virtualization, cloud computing and high frequency trading place new demands on the system network fabric to deliver non-stop, ultra low-latency traffic flows. This traffic is increasingly “east-west†in nature to enable machine-to-machine communications versus the “north-south†traffic that characterizes conventional client/server and Web-based application environments. To deliver this east-west traffic using the most efficient flows, large flat networks are becoming increasingly popular. These flat Layer 2 networks eliminate extra hops to decrease latency, do not block any paths across the network, and are simple to configure. Such flat networks are built with large numbers of inexpensive top-of-rack switches, scale horizontally by simply adding more switches, and enable VLANs to span across a data center to provide larger server pools for virtualization. TRILL or TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links is fundamental to IBM’s approach and is explained in this white paper.
March 15th, 2011
By Clabby Analytics
Other reseach and analysis firms seem to see IBM’s acquisition of BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE) as a competitive response to
Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of 3Com and Cisco’s entry into the blade server business, but there’s much more to this deal than competitive dynamics. Clabby Analytics believes that data center virtualization is accelerating, and the demand for more I/O per server is on the rise. Additionally, networks are converging around a single Ethernet wiring plant. These industry changes are the true driving factors in this deal.
In this Research Report, Clabby Analytics examines what the acquisition of BLADE could mean to IBM and its customers. We take a closer look at the DCB convergence that is taking place in the networking marketplace; we examine why virtualization logic at the network level makes sense; and we discuss what this acquisition may mean from a competitive positioning perspective. Finally, we conclude that now is an ideal time for IBM to re-enter the networking business.
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.
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.
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 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 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
By BLADE Network Technologies
To exploit the benefits of server virtualization, data centers need to enable the dynamic and automatic movement of Virtual Machines while protecting their security and maintaining accessibility. Data center network plays a large role in delivering these and other important services for virtualized environments. Current networking switches are not aware of Virtual Machines, and this creates security and availability issues for both server and network administrators as they try to fully exploit the value of virtualization and manage this new environment.
Find out how to build a VM-aware network 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.
